The Great Burger Debate, part 1

Yes, Erin, I will stop blogging about food eventually. I swear. And then I'll blog about linguistics. Then you'll be sorry.

Hamburgers and I have a long, conflicted relationship. From age 6 to age 21, I hated hamburgers. My brother has always loved hamburgers, and I have always unilaterally rejected them (except Annie's hamburgers, but then only maybe once a year). It began as a personal preference. I don't like gristle and hamburgers can sometimes have a lot of it. I hate it when things are chewy and sometimes hamburgers are chewy. Also, I just like(d) hot dogs better. What's wrong with hot dogs? I could easily get by in fast food joints by eating arguably more dubious food items, such as the Filet-o-Fish.

Setting aside that my contamination fear irrationally excludes hot dogs, when I went to college and was forced to take a biology class, my relationship with hamburgers took a turn for the worst. It wasn't that I was surrounded by vegans and began to enjoy vegetarian food; it was that I had to sit right next to the incubator in biology lab. And while we were in biology class, we had to do a months-long experiment with E. coli.

In case you're not familiar with E. coli, it's a thing that lives in your colon and will give you diarrhea if it somehow makes its way out of your colon into other parts of your body. Let's go back and highlight something. E. coli is a thing that lives in your colon. In case you've forgotten, your colon is where poop lives. In case you can't see where I'm going with this, E. coli smells like poop.

We did eventually do an experiment where we tested storebought hamburger patties for poop E. coli. I don't remember what the results were exactly, but the point of this story is that I was never able to eat hamburgers again. Every time I saw a hamburger, all I could think about was the incubator and how terrible that stupid thing smelled.

There's a happy end to this story. A couple of summers ago, I did an internship in DC. In DC, they have a restaurant called Five Guys. I would never have gone to Five Guys until I learned that our President eats there, and as it happened there was a good chance (or so I believed) that if I went to the Five Guys near my workplace on Pennsylvania Ave, I might eat at the same restaurant as the President. So one day on my lunch break, a fellow intern and I went out to go find the Five Guys, which ended with us never finding it and me being accused by Special Police of being a plant to test security... but that's another story.

I eventually made it to Five Guys, where I enjoyed a cheeseburger. Yes, after 15 years of reluctance and/or disgust, I ate a hamburger, and I enjoyed it. Five Guys taught me to love again. I ate Five Guys frequently the rest of that summer, then went back to Portland into famine, as the nearest Five Guys was in Hillsboro. But my eyes had been opened. Soon, I was eating at Burgerville, the Pacific Northwest's own venerable burger chain. And I began to consider the burger a legitimate form of food, capable of great heights of culinary awesomeness.

Now, in Arizona, I discover that I have access to what appears to be every good burger chain in the entire United States (except Burgerville). Five Guys. In-N-Out, the place Californians won't shut up about. Culver's, the bastion of the Midwest. Whataburger, the one true Texan love. Fatburger, endlessly promoted by Jon Huertas on Twitter. There are probably more, but I have to stop somewhere.

And now that I love burgers - yes, I love them - I have decided that I must make the best of the Phoenix wasteland. I must take advantage of the chain saturation.

I must settle, once and for all, which chain has the best burger.

Some of my Facebook friends have already weighed in, but I invite you to fight it out in the comments some more.

Busy

I go to a school where people work so hard, they get sick, are miserable for weeks, and then get better just in time to catch the same disease right back. Or so it appears, although I have been informed that according to medicine this is not very likely. The point is that most of my colleagues have a startling disregard for their own health.
I find this perplexing, as I love making myself feel good. I don't exercise enough or eat as well as I should, but I refuse to fail to get enough sleep unless it's really important, and most of the time I do get the hours in. I believe that taking a lunch break, or a taco break, or a dinner break, or a midnight breakfast break, is not only important, but sacred and necessary. I will go to great ends to accomplish this feat. In general, I believe in taking breaks because I have an extremely hard time maintaining my concentration for long periods of time. Taking a break - and I like to take game breaks, or TV breaks - refresh the mind and lighten the spirit.
I know for a fact that I don't get enough work done by my own measure. While it is commonly believed that teachers assign you more than they expect you to read, I always intend to read all of it. Naturally, I virtually never accomplish this goal, and fall short of even my minimum standards. I am always sorry not to get enough done, but it seems that in reality, there is little I can do to get more done and retain my sanity. And I find that sanity makes me more efficient than being depressed about work.
When I take breaks, especially when I take food breaks, I frequently attempt to seduce my colleagues away from their desks and make them come with me. I ask because I know that they, too, are working hard, and they will more often than not refuse to take a break. As far as I know, this pattern of behavior is the norm. Want to go grab a bite? Nope, can't, too busy. We are too busy all of the time.
One might ask, if we are too busy all of the time, then shouldn't we be getting more done? How is it that we can all be too busy, but never finished? Is our only alternative to settle for less than we know we can accomplish? When does being too busy wrap around to become an impediment to accomplishment unto itself? What are the bounds of sanity, and do we cross them when we decide that work is more important than rest or food? Perhaps most importantly, when we leave this place and stop having homework, what will fill that void?
It's difficult to address these questions when you have deadlines, but they are no less important in the long run.