That's The Way Cookie Doesn't Crumble

Hello Dr. Eve. My girlfriend (let's call her Cookie) and I were meeting another couple for dinner. They were 10 minutes late. The restaurant was wine only, so we couldn't order a cocktail. Would it have been impolite to order a bottle while we waiting?-Parched in Poughkeepsie

Dear Parched,

First of all, let me commend you for directing your query to me. Not only would Miss Manners have taken months to answer (how is that polite, I ask you?), she would have completely missed the existential cry for help that is the subtext of your letter.

This accursed "thirst"; this "wine" for which you pine: What are they but a plea for meaning in a meaningless void? The contents of your letter are nothing more than the all-too-sane railings of a deeply human being (you) against a universe beshadowed by the spectre of hopeless absurdism (war, famine, Gosselins, restaurants that don't have a full bar). You and your aptly-pseudonymed "Cookie" -- like the bits of data which bestow upon you a sense of individual identity in the undifferentiated void, so does your life partner provide the illusion of selfhood -- did, as you so eloquently put it, "while we waiting," hope against hope for a flicker of truth. What you got, one can only hope, was a bottle of wine. It's the very least you can expect. And I trust your eventual dinner companions, assuming they did not exhibit a predictably Godot-like absence, agreed. If not, they are jerks.