The Lunchtime Quest
Your lunch hour is yours to use
The fire-breathing dragon dwarfs over me, its shadow blocking the June sunlight as its menacing eyes glared at my measly cursor. Its tail swings at me. I’m frantically keying CTRL+Z in defense, which aggravates it even more. It lets out a roar, triggering some #VALUE! cells to fall all around me. I see my HP bar slowly draining away. This boss battle wasn’t going to be easy.
Ding. 12 o’clock.
I minimize my Microsoft Excel window. It’s lunchtime, so my main quest—I mean, my office work—can wait an hour. I grab my green backpack and beep my staff card out of the building.
I've been dedicating an hour of my workday to personal adventures, realizing after six months in a corporate setting that lunchtime is truly my own. Some days I go for a Bodypump class, returning back to my desk with a microwaved shrimp balado rice bowl and fresh wet hair from the shower. Others I spend on my desk, cranking out a draft for this Substack. I call them side quests, because they aren’t a must at any given day, but they level me up.
The Hong Kong outdoors is hard to resist when I am just a ten-minute walk away from the pier, able to look at the Kowloon skyline and feel the harbor breeze. So I walk straight there after exiting the office building.
This lunchtime, though, I want to look for a new spot. I’ve been working in the central business district for 18 months, and still have so many hidden gems to uncover.
Uncovering new haunts, I feel like a local, embracing this neighborhood in all of its entirety. I once went to Tai Kwun, a refurbished police center compound, to check out a queer arts exhibition. I’ve also stopped by a museum by the pier (aptly called the Maritime Museum), traveling back in time to experience the history of voyages that have cruised these lands long ago before us. Each experience is a dose of potion restoring life back to me.
Today I was going to see rubber ducks. Yes, you read that right, and yes, they are yellow. Last week, the city introduced two 18-meter rubber ducks by Dutch artist Florentijn Hofman, and they are stationed on the waters. I plop down on the edge of a pier, legs crossed and a sketchbook laid open. I’m starting to draw the ducks in, and was filming the process for a future YouTube video.
These lunchtime adventures have been instrumental in breaking up my day, with my personal creative projects of writing, painting, and creating videos being completely distinct from my office work. Though it often seems like a daunting activity to have to go out and not eat for lunch, I always come back feeling refreshed and ready to tackle the remaining half day of work.
After finishing up my sketch, I make my way back to the office. I sit down at my desk with my microwaved lunch, readying myself for incoming emails. I put on my headphones, swinging my cursor around the spreadsheet battlefield screen. My HP bar is fully replenished, with a 2x attack multiplier to boot. I take in a deep breath. It’s time to tackle the fire-breathing dragon.
Thank you to my Write of Passage quest buddies , , , and . I’m joining Runway, a 12-week follow-up to the WOP course. Publishing dates are shiften to Monday, so that’s when I’ll land in your inbox for the next three months. I can’t wait to keep writing to ya!
What a great use of your lunchtime energy and focus Rebecca. I also love the term "side quests." My life is full of these, but I never had a name for them. It's much fun to make small investments in a novel or whimsical direction. And sometimes those side quests can turn into opportunity highways.
This is such simple and powerful explanation. ‘I call them side quests, because they aren’t a must at any given day, but they level me up.’
Great story, thanks for sharing!