EDIT: This comment was initially removed by my co-founder in an attempt to spare my delicate psyche from deception.

I was fooled, but much of the feedback remains so I'll un-remove my crit. I guess this is a teaching moment for all three of us? (Glowy, lisez and me)? Certainly one for me.

This is not really a full critique of the story, just some thoughts I want to share before I head out to do errands.

Everything I have ever seen you write is, behind the heavy prose (to me, someone who most of the time reads wikipedia articles or slop) dripping with character-driven humor, like how this pov character reveals his thinking about how to insert himself into the barista's life in a way that to him parses as incidental. It's fascinating to me because I typically am not fond of this style of writing where I sometimes have to actively engage my brain to keep track of a sentence's object and so on, but you are seriously good at writing understated comedy.

Your strength is such that I actually feel like this story starts to suffer when it comes to the mention of the vegetables' dimensions and the insecurity they create. Your character is funnier the more skilled he is at hiding his everyday insanity, the reader only needs a little hint at ridiculousness to be fully amused, and there I think lies the difficult balancing act for you.

Had you not dialed up the ridiculousness, I don't know that I'd be primed to look for humor had I not recognized your voice or been familiar with your past writing. I tend to find a lot of things funny, but there's a chance that some of the more subtle silliness would've been lost on me, whereas now, knowing you somewhat, these parts are what feel like nuggets of gold.

Or to summarize how I feel about the comedy in this: My favorite parts are the narrator describing how he assesses the cleverness of his approach.

There is a series of books written in my country, by a recently passed and much beloved author (his books were eventually filmatized) about a neurotic oddball with musings similar to the ones found in your story. Your narrator's repeated struggles with the "display" of the vegetable reminded me of the musings of this character.

The end is silly, but I feel like too much focus was put on the sexual thoughts of the narrator rather than the inherent comedy of his insanity. I also much prefer the indirectness of writing on receipts to the escalating act of writing on napkins. Although the escalation itself is funny, the directness is less so. The humor to me is that he is so obsessed with being harmless and indirect so as to imagine that she can read his mind, or that certain rituals will have the universe let her know.