Revival!
It's a revival! Because I am just *that* bored.
To start: a short snippety thing that I wrote after reading Death by Pad Thai, edited by Douglas Bauer. In the book, writers like Amy Bloom and Claire Messud lend their pens to talking about their most memorable meals; it's not so much food-writing as it is food-memoir.
# # #
The end of the school year is never pretty, and that year was no exception.
In some strange stroke of delusion, I had signed up for two upper-level seminars, one in American studies and another in art history, both of which required major research papers at the end of the semester. The timing was especially tragic because it was spring semester, meaning that my production of these two projects would coincide with my moving out of my room. I don’t think I can sufficiently re-created the sense of panic I had about the situation, although, thinking back, I wasn’t really panicking until the very last hours of the whole ordeal, which serenity either resulted from my lack of sleep or, more unlikely, had been taught to me by my Mormon background in accepting all that God has foreordained. And if God did indeed foreordain the mad rush of these last few days of the semester, then he really is a sadistic sonufabitch.
The papers were easy enough. It all went by in a blur, and I’m still not quite sure how I managed to churn out fifty pages of academic writing in three days. Unlike my later days in college, when I learned to separate the research and writing phases of my projects and meticulously tabbed books and journal articles for my data, the writing process of these two seminar papers involved a jumping exercise between source and computer as I wrote one sentence and then dug through the piles of books I had to find some evidence – any evidence! – to support my claim. (Not to jeopardize Amherst College’s stellar reputation as an academic institution, but I feel it necessary to disclose that these two papers were two of my highest grades in my undergraduate career.) I loved writing the papers. I believed every word I put on the page and thought I had original and exciting research to contribute. I was just a little behind and inefficient in my presentation.
The papers were due on Friday, and I wrote feverishly to make the deadline. Through the night of Wednesday and the early morning of Thursday, I moved down the hall from my room to work in my then-boyfriend’s dorm room. Max had his own work to do, and we worked on opposite sides of the (seriously, against conventional knowledge of college residences) cavernous room. Like I said, I don’t remember much about that night, except that I looked up briefly, probably around 5 AM, to note to Max that I had never been up late enough to hear birds waking up in song in the morning. These delicate and cheering signs of life, I’d learned over my two years at Amherst, were luxuries in New England that had to be cherished in the two out of twelve months a year that the region is inhabitable, at least by reasonable human beings.
Working in Max’s room was a fairly risky move, actually. Max and I did not live on the same hall because we were classmates; I was his resident counselor (resident advisor, junior counselor, et cetera, et cetera). We began dating around Spring Break. The night before I left for home, Max had put his head on my shoulder while we lay on my bed watching TV (after watching The Passion of the Christ with my friend Pem, I thought, sandwiched safely between us). As my friend Matt reminds me, I had only two nights before confirmed that I would not let anything happen between Max and me; it was unprofessional, I declared. I still don’t know what changed. But Max put his head on my shoulder, and, later, I kissed him. We stayed up talking all night: about our families and his novel and my screenplay and what this budding relationship would mean. We began dating after we returned from Spring Break, and our relationship was as well kept a secret on campus as Mark Foley’s homosexuality was in Washington. Publicly, we disavowed any rumors that we were together, but people talked. Other resident counselors asked me in private, and I didn’t lie to them. More than once, another resident of Appleton Hall saw us as we were cuddling on my bed (I still maintain, by the way, that after knocking one should wait for a response instead of opening the door directly).
I don’t think we ever ate together during those two and a half ambiguous months when we were technically and officially not dating (but actually and emotionally very much so). A psychology professor once advised me that people aren’t ever paying as much attention to me as I think they are, but, of course, it never feels that way. The other reason we never ate together would be that our dining hall, named Valentine, is a decidedly unromantic venue, as all college cafeterias, I would venture, are. It’s a nice place to study and socialize, but dates are destined to crash and burn within its pastel-colored walls and giant deep-dish lights and black-and-white school-spirit photos. I’m not saying couples don’t eat in Valentine together; I’m saying you don’t do it when you’re starting out or when you’re trying to impress someone. The subliminal message is something like: “I offer these limp and soggy chicken chunks and this low-fat mocha frozen yogurt for your stunning beauty.” It just doesn’t work.
So Max and I waited for our first date, and it occurred to us that we could really make an occasion out of it. My contract as a resident counselor for the year technically ended at 8-o’clock on Friday, May 21, 2004. Everyone had to move out of the dorm by that time, and, at that point, Max and I would be just two regular students. Technically and officially allowed to date. The occasion called for a dinner. But first we had our papers to write, which brings us in a circular way back to the moment of the meal.
I turned in the second of the two projects on Thursday, in the afternoon. Walking out of Morgan Hall, where I’d dropped my behemoth of a paper in the mailbox of Professor Karen Sanchez-Eppler, I felt a brief moment of elation and relief before the dread of moving out moved in. College students are really just a more dignified version of street transients. Every year, we are forced out of the places we’ve grown to call home. We pack our lives’ possessions in boxes and shove them into dark and dingy basements and await the glorious fall day when we can begin anew the reconstruction of our young identities by tacking up sophomoric posters and icicle lights. My packing process was complicated by the fact that Max had moved his things into my small room in order to take advantage of my extension to stay one extra night in the dorm. The extra night was crucial for our plans to finally have our first date.
Thursday and Friday went by too quickly. I ran out of packing tape, as appropriate according to Murphy’s Law in these last-minute situations. To substitute, I taped shut my exploding plastic containers with reels and reels of scotch tape. Hold for the next three months of the summer, I prayed silently to the same God who had foreordained this mess in the first place. Plastic bags and crates and boxes spilt into the hallway. The afternoon came and went. Max sat at my desk, fiddling with the computer while I hurried to and fro. We looked up briefly and smiled at each other at 8-o’clock. The spell had been lifted. Then I went back to packing. 9-o’clock passed. Dinner was only a vague afterthought in my mind. Finally, around 10-o’clock, I finished. I was sweaty and gross and sticky and exhausted, but we grabbed our jackets and walked into town center.
This is perhaps the point when I tell you that everything was closed and that, for our first date, Max and I were forced to eat burritos on the steps of the Amherst town hall, and that because of the special-ness of the moment, even such pedestrian fare seemed to be magical. But that’s not what happened. Many of the restaurants in Amherst were closed already, indeed, but Pinocchio’s was still open. To our good fortune, Pinocchio’s was also the best restaurant in town. (Unfortunately, it burned down in the summer between my junior and senior years, the more cynical among us passing on rumors that the proprietors wanted the insurance money.) Pinocchio’s was where the College took its prospective hires for dinner after a grueling day of interviews. It was one of the two places in town students angled for their parents to take them when any combination of Mom(s) and/or Dad(s) was in town. Pinocchio’s was the exact opposite of Valentine: elegant, dimly-lit, warm, romantic, clean, non-institutional. Waiters in crisp shirts and ties drifted between tables with baskets of foccacia, placing them carefully with extra-virgin olive oil on starched white tablecloths. I had been to Pinocchio’s before but only ordered the medium-priced pastas; the proteins and the fresh fish seduced you until you saw their prices. It’s really too bad the place burned down.
Max and I walked in on a near-empty restaurant. There were a few odd couples left still eating or finishing dessert, but the hostess graciously and quickly sat us at a table for two. I can’t remember the details clearly, because I was exhausted from the intellectual unpacking of my brain over the course of the week and the physical packing of my room the two days before. I remember that we threw fiscal responsibility to the wind like Republicans at war. We had a multi-course meal. I forget what the appetizer was; probably something generic but well-executed like fried calamari. I ordered the Delmonico steak, the largest chop in the house, and seared to as rare as possible as I believed beef should be eaten. Max ordered, if I remember correctly, a pear salad with confit of duck leg.
The evening seemed to melt away over the course of a meal. The food was spectacular, but that was perhaps because the occasion was spectacular. I remember smiling a lot, grinning like a fool at my boyfriend over bites of tender steak. A boyfriend that I could finally introduce to my friends and my coworkers and my bosses and, eventually, my mother. I wish I’d remembered how happy I had been at that moment in Pinocchio’s when I made the fatal decision that would be the beginning of the end of our year-and-a-half-long relationship.
Life is about waiting. Hurrying up and waiting. Sometimes, if we’re lucky, the objects of our waiting actually match the ideas we inevitably construct of them during the wait. Food, I find, is very much that way (probably because in an efficient market no one wants to wait for bad food, except when diners sell out for a restaurant’s brand over its food, like the Hard Rock Café). So are relationships. And when the two are combined, a memorable meal is inevitably born.
To start: a short snippety thing that I wrote after reading Death by Pad Thai, edited by Douglas Bauer. In the book, writers like Amy Bloom and Claire Messud lend their pens to talking about their most memorable meals; it's not so much food-writing as it is food-memoir.
# # #
The end of the school year is never pretty, and that year was no exception.
In some strange stroke of delusion, I had signed up for two upper-level seminars, one in American studies and another in art history, both of which required major research papers at the end of the semester. The timing was especially tragic because it was spring semester, meaning that my production of these two projects would coincide with my moving out of my room. I don’t think I can sufficiently re-created the sense of panic I had about the situation, although, thinking back, I wasn’t really panicking until the very last hours of the whole ordeal, which serenity either resulted from my lack of sleep or, more unlikely, had been taught to me by my Mormon background in accepting all that God has foreordained. And if God did indeed foreordain the mad rush of these last few days of the semester, then he really is a sadistic sonufabitch.
The papers were easy enough. It all went by in a blur, and I’m still not quite sure how I managed to churn out fifty pages of academic writing in three days. Unlike my later days in college, when I learned to separate the research and writing phases of my projects and meticulously tabbed books and journal articles for my data, the writing process of these two seminar papers involved a jumping exercise between source and computer as I wrote one sentence and then dug through the piles of books I had to find some evidence – any evidence! – to support my claim. (Not to jeopardize Amherst College’s stellar reputation as an academic institution, but I feel it necessary to disclose that these two papers were two of my highest grades in my undergraduate career.) I loved writing the papers. I believed every word I put on the page and thought I had original and exciting research to contribute. I was just a little behind and inefficient in my presentation.
The papers were due on Friday, and I wrote feverishly to make the deadline. Through the night of Wednesday and the early morning of Thursday, I moved down the hall from my room to work in my then-boyfriend’s dorm room. Max had his own work to do, and we worked on opposite sides of the (seriously, against conventional knowledge of college residences) cavernous room. Like I said, I don’t remember much about that night, except that I looked up briefly, probably around 5 AM, to note to Max that I had never been up late enough to hear birds waking up in song in the morning. These delicate and cheering signs of life, I’d learned over my two years at Amherst, were luxuries in New England that had to be cherished in the two out of twelve months a year that the region is inhabitable, at least by reasonable human beings.
Working in Max’s room was a fairly risky move, actually. Max and I did not live on the same hall because we were classmates; I was his resident counselor (resident advisor, junior counselor, et cetera, et cetera). We began dating around Spring Break. The night before I left for home, Max had put his head on my shoulder while we lay on my bed watching TV (after watching The Passion of the Christ with my friend Pem, I thought, sandwiched safely between us). As my friend Matt reminds me, I had only two nights before confirmed that I would not let anything happen between Max and me; it was unprofessional, I declared. I still don’t know what changed. But Max put his head on my shoulder, and, later, I kissed him. We stayed up talking all night: about our families and his novel and my screenplay and what this budding relationship would mean. We began dating after we returned from Spring Break, and our relationship was as well kept a secret on campus as Mark Foley’s homosexuality was in Washington. Publicly, we disavowed any rumors that we were together, but people talked. Other resident counselors asked me in private, and I didn’t lie to them. More than once, another resident of Appleton Hall saw us as we were cuddling on my bed (I still maintain, by the way, that after knocking one should wait for a response instead of opening the door directly).
I don’t think we ever ate together during those two and a half ambiguous months when we were technically and officially not dating (but actually and emotionally very much so). A psychology professor once advised me that people aren’t ever paying as much attention to me as I think they are, but, of course, it never feels that way. The other reason we never ate together would be that our dining hall, named Valentine, is a decidedly unromantic venue, as all college cafeterias, I would venture, are. It’s a nice place to study and socialize, but dates are destined to crash and burn within its pastel-colored walls and giant deep-dish lights and black-and-white school-spirit photos. I’m not saying couples don’t eat in Valentine together; I’m saying you don’t do it when you’re starting out or when you’re trying to impress someone. The subliminal message is something like: “I offer these limp and soggy chicken chunks and this low-fat mocha frozen yogurt for your stunning beauty.” It just doesn’t work.
So Max and I waited for our first date, and it occurred to us that we could really make an occasion out of it. My contract as a resident counselor for the year technically ended at 8-o’clock on Friday, May 21, 2004. Everyone had to move out of the dorm by that time, and, at that point, Max and I would be just two regular students. Technically and officially allowed to date. The occasion called for a dinner. But first we had our papers to write, which brings us in a circular way back to the moment of the meal.
I turned in the second of the two projects on Thursday, in the afternoon. Walking out of Morgan Hall, where I’d dropped my behemoth of a paper in the mailbox of Professor Karen Sanchez-Eppler, I felt a brief moment of elation and relief before the dread of moving out moved in. College students are really just a more dignified version of street transients. Every year, we are forced out of the places we’ve grown to call home. We pack our lives’ possessions in boxes and shove them into dark and dingy basements and await the glorious fall day when we can begin anew the reconstruction of our young identities by tacking up sophomoric posters and icicle lights. My packing process was complicated by the fact that Max had moved his things into my small room in order to take advantage of my extension to stay one extra night in the dorm. The extra night was crucial for our plans to finally have our first date.
Thursday and Friday went by too quickly. I ran out of packing tape, as appropriate according to Murphy’s Law in these last-minute situations. To substitute, I taped shut my exploding plastic containers with reels and reels of scotch tape. Hold for the next three months of the summer, I prayed silently to the same God who had foreordained this mess in the first place. Plastic bags and crates and boxes spilt into the hallway. The afternoon came and went. Max sat at my desk, fiddling with the computer while I hurried to and fro. We looked up briefly and smiled at each other at 8-o’clock. The spell had been lifted. Then I went back to packing. 9-o’clock passed. Dinner was only a vague afterthought in my mind. Finally, around 10-o’clock, I finished. I was sweaty and gross and sticky and exhausted, but we grabbed our jackets and walked into town center.
This is perhaps the point when I tell you that everything was closed and that, for our first date, Max and I were forced to eat burritos on the steps of the Amherst town hall, and that because of the special-ness of the moment, even such pedestrian fare seemed to be magical. But that’s not what happened. Many of the restaurants in Amherst were closed already, indeed, but Pinocchio’s was still open. To our good fortune, Pinocchio’s was also the best restaurant in town. (Unfortunately, it burned down in the summer between my junior and senior years, the more cynical among us passing on rumors that the proprietors wanted the insurance money.) Pinocchio’s was where the College took its prospective hires for dinner after a grueling day of interviews. It was one of the two places in town students angled for their parents to take them when any combination of Mom(s) and/or Dad(s) was in town. Pinocchio’s was the exact opposite of Valentine: elegant, dimly-lit, warm, romantic, clean, non-institutional. Waiters in crisp shirts and ties drifted between tables with baskets of foccacia, placing them carefully with extra-virgin olive oil on starched white tablecloths. I had been to Pinocchio’s before but only ordered the medium-priced pastas; the proteins and the fresh fish seduced you until you saw their prices. It’s really too bad the place burned down.
Max and I walked in on a near-empty restaurant. There were a few odd couples left still eating or finishing dessert, but the hostess graciously and quickly sat us at a table for two. I can’t remember the details clearly, because I was exhausted from the intellectual unpacking of my brain over the course of the week and the physical packing of my room the two days before. I remember that we threw fiscal responsibility to the wind like Republicans at war. We had a multi-course meal. I forget what the appetizer was; probably something generic but well-executed like fried calamari. I ordered the Delmonico steak, the largest chop in the house, and seared to as rare as possible as I believed beef should be eaten. Max ordered, if I remember correctly, a pear salad with confit of duck leg.
The evening seemed to melt away over the course of a meal. The food was spectacular, but that was perhaps because the occasion was spectacular. I remember smiling a lot, grinning like a fool at my boyfriend over bites of tender steak. A boyfriend that I could finally introduce to my friends and my coworkers and my bosses and, eventually, my mother. I wish I’d remembered how happy I had been at that moment in Pinocchio’s when I made the fatal decision that would be the beginning of the end of our year-and-a-half-long relationship.
Life is about waiting. Hurrying up and waiting. Sometimes, if we’re lucky, the objects of our waiting actually match the ideas we inevitably construct of them during the wait. Food, I find, is very much that way (probably because in an efficient market no one wants to wait for bad food, except when diners sell out for a restaurant’s brand over its food, like the Hard Rock Café). So are relationships. And when the two are combined, a memorable meal is inevitably born.
posted by K. Ian Shin | 7:10 AM
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