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seitanic blandness
Wednesday, August 1 2001
The beginning of August is always just a little bit depressing for me. I suppose this dates back to the days when I was in school and August meant that my summer was ending and I'd be back in class soon. It doesn't really matter now what time of year it is but at least now that I'm back in the East I actually get to see the seasons change once more. By contrast, time of year was almost completely irrelevant in Santa Monica and I would have to think for a moment were to ask me the season.
Last night I was in something of a bigoted, prejudicial mood and I told Gretchen "there is nothing less funny than a Native American." She was appalled at this over-generalization and proceeded to inform me that she had actually studied Native American literature and that the Native American wit is a "dry acerbic" one, similar to the wit of the Jews. At some point in the conversation I realized that in the future I wanted to refer to funny things with the description, "dry, in the manner of Native American humor, which you've no doubt heard of." But that would just be for laughs; I still don't believe Native Americans are funny.
Come on people, can anyone give me an example of Native American humor?
Since moving to New York, I've found my social calendar is continually full of obligations, most of them inserted a week in advance by Gretchen and cemented by my usually semi-distracted grunt of approval. But in the process of meeting these obligations, I've found myself neglecting my own friends, the people I know in New York through contacts other than Gretchen. Admittedly, most of "my friends" are people I've never physically met whom I know only via the internet. But there's also a substantial group of Charlottesville people from the Big Fun days living up in Queens and I really should be trying to contact them.
My social obligation tonight amounted to yet another double-date restaurant meal. After work at 7:30pm I waited for Gretchen at the northeast corner of 18th Street and 7th Avenue. A lot of stuff happens at the entranceway to a subway in Manhattan, but in this case I couldn't comprehend any of it. What were the two police cars doing there when I arrived? What was that girl doing, the one who kept looking at the eye-level brickwork and walking back and forth anxiously a few times before disappearing into the subway?
When Gretchen arrived we took the subway up to 86th Street and Broadway in the Upper West Side to rendezvous with her friend David the Rabbi his on-again-off-again fiancé Elena. They'd given us bad directions to the place we'd be doing dinner, a vegetarian restaurant called Mana, and while Gretchen fumbled with her cell phone and the pay phone (which even cell-phone-equipped Manhattanites use for free directions), David and Elena came strolling by.
Our waitress at Mana was bubbly, melodramatic and effusive. Gretchen, who is also effusive, asked me if I found the waitress's effusiveness attractive. I replied that it wasn't "dark" enough for me.
Throughout the meal I kept being momentarily confused, swapping the personality of David and Elena for Gretchen's brother Brian and his fiancé Jen.
I was disappointed in the dish that I ordered. It was a seitan parmigiana, but the loaf of seitan (wheat gluten) was so under-flavored that it tasted like bread. And the tahini sauce on my pasta didn't complement the weakly-flavored seitan at all. It's dishes like this that give vegetarianism a bad name.
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