Geeky Chic

I am midway through my post-Bar / pre-firm break, and these may be my best days. I feel blessed every day that I essentially get to choose my own adventure. I am not using my free time efficiently, but I am basking in the freedom to mentally wander through interesting conversations and books (a good deal of thought has been put into semiotics lately, but more on that later). Though I typically like autumn, I have regarded the “Back to School” and “Fall Arts Preview” announcements with dread because they are loud reminders that I will soon be suited up for work, without respite in sight.

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My A.P. English lit teacher once mournfully announced that there exists a class of people who read The New Yorker from cover to cover each week, ignoring the two to three poems within its covers. I am usually among this class; I almost always bypass the poems. But the announcement that Czeslaw Milosz passed away two weeks ago brought to my attention his poem, “If There is No God,” published in this week’s issue:

If there is no God,

Not everything is permitted to man.

He is still his brother’s keeper

And he is not permitted to sadden his brother,

 By saying that there is no God.

(Trans. by Milosz and Robert Haas)

At a dinner party last night, I learned from a couple of very well-connected Vietnamese nationals that French-Vietnamese food is more Vietnamese than Chinese-Vietnamese food.  Soy sauce is the non-indigenous ingredient that corrupts Chinese-Vietnamese food; it is never found in true Vietnamese cooking.  Fish sauce and lime, fish sauce and lime.

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I am done with pretentious food for the weekend, or rather, for a long while.  I just want simple, unadorned food now.  I lunched on the prix fixe meal at Bouley Bakery yesterday, and a parade of desserts followed the boring entrees (I had some sort of poached chicken over over anise-tinged barley risotto).  Even though there was only was one dessert listing on the menu, we received five desserts (excluding the petit four plate): a white chocolate pot au creme top with green tea (second best), a blueberry parfait, a warm valrona chocalate cake mislabeled on the menu as a souffle (it was better than the one that I can achieve at home), a raspberry meringue with a two egg-based lace cookies (the frontrunner), and a rich Madagascan creme brulee (I presume that they called it “Madagascan” because that’s where vanilla is cultivated).  When the waiter brought out the creme brulee, our reaction was, “Oof, not another dessert.”  I haven’t felt so sick on sugar since my last visit to the chocolate buffet at the Le Meridien in Boston.

I think that it’s time for me to add a feature to my sidebar, a special page to catalog bad restaurant experiences. Anna’s cockroach experience at Matsuri this weekend ranks up there with the live worm that fell to my table from the mosaic ceiling at Farallon.

After Finch picked me up from the CalTrain station this evening, I was tired and hungry, so we headed to the neighborhood Hawaiian restaurant, Hukilai, for a quick bite. We had a case of the disappearing waitress even though the place wasn’t busy. After she took our order, she forgot to bring us our drinks. After we waited for a good 25 minutes for our food, Finch had to use the restroom and spotted our food sitting at the kitchen counter waiting to be picked up. After he returned, the waitress noticed that we were disgruntled, and said that the food would be coming shortly and disappeared for another 5 minutes. When she finally brought our plates over, she had the audacity to lie, “Sorry, the kitchen was a little backed up tonight.” We didn’t have the energy to complain about our entrees being cold, but the manager overheard us whispering about not leaving a tip, and comped our drinks.

Phase I of my summer is complete — I finished the Bar on Thursday, and since then, the question almost everyone that I see asks me is, “So, did you pass?”  I have no way of evaluating my performance, so all I can report is that I am relieved that it is over, at least for now.

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I clicked on this article by way of Arts & Letters Daily because I thought it was a standard critique of the N.Y. Times “Portraits of Grief.”  It starts off that way, but instead morphs into a discussion of crowd theory, privacy, the fine line between the public and private, and the selves that we present to the world (“personal branding”). He even uses a deft anecdote about HLS Professor Larry Tribe to illustrate that we live in an “Omnipticon,” where “many are watching the many, even though no one knows precisely who is watching or being watched at any given time.” It seems relevant to Anna’s comment about how our websites misportray us.