Finally, an Introduction.

So! I haven’t posted in quite a while – for this I have no apologies, but plenty of excuses.

A list?: I had no finals per say, but about 20 pages’ worth of papers due at the end of last week, therefore I got very little sleep (there were two nights somewhere in there where I spent the entire night in the library); when I finally was able to post, a lack of communication led to mass hysteria, riots and revolution in the form of the blog running (somewhat) smoothly with posts almost every night, stealing my chance for a return; and, lastly, I fell down a flight of stairs and so could not post. (This last excuse is an outright lie but I’ve always wanted to use it.)

So! Onto the meat and potatoes of this post. I figure it’s about time to introduce this bad boy of a blog. Please forgive me if this is extremely scattered, I probably have ADD and I’m coming up with this stuff as I go along.

First, the origins: A couple years ago I started asking everyone what they had for dinner last night. Simple, right? At first it was just a way to find out what a friend’s mom cooked the night before (she was an awesome cook.) Then I started asking my older brother, who was a freshman in college, as a general means of finding what was up. Then came 11th grade honors physics. I shared my table/desk with the infamous Meredith first period. Naturally I was pretty much comatose, it being 7 freakin’ 30 in the morning and all – so Meredith and I didn’t really hit it off for a while. Eventually I started getting more sleep and Mer and I started having semi-actual conversations (it was still physics and it was still damn early...ah, Mr. Bender!). To kick start conversation I utilized the ultimate question: What did you have for dinner last night? And so it became an early morning mutual physics ritual. That and interesting weekend stories which most often involved crazy Hallmark-goers.

The next step in the history of the question came when I began to comprehend just how awesome the question truly was. There was something about it, maybe its ability to catch someone completely off guard, that even in the most awkward of circumstance, with the most awkward conversation partner possible, that seemed to spur real, deep, meaningful dialogue. Well maybe not deep, but I’ve always loved the question because I’ve realized that dinner is such a central subject in a person’s life and you can get a lot from just knowing what they had for dinner. For instance, I had a kickass fondue...thing tonight at a restaurant called The Melting Pot. Why did I go out for uber expensive cheese in a bowl? Because the semester’s coming to a close and I probably won’t see most of mis amigos for about two months. On a side note, the whole dipping bread in melted cheese bit was pretty cool, but they should definitely offer whole platters of different things to dip like pretzels, pizza, even mozzarella sticks.

Oh yeah, origins of the blog. So I’d been asking this question for years now and it was kind of my trademark. Then we all went to college this year and something or other provoked it, but, long story short, I started a blog! First it was just Erik (Professor Nesto) and I (Not Fat Dan). Then Ian (Xavier Gillies) jumped aboard. Then sometime or other came Marie Claire and D.L.Nicastro. Meredith’s our newest member although, of the lot of ‘em, she has the most what did you have for dinner last night experience.

You won’t be able to tell by reading this, but I just stopped typing for an hour or so between the last sentence and this. Where’d I go? I left because I realized there’s no good reason this place should be called BigFatDan (if anything it should be NotFatDan). So, naturally, I bought www.WhatDidYouHaveForDinner.com just now. I’m still workin’ out the kinks, but it should be functional pretty soon. So screw going into the reason this blog is called BigFatDan and my username is NotFatDan.

Moving along. Don’t get freaked out by this, but we worship Bob Dole and we call ourselves Dolists. I don’t think that needs any further explanation, because it’s Bob Dole after all. We’re also sometimes AKAed as the Onions. I’d explain the reason for this one, but I have no idea what it is. I don’t think anybody does anymore. Lost to history. So it goes.

Who knows if anyone besides the six of us actually reads this, but I’ll add commentary/annotations/footnotes where necessary to get the full scope of what we’re saying because, seriously, we say so many things that would be completely unintelligible to anyone else.

I think that’s about all the history I’ve got, but feel free to comment with more. I already said what I had for dinner so...

Breakfast: I finished my finals last week and the only reason I’m still here is that it beats being home. Also, I don’t have a ride until Friday... This means that I haven’t woken up before noon in about a week and so haven’t had breakfast.

Lunch: Tuna Melt at Subway, yum!

Edit: The new website is up, you might not have noticed because it is pretty much the old website just called Whatdidyouhavefordinner.com. If you go to the old address it will forward you to the new one. Also, each of us can now have email addresses (I'm notfatdan@whatdidyouhavefordinner.com. Just ask me about 'em.) Cheers!