Rethinking cliches

Saturday night in downtown San Jose. Zen Boy (recently arrived from the SF-based monastic retreat where he's wintering) and I were discussing where to have dinner. I realized I had almost no idea what his food preferences or limitations were, since we had met and interacted almost entirely at a retreat/Buddhist monastery that provided nearly endless quantities of gourmet vegetarian food. (Wistful sigh here, both at the food and at the interaction.)

"Hey, so, what's your absolutely favorite kind of food?" I asked, realizing as soon as the words came out of my mouth that not only was this was not going to be useful information in the limited restaurant environs of downtown San Jose, but that it also kind of sounded like one of those awkward getting-to-know-you dating conversational moves. Which at this point I was pretty sure we were past.

"Well, if I was stranded on a desert island with only one kind of chef, I think it would definitely have to be Indian," he replied.

Yeah, so it turns out that Zen Boy doesn't cook. At all. But I find myself enamored of the idea of being stranded on a desert island with a cuisine-specific chef -- this certainly would change all those desert-island cartoons.