NSA Dinner

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.