Pizza for one

A Friday Silly Short essay on middle-class as a state of mind

Have you ever ordered pizza for one? If you’re like me, personal’s too little and medium’s too much. Adding a side to a personal pizza ruins the purity of the experience. Add fries? Too much cognitive dissonance. Add choco lava cake? Too much guilt. Add human being to share medium pizza? Too much extroversion. Add garlic bread? Too much carbs. And don’t even get me started on burger-pizza and birizza.

In one of my proudest moments, I discovered the solution to this intractable problem. Order a medium, but make it thin crust. Not overbearing. It may even be lighter than a regular-crust personal pizza, but 44% extra area fools the senses. As does the superior cheese and topping to crust ratio. While snooty highbrows may scoff, Dominos’ thin crust is up there with the best.

But this solution comes at an excruciatingly painful psychological cost. Some evil genius at Dominos has priced thin-crust at a premium to regular-crust. So, I pay more for less. Not unlike full school fees for a bum on a couch pretending to listen to a screen. Much as I can afford the difference, ordering pizza suddenly transforms my self-image from middle-class to Masa. And boy, that hurts. As the saying goes, you can take the man out of middle-class, but you can’t take middle-class out of the man. Damn you, Dominos.