|
|
|
tumors versus babies
Saturday, July 6 2002
Gretchen and I went down to 7th Avenue for a light brunch somewhere, hopefully the little place where you can sit out in front and eat grape leaves. But no, the three people sitting out in front were somehow taking up all four tables and not making any motions to reshuffle, the thing we would have gladly done had we been them. So we went down to Second Street Café instead and put ourselves on the fifteen minute waitlist. Second Street Café is one of those restaurants that Gretchen dearly loves but which I don't care about one way or the other.
Before seating us, our hostess gave us the "dog rules." According to these rules, Sally couldn't sit inside the patio area with us and she couldn't be tied to the patio's rail. This arrangement didn't end up being a cruel as it first seemed, but it nonetheless reflected another data point along a disturbing trend. I get the feeling that there was a time when Park Slope was a lot more lawless, when dogs roamed freely in the post office and down the aisles of Key Foods. But with gentrification dogs are being increasingly marginalized. If only the same were true of the poo-squirting screamers being pushed around in ones, twos, and threes up and down the avenue, always ending up parked right next to me. Until moving to Park Slope, I never understood that the price exacted on the environment by individual humans begins not with a whimper but a bang. Long before they're totaling Camaros and tossing Zima bottles in the creek, their ear-splitting screams are making most of my days just a little more miserable. In all the other places I've lived, babies, the kind proudly paraded in public, were uncommon. But post-lesbian Park Slope is to white people as piles of tires are to mosquitoes.
The main reason Gretchen and I wanted to eat a light brunch was that we planned on eating Indian food tonight. Gretchen's friend Mary Purdy had a membership to something or other that gave her a 20% discount at a wide range of restaurants, including the Jewel of India in Manhattan.
As Gretchen and I were approaching the Jewel of India on foot, we found ourselves on Club Row, an unusually tony part of Midtown, passing the Algonquin Club and an over-the-top members-only club exclusively for graduates of the University of Pennsylvania. There was a bum picking through some obsolete computer junk in a big cloth hamper and I stopped to look at the stuff in another cloth hamper nearby. The bum suddenly shouted at me, "You can see me standing here, so you know it's mine!" I really don't know how he could have assumed I knew bumster etiquette, and besides, he wasn't standing beside the cloth hamper I was about to examine.
I suppose we should have known that we weren't going to be impressed by a restaurant in this neighborhood, but still our inertia propelled us inside. We looked around at the people eating in the dining room and they all looked like older white people from the Midwest. These are the sort of people who never venture more than a block from their hotel and like to go home and brag over the picket fence about how much they spent on a New York City dinner. Other possible diners at a restaurant like this are executives with the power to expense everything - anything it takes to impress that crucial client and take his confidence to the next level. Being on the one hand unemployed and on the other underemployed, Gretchen and I had no business being there. As the overly-unctious waitstaff fluffed our napkins and pulled out our chairs, all I could think was "ca-ching." Then we looked at the menu. Holy shit, I don't even remember what the prices were for the entrées. They were so high that I immediately jammed them down into my subconscious, where they can only bother me in nightmares. I do, however, remember that rice didn't come with the dishes and cost four dollar extra. Gretchen happened to see one of those thimble-sized four dollar rice bowls, and that was it. We got up and escaped.
We found Mary on the street only about a block away. Off in the distance she was making faces and giving us the universal thumbs-down; she'd walked by the place earlier and her opinion of the Jewel of India had been exactly the same as ours.
After considerable shopping around on 9th Avenue, we decided to eat dinner at a little Italian place called Cara Mia (between 45th and 46th streets). Ah, now this was a truly great restaurant! I ordered the roasted calamari-with-mushrooms hors' d'oeuvres and it was right up there with the most exquisite things I've ever eaten. [I'm making the mistake of writing about it on an empty stomach.]
Our dinner conversation was mostly about the process of writing, including the tools we use. I said that I'm so spoiled with word processing (or whatever it is I'm doing when I edit source code in Homesite) that it's hard for me to compose text any other way. Indeed, muscles in my right arm that used to control the movement of pens have atrophied away over the past ten years. Mary, who is (among other things) a standup-comedian, said that she often carries a little tape recorder around with her, which is great for the raw capturing of ideas. But pity the person who is forced by disability to edit text entirely through voice commands.
We also had a conversation about the good things that come to women when they are on birth control pills. I didn't know that birth control pills had so many health benefits in addition to the prevention of pregnancy. It seems that women who are not on the pill experience much more arduous periods, are more susceptible to tumors (in both their breasts and reproductive organs), and suffer more dramatic mood swings. Of course, these medical problems can also be remedied by staying pregnant throughout one's child bearing years, but that's hardly a satisfactory solution for the non-fundamentalist career woman of today. Before the pill, it seems, women had to make a choice: they had to grow something, be it tumors or babies. This led to a hilarious conversation about the benefits of growing tumors instead of babies. Tumors don't go "waaaaa!" and never shit their underpants. Not only that, one never has to stay up late waiting for a tumor to come home or send one's tumors off to an elite private university.
After dinner, Gretchen and Mary went to see a lefty lesbian political comedian named Reno and I headed home by myself. Later, after she came home, Gretchen told me some of the highlights from tonight's show. As you might imagine, George W. Bush played a central role in much of Reno's humor. The guy makes a comic's job into a mushroom harvest. As Reno herself says, when he's been coached, Bush acts like a drunk who's faking sobriety. But when he hasn't been coached, he does things like congratulate the Japanese for 150 years of peace and asks a Brazilian diplomat "Do you have blacks too?" With a mind so full of errors, how can he possibly be making sound decisions? George W. Bush might have an MBA, but he can't even pass a Turing Test. It's no wonder the American dollar is sagging on foreign exchanges; the rest of the world can see we're being led by a man who ought to riding the short bus instead of Airforce One.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?020706 feedback
previous | next |
