I stood in line for an hour this morning to wait for the hotly anticipated opening of Westman's Bagels on Madison and 15th today, but there was no whitefish salad at the end of it.

Maybe you don't know what whitefish salad is and you don't care. Maybe you were the people standing in line behind me talking about the gluten-free pizza you ate last night. Maybe you have no connection to a real spread, like the kind you have after a funeral or a sleepover at your aunt's house or a regular Saturday morning Shabbat service, and you saw a rainbow bagel on Pinterest and pinned that shit.

If you are that kind of person, congratulations. I bet your day is going really well. Have you ever crawled on your knees through a desert with an outstretched arm toward a vision of a drinking hole, only to find out that you're actually miles away from water? Have you ever dreamt of kissing a love you missed so much it made you ache, only to awake to an empty pillow?

Did you like your bagels?

I am told that Westman's will have whitefish salad—yes, kind of like tuna salad, but minus canned tuna's watery, leathery bite—but that day is not today. (Whitefish salad actually has a much smoother texture; it's deliriously smoky and subtle.)

"However, one cannot strictly call an individual unhappy who is present in hope or in memory," Søren Kierkegaard once wrote on the notion of a "wandering Jew." "For what one must note here is that he is still present to himself in one of these. From which we also see that a single blow, be it ever so heavy, cannot make a person the unhappiest. For one blow can either deprive him of hope, still leaving him present in memory, or of memory, leaving him present in hope."'

Anyway, I got an everything bagel with some veggie cream cheese.