Oakleaf Restaurant, Pittsboro

This restaurant had gotten a lot of good press, so we went. And it was, indeed a beautiful room and an excellent place to go, and we'll happily go back.

And the food was good. And yet, it wasn't all that, and this is a problem we keep having.  We spent $130 on dinner, but couldn't help walking away feeling that more of our dining dollar had been spent on adjectives, less on nouns, and even with the adjectives they fell down a little.

Take, for instance, my entree.  I got bass with potatoes cooked in duck fat.  You know I was psyched for those spuds. However, while it was apparent they had been cooked in some kind of fat, it wasn't all that special. They weren't particularly crispy or anything, and they needed a fair amount of salt. And the fish was, indeed, a nice and handsome piece of fish, but it had essentially no sauce.  I had to ask for lemon to spruce it up.  I don't know if the sous chef in charge of modifiers just got tired on this one, but why not a little garlic with some berries and some oil or something to spruce it up? It's a $23 dish, you can spare em.

Don't get me wrong, we may go back, so charming a jernt it was, but it won't be tomorrow. Restaurants like this, more and more, seem calculated to assuage the diner and convey to him membership in the ruling class, more than to deliver really great eating experiences.

Ramseur St, Durham, 12:30 pm, Sunday

There are a couple of blocks off of Fayetteville St on Ramseur St near my office which have loading dock/warehousing space, some of which have been converted into offices.  A few weeks back I drove along the blocks to see what else they had been converted into.  The answer?  Churches.  1 or 2 appeared to be African-American congregations, the other were hispanic ("Casa de Dios, etc.").

During the week the area was kinda empty. But what, I wondered, would it look like on Sunday, around worship time.  This weekend, though the day is lovely, I found myself headed back to the office for a few hours, so on the way there I stopped over and had a look.

The answer?  It was packed.  Not a place to park anywhere. In fact, a couple of churches had parking attendants.One would imagine that when the weather's even warmer then today's 57 degrees, they could roll up the grates and have open air worship, but not yet.

But at one of the black churches there was a guy standing at the door craning his neck in, apparently unable to fit in there. And there were a couple of brightly dressed hispanic girls in a parking lot jumping rope.

A couple of blocks away, a group of teen boys sat around on a picnic table doing nothing, like a scene out of The Wire.

 

CHHS, 8:15 am

It was cold and rainy out in front of the high school, but there were still maybe 200-250 people waiting (including parents) to get kids in to take the SATs.  Hell, probably more.  Lots of idiot high school boys wearing shorts, whatever the hell that's about.

I had forgotten an umbrella (I always do) and Natalie of course has no raincoat (she lost hers and refuses to buy another), but we took shelter under the umbrella of the mother of a friend of hers, a nice Chinese girl.

I had been nervous about Natalie feeling wierd in there with a bunch of high schoolers, and a little bit guilty about pushing her to take the SATs in the first part, her being only twelve and all, so I was really happy not only to see lots of her peers there, but to see that they had segregated a whole hallway just for the middle school kids who were applying to the TIP program, like her. That was awesome.

And then there was the matter of being back at CHHS.

And while I was there, I ran into the daughter of a friend of mine. Her sister is going through chemo now.  And the ex-wife of another friend, who's gone through a pretty acrimonious divorce and about whom I hear pretty crazy stories. But I was at her wedding back in '94. And then I ran into a woman I used to sit next to in Latin back in that very building some 30 years ago, and we would flirt a little and make fun of this asshole, who is himself now a very rich Republican guy.  And this woman's husband was killed some years back in a pretty violent way, so she's now a single parent and a doctor to boot.

In short, life, memories, emotions.  And now there's snow.

Hogan's Heros

Somehow I was reminded of Hogan's Heros not long ago, so Graham and I have been watching episodes on YouTube. It was really funny at first, but it has started to wear on me a little.  Graham has maintained his level of excitement, so I'm trying to stay on it.

It confuses him a little, and I must say that I understand why.  The big joke is, continually, that one thing or another threatens to move the prisoners or Colonel Klink away from Stalag 13, which would be the worst thing possible, because life is so easy for the prisoners there, and so good for the allies!  So Hogan is always alternately trying to make Klink look good, or bad, depending on which way the wind is blowing. There's a lot of subterfuge that washes over the aspie 9-year old. But it amuses him to no end.

I had never quite realized that the show basically only ever shows 3 Germans as regular characters:  Klink, Schultzy, and the lovely Helga, with whom Hogan is always making out (thank God she didn't take up with Bob Crane in his later, porno-master days). That's how they kept the budget low. Only about real actors needed to be paid regularly, 3 Krauts, and 4 allied soldiers (Hogan, Lebeau, the Richard Dawson character, and the goofy American who builds bombs).

Silence of the lambskin

I was at the dentist the other day for a filling, and before putting on her gloves and getting started the dental assistant asked me:  "are you allergic to latex?"  So I said, "what would you use if I was?  Lambskin?" It was funny.

Citizen of the world

Today I got a Facebook message from my good friend Eric who lives outside of Rome, wondering if I'd be going to our college reunion in May.  So I finally got Skype set up on my phone, and tried it by calling my friend Mattie, who lives in Berlin. Turns out he was in Norway, we chatted a bit.

Later, as Natalie and I were sitting outside the public library at the mall sharing a cup of coffee, there was an Indian grandmother type sitting across from us, chilling in a nice sari.  And then a Chinese woman -- toting an improbably large and old windows laptop of some sort with a lot of tape on the keyboard -- asked if she and her two kids could sit next to us on the couch. The kids watched a video.

I had this warm citizen of the world feeling, even though I was at the same mall I first shopped for jeans at maybe 40 years ago.

Mr. Stupid Nobody

Many years ago, when Graham was meeting someone for the first time, he would introduce himself as "Mr. Stupid Nobody."

Then there was another moniker he gave himself, something like "Space cadet broken down trainwreck."  These days, he mostly prefers Graham.

Walking the walk

Once more I walked the mile into town to get a sandwich today.  As I was walking out of my office onto Main St. a couple of young ladies were walking along, carefree, listening to music. One of them looked at me and said: "Do you have a dollar?"  No prefacing it with "I need to get something to eat" or anything.  I said no. 

It is a pretty windswept walk. I go past several generations of public housing, a couple of them quite nice, a couple of them not at all so. I pass JC's Kitchen (where Brian and I ate a couple of weeks ago, awesome) and a walkup takeout called Not Just Wings where I know I'm headed one of these days, I just haven't yet pulled the trigger. There is the Centro Hispano, and multiple Durham City Government offices.  The Housing Authority, etc.  There is a massive and gleaming new project which will soon be Durham's Office of Human Services, which looks nice but which reiterates all the modernist mistakes made by the new Court House and Police Station and some other faceless piece of pseudo-Corbusier crap down the way a piece:  big building with lots of glass closed off to the street, no storefronts, no life.

And I pass St Phillips, the church where I was baptized and where I sang solos lo those many decades ago when I had not even heard the word puberty and had a nice high voice (so my mom tells me), where my sister was married, where I absolutely slaughtered people in look-up-shit-by-chapter-and-verse competitions, and where I sat every Sunday looking up at the stained glass centerpiece of Jesus and some little lambs, fully expecting a brick to come flying through it, cuz the nabe was rough even back then, being as how it was next to the Greyhound station, long since gone.

In general, Durham East of Roxboro St awaits the dawning of the age of foodiness and ironic facial hair. The Golden Belt is an island of private sector whiteness. There's a new building going up along Fayetteville St, and I thought that boded well. And then I saw the sign: DaVita Dialysis. It's good to have a modern facility for people to go get there treatments, to be sure, but at the end of the day it's just another place for Medicare and Medicaid to be spent, not really a productive asset.

Today I came in to work and there was a tarp over the front door of our building, which had been hit and run by some drunk dude in a Mercedes, who careened through the parking lot and into our front lobby, before reversing and high-tailing it out of there.

Idea for app

My office building has only one toilet in the men's room.  Which becomes a problem when guys spend a lot of time there.  It appears that, as occupancy rises, this is happening more and more.  Which is why I think there should be, if not a webcam (at foot level, showing if there are shoes in there), then an app which we can have on our desktops telling us if the door to the stall is locked, or if the seat is warm, or whatever, because it's a bummer to walk out there and then find that somebody's in there working on the Great American Novel.

Ramseur St

Trying to avoid the light at Fayetteville and Main, and intrigued by a row of little businesses in small storage-like buildings on Ramseur St., I turned down it to see what was there.  Turns out that, down the way a piece, there are several church spaces set up in these commercial storage areas, some hispanic, some anglophone. It also appears to be a quick way through to the taqueria on Alston Avenue that I espied on my way out last night, the one with bars on the windows.... looks muy bien to me!

Wrapping up the ultimate season

And so, Natalie's first season of ultimate is over. Let the record show that she:

1. Threw for one point
2. Caught 3 points (two in one game!)
3. Generally got into it and made friends
4. Got in shape and really seemed to appreciate the exercise component
5. Looked beautiful and healthy coming in off the field, ruddy-cheeked in the winter air.

Let us hope that it sticks.

Graham reading from book

Both of the kids really like to share details from their books that they find infinitely amusing.  As adults know, this is a difficult thing to do:  giving your interlocutors enough background on what you're reading so they get it without giving so much that it bores them to tears and/or wrenches them out of their own flow is a tricky balancing act. Neither of the kids have mastered it.

However, we want to encourage them to read and maintain their enthusiasm for it. So, this morning on the couch, Graham was talking to me about a book he was reading -- I think it was one of the ones Natalie bought yesterday at the Bookshop on Franklin St. (shameless plug for an institution that really has shaped my life in so many ways) thinking that Graham would like it.  So Graham starts telling me about a little place in the book that he finds really funny -- and I have no earthly idea what he's talking about -- but he finds it so intensely funny that he goes into spasmodic screw-up-his-face belly laughs, particularly as I nod and giggle and laugh along with him.

Awesome.

Speaking myself

I remember when I saw my first Atom Egoyan movie, The Adjuster, back in 1991, that one of the most striking things about it was the way his characters presented themselves to others.  The lead character, an insurance adjuster, has to deal with people in post-crisis situations, and he introduces different himself to clients using more or less exactly the same words and intonations.  And most of Egoyan's other characters do the same, looking backwards at his earlier movies.  He's made a lot more films now, can't keep track of it any more. But the main thing that we glean from is that the characters are performing themselves, of professional and personal necessity (you can't make up a new self several times a day), out of habit, and in an attempt to control others' perception of them.

And one of the things about being out in the world as a consultant, a social person, a person sometimes looking for next career moves, is that I have to tell my story a lot. And I know that I do it all too often in the same way as Egoyan's characters do.  I hear myself describing the arc of my life (being a geek, PhD in humanities, jump to consulting, raising a family, getting interested in finance) as an out of body experience, almost. When I'm getting more personal I add in a layer about parents getting divorced, substance abuse, recovery, marriage, kids, Mary's family, a special needs kid, etc., and that is less rehearsed and more organic, but still a little bit.  Certainly I try not to drone on too much and engage with whomever I'm talking to, almost to escape this rote self-enunciation. And certainly I'm grateful when someone asks questions that push me out of the zone of myself.

In any, case, it would be nice to move beyond this stage, to the point I discover new facets in myself.  The problem is, one of the only feasible ways of getting there is by talking to others and hearing their stories (rote though they may be), and you rarely get much of that by being quiet about yourself. Share and share alike.

Prius skeptic

Don't get me wrong, I like the car.  It is comfortable for the family, carried us smoothly to and from the Northeast, and it gives us the feelings of piety and virtue that WASPs so crave. And the sound system sounds nice.

But there are some messed up things, nonetheless. For example, the control which is supposed to let you move the side mirrors around is poorly designed and was all too easily mashed in by my over-zealous and lovely wife. And the passenger side seatbelt is messed up.

Mostly, I am suspicious of its claimed mileage.  It says it's getting 46, but when I fill up the car with, say, 9 gallons of gas, it has suspiciously travelled only 370 miles or so since last getting filled up, which is more like 41.  Which is great, mind you, but my dashboard shouldn't be freaking lying to me.  I will be watching this thing, and will report back to you.

Taking down the Xmas tree

After we took off all the ornaments and lights, I had to bale all the water out of the stand so I can get it out of the house.  Our cat Leon sat under the dining room table and stared at me the whole time, no doubt cursing me under his kittie breath, cursing me and the unbearable cruelty of my taking away his source of sweet pine water and the wondrous bower to hide behind. Till next year.

Good hair and Ms. POTUS

I was thinking about Chris Rock's movie Good Hair the other day. I probably blogged about it.  If you haven't seen it, you should. Basically it's about the insane amount of money black women spend straightening their hair, and the amount of self-hate that implies, and how Chris researches it upon the birth of his daughter.

And so, I ask, what's up with Michelle Obama's hair. It's mighty straight. Now that Obama is in his second term, I think it would be great to see her shave her head and go Cleopatra Jones style, let it grow out as it would, all natural like. That would be a strong message to send to America's women of color. The only good reason I could see that she wouldn't would be if they got a lot of campaign money from the hair industrial complex.

Xmas tree water

Leon has decided that, beyond any reasonable doubt, the water in the Christmas tree stand is much better than the water in the kitty dish. Rascal, for the most part, really seems to prefer drinking from the toilet.

We have come a long ways from last year, when Leon ran away for a few weeks, and then was for a week or so supplanted by the duct-diving impostor kitty we dubbed Noel.  It took some months for Leon and Rascal to reacclimate to one another.  They kept their distance for some weeks, snarling and posturing and scrapping. But for many months now they have been back together, sleeping on each other, Leon sticking his butt in Rascal's face in the gentlest and most loving way, and licking each others face. Very nice.

Lunch in Durham

Durham is quietly booming, and you can tell it around lunch. Yesterday I went to the taqueria in the cheap Asian grocery store off of Lakewood (yes, I did just say that). First off, it was good. But I got there at 12:20, which was not a good idea. There was no place for a gringo to sit, and my order fell in line behind the orders of all the other trabajadores who were getting a little almuerzo. Next time, I'll be having some of what they were having. So that took a while.

Today, I walked the 10 minutes from my office at the Golden Belt to the Subway in the basement of the old court house (yes, I did just say that).  I got there at 1:10, and there was a line of 10 or 12 folx in front of me.

The problem is not that there aren't places to eat in downtown Durham, there are:  Toast, the chicken and waffles place, Grey Brook's new Pizzeria Toro, Scratch Bakery, 9th Street Bakery, Little Havana, etc. The problem it is, it's all so upscale. Plenty of places to get your $9 sandwich, few places you can get in and out of for five or six smackers, which is what I'm talking about. Durham needs a slice joint. It needs a place with the $5.99 all you can eat buffet with saag paneer and chicken vindaloo where everybody can go when it's blue shirt day. Nothing fucking artisanal or coy, just grub.

Competing with Graham

After a little bed wrestling the other night, Graham speculated a bit on how it was that he was able to pin me to the pillow with such regularity, when his cousin Sadie, all eight years and maybe 50 pounds of her, was able to compete with him more effectively in wrestling. "I bet I know why it is," he said. "It's because she's quicker than you, people get slower as they age." Well, I didn't really know what to say to that, he really had me there.

Somehow, Graham has been able to maintain a remarkable competitive advantage over me through the years.  He beats me regularly at running, wrestling, by God, even at soccer. Tonight he defeated me 25-22 at our patio version of soccer, even though I did land a few real "zingers," as he said.

I must keep trying.

In brief

I am vaguely oppressed by my own long silence.  In short, let me just say that I have to, gasp, go to work tomorrow.  In Durham.  First day of the rest of my life and all that.

We are just back from a blissfully uneventful holiday trip to the northeast. The worst of it was Graham puking in the car on the way up there.  Poor guy. It seems he is not meant to play with an iPod while traveling. That was a long trip north, over the mountains of Virginia to 81 and through Harrisburg, Scranton, and all that. And then, to add insult to injury, we had to divert to the Tappan Zee (now christened the Chimpanzee) because of traffic on the GWB..

Yesterday, by way of contrast, was a blissful sail south through Baltimore, DC (where all the cars must have been parked downtown debating the cliff legislation), all while listening to CDs of E.H. Gombrich's magisterial Short History of the World. We learned a lot, though perhaps a tad too much about Roman generals and German tribes and people like Theodoric and Alaric, but what are you gonna do?