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superhuman empathic abilities
Tuesday, January 19 2016
Today was Gretchen's 45th birthday, so of course it was packed with activities. We started out with me giving her a birthday present above and beyond the new kitchen sink. This other, smaller present was a pencil sharpener, the hand-cranked kind we all remember from our school days. Gretchen needs a reliable way to sharpen pencils, since she depends on pencils to solve crossword puzzles. And she solves all that the New York Times can produce.
Next we went to Outdated in Uptown Kingston, which proved to be (as it often is) crowded with lots of people and even a few well-behaved dogs. One of these dogs looked a little familiar, and it turned out she was Lulu, Juliana & Lee's dog, who we didn't initially see because our brains were filtering out everything in our visual field but the dogs. Then when Gretchen placed her order at the counter, she heard a voice behind her saying he'd be paying for it. She turned around to see Mark (of Mark and Maresa), who just happened to be there. He later sat with us and chatted mostly with Gretchen while I ate my tempeh reuben, drank my coffee, and half-heartedly surfed the web on my laptop. Topics discussed ranged from Mark's mother (who is doing poorly in New Jersey) to the superhuman empathic abilities of dolphins. At some point, Mark waved a woman over and had her tell us about her recent visit to Lesbos in Greece, where she'd been helping with the Syrian refugee crisis. The only thing I remember from that was that few of the do-gooders flocking to Lesbos can speak Farsi, which is, it turns out, a language common among the refugees (in addition to the more-expected Arabic and Kurdish).
Gretchen and I had gone to Kingston in separate cars, which allowed her to continue on to work. For my part, I drove out to 9W to have a look around in the Goodwill thrift store, which I remember being significantly better than the one belonging to the Salvation Army. I found their electronics section overrun with smallish stereo systems, and their prices were strangely inflated. There was, for example, an old DVD drive (the kind that needs to be installed in a desktop computer) with a price of $10. For $19, meanwhile, you can buy a brand new DVD burner supporting all the latest formats from NewEgg.comm, and it is guaranteed to work.
Soon after returning home, I went on a firewood salvaging foray at the windfall, where my load added up to 119.45 pounds. Perhaps because I loaded it badly on the backpack, it felt heavier than that, and I could feel the weight causing my hip joints to ache.
Later, in anticipation of the evening's activities, I drank a cup of kratom tea, which (at least for this batch of kratom) acts as a stimulant. And then I began working on putting some additional structure under the new kitchen sink. There were a number of ridgelike structures under the flat part of the sink, and it seemed like a good idea to support these from below so that the forces they concentrated (from, say, a falling frying pan) could be carried into the structure of the house. So I made a grid of two by three beams resembling, in general structure, a Roman numeral two (II) and fastened it with long drywall screws and L-shaped steel angle brackets.
My work was interrupted by our next activity: driving to New Paltz. The plan was to get a spaghetti dinner at the Plaza Diner (which has the best spaghetti marinara in the Hudson Valley), but first Gretchen wanted to check out a new New Paltz bar called Huckleberry. Being a college town, New Paltz isn't known for its adult bars. But Huckleberry is exactly that: tasteful, serene, dimly lit, and equipped with ridiculously-high ceilings. The decor is sparse but sprinkled throughout with little and big details, all of which look like great finds from an architectural salvage store (particularly the wrought-iron chandelier). The music tends to be a mix of classic alternative rock and somewhat-unusual punk (for example, Mission of Burma), which may not be perfectly in tune with the desired clientele. Though the bartenders and other staff were all very young, the people doing the drinking seemed to be clustered around our age. Gretchen ordered some sort of spicy cider drink and I ordered an Other Half IPA (if I recall correctly) which tasted exactly how I like my IPAs to taste: like grapefruit juice.
It was Gretchen's birthday, and she'd invited our monthly dinner date companions Jasmin and Mary Ann to the Plaza Diner to have spaghetti with us. We all ordered the same thing, including the minestrone soup (which, oddly, was served at a lukewarm temperature). All agreed the spaghetti was ineffably fabulous. Before our meal, Jasmin asked if there was any alcohol at the diner and expressed disappointment when I told her that there wasn't. "I'm sort of an alcoholic these days," she said cheerfully, which earned her a high five from me. Later the four of us went back to Huckleberry for a few more rounds of drinks (though only Jasmin and I were actually drinking alcoholic beverages). I was in a sort of a confessional mood, so I found myself telling the Jasmin and Mary Ann how it is that Gretchen and I fight, which is mostly by not talking to each other. And yes, we do go to bed mad, and we have been known to use email to bring an end to a fight, particularly a multiday one.
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