The wife and I recently bought a nice small little pine-and-wrought-iron breakfast table set for our breakfast nook.

Do you know how many years I spent thinking God, I'd kill to live in anything with a space that can be characterized as a "nook"? A long time. And we've been in this place for a couple years, but only now did we finally get around to accessorizing said nook with a table set. It's pretty awesome. We've furnished our nook! Previous inhabitant of the nook-space: a wan houseplant that perpetually looks like I water it with gasoline. It's such a shitty plant. I lavish attention on it, and yet it always looks like something you'd find in a Kierkegaard essay. "Why won't this fucking plant die?" I will occasionally scream, and my friend R., who knows from plants, inevitably replies, "Because it's a weed."

My houseplant is a weed.

Get lost, weed! Make room for the awesome nook-making table and chairs! Now we have a proper nook. We try not to talk about the fact that five feet away, in our newly appointed nook, is what I guess must be a "breakfast bar," since that's where the bar is. It distracts from the nookness of the nook. On the other hand, it might be comforting some Sunday morning, esconced in our nook and eating omelets, to know that at any moment, it would be child's play to make a five-foot dash for some badly-needed rye shots.

Another useful thing about our new nook is that instead of eating dinner on, say, an ottoman (me) or a lap (the wife), we can now eat it on a table! The breakfast table! We are eating dinner on a table, I think deliriously. In our breakfast nook. There's an indescribable frisson about the whole thing that's hard to talk about. Dinner in our breakfast nook! That's crazy! Tom Lehrer could write a song about this! (Memo to Tom Lehrer: Please don't.) Fred Durst could write a song about this! (Memo to Fred Durst: Please don't.)

I furnished my own little nook-y/Perhaps you'd like a cookie . . . Well, fuck, that's going to stick. Dennis Quaid was in "The Rookie"/We should totally go to Stuckey's/I'm not even rhyming any more . . .

Anyway. We had a lovely dinner tonight. The wife even set out a little bowl of savory items, gherkins and pickled onions and so forth. At one point, she plucked a cherry tomato from the bowl and chomped into it. We were seated at our lovely little nooked-up table. And out of the corner of my eye, I saw this . . . jet . . . of corpuscular red shoot out at me. Having seen Platoon, I of course screamed, "NOOOOOOO!" in slow motion before this horrible arterial spray of tomato juiceseed hit me in the chest and neck. The tomato had simply exploded in the wife's mouth and blew the fuck all over me. Have you ever picked a tiny tomato seed off of the side of your neck? It's quite a singular experience. "I'm sorry!" my wife wailed, right before dissolving into helpless laughter. I solemnly rescued a tomato seed from my weird-ish epicanthic fold.

I should at this point note that, in addition to our usual bottle of wine with dinner, we had some San Pellegrino water, which I had downed at a gulp at the beginning of the meal. Now relieved of my sudden burden of tomato shrapnel, I opened my mouth to comment on recent events, and said: "HOOOOOOOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAGGG." A shocking basso belch erupted from my abdomen; it sounded like Merle Haggard and His Walrus Chorus being caught in an industrial press.

Both of us were now just fucking useless, and we dropped our utensils in paralytic hysteria. "Dinner with the hillbillies!" the wife choked out. Eating was now out of the question, and breathing was starting to get difficult. We laughed and laughed.

Fuck, I love this nook. You know what everyone needs, I've discovered? Nooks.