NSA Dinner

I have a new blog. Writing about non-dinnery things here makes me feel squeamish, and my livejournal is solely for moaning about work and stuff and nonsense. Anyway, if you want to read the things I write, mosy on over tomarnegras.wordpress.com, where every day is Marne Gras.

This is not about food, but it is funny and it is about me making other people laugh, and this makes me feel good, so I will share it with you.  If you’re here for the food, go now.

On Tuesday night I went to the Seattle Salon of Shame and read a diary entry I made in the fifth grade entitled “Good or Bad Reasons to Be Anne Frank”.

this is what I wrote/read:

Bad–

1. almost no food
2. didn’t go outside for 2.5 years
3. no friends except for peter

Good–

1. Private
2. finally getting boyfriend
3. good view except for when there were battles

In my journal I also wrote a series of entries (wait for it…wait for it…) AS IF I WERE ACTUALLY (!) Anne Frank… but I declined to share those with the crowd.

Early on in the whole dinnerslut thing, I set up a date for nearly a month later with a woman who offered to take me anywhere I want. Because my favorite restaurants are based solely on name and branding, we set up a date to go to Coastal Kitchen. The date was for almost a month later, and I forgot about it.

After the date with the woman who looked like my ex (and all the dates that came before that), I was tired. I was tired of sending strangers my contact info and e-mail address, wondering if they would show up on my porch wearing a corset and holding a flogger and a steak knife in each hand. I was tired of finding random restaurants and showing up a half hour early and having weirdly boring conversations with lonely women. I was tired of feeling poor and pathetic. I was tired of eating restaurant food and having to explain each and every date to my coworkers as they watched my reheat my evidence leftovers. I was going on “real” dates (read: more than one date with the same person) and at first I was ashamed to tell the real dates about the dinner thing and then I was pissed off that I was ridiculously overscheduled. I actually told a pretty girl who wanted to go out on a Monday night that I wasn’t free until a week from Thursday. If anyone ever did this to me, I would tell them to suck my grits. If you can’t free up one night in a week for me and we’re still in the exciting and fun stage of the possible relationship, then go away. I wanted my food stamps to roll over, and I wanted to cook myself a meal. I didn’t want to be a dinnerslut anymore.

Even though I was positively buoyant over the prospect of eating at Coastal Kitchen, I still felt gross all over about the prospect of having another get to know you talk. I almost canceled the date outright; however, Coastal Kitchen was the one restaurant I remembered reading about in my parents’ house at home long before I moved to Seattle while I pawed through a Frommer’s Guidebook, trying to get even a vague idea of what I was getting myself into. When I finally moved to Seattle I forgot about it, but a few months after my arrival I moved to the Central District, and one evening I walked by Coastal Kitchen with a housemate, who was understandably confused by my giddy reaction. I made her cross the street with me so we could go stare in the windows and look at the menu when I realized everything was way out of my range (like, er, all of the restaurants in the greater Seattle area). I sadly wrote it off until the dinnerslut thing began, when it was my secret goal to have someone take me there.

The food did not disappoint, although I had expected it to. A friend had told me that only a few select items are alright, and most of the dishes are hit and miss. I was prepared. They were featuring food from the Peruvian coast (Coastal Kitchen has a set menu and a quarterly menu that features a coastal cuisine from around the world). I ate grilled mahi mahi in this avocado butter cheese sauce called huancaina sauce. The fish was salty, crisp, and buttery. I threw the few table manners I usually employ right out the window: I felt only mildly slutty as I licked the grease off of my fingers one by one. It came with roasted purple peruvian potatoes and grilled corn on the cob. I hadn’t seen that variety of potatoes in over a year, when I worked on a farm that grew them, and I hadn’t eaten grilled corn on the cob since July. If the actual cob had been edible, I would have sucked that down, and as it was, I ripped off the handle on the ear so I could get my mouth around the few kernels on the end. I may or may not have snorted like a piggie during the consumption of the corn.

My last date was kind of batty, regrettably in a cuckoo for cocoa puffs kind of way. She worked for Microsoft; it didn’t seem like she got a whole lot of sun or social interaction. She talked a lot about children’s television and I did a lot of nodding. I’m actually terrible at small talk, and on this date I made no effort to make things any less awkward. I talked about whatever I felt like talking about; I made rude observations about the waiter and the couple sitting next to us. I burped. I snorted while I ate the corn on the cob; I acted like myself, mostly.

For the wonderfulness that was my actual meal, I was still hungry when everything was gone (if the plate had been made out of corn plastic, i probably would have tried to eat that as well). My date noticed and suggested we eat dessert.

Until this point, I had always said no to drinks, appetizers, or desserts. I don’t know why; everyone I went out with would probably have been happy to order anything I liked, but I felt uncomfortable. Even when I really wanted spring rolls at the third thai restaurant or when I wanted a beer at the tapas bar, I held back. I told the waiter that we would love to see a dessert menu.

I ordered this fancy concoction that came in an oversized martini glass: dulce de leche layered with blackberries, with fresh whipped cream on top. Holy hotdog. For a few minutes, I was the happiest little girl in the world. I licked the glass. I did not share. It was very, very good. I like desserts that have fruit but that aren’t just fruit; it’s like having anonymous sex with a condom. Slutty, but health conscious. Yum.

The meal cost twice as much as any other meal I had during the entire dinnerslut experience. I didn’t care. I didn’t feel guilty or wrestle with feeling like a welfare queen. I was done. I hugged my date goodbye as she stammered something about wanting to see me again and I uttered an mmkaysure and was gone in a flash. It was over.

Dinnerslutting has been over for me for over a month now. Shortly after the last dinner I spent a long while scourging craigslist for a babysitting job and found one that works with my schedule for an amicable family with stable children that make it worth my while. I still can’t go out without freaking out about paying my rent, but I have the tiniest bit more leeway that allows me to do so every once in awhile. In the past month I have gone back to cooking a lot at home, walking into coffee shops as they close to inquire about where the stale pastries will go, and convincing my friends that it’s “take a poor friend to dinner” night again.

I am especially grateful to all of the people who took me out, especially the folks to whom I was unnecessarily rude. Thanks for feeding me. I never sent any of you a thank-you, but you affected my life in a big way.

I feel like I’ve written a lot about what I learned from all of this, but I’ll try to sum it up here. I’m not really in a mood to write, but I want to get this down and have it all be over, so here we go:

All restaurant food eventually tastes the same, no matter where it’s from. First conversations are almost always the same; if they aren’t (in a good way), get this person’s phone number. If you can’t make fun of the waiter in front of your date, they’re not worth your time. Don’t second-guess yourself in front of others; you’re probably right. You know yourself better than anyone else; fuck anyone else who disagrees. Don’t be a half hour early to anything. Smile more; it puts people at ease (unless you don’t want them to be). Everyone loves to talk about themselves; this puts people at ease. Dinner is the longest meal of the day. It’s okay to ask for help. Sometimes I think the only people interested in helping other people are people who are lonely, people who are looking for something. I don’t really think it matters if someone helps for altruistic reasons or not. Altruisim is a fucked up concept anyway. Facial expressions give away a lot. Craigslist is the best website ever. It’s okay to ask for help. It’s okay if you don’t want to be friends. If you can’t eat a corn on the cob the way you want to in front of someone without feeling bad, they aren’t worth your time. It’s impossible to tell who’s most in need of charity. Vegan food is good. Good service makes the food taste better. Yellow curry is yellow curry is yellow curry. It is really okay to ask for help. No, really.

No one ever asks me if I would do it again (and I talk to people about dinnerslutting fairly often). I guess people assume that I would do it again because I did it the first time, and that makes me seem like enough of an ingratiating douchebag so people guess I would do it twice.

Of course, I would totally do it again if I felt like I needed to. For the first time in my life I created something that was my own sick, unique vision. I got fed a lot. I made some memorable connections with the most random people that I never would have met otherwise. I ate pumpkin curry and mahi mahi.

I don’t know if there’s anything else to say on this blog, because I don’t anticipate dinnerslutting again in the near future. Maybe I’ll write about other adventures that pertain to being broke and hungry, but maybe not.

warm regards,

your dinnerslut

This entry was hard to write because it is about food but it is also about being momentarily infatuated with someone who looks a lot like an ex of mine.

It is harder than one might imagine to seamlessly connect the descriptions of meeting a stranger who looks like someone I used to know to the description of a $3 plate of almonds.

On Monday night (this is now Monday night over a month ago) I arranged to go out for tapas with a girl who had stood me up once already.

I had had a premonition that she would stand me up (because the dates had been going so well up to that point, it felt like something had to go horribly awry). She was the youngest of anyone who responded to my ad (23), which clearly made her a prime target for making plans with me and then losing track of time while practicing kegstands (or something like that).

Her response to my craigslist ad said she would only take me out because she loved the joke I made about my budget being ‘tighter than condi’s asshole’ (I only use the classiest metaphors). She said she was looking for awesome friends and thinks “that i might be one”. Ignoring the poor choice of qualifier, I was insantly excited over the prospect of going out with someone close to my age; I shrugged off the fact that the language she used in her e-mail made me die a little on the inside.

I wrote her back, suggesting a time, and she wrote me back with a place, Kwanjai Thai in Fremont. She did not write back with a photo, causing a close personal aide to disclose that she was “probably ugly, a lot older than 23, fat, and possibly a man”. If she had shown up, she would have been my third dinner date, but she didn’t. I waited outside of Kwanjai Thai for a half hour, earnestly staring into the eyes of anyone who walked by the restaurant, hoping that they would be this mysterious girl. Nobody was, but two people asked me for directions.

After a half hour, I finally drove home. I blasted Queen’s greatest hits on the drive back, I guess thinking that doing my Freddy Mercury imitation would make me feel better (only a temporary fix). When I got home I sent her a one line e-mail “It was not very nice of you to stand me up. You should not do that to anyone ever again”. I figured she had flaked and I would never hear from her, but within twenty minutes I got a response: she said she had messed up, that she had meant to tell me Kaosamai Thai (across the street from Kwanjai Thai) and that she had stood outside there for a half hour too. She offered to take me out somewhere the next week, anywhere I wanted.

I didn’t want to be a jackass and suggest that she take me to Canlis, but I didn’t want to suggest The Old Spaghetti Factory either. It took me over an hour of scanning restaurant reviews on yelp.com to find something affordable, good, and not pho or chain restaurant food: Ocho, a new tapas bar that recently opened in Ballard. It had a half dozen five star reviews, and tapas are (deceptively) affordable. She agreed, set a new date and time with me, and I spent the rest of the week trying to figure out how I managed to arrive at this particular point in my life.

That night I drove down Market in Ballard and went past Ocho twice before I found it, in a tiny corner with no signage, looking conspicuously up and coming. No one was waiting outside. I stood there for a minute, then poked my head in the door. The restaurant was smaller than my living room, about the size of an ample galley kitchen, with an imposing, sexy bar taking up half of the restaurant. There was a menu on a chalkboard bolted to one wall. There were three people inside sitting down: two people getting smoochy and sloppy at the bar, and one young woman clutching a glass of white wine, sitting uncomfortably by herself. I hesitated before walking in, and almost went back outside to wait. The woman sitting alone was attractive and well dressed and did not resemble any of the other kind souls who had recently taken me out. She was too pretty to be my date. There was no unkempt ponytail in sight.

“Are you Marne?” she asked, not getting up.

If I was a Christian, at this moment I probably would have crossed myself or said some ridiculous religious type thing like ‘thank you jesus’, but I settled on a very deep breath and then I walked over to her table.

I smiled, mumbled something about being Marne, and sat down. She didn’t smile. She had another sip of wine and widened her eyes a little to acknowledge that she was actually my date and not some psychic who could divine names on cue. She didn’t seem excited to meet me, or even happy to be in a tapas bar with a possible ‘awesome new friend’ but I was giddy and didn’t care. I was at a tapas bar with a girl in my age bracket who was not just pretty, but who bore an uncanny resemblance to one of my exes that I had been somewhat entranced with earlier in my lifetime.

…This was like finding an unopened candy bar wrapped in hundred dollar bills lying in the sreet. Except for her seeming a little disinterested and morose (which I was happily willing to overlook), this was like Christmas.

It is probably definitely not in my best interest to post photos of people I have dated on the internet without their permission, but to prove that I do not have bad taste (and to break up all this text with a pretty pretty picture), here is an elusive, artsy photograph of the ex in question:

This is who I thought about when I sat down to eat with this stranger. The ex had a face that was very nice to look at. She had round, serious eyes, a round, button nose, and a round mouth. She had rosy cheeks, a bashful smile, and she laughed a lot. She was kind. You know how a patch of sunlight will mosy across your bedroom or your living room, and you can stretch out in it for awhile and soak up the sun’s warmth? Being around her was a lot like that. The split was amicable and without drama, thus it was exciting, rather than gut-wrenching, to meet her doppleganger. My mind took off in a hundred directions at once. I felt like a pinball machine. For a few minutes, I felt like I had found the last golden ticket. I think this is what everyone feels like when they go out on a blind date with someone cute, though, so maybe this wasn’t anything special.

I was thinking how similar my date resembled this woman while we went through the get to know you routine:

I asked “What’s your job like?” as I examined her hair: the texture, the cut, the way the uber-slutty lighting cast shadows across her face.

I told her “My other dates have been…interesting” as I studied her face, how her features were more angular, the skin lighter, her smile wider (she did eventually smile).

While we ordered (patatas bravas, almendras, an egg/potato tortilla, and beets with bleu cheese and nuts), I stared at her red coat, the same one my ex used to wear, the one in the blurry photo.

Her mood improved, or she wasn’t negative at all and I just thought she was, because we ended up happily eating together for well over two hours. We started at Ocho and worked our way through four tapas, all of which ranged from average to almost lovely. I think tapas are slowly becoming my favorite food because you can graze on a million different things and I have an obsession with tiny versions of life-sized objects (a love of dollhouses was irrevocably beaten into me at an early age, and i’ve spiraled downward ever since). Also, my favorite cookbook has a recipe for cherry tomatoes stuffed with warm tuna salad; if I were food, this would be it, and I am forever indebted to the inventors of the concept of tapas for creating a cuisine that would encourage folks to stuff cherry tomatoes with anything.

My date could not eat wheat-gluten and I do not eat meat, but we still found a bunch of dishes on Ocho’s tiny, (tiny!) menu that catered to both of our needs. We both liked the patatas bravas the best. They were fancy homefries in essence, but they well-spiced and not too salty. If I had been able to order any of there toasts or she had ordered a meaty thing, it probably would have felt like the perfect accompaniment. There was spiced mayo (I think? In restaurants this fancy I probably have to call it aioli) on the side that was excellent, and we devoured the little portion quickly.

I hate beets and bleu cheese more than I hate any other foods (besides olives; I’ve reserved a special place in my own fantasy hell for olives), but I put on a happy face and choked them down so my date wouldn’t feel like she had ordered the dish for herself, and I didn’t gag or throw up, so I guess they were alright. The beet itself was massive, and there were candied nuts sprinkled on the plate that I liked a lot, for whatever garnish is worth. The egg/potato tart was nothing special. I liked it, but I don’t discriminate against starch. My date thought it was weird, and it was lukewarm. The almonds, which at $3 were one of the cheapest things there (nothing over $6), were fine, but there were roughly twenty almonds in the dish, which made us both laugh and shake our heads. You can sell people in Ballard anything. What did we think we were getting? I have no idea. They were a lot like the seasoned nuts that plantar’s sells in big plastic tubs. I wonder if they had msg on them. I wonder if I paid $3 for a portion of 10 almonds seasoned with msg?

Oh, right. I didn’t pay.

Throughout the conversation I kept noticing things that were different from my ex, like this woman’s personality, life experiences, her preferred alcoholic beverage, etc. The feelings of elation and lust were brief, and by the time the first round of dinner was over, I was feeling happy and grateful rather than psychotic. I came down from my little cloud and I slowly stopped fantasizing about this woman being ‘everything my ex wasn’t and more’ and realized that she was not my missing piece. My stomach growled; I was still hungry. Sometimes I love my bodily functions.

There wasn’t anything else on the menu we could both eat, but I guess I appeared despondent enough, because my date suggested we go find some place that had nachos. I thought this sounded excellent, so we paid our tab and left. We wandered/crawled over to the Matador and ordered some nachos, which were exactly the same as the ones you’d get at a Ruby Tuesday, except they didn’t have as much cheese or other toppings and they cost twice as much. However, Matador has a gigantic fireplace and makes you feel very special and beautiful when you are there, so it was okay. Plus, I didn’t pay.

While we ate the nachos we talked about our families and college and any other random topics we could come up. It felt like we just wanted to keep talking to stay in one another’s presence. I started to say weird, random things and laugh anxiously and uncomfortably at my own jokes– it felt like a date. I picked at the nachos until I was sick because I didn’t want to leave. I didn’t think I had a whole ton of chemistry with this woman, and she wasn’t much like my ex at all, save for looking young and female really, but she was interesting, fun to talk to, and possibly an awesome friend.

What was to follow that paragraph here was a whole long bit about realizing how few of these women I wanted to be my friend and how I realized I wanted to hang out with this woman again (in a friendly way, not in a “come over and watch a movie in my bed with the lights off” kind of way). Then I was going to write about how it felt almost nice to think upon my ex fondly and briefly and think about the things I liked about her. I was going to write about hungering for familiarity, genuine appreciation, and love in a cold, wet, unfamiliar town. Then I was going to talk about all of those minute reactions that I felt and why I chose to write about them and not, say, the ambiance of the Matador and how my editorial choices reveal how fucked up I am in general. THEN I was going to write about wrestling with wanting to see someone who reminded me of past lives led and what did THAT all MEAN, but none of that is really important. This is a blog about food with strangers, not my failed relationships and future exes.

The food was good and different and cheap. The company was good and different and fun. I felt like I had made a friend and come full circle with the dinner date.  I had possibly made one new friend who might want to see me again at a later date (providing she could through all that NSA stuff out the window). I had something to show for all of my erratic and sometimes painful dinnertime conversations with strangers. At the end of the date I felt ready to be done with the whole thing. I realized I was dinnerslutted out.

When the nachos were finally gone, I bade this woman goodnight, hoping for the first time that I might see her again, and I went home to gear up for one last dinner date.

My best friend from college has been traveling around Africa since August on a Watson fellowship. She is spending a year charming strangers and making music and noticing patterns and getting paid to not go to school. I find the idea of this project so overwhelmingly huge, it makes me pee my pants. Whenever I have a hard day in Seattle, I think about my friend and her project and how hard it must be to wander around a place you do not know and miss home and have to do good scholarship and have to feel grateful all the time for the opportunity and then everything that is going on in my life gets smaller and smoother and feels more manageable. This exercise makes feel a little sheepish, but the effect it has on my stress levels is noticeable, so I’m withholding self judgment. I wonder if there will ever be a day where I can deal with my own problems without stacking them up against someone else’s. I like to make lists and use hyperbole, though, so probably not.

The other day I spoke to my friend on the phone for the first time since July, and she told me about her life right now. She is in Dakar and she has been there for a while now, and she has noticed that whenever her host family sits down for a meal, other folks from the neighborhood always eat with them. They just seem to appear whenever a meal is being served. Nobody is turned away, because everyone needs to eat. People who need help ask and receive. This sounds nice to me, and when I hear this my thoughts turn to how I don’t know who any of my neighbors on my street are. …This makes me feel like I have underestimated the solution to the problem of hunger. Maybe I should get to know my neighbors and invite them over for potlucks (maybe they’ll bring something besides hummus or napkins) instead of going on dates with strange women. Maybe if strange women weren’t so eager to take me out I would actually consider doing this. But they are, so I don’t, so I just daydream about block parties I’ll never organize instead.

The woman who wants to buy me this particular dinner writes me a first contact e-mail that reads like a resume or a cover letter. In response to my craigslist ad she sends me something you might send a potential employer or a business you want to request a donation from. She is 32 and doesn’t want to be mistaken for a dirty old woman (DOM, which she shall be referred to as hereafter). DOM’s e-mail has a well-written introductory paragraph with blatant hooks so I can know why she is the perfect woman to buy me thai food. She says she is “amazed” by people who do service work programs like Teach For America or City Year and the “various motivations that move people to save the world” AND she tells me she has been involved with community services here in Seattle. In an on-going basis. I’m a liar if I say I’m not slightly intrigued in a more-than-NSA-dinner kind of way. Dirty old womanness aside, professional demeanor in personal e-mails turns me on.

DOM is blissfully unaware that this is not a competitive venture. I wish she could know that there is no question as to whether I will e-mail her back or not. This is not like waiting for someone to call you after a good first date, or waiting to see if someone will respond to the free flirt message you send to them on the Stranger Lovelab. I’m not a potential employer. I’m not a potential girlfriend. I’m more like community college: the application is just a formality.

DOM frames her offer uniquely. She wants– she “needs” to know about my relationship with service work. She is not taking me out because it’s a strange, exciting thing to do. She is not taking me out because she wants to meet someone new or eat in a restaurant. She is a phd candidate, she is hungry for first-person accounts of working in a non-traditional educational setting. She is doing research, bitch, and I am doing her a great big favor by agreeing to meet with her. She says she will only buy me dinner if I’m “willing” to talk about myself and the service work that I’m doing while we eat.

This is ridiculous for a lot of reasons, the main one being that everyone loves to talk to themselves. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t. Anyone who says they don’t love to talk about themselves is lying, and if they aren’t lying, then they probably also shit little nuggets of pure gold. I think most people’s idea of a great first date is talking solely about oneself while chowing down on a free meal. Maybe I have found the holy grail. This offer feels a lot like the e-mail you would send someone really dorky and uncool if you wanted to go out with them but you wanted it to seem like you’d be doing them a favor. Maybe that’s not that right analogy at all, but something about this feels cheap and overdone. There is definitely some wheedling going on here (I love that word).

That is why I am thinking about justification as I walk briskly towards Rom Mai Thai on Wednesday night. As I head up John Street (which turns into Thomas and then back into John for reasons I will never understand) I think a little bit about how I will never hear the word ‘justify’ or ‘justified’ or ‘justification’ in my head again without thinking of Justin Timberlake (this makes me giggle), but mostly I am thinking about this date that I am going on and the woman who is taking me on it and how it seems like we are constantly engaged in the process of justifying our actions to ourselves and to the rest of the world.

To be blunt, I know that I’m not a hungry hungry hippo. Things could be a lot worse than they are in my life right now. Anyone who has lain eyes upon me knows that I’m not wasting away (on the contrary: I am expanding ever outward). My food stamps will roll over very, very soon (I am counting the hours now). I have housemates and friends who seem to have renewed their concern and commitment to subsidize my feeding while I wait to have government money back in my wallet again. My parents tell me they love me when the right moment comes along. I think about all of these things in a never-ending cycle, it’s like there’s one of those little red plastic camera/binoculars with twelve slides of ocean scenes that you can scan through over and over again, except it’s in my head and it’s reasons why I’m not poor poor (whatever that means) and I think plastic toys are abhorrent.

No matter how much positive feedback I get about the NSA dinner date idea, I cannot stop thinking if I deserve it.  I spend just as much time convincing myself to quit worrying as I do guilt tripping myself.  I need this, I tell myself as I am looking in my cupboards for something breakfasty, finding nothing but an almost empty bag of brown rice and some kasha. I deserve this. I’ve volunteered at a shelter, at a food bank, at a warehouse for foster kids, among other places in addition to spending all day every day building relationships and growing plants with street youth. I pay it forward, and I would do the same thing for another stranger if they asked. I would be the kind of person who answers the craigslist ad I posted. My mind races through these facts over and over again, turning them over, looking at them every which way, because maybe if I look hard enough I can unearth some speck of some forgotten detail, some statistic or truth that makes what I’m doing 100% completely acceptable and good. I’ll let you know when that happens and/or when I develop my first ulcer.

I am thinking about all of this when I arrive at Rom Mai Thai and I can navel gaze some more because I am early, as usual. This time I am early because I overestimated the amount of time it would take to walk to the very north end of Broadway. I overestimate the time it takes to walk anywhere in Seattle. It’s not that big at all. However, DOM has done the same thing, and we are both there almost fifteen minutes ahead of time. There’s no point in waiting for it to be 6pm outside with her, so we go in.

All of my dates to this point have looked a lot alike; this one isn’t any different. Granted, I have a sample size of four, so there’s not a lot of statistical power to any of these words, but the resemblance is striking. I don’t think it means anything important so I won’t post photos or ruminate at length about their appearances here, but to anyone who has asked me what these women look like: no, they do not in any way resemble angelina jolie or shane from the L word. I am, regretfully, not interested in going out on romantic dates with this lady.

DOM is sassier than the other women I’ve gone out with, which I notice immediately. Whenever I meet someone who is as stereotypically east coast as I am, I exploit their sarcasm for all its worth and wrap myself in it like a blanket. I love it, and I miss it a lot. I inquire about this, and my hunch is correct: DOM lived in Boston for six years. There’s a reason why people invented the phrase ‘Massholes’ and it has a lot to do with Boston.

She gets right down to it too, firing questions at me about service work before our menus arrive and she doesn’t let up until almost the very end of the evening, which, thankfully, is not that long. After an hour of eagerly talking about myself I usually realize what an asshole I am and I become horribly self-conscious and I self destruct into a little, sticky puddle of goo. Like Alex Mack, only with more shame.

I order the yellow curry again because I’m boring and my life needs more repetition and structure, and the last time I ordered something that wasn’t yellow curry at a thai restaurant I regretted it for two weeks afterwards (this is what happens when I buy myself food in a restaurant, which is why I make strangers do it for me now). DOM tells me she picked this restaurant because this is the best thai food for this price she’s ever had in Seattle. I’m skeptical; most thai food is alright to pretty good and there are eight billion thai restaurants in Seattle and half of them are the best one someone’s ever eaten at. I’ve never had awful thai food, but I’ve also never had thai food that left me shaking with pleasure and unable to remember my own name. People who feel fanatic about certain thai places also usually happen to really enjoy spicy food; their word for this is “flavorful”. As I am Mrs. Cracker McWhiteypants from upstate New York, I hate spicy food and I enjoy extremely boring, bland flavors like potato or, well, potato.

The service at Rom Mai is incredible, and it is so friendly and attentive that I am frightened and I think I am in the beginning scenes of an episode of the Twilight Zone. This is typical Seattle here; every time I take more than one sip of water from my cup, a smiling waiter comes and refills it. When we get halfway through the rice, someone takes it away and brings more fresh, steamy jasmine rice. No fewer than four people try to take our order before we’re ready (I can’t converse and read at the same time, so I always ignore one in the name of the other), and once the food comes they stand less than ten feet from our table, smiling blandly in our direction, waiting for any indication that we have a need that is not being met. I love Rom Mai Thai.

My curry is very good, probably the best curry I’ve had in Seattle, but not by much. If we’re talking statistics, there is not a significant difference between this curry and most of the other curries I’ve had. The tofu is fresh and flavorful and there is a lot of it, and it is just spicy enough for it to not be boring or too impossible for me to eat, and the rice flows like wine coolers in a sorority house. DOM orders something she think I will like, and she orders it with tofu, and she orders a level of spice mild enough for me to eat; she tells me the leftovers are for me. If someone I went on a real date with did this for me, I would probably agree to sleep with them right then. Like on the floor, under the table, under my two sets of leftovers. I have just discovered the quickest way to my own heart.

sigh.

The conversation we have at dinner is a conversation I’ve had many times in Seattle, nothing special. People are really curious about service work, mostly because they cannot imagine trying to subsist on that kind of a budget, but also because they perceive this work to be exceptionally emotionally draining and they would need oodles of money to offset the emotional toll. Also, I come from the land of suburbanites, none of whom have ever even seen a farm, much less thought about having a garden or becoming a farmer. This perplexes everyone, not least of all my family members. I tell DOM I didn’t take this job because I wanted to do service work– I wanted this job, and it happened to be through a service program, so I signed up. We talked about being qualified to do everything and nothing. I waxed poetic about working with youth (so challenging! so engaging! so rewarding! blech.) and attempted to speak thoughtfully about the concept of national service (I think it would be cool if everyone did it, but I also think there are aspects to this program that are wholly fucked up). This wasn’t anything I hadn’t said before, and I left thinking about why DOM needed to justify to me why she’ll buy me dinner.

How come we couldn’t just make plans, go out, and have a good time? Why does she need to have any excuse at all? Why do I need to have multiple layers of excuses to ask for help in the first place? Why does this program not pay me a living wage? How do I expect to survive in the ghetto that is the non-profit world? What is the alternative? There are so many things that are fucked up about this situation. I spend so much time swimming in these issues that are not going to go away when my foodstamps roll over tomorrow. It’s a relief when they next day in the office I can take a half hour break and ignore the need to qualify my life to myself over DOM’s leftovers. It is pumpkin curry with tofu, something I never, ever would have ordered, and it is amazing and it is without a doubt the best thai food I have ever eaten.

I do not love bagels. You wouldn’t know it because I spend most of my time here in Seattle complaining about how you can’t get a good bagel, but at home in upstate New York I usually feel relatively neutral about bagels. I would rather have eggs. I got off bagels when I got braces at twelve and they became verboten item #2 (after chewing gum) and I couldn’t eat bagels for three years; I never really went back in the same way. Most mornings I have yogurt. Sometimes I put fruit or granola in the yogurt.

However, if you happen to be one of the new friends or acquaintances or, really, anyone I’ve ever spoken to for more than ten minutes on this coast, you might think my undergraduate major had been “kvetching about bagels”. I find myself talking about the awful state of Seattle bagels ALL THE TIME. Seattle bagels are terrible. They are so, so , so very awful. God does not smile upon them. Sometimes I think it would be better if people in Seattle had never heard about the invention of the bagel so they would never have felt tempted to recreate its bagelly holiness here.

But there are only fake bagel imposters here, just like there is no cheap diner food, no decent italian or mexican food, and no pizza worth shaking a stick at (such a weird turn of phrase, but so useful). There is only Vietnamese. Or Thai. Or Indian. or Teriyaki. This is why, even though I don’t like noodles at all, I am walking in the direction of In The Bowl on a Tuesday night.

I’d walked by the Olive and Denny intersection a handful of times before noticing In The Bowl, and I only saw it because I was walking with a friend who mumbled something about “good noodles”. Noodles are the only really affordable food here, which I don’t understand, because you think people would want more cheap options that don’t closely resemble Top Ramen. I had never heard of pho or bun before I came out here, but it didn’t take me very long to figure out that these two options made up the bulk of restaurant menu items I could afford. People in Seattle were shocked when they found out pho isn’t widely available in my hometown, so I present for you folks that have no idea what I’m talking about, a description of what these two dishes are by an unnamed born-and-bred seattlite:

pho: “pho is rice noodles and broth and i think cilantro and sometimes chicken and yeah, i mean, mostly it’s huge, and that’s kind of the point, and some people put bean sprouts and lime on top, and there’s always plum sauce, and that’s usually when i find out people can’t use chopsticks”.

bun: “bun is like pho because its rice noodley but there’s lettuce and different kinds of meat and, um, i think it has carrot shavings and it’s sort of the color, i don’t know, it’s sweet and soury and i have no idea what it is but you mix it up and it becomes this big bowl of stuff and it’s very delicious”.

I am going to In The Bowl because the woman who is buying me dinner does not appear to have money coming out the wazoo. This is the first date that I’m slightly anxious about. I felt great about the first two dates (see: history of shamelessness) but I got stood up the night before sort of accidentally (one of us went to Kaosamai Thai, the other to Kwanjai Thai) and now I cannot stop thinking about all of the things that could go wrong in this situation. She might not show up tonight. She might show up and make me pay or leave before the check comes. She might be a massmurdering fuckhead. “She” might be a group of teenagers who will steal my empty wallet and run away. She might hold me hostage until all the kitties in the world are free. This could be ugly. I hadn’t thought about that. Fuck.

The woman who is taking me out is also an intimidating. She described herself in her e-mail as “43, a social worker, out for 24 years”. She originally offered to take me to the Ballet restaurant. She sent me a photo that almost made me cancel the date outright. In my original craigslist ad, I had been adamant about my being willing to go out with anyone. I am definitely desperate enough. I am clearly being tested.

I am there barely five minutes before our date begins and I can see her inside, sitting down at a table. I cannot believe I am doing this. I shake her hand, and we are immediately handed menus and talking to this stranger is going to have to wait until I decide between the yellow curry and swimming rama. Not coincidentally, neither of these dishes involves noodles. Yellow Curry. Fresh tofu, not fried. White rice. Just Water. Thanks.

The best part of the evening is that we are sitting less than an arm’s length from two old dykes on a date and they overhear every word of our conversation and they are making yucky faces at me and the intimidating woman to indicate their disgust and horror because they assume we are on a first date. The intimidating woman doesn’t notice or doesn’t let on, and like most things that are terrible, I think this is hilarious, and I begin to ask questions like I’m actually on a date that isn’t about my freeloading on strangers.

“So what are your greatest passions?” I ask her, sipping my ice water. I don’t order drinks with these women. Something about that seems unfair. I need nutrition, yes, but I don’t need a thai iced tea, and we both know that.

She responds: “birding”. Not long ago someone told me they asked all of their dates and acquaintances this question instead of “what do you do?” because this question makes people squirm, and this is a fun thing to watch. The intimidating woman embarks on a long narrative about heron migrations and going to see birds with her estranged brother who has cancer and her aging mother and I can’t stop thinking about the fact that her greatest passion is birding, much less process any of the words that are currently spilling out of her mouth at frightening speed. I become acutely aware of the fact that I don’t know anyone who loves birding and I don’t know anything about birds except for what Tom Robbins had to say about whooping cranes in ‘Even Cowgirls Get the Blues’ and this fact occurs to me while she is talking and I feel ashamed for thinking about Tom Robbins. For someone who writes e-mails professing her interest in other people, this woman is sure talking a lot. I am here to listen, I remind myself. Listen to this woman. Nod your head. Smile. Nod again.

The food arrives and we fall silent, shoveling food into our mouths. I love how in this country we cease all conversation upon the arrival of the food. We’re not here for each other, for the ambiance, for the quiet time being spent on starting to know another individual and feel a little less alone in the world. We’re here to stuff our faces as quickly as possible and complain about the food or service if necessary. My sister went to college in Montreal and the only thing I remember from the meals I ate there was the intentional slowness of the service. Dining out felt entirely different, like an event or an experience, not an appetizer for a movie or awkward, drunken, regrettable sex.

I am making an effort to eat slowly, to show that I am making an effort to be interested in this woman’s life story, but fuck, this curry is good. Yellow curry is pretty good everywhere which is why I order it. It is plain, boring, and full of saturated fat. It is on the menu at almost any Asian-cuisine restaurant and it is generally always the same. I discovered yellow curry in college at about the same time I stopped having any real faith in Judaism. Yellow curry is my rock now.

The curry, dependable as ever, comes with something that looks like chips of crispy fried naan and a sweet sauce with little bits of cucumber and shaved carrot in it. I have no idea what these things are and I didn’t ask if they had names, but they weren’t on the menu as things that came with my meal and I am, by extension, delighted. I love crispy friend things. I would probably eat fried crickets or fried tongue or fried dirt if it were offered. I like to think I have a spirit of adventure.

This woman seems lonely. It seems like she doesn’t get to talk to a whole lot of people. Why would anyone buy me dinner, people ask me if I tell them about this whole operation. Why would anyone buy a stranger a meal and not ask for anything in return? Like the other two women so far, this woman is the corporeality of niceness. She seems adventurous, which is the nice way of saying she seems a little crazy and a little spontaneous. And I think she is lonely. I wonder if she has a lot of days where all she says is ‘thank you’ to the cashier at the grocery store. I have days like that, I want to tell her. She works in social services. I want to tell her that I know what it’s like to spend all day building relationships with people who are struggling, developing allyships and listening and helping and then go home alone and stand quietly over the stove and watch the water boil for your macaroni and cheese and have no one to talk to about your day. I know what this is like too. I know what it feels like to talk and talk and talk at the first person who seems vaguely interested in your day, which is what it feels like this woman is doing right now.

Maybe I’m wrong, and maybe this woman’s life is filled with people who care about her and want to hear about her passions and her deadbeat stepfather. I have no idea. I might, though, because this woman wants to buy me more dinners. She says she will buy me breakfasts because I told her that breakfast is my favorite meal of the day. I’m probably not wrong about her being lonely.

Dessert is black sticky rice pudding with coconut milk; it comes with the meal. If it hadn’t come with the meal, I wouldn’t have ordered it. This pudding is everything that is bad about sticky rice, caviar, jello, and fish eyes rolled into one. I take two bites; the texture makes me want to throw up all of the curry that I have so happily just polished off. I feel bad about not finishing it.

After my brief encounter with the pudding, I am back to navel gazing about this woman. Part of me feels like I’m trying to determine who has the upper hand in this situation; who is more pathetic? The woman with no money and no food, or the woman with no one to talk to? It’s only recently that I’ve acquired housemates who occasionally ask me about my day and a smattering of friends who might pick me up in the middle of the night if I called them. She probably has enough money to not every worry again about these noodles. We’re both pathetic, which means that for once I can stop feeling pathetic. It’s like coming home to a gay bar or a room full of people your own race or weight or whatever. I can stop thinking about being broke and revel in me at the same time. This is good.

This woman offers to buy me more meals, possibly set up a longer term arrangement. Dinner or weekend breakfasts (I told her that breakfast is my favorite meal of the day) in exchange for my company. I don’t know if I’ll ever see her again or if we’ll ever set up this arrangement, but as I walk home in the dark, full of curry and someone else’s stories, I enjoy the sensation of feeling poor and very not poor at the same time.