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avoiding eggs and real estate customers
Sunday, September 15 2002
Today there was an open house held in our brownstone so that people could wander through, decide whether or not they wanted to buy it, and hopefully not steal anything too valuable. Our real estate agent was running late, so Gretchen had to serve as a stand-in agent at the beginning. (Gretchen has a perfect real estate agent personality, though in her weaker moments it can be somewhat compromised by her gloomy world view.) Meanwhile I took Sally down to Ray and Nancy's place. She tends to get kind of crazy when lots of random people are coming and going.
The Ray and Nancy contingent swelled to include Nancy's sister Linda and Linda's boyfriend Adam, the guy who played guitar at Nancy's wedding. We all walked down to Beso, a hipster Latino eatery down on 5th Avenue. It's sort of a Latino breakfast interpretation of the youthfully-gentrified 5th Avenue Long Tan vibe. The menu was entirely too rich in eggs for someone with my egg aversion, and I sort of felt like a vegetarian at an Outback Steakhouse. The feeling is primarily one of resentment, something like, "What, are people such unthinking products of their culture that they won't question the flawed logical premise of breakfast food?" There's something about the grease that hangs in the air at a breakfasttime restaurant that always leaves me feeling like I need a shower after I leave. I'm thinking about establishing an inflexible rule wherein I categorically refuse to go to restaurants whenever they are serving primarily breakfast dishes. This would be similar to the doctrine followed by Joe, my former housemate's (John's) brother, which is to never pay for cabs as a matter of principle. (He has no problem with riding in them, however.) I did manage to find something I could eat, the chicken-avocado salad, and the Sangria took some of the edge off my egg-induced unease.
It also helped that, when she arrived, Gretchen carried good news from the opening. Plenty of people had shown up and said things like "so I guessed" when Gretchen had told them that the place had only been on the market for a few days.
This evening Gretchen went by herself to rituals related to the start of Yom Kippur. It started with a dinner over at the David the Rabbi's parents' place and then continued with and a Kol Nidre service at David congregation in Manhattan. When Gretchen came home later tonight, she was completely spent, having had one of the most miserable evenings in recent memory. The crux of her misery was the Kol Nidre service, which was done in the tradition (or lack of tradition) of Reform Judaism. Reform Judaism features a completely different service from the one Gretchen attended in her youth. She was raised in a Conservative congregation, featuring Hebrew services and interactive singing. In Reform Judaism, all the sermons and songs are done in English and the singing is handled by a choir, church-style. Gretchen found tonight's service almost unbearable, what with the constant God talk presented in the unshrouded banality of her native tongue, the language of rock and roll and air traffic control. As she put it, "It has all of the God and none of the culture." Being an atheist, Gretchen is only in this stuff for the culture.
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