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.
