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July 3, 2000 |
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Ugghh! Mornings!
I originally wasn't supposed to get today off, but I managed to talk my boss into taking it as a floating holiday.
We only have a set number of holidays at work, Independence Day is
one of them, but they don't make concessions for either of the surrounding
days had they fallen on Monday or Friday. I'm off today.
Freedom! I would normally say that I would get to sleep in today,
but I get to sleep in most days (flex time is wonderful), and today I
wasn't actually sleeping in…
It was about 9:30am and Pam was getting me out of bed. Her sister Linda and her friend Mary would be arriving soon; they are on vacation from Michigan. They were spending the next couple of days at Pam's place. This wouldn't be the first time I've met parts of her family. I met her parents some months ago, although we weren't together at that time. I think I made a good impression.
Pam was doing some last minute things to get her place ready. I volunteered to take out the trash. That I knew how to do. As I was taking out the trash, I noticed a couple of women getting out of a cab. I was wondering if it was them and approached. Sure enough it was.
We came in and exchanged cordial greetings. Pam seemed pleased to see her sister, they had not seen each other for about a year. This is also the first chance her sister has had a chance to visit since she has moved here to Seattle. I was delighted to meet them, though I still felt a bit groggy from the lack of sleep.
It would be a full day today. We had talked about doing lunch and a women's basketball game in at 7pm. Somewhere in there I would have to find time to drive back to my place and feed Magic, though we had plenty of time. Or so I thought.
We didn't have access to a car. We did actually, have access to my car, but it is a two-seater and we can't get around that way. So most of our plans involved getting around by bus or foot. I wouldn't classify either mode of transportation as particularly close to my heart.
We took the bus to the Pike Place Market. For those of you who haven't been to the Market, it still stands as one of Seattle landmark places. Why? I couldn't begin to tell you. It's true that there is one fish shop there where they will throw your fish from the perimeter of the shop to some of the folks behind the counter to weigh the fish and package it. You only have to get this a couple of times before they realize that they bruise the fish that way. After a while the place really loses its novelty. The one place, which I do find interesting is the comic shop somewhere on one of the floors below.
There's also a shop downstairs where you can buy a bong. For the record, I'm not a drug user. I don't pass judgment though, I just haven't in the past and haven't had a need, want, or opportunity to do it. I thought to myself that it would be incredibibly funny to have a new, clean bong sitting on my passenger seat the next time I get pulled over by the police. Many friends of mine don't think it would be as funny as I think it would be though.
We all wondered around the Market looking at fruits and flowers. I'm not terribly fond of fruit, I think I may have mentioned that before. Still I don't care if other folks get and enjoy food, people have strange fascinations fruit can be one of them. I'll point out that we didn't actually buy any, we just looked for now.
We roamed around the streets surrounding the Market and wound up in the Cafe Campagne for lunch. It is a French restaurant. The food was good, probably not as good as you might expect from the prices, but this is Seattle. The place felt small, the word ratcage comes to mind. I remember the waiting staff brushing my back a number of times while they passed by. Our waitress was a little condescending at times, but then again, Mary asked a couple of strange questions… like, "Is this a German restaurant?"
During lunch I mostly listened, I knew how important it was for Pam to catch up with her sister. It's not as if I was being antisocial, but this also gave me an opportunity to learn more about my girlfriend. They had all been roommates in college as well, so they had quite a bit in common. It was a little strange to learn these little details about her, not that she was holding back or anything, just things that were never mentioned. I did find that everyone in her family has the same fascination with the weather, they tune the weather channel the way many tune ESPN or CNN. As far as the company was concerned it was a delightful lunch. Linda picked up lunch. It's always a bit awkward when a near stranger pays for your meal isn't it?
I figured that we would now be heading back… Nope. They wanted to see some of the shops in downtown Seattle, I thought to myself, how long can this take?
Okay, people, if you ever ask yourself this, brace yourself for impact. I know that I saw much more than I wanted to see of Seattle, including too much of the Eddie Bauer store. Get a life people, the way you wear the clothes makes the look, not so much of the clothes themselves. I've never liked wearing a particular name, with the possible exception of Levi's and this is because it is the most common article of clothes, and the most common brand. I abhored Polo's in high school and to this day do not wear polo-like shirts. This detestable store embodies this mindset.
It's a name people, that's all it is. It's a bloody name! If they were to sell shirts made out of cardboard with the name Eddie Bauer you would go out and buy them like happy little lemming. That's okay, this has been going on for years, but I think the idea of having an Eddie Bauer edition of a car has gone too far. This is like having Ford make cheese products.
We continued walking and searching for a thermometer. No, I cannot make this up. A thermometer. Mary was looking for a thermometer for her garden. Not your typical run-of-the-mill mercury tube thermometer, one of the round ceramic ones with a dial.
I suppose that over the years I have learned not to care about the weather. In Seattle, caring about the weather is a bit of a losing proposition. It would be a bit like having an RV in Manhattan, you just chalk it up as one of the things you simply do not do and move on. Still, many people move to Seattle determined that the bad weather will not get to them, but most admit that it does.
We spent most of the afternoon looking for one of these thermometers to no avail. We did manage to stop by the Levi's store where I picked up a couple of pairs of jeans. Come to think of it, I probably have too many pairs of jeans, but I'm transitioning to a new waistline (dropping inches baby!) and it saves me the trouble of doing laundry as frequently. Not that any of you needed to know that.
We eventually head back to the Pike Place Market to pick up the fruit and flowers that we didn't pick up the first time. We also ended up picking up some dungeness crab and Alaskan king crab for dinner tomorrow night. We went to a couple of different places for the fruit, because the first ones didn't look as good.
As we were looking through the market they mentioned that they needed some dessert for dinner tomorrow. I'm not sure how it was, but somewhere along the line I promised to make my dessert specialty, which is my Northwestern cheesecake. I had baked it so many times that I'm sure that I could bake it with my eyes closed; I think that a couple of times, I really did have my eyes closed. I also promised to make my scalloped potatoes for tomorrow. I normally look it up, but I had only prepared them a couple of months ago so the recipe was still fresh in memory. And… no, that doesn't make me a freak.
If you're picking up that I wasn't in a particularly good mood, you're right. I'm not particularly fond of buses or walking. Don't get me wrong, I'll tolerate them if they're the most efficient way of getting some things done, which is one of the reasons I find the city of Seattle so detestable. Still, the logic of riding the bus to get to the Pike Place Market and hauling the several bags of berries and fruits through several blocks and through the bus simply because they're presumably better than the ones at the local grocery store, eludes me.
We eventually make it back to Pam's place. It is now past five, the WNBA game starts at 7:00pm and we would be walking there, which means that we had to leave considerably earlier. I would not have time to drive back home and feed Magic, I had not fed him for about twenty-four hours. I was getting a little worried.
We went to the game our seats were located in some strange plateau in the Key Arena, section 127, if you must know. Another one of my pet peeves is the way everyone roots for the local sports team. Now, it is one thing to root for your alma matter, but it is entirely another to root for a local professional team. Why? One is a bond that you have picked when you joined the school, it is your family of sorts. The other is a local company, every professional sports team is in the business to make money. Rooting for the local sports team would be like rooting for Ford if you lived in Detroit. Okay, maybe that's oversimplifying it. It would be like rooting for another entertainment company, like Fox, for instance.
People root for one team because they want a sense of belonging. They want to feel like they're part of a community. Except that there are many other things that this elicit, for instance homophobia. Do you think that they're more forgiving of homosexuality in the Deep South rather than say San Francisco? It is a way for people to lose free will… a way for people to have less choices. Fine go root for your Mariners… even if you have no clue what a balk is. Or if you don't know what happens if a ball is bunted foul with two strikes. How is it that you can say that you're a Mariners' fan if you don't know baseball. That's like saying you love chocolate, but you don't like sweets.
Naturally, everyone rooted for the Seattle Storm, so conversely I rooted for the Washington Mystics. The game was good. I though it was a little silly or even demeaning to have kids as the cheerleading squads for women's basketball. You see there's still this power thing, for some reason the players have to be more than the cheerleaders. This follows the premise that somehow cheerleading is beneath the players. Much like homemakers shouldn't be considered any lesser than the bread-earners, yet we still see men homemakers as less manly. The real trick would be to have an androgynous cheerleading squad OR perhaps to still have women cheerleaders. Having kid cheerleaders? Silly if you asked me.
I was delighted by the fact that I was one of the lone voices that cheered when the Mystics scored, which they did… more often than the Storm. The final was Mystics 60, Storm 55. Woo Hoo! There's always a small part of me that expect some drunken fan to whack me beside the head while I cheer for their opposition. They may say that it is un-American to root against the home team. I suppose I see it as being un-American to not have choices. I have made my choice, I'm rooting against the local team. The game was over by about 8:30pm or 9pm. By this time, it had been about 27 hours since I fed Magic.
We still had to pick up a few more items for dinner tomorrow, so we went into Larry's Market to pick up a few things. Yes, I remember the ingredients to the recipes from the top of my head. I walked down the aisles in the market and picked out what I needed. I won't pretend that I'm that familiar with this market, but if you know what you want, it really doesn't take so long. Five minutes. I figured that they also knew what they needed since they elected to come to the market.
It's never quite that simple is it?It took incredibly long for the remainder of them to pick out their items. Just picking the wine was an ordeal. I'll be the first to admit, I know little about wine. However, if you're buying wine you must have an idea about what you want. If they don't have the one you want it would seem that you would have alternates in mind. I suppose I picture it like buying cereal. You know which one you want, if the store doesn't have it, you probably know of a reasonable second choice, or else elect not to buy any.
This approach doesn't work with wine?
You know… I try not to be judgmental, which is precisely the reason why I normally ask people why they do the things they do. I figured somewhere along the line people are doing something or thinking in some way for a reason. There must be a logical reason why picking a wine takes twenty minutes. Maybe it has something to do with the idea that people like to struggle. They labored over the choice so thus it must be a good choice. That reasoning is similar to the idea that something must be better if you payed more for it. Who knows? The logic eludes me.
We walked down to Tup Tim Thai for dinner. The dinner was very good as usual. We had one of their specialties, which was the stuffed chicken wings. They're a bit tough to describe, you'll just have to try them. I had the phad thai, as usual. I've had it prepared better in some other places, but their recipe wasn't bad. We chatted some more about Pam's past as I listened attentively.
We lingered there for a while, this is considering that we arrived at the restaurant close to their closing time. I'll give you a little Frank history here. I waited on tables for a while, you might even say that waiting on tables helped put me through college. I did this for about four years, during that time, I worked mostly dinner shifts, but also had my share of lunch and closing shifts.
There were a number of things that I found irritating about what customers do…
First, I hated it when a customer comes in minutes before closing. There are many little tasks that have to be done in a closing shift, many things have been put away, and serving becomes much tougher. And it irritates the chef, and you don't want to irritate the chef. Think about how much tougher is is to put a salad together if everything was in tupperware instead of a salad bar.
Second, I hated tables that lingered. As a waiter, you make your money almost entirely on tips. Paychecks are laughable. Yes, tables will tip better if you give them better service, but not that much better. Simply put, you make your money by turning over the tables quickly. If you happen to piss off one customer, sure they'll short you… but having waited on just one extra table will more than make up for that difference.
Tonight we did both, we walked in late and lingered. Had I been working that night, I would've been irritated.
Next, Mary proceeds to open up one of the boxes of cookies in the restaurant and eating them while we chatted. To her credit she did ask, and had I known her better, I would've posted an objection. Eating external food at a restaurant is a bit of a slap in the face. It would be like bringing a set of headphones to a concert and seating in the front row.
Yes, at this point I was in a pretty pissy mood. I'm not a morning person. I don't like walking or taking the bus. And at this point, I was getting alarmingly worried about my sweet cat, Magic. You know what else? I missed being at home. I don't really like going out to begin with, I'm not what you would call an extrovert. I generally prefer watching baseball games on television.
We eventually made it back to Pam's place and I immediately tell her that I have to go check up on my cat, I've been a bad, neglectful human to my cat. I was pretty upset. She first suggests that I should simply go home and sleep in my own bed, but I'm not sure what kind of message that would send to her sister and Mary. No. I was going to be supportive. Besides, I had to pick up some of the utensils and remaining ingredients for the cheesecake.
You see, I gave my word, I'm very serious about keeping my word.
Pam rode back to my place with me. During the trip, she kept insisting that I should simply drop her off, or that she could just get a cab and go back to her place. It wasn't so much about staying at my place, it was about having stayed out so late and neglecting my responsibilities to my cat. Getting a pet is making a promise that you would care for him/her, and I broke that promise, to myself and to Magic. We finally made it to my place and greeted my poor hungry cat… thirty hours since the last time I fed him. He seemed okay, a little lonely perhaps, but he's had to get used to that more often lately. I hold Magic for a while to let him know that everything is okay. I then collect the things I need for tomorrow and we head back to her place.
As silly as this sounds, we were both visibly upset about this. In fact, I don't remember both of us ever being as upset about anything. We talked about it some more on the way back. Linda and Mary were sharing a room, so we did have a chance to talk about it some more after we made it back to her apartment. We had calmed down by then, and somehow things didn't seem that important by then. Still, the sad thing is that I don't know if I would've done or felt any differently about any of it.
July 3, 2000