The White Peril 白禍
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en-us2008-06-30T00:06+00:00Why I'm glad I returned to the States
http://whiteperil.com/posts/1214786119.shtml
...Sean2008-06-30T00:06+00:00At last--the creamy taste of Cool Whip is now in a can!"]]>And I'll send you letters / And come to your house for tea
http://whiteperil.com/posts/1211170410.shtml
It's interesting that Alice should tag me with something food-related, given that my stomach is having more trouble than the rest of me adjusting back to life in the States....Sean2008-05-19T04:05+00:00tag me with something food-related, given that my stomach is having more trouble than the rest of me adjusting back to life in the States. I'm not sure my answers will say much, but here they are.
What’s your favourite table?
My father made a beautiful oak trestle table for my parents' dining room. (It is the table itself we're talking about?)
What would you have for your last supper?
My mind would probably be too distracted for me to enjoy really good lamb or venison or beef, so I'll say vegetable tempura, which is heavenly when the batter and frying oil are perfectly prepared.
What’s your poison?
My favorite whisky is probably Laphroaig 10. Not a particularly highfalutin choice, but the one I reach for most. I like them peaty.
I do most of my drinking in merry, boisterous crowds, though, and I find that vodka and tonic (the well vodka wherever I am, unless it's particularly nasty) is both tasty and non-staining when my arm gets jostled. I had a nail-biting near miss with a negroni the other night that I don't care to repeat.
I like wine, too, of course, but I'm no geeky oenophile, and I generally find that whatever group I'm in has at least one person who's far more informed than I am, so I just go along with whatever he or she recommends we get.
Name your three desert island ingredients.
Peppercorns, sweet red bell peppers, unsalted butter.
What would you put in Room 101?
I guess it would be cheating to count strawberries, since I'm physically allergic to them.
I find the texture of globe onions repellant, though assuming Julia's like everyone else I know, she likes them and wouldn't mind having to eat them in my place.
Oh, and watermelon. I adore pink and green together, but I'm sorry--fruit should not be corky. (Don't bother telling that good watermelon doesn't have a corky texture. Yes, it does.)
Which book gets you cooking?
This may surprise some people, but in my case, Jane Brody's Good Food Book. Yes, I think Brody's too high-strung about nutrition and unproven dangers to health, but she genuinely seems to believe food should be enjoyed, and her approach in adapting recipes is often designed to bring the flavors of the star ingredients to the fore.
What’s your dream dinner party line-up?
I like large gatherings for parties, but not for dinner. Too many people makes lively shared conversation and pleasurably wicked confidences difficult, especially if several are new acquaintances.
All of that is a roundabout way of saying I like dinner parties with close friends.
What was your childhood teatime treat?
The Pennsylvania Dutch make great sticky buns, with lots of nuts and moist yeasty cake and enough syrup to make the entire population of the Northeastern Seaboard diabetic.
What was your most memorable meal?
Hmm. Probably when I was eleven and we were visiting my Auntie June in England, because it was the first time I realized that my parents and family elders thought I was ready to start being introduced into the adult world in public. No, I wasn't given a cigar and two glasses of port...just permission to order a main that came with artichokes and then after-dinner coffee. I like to think I still have my youthful energy, but I'm grateful I had the kind of family that still believed grown-up pleasures were something children should be taught to aspire to.
What was your biggest food disaster?
3 May 2001. Atsushi and I were giving a party over the Golden Week holiday for a few dozen friends in the afternoon. At about 10:00 a.m., I was julienning carrots for primavera sauce and lopped off the tip of my ring finger. I didn't cut it off at the joint or anything, but there was blood everywhere. Emergency room, painkillers, huge bandage, stern admonition from doctor to keep hand elevated above heart for the rest of the day. Luckily, gay guys know how to pull together in a genuine catering emergency, so we had five or six friends who finished my prep while I tried to be useful with one hand and an addled brain.
What’s the worst meal you’ve ever had?
Let's see. There was the Christmas dinner hosted by the owner of the bar that was kind of my local in Tokyo two years ago. It was oyster season, so the restaurant gave us its special ten-course oyster-themed prix fixe party menu. Have I mentioned that I can't eat shellfish? There were oysters in everything: oyster miso soup, oyster stew, oysters au gratin, raw oysters on the half shell, grilled oysters--it was like the Spam episode in Month Python, only with oysters.
I ended up snagging the two or three pieces of tuna and yellowtail sashimi that had found their way to the table, and then for the rest of the dinner subsisting on shochu and oolong tea and the occasional shiso leaf. When it was over, I collared my best friend and marched us to a little dining cafe in the middle of the gay district, where I demanded servings of their chicken karaage and steak-cut fries before they'd managed to get us sat down at a table.
Who’s your food hero/food villain?
My hero is whoever figured out that whipping cream turned it into whipped cream. My villain is the inventor of the no-taste tomato.
Nigella or Delia?
No offense to Nigella, but she's always going on and on about how sloppy and casual and unstudied she is while cooking, and see how I made this lovely soufflé by just pitching some eggs and flour into a ramekin and shoving the lot into the oven without getting so much as a smudge on my cashmere twinset? Just wait for your friends to arrive, pluck the perfect complementary wine from your little wine cellar, and there--instant party!
The problem is, a lot of cooking is engineering, and while it's not as hard as running a nuclear reactor, it really isn't as artless as all that. I haven't seen anything Delia Smith has done in the last decade or so, but from what I've read and watched of her, she's good at breaking down complex recipes into series of manageable steps and combinations of compatible ingredients.
Vegetarians: genius or madness?
Hold on--when I swallow this mouthful of steak, I'll tell you.
I don't make a practice of passing judgment on other people's dietary choices. I'll only note that, IIRC, lack of milk and meat aren't good for children's early development.
Fast food or fresh food?
You will not get me to apologize for my once-weekly trip to Burger King for a Whopper w/ Cheese combo with the largest fries and Coke. There's nothing quite like it to give you that pleasurable feeling of being at the very tippy-top of the food chain.
If I eat that way every day, though, I start to feel clogged up and crave steamed vegetables and rice for a few meals. And as Alice said, some very quick meals are among the most wholesome and satisfying. I love buttery scrambled eggs on toast with some black pepper as a light dinner, and it takes ten minutes if that to prepare.
Who would you most like to cook for?
Uh...my mother cooked most meals I ate until I was eighteen, and my father worked to pay for the ingredients, so I guess it wouldn't hurt to return the favor. I think they order in or eat out most of the time now, though.
What would you cook to impress a date?
I'm not sure "impressive" is what I'd aim for. It seems to me that a better precedent to be setting with date food is "luscious." Maybe grill up lamb chops and rinse the pan with a glass of wine? And make some mashed potatoes, which are one of the best-tasting foods imaginable when fresh from the ricer and fortified with butter and cream.
Make a wish.
I wish for development of more and better GM crops, and for less sanctimony and skittishness on the part of governments about introducing them.]]>We break bread
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Hello, nice gentlemanly Woofie-boys....Sean2008-05-15T01:05+00:00Hello, nice gentlemanly Woofie-boys.
Why are you staring at me with those molten eyes?
I know you missed me while I was out all afternoon, but you'll have to wait before you curl up next to me while I read. Right now I'm trying to eat this hot pastrami sandwich. Yes, with all these puddles of gravy. And the french fries. It is as good as it smells, thanks for asking--aren't you happy for me? Num-num-num....
Now, come off it. You have the better lives by far in this arrangement. No one keeps a bowl in a special place for me and sends half my weight in kibble raining into it twice a day, like manna from heaven. I have to go out and get my own food.
Okay, fine, if you're going to be all technical, I didn't go out and get it--I was feeling lazy and called the diner and had that nice man with the nice calves deliver it. I know you noticed the calves, too, because when he appeared you started shouting, "Woof!" Well, it came out "Arp!" as always, but I know what you meant. So I didn't go out with a stone-tipped spear and hunt for my food and stuff, but I worked for it. And I had to get up and buzz him in and pay for it, which at least earned me the calories in the milkshake.
Must you sharpen your claws on my favorite Diesel jeans? There, that's better.
No, for the last time, I can't share food with you anymore. You know when Mommy took you in the cab to the man in the lab coat with the big, scary needle the other day? Well--
Don't you dare growl at me. If Mommy carefully avoided mentioning the big, scary needle so you wouldn't freak out when she packed you up in the pet carriers, it's not because I told her to! You didn't ask whether there would be needles involved, did you? Thought not. (I mean, really! "We're going to take a very special trip in the cab to see some pretty buildings uptown! Yes, we are! Yes, we are!" You seriously bought that?) So really, can you blame anyone but yourselves for having let your guard down?
Anyway, when you hear what the vet told Mommy, you may think the shot wasn't so bad by comparison: he said you're a porker and need to eat less. Yes, you, Blond Woofie. You don't think Daddy's giving you less food at a time this week because he suddenly decided to economize, do you? You don't want to turn into a dirigiwoofie, do you? The Goodyear Woofie. The Hindenwoofie.
Fine, that was a little uncalled-for. Sorry. Just trying to drive the point home. It's for your own good.
Oh, for Pete's sake, don't give me the teary-eyed routine. Most of us don't get to spend all day every day doing nothing more demanding than snuggling in while someone draws a blanket over our furry, sinewy little bodies and whispers that we're adorable and should just lie still while he gets us breakfast.
I am not a liar! I clearly specified "all day every day." Sheesh. You know, you can keep your eyes and snouts glued to every morsel of pastrami I convey from plate to mouth, but you can't listen to a thing I say. The last time I snu...never mind. It's none of your business. You just sit there thinking your coarse, untoward thoughts. I can't stop you.
There's just no reasoning with you two.
Oh, for the love of...here. A quarter-inch square of pastrami for each of you. And NO MORE. Just the lean part so your Daddy doesn't yell at me too much. Now stop staring!]]>Those jealous dogs / Always on the alert
http://whiteperil.com/posts/1210638405.shtml
A few years ago, my buddy gave his wife a pair of chihuahuas as a present. Now that I'm staying with them, they've become my companions....Sean2008-05-13T00:05+00:00
Don't they look adorable?
Of course--in still photographs. In real life, though, they move.
I call them the Millicujos.
They open their little jaws and bark at the slightest noise, often for close to a half hour before settling down. Usually, it's the elderly elevator in our brownstone that sets them off, but sometimes the stimulus appears to originate somewhere around the kitchen skylight--a creak caused by the wind? the piping of a bird? Usually I can't make it out. No trouble making out their response, though.
The blond with the limpidly innocent gaze is, you shouldn't need to be told, the more implacably hostile of the two when the public isn't around to observe. Not by all that much, though. His darker, younger brother is a willing accomplice.
J. and his wife have nicknamed them "the Woofies." This is a courtesy title, about as connected with reality as "Princess Di." These two wouldn't be able to produce a butch, baritone, thrillingly menacing "woof!" if they sold their souls to Cerberus. Even "yap!" errs somewhat in the direction of resonance, as far as I'm concerned. My conclusion--borne of repeated and lengthy exposure--is that "arp!" is the best transcription of the noise they make (and make and make and make and make).
They've grown accustomed to me now, so they'll sometimes jump up into my lap when I'm trying to type. Mostly, though, they still eye me with deep suspicion. Unless I've just cooked something along the savory/buttery/meaty axis, that is. Then I become their new best friend. Their little eyes liquefy, and (I swear) they pout. For those who've been wondering why they're not hearing more about how adjusting to New York has been, a major reason is that I'm too busy defending my breakfast eggs.]]>New York update: food, clothing, and shelter
http://whiteperil.com/posts/1209468543.shtml
There's a favorite story on my mother's side of the family: My great-grandmother's sister came from Poland for a visit in the 1950s, and seeing the variety of goods in a...Sean2008-04-29T11:04+00:00
Japan is a first-world country, so it's certainly not the case that I've become unused to variety. But of course, the brands are different, the diet is different, what appeals to people is different, the cumulative effect of surveying the aisles is different. Coming back to New York means readjusting my eye and palate to New York food sources. We were going to order from Fresh Direct, but last night we passed D'Ag's on the way home, so we stopped in. I'm afraid I kind of embarrassed my friend by giggling at everything, but I couldn't help myself.
It wasn't the type and distribution of products. Even from only coming home twice a year for the last decade, I'm still used to that. It also wasn't that anything and everything comes in 50-gallon-drum size, which wouldn't fit through the door of most Tokyo houses. I'm used to that, too. What got me was the evolution in some specific familiar stuff. The most improbable brands have gone upscale.
Cheer's curvy new bottles look as if they were inspired by ewers from Pottery Barn; I half expected each one to come with a little basin in matching plastic. For detergent containers, they looked invitingly touchable, almost ergonomic. (And, unsurprisingly, they're clearly aimed at the lady of the house, with filigree patterns in the background on each label.)
There are formulations for the stuff inside that I hadn't seen before, too. One is supposedly targeted at dark colors. (The brand concept was developed by "strategy and design teams fully immersed in darkness." Is that the most fabulous thing ever, or what? And I like the way "Cheer Dark" sounds like Near Dark, the Kathryn Bigelow vampire movie that reunited many of the most memorable cast members from Aliens.)
I was utterly bewildered by a product called True Fit:
Nothing can ruin laundry day like finding a favorite shirt has stretched to the point of no return. Help clothes keep their shape with Cheer® 2X Compacted True Fit™.
Love your clothes. Treat them right.
Personally, my solution to clothes that could get stretched out of shape is either to take them to a proper cleaner's or to use a mesh bag in the washing machine, but I love the idea that there's a detergent out there that's specifically formulated for them.
Also, Dietz & Watson? I grew up not far from Philadelphia, and to me, Dietz & Watson means hot dogs and kielbasa. But not anymore. The company introduces itself on its website with this VERY WRONG sentence:
Welcome to Dietz & Watson, home to the World's Best Meat Delicacies and Artisan Cheeses.
Or maybe it's not so wrong. Dietz & Watson was always a local, family-owned company that emphasized homely production values. It's just that it used to be assumed that those values appealed to local just-folks types; now, rebranded as "artisanal," they've moved up in the world.
I love the disdain that drips from every phrase on this page about condiments:
The World's Best Meat Delicacies and Artisan Cheese deserve better than that "same old yellow or spicy mustard, horseradish without a kick or sour pickles without a snap". So we created our Deli Complements™ with just that intention, to complement our meats and cheeses with enhanced flavor profiles to satisfy today's adult taste expectations.
Enhanced flavor profiles! For a range that includes something called "Sandwich Spread." I love it! What next--small-batch Cheez Whiz in earthenware jugs stopped with natural corks? (And psssst! Kudos to your marketing people for choosing the right spelling of complements for this context. Now they just need to tell your webmaster to fix the filename for the image. And guys, this is America: the period goes inside the quotation marks.)
It's been rainy for the last few days, and one of the things I always notice about being back from Tokyo is how much better New York looks in the rain. The grey weather can still be depressing, but there's something about the presence of organic-feeling brick surfaces sprinkled through the built environment that makes it feel less off-putting. The relentless onslaught of steel/glass/concrete/tile in Tokyo can really drag you down. And sidewalks in the City are so wide that you can actually navigate down them with an open umbrella without maiming anyone.]]>Pack it and move it
http://whiteperil.com/posts/1208089312.shtml
Does anyone out there know where my evening shirt is?...Sean2008-04-13T12:04+00:00
Well, what good are you?
I thought I always kept it inside the dinner jacket on the same hanger, but unless it's invisible, it's not there. I hope I didn't leave it in Atsushi's closet when I moved out.
*******
How is it possible for one man to have so many vases? If there were ever any doubt that I'm gay, it's been dispelled by the four boxes of decorative housewares I've just packed. Mind you, they don't include anything you could eat off or store something in.
*******
It's time for me to break a pair of sunglasses. Or maybe lose them. I can feel it. The weather keeps going from sunny to cloudy, so you need them sometimes and then not others. They end up in a pocket or dangling by one slender arm from my bag. I seem to have a thing for dropping them in cabs or putting them down on tables and putting something heavy on them. I school myself resolutely to keep them in their little crush-proof cases, but it never works.
*******
I'm not entirely sure why, but I have The Descent in the DVD player, and I'm finding it oddly comforting to have it playing while I'm packing. Given the increasing claustrophic-cave-like-ness of my apartment, you'd think it would make me afraid of confronting a throat-biting humanoid in the bathroom or something, but I actually find it rather cozy. And I used to be of those people who were completely unable to handle horror movies. (When I was growing up, all the talk of demons waiting to getcha we got in church affected my over-active imagination a good deal.)
BTW, if you like suspense and have a strong stomach, The Descent is a great little movie. It's bloody and seriously scary at times, but you don't leave it feeling cynically worked over. It's thoughtful and raises interesting questions without being pretentious, and the cave scenes are very persuasive even though they were all shot on a soundstage. I love hypertrophied old Hollywood glamour-orgy productions as much as the next gay man, but there's a lot to be said for a movie made by people who relied on ingenuity, skill, and conviction rather than piles of money.]]>Raise the pressure
http://whiteperil.com/posts/1206963424.shtml
On Saturday, I flew into Tokyo as a resident of Japan for the last time. Sometime in the next few weeks, I'll step out onto my balcony and see this view...Sean2008-04-02T13:04+00:00
If you're a Westerner living in Asia, you have, at any time, at least a half-dozen friends who are trying to decide whether they want to leave or stay. It's just a topic that comes up a lot. Therefore, I was able to draw on a lot of advice, not all of it solicited. Most of the people whose opinions I valued echoed my Belgian architect friend (whose advice I did solicit, since he has a lot more experience with these things than I have): If you have experience working in Asia, you can always find a way to come back; but the longer you're away from home, the harder it is to find a way to return.
So I'm moving back. Taking a bit of a rest, staying with my old roommate in Murray Hill for a while, then getting a new job.
"Aren't you afraid it'll be hard to adjust?" I've been asked (and asked and asked). Yeah, sure. I've been in Japan my whole adult life. (I don't consider college and grad school adulthood--not when you're being funded by Mom and Dad or the Japan Foundation.) But people move to new places all the time. And New York is somewhere I've lived before anyway.
And yet...it's been a long time since I've lived in the States. When I last lived in America, Buffy the Vampire Slayer was still nothing more than a rather bad movie with Kristy Swanson. When the television show debuted and friends started raving about it, we saw it in Japan the way you saw American shows back then: friends sent videotapes.
I bought a few new CDs on their day of release a week or two after arriving in Japan: Bilingual by the Pet Shop Boys and Nine Objects of Desire by Suzanne Vega.
I don't remember which movies I first saw in the theater after coming to Tokyo. I do remember watching Alien Resurrection here when it was released. Japanese audiences are very quiet, so when the Winona Ryder character reappeared after being shot, my spontaneous cry of, "YOU'RE SUPPOSED TO BE DEAD AND OUT OF THE PICTURE, YOU ANNOYING B..." could be heard echoing through the theater until my then-boyfriend clapped a hand over my mouth.
That's how long I've been away. Yes, I see my friends back home at least once a year, and I'm in constant e-mail contact. And there are loads of things that make keeping in touch easier. Everyone has e-mail. (That wasn't true even in 1996.) You can download just about anything. (When was the last time I had to leave the house without 6000 songs stored on a device the size of a deck of cards? I don't even remember.) You can torture people with your vacation photos without even having them printed; just create and online album and e-mail the URL to friend and foe alike. But it isn't the same as being there.
I'm not focusing on changes in pop culture stuff because I'm unaware that there are more important things in life. It just, when you live far from home and contact friends to find out what's going on there, they assume you're watching the news. If someone brings up what Obama just said at a rally the other night, it's because they want to discuss it, not because they think they're informing you about something happening at home that you couldn't have heard about.
It's the new movies and music and restaurants and things they tell you about to help you feel caught up. (Books, too, but despite being someone who reads all the time, I generally have a hard time getting into contemporary fiction, so my friends have learned to stop recommending new novels to me.) Even if you find soap-opera-ish dramas tiresome, knowing that a lot of the people you know are watching Ally McBeal or (now) Grey's Anatomy and gabbing about it at brunch on weekends becomes meaningful. You're not participating in one another's daily lives, but you can at least feel secure in the knowledge that you're not becoming strangers.
So. Three weeks to settle things here. Then however long it takes to get settled back in at home. I'm looking forward to the culture shock in a way. It would be a bummer if America and New York and I weren't different after twelve years. And now that Japan seems to be cool again, maybe I can parlay my experience here into a hip, cosmopolitan demeanor that gets the men flocking to me.
Or maybe I'll just seem out of it.
We'll find out soon enough.]]>染み取り
http://whiteperil.com/posts/1206422208.shtml
So I haven't learned much Chinese in Taipei, but I have developed a nice line in learning which sinitic compounds used in Japanese do not carry over into Mandarin. You will...Sean2008-03-25T05:03+00:00not carry over into Mandarin. You will doubtless profit from hearing that Chinese and Japanese write "lamb" differently.
I made this important discovery yesterday at the dry-cleaner's. At a birthday party for a friend over the weekend, another friend had (kindly) offered to give me some lamb but (unkindly) cut it so that some of the connective tissue whipsawed. I ended up with a very neat diagonal line of gravy spattered across my shirt. Chuckles all around. A torrent of fervent apologies from my friend--the only way to salvage your friendship with another member of the Family after you've ruined his outfit is to abase yourself big-time.
Luckily, I was wearing a T-shirt underneath, and Taipei's an informal city, so Mr. Button-down was relegated to my bag until the cleaner's could deal with him. Naturally, yet another (sloshed) friend decided to pitch forward (sloshily) and expectorate half his cosmo onto my shoulder a few hours later. (I know I'm something of a wit, but I don't think what I'd just said was that funny.) In case you didn't know, pink liquid shows up rather well on light blue fabric in bar lighting.
*sigh*
Given a choice between going through the rest of the night either (1) looking like a cosmo drinker who was too far gone to aim his glass at his own mouth or (2) barechested, I decided to keep the shirt on and adopt a happy/spacey expression. T-shirts are machine washable, after all, and I'm only in this city for another week.
Later, though, it was time to go to the cleaner's. The receptionists in my office offered to take care of it for me, but since I have a perverse sense of adventure, I went myself. That's how I ended up trying to explain to the woman behind the counter (who spoke a little English and a little Japanese but understood neither "lamb" nor "ko-hitsuji") what the hell was splashed across my shirt front. Luckily, through a combination of 羊 and 汁 and a few other Chinese characters, which I scrawled on an empty receipt as she giggled, I'm pretty sure I got the general idea across. Can't wait to see what my shirt looks like tomorrow!
Good times.]]>Hey You
http://whiteperil.com/posts/1188136137.shtml
My computer came back from Toshiba this weekend, so I've been getting it back into something reasonably resembling the shape it was in before it went crazy on me. Can't quite...Sean2007-08-26T13:08+00:00
iTunes has alphabetized my Madonna songs after the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and before 10,000 Maniacs. This state of affairs is so plain weird that I'm tempted to go to the Apple store to ask whether Madonna's first initial is now assumed to come after Z in the letters or before 0 in the numbers and other characters, just to satisfy my curiosity. Maybe something wacky happened when I sneaked my tracks back into iTunes from my iPod, which was the only place they'd been backed up? But why only Madge?
no browser wants to open google.com or gmail.com. I've tried making a special permission in Norton 360, turning off the firewall temporarily, and using every conceivable alternative URL. Nothing works. Good thing Gmail Lite is around.
the brightness refuses to stay set at three levels below maximum. It reverts to full-on lightbulb-in-the-interrogation-room setting whenever I restart the computer. Now that I think about it, maybe it did that when I first bought the machine three years ago and I've just forgotten what I did to fix it.
These modern conveniences--such a time-consuming chore to work with. Should be back as normal soon.
(BTW, speaking of Madge, the title of that newest single captures with exquisite, if obviously unintentional, perfection the strident haranguing tone she adopts when she gets going on one of her moral crusades. And please--no one whose personal dressing room and gym probably consume more energy per day than Sierra Leone should be preaching at us to...uh, actually, I'm not sure what the hell she's telling us to do. This is not one of her more incisive sets of lyrics.
But of course I can't help liking it anyway.)
Added on 28 August: Speaking of Windows-related woes (which started this whole situation), I just got this from a colleague. The parody of Word--I hate that damned paper clip!--made my day.]]>In which Sean complains gratingly
http://whiteperil.com/posts/1180599862.shtml
If there are any managers of housewares departments reading, may I ask you a favor? When hiring men, please make sure they're queens....Sean2007-05-31T08:05+00:00
Straight men are great--my very own father is a straight man, and I just love and respect him to pieces--and there are plenty of roles they can fulfill in society that constitute a real contribution. Just not when they're supposed to be selling you vases, endtables, or curtains.
I thought I was going to end up making this guy cry yesterday by asking whether he could measure the depth of a vase for me. You know, I wanted to buy flowers for it on the way home, and I needed to know how long the stems had to be without unpacking it right there at the flower shop. (You can eyeball these things sometimes, but it can be tough to gauge how thick the bottom of something is.) If the flowers are too short, they have to be entirely defoliated and end up looking as if they were being garroted, which isn't a pleasing decorative effect unless you happen to live in a dungeon, and maybe not even then. The more I tried to explain this, the more traumatized he looked. By the time the ordeal was over (the first vase got marred when they tried to scrape off the brand label for me, so they had to bring a second one out of the stockroom--yet more agitated activity for one of these foreigners with their strange requests), I was feeling traumatized myself.
*******
Luckily, one of my friends was back from a week home in Australia, so we went out for a restorative drink and catch-up. Less luckily, just as the vase encounter had blissfully slipped from the memory, I was beset by two guys who had been talking and flirting with my buddy.
It was the usual round of questions: How long have you been here? Where are you from? Oh, and where did you grow up? Oh, where on the East Coast? Pennsylvania? Where in Pennsylvania? Oh. Well, then, where on the Philadelphia end of the state?
At this point, I know I'm in for it. Long draught of vodka. Sigh. "From just outside Allentown."
One beat. Two beats.
Oh! You mean like the Billy Joel song?
Now, that everyone I will ever meet in my entire life will respond to the mention of Allentown with that exact sentence is a harsh reality to which I have long been inured. That everyone seems to think he's the first to think of it also doesn't bother me--we're all less original than we like to imagine we are.
But rarely do two people utter it at the same time.
And then start singing the song at me in stereo.
My buddy, who's seen this conversation and my wearied reaction many times before, stifled an uncharitable chuckle and excused himself to go to the toilet. (Bitch. I'll remember that.) Fortunately for me, another friend, one who actually understands the meaning of loyalty, was on my other side. At the first opportunity, he commandeered my empty glass and waved one of the bar guys over. "Oh, darling--not just the Allentown comment, but impromptu karaoke as well? I saw your fist clenching and unclenching--just be glad it's over now and relax and drink this."
*******
And while I'm mewling, why do delivery services find it necessary to play head games with you? Tokyu Hands originally told me my latest acquisitions could be delivered between 9 a.m. and 2 p.m., but that I'd be called with a more exact time this morning. Fine. I get a call at 8:30: "I'll be arriving at your place between 11:00 and 13:00." Okay. At least that's a reasonably narrow range.
At 10:30 I'm getting ready to get in the shower so I can be out, dressed, and maquillage-èd by the time the guy comes. (Just because I want to be able to leave for work right after receiving my delivery, not for the other reason that may occur to the image-conscious gay mind. Japan must be the only country on Earth without hot delivery men and construction workers.) My keitai rings. "Hi! It's XX from Tokyu Hands. I'm at your building in less than five minutes." Granted that being early is better than making you wait around endlessly, I was just lucky I hadn't decided to go out and run some errands under the assumption that it would be okay to be back at my apartment by 10:55 or so. (I've done so before with unpleasant results.)
On the bright side, the apartment is nearing completion.]]>
