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across Union Street
Sunday, September 29 2002
Today our home was to play host to yet another open house. We'd done our homework, making the house even more fabulous and neutral than before. And supposedly our real estate agency had done their work, taking out the correct advertisements in the New York Times and on their website. But alas, that wasn't the case. A brief investigation before the open house demonstrated that all three of the advertisements they'd placed were wrong, each in entirely different ways. One of them even made the ludicrous claim that our building was staffed by a 24 hour doorman. Well, Gretchen found this development infuriating. We'd endured several other instances of incompetence from this particular Park Slope real estate agency, but this one took the cake. The one thing a real estate agency does is sell property, and they somehow can't manage to get a single one of their ads right for this particular open house.
As Gretchen and I were walking down 7th Avenue with Sally (to drop her off with Uncle Ray and Aunt Nancy), I observed that it seemed to me that professionals in big cities are, by and large, less competent than their colleagues in small towns such as, say, Charlottesville or Kingston. Gretchen agreed and proposed that this probably had something to do with how little one has to do to succeed at selling real estate in Park Slope at the height of the present real estate bubble. (Yes, at these prices, I'm convinced it's a bubble and high time to cash out.)
When we arrived, Ray was in the midst of a low-key multicultural Sunday afternoon. His stocky Filipino figure was all stretched out on a couch and he was watching Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon and eating Swedish food from Ikea. Before their last trip to the Ikea in New Jersey, I'd had no idea Ikea sold food for anything but termites and silverfish. In discussing the real estate situation with Ray and Nancy, we started thinking that perhaps we should just sell our house by ourselves. How hard can it be to do it competently, particularly in this market, particularly when we save $20,000 by doing it that way?
Now that we were without Sally, Gretchen and I walked to Hunan delight via 6th Avenue (thus avoiding the baby stroller madness of ever-fecund 7th). It being 2pm on a Sunday, we were the only customers in the restaurant. We sat in the window seat eating vegetarian dishes rich in soy products and purportedly devoid of preservatives, additives, and MSG. Outside the window we saw various groups of people acting out their lives. Across Union Street in the outdoor part of Rosewater, some guy was stretched out in his seat, barefoot and barelegged, absorbing the sun through the slight autumnal chill. Closer by, a young man was setting up a yardsale, hanging tiny spaghetti-strapped Britney Generation halter tops on the fence in front of his brownstone. Then a little toddler wandered past and I was horrified to notice that he had no face. In its place was a weathered Easter Island mask of irregular skin-toned flesh, an intermediate stage in a lifetime of reconstructive (or perhaps just constructive) surgery. Not that I didn't wish the kid well, but I was also glad that when I saw him I'd already finished eating.
After picking up Sally from her aunt and uncle, Gretchen and I returned to hear how the open house had gone. As expected, there had been a lighter turnout than before, but our agent seemed enthusiastic about the interest expressed by a few of the people who had passed through. Gretchen nodded her head with thinly-veiled irritation and then vented some more about her disappointment with the ads. Our agent agreed vehemently, and, as damage control, made a show of yelling at the moron responsible over the phone.
While this was going on, we were visited by Nina, Gretchen's Jewish friend from Long Island. With Nina was Karstin, the new man in her life, a non-Jew from Germany. I mention their relationship to Judaism because I also want to briefly relate a story Gretchen told me about them. It seems that a reporter wrote an article about their relationship for a Jewish publication, the article was published, and then the publication was deluged by hatemail from readers appalled at the notion that any self-respecting Jew could possibly depict such a coupling as anything but an echo of the Holocaust.
It turns out that Karstin has a Ph.D. in molecular biology (or perhaps biochemistry). On the walk to dinner, he was telling me about the work he does. He's been studying the proteins that fix damage in DNA. I'd never really thought about what sort of damage DNA can sustain, but he knew all about it intimately. Some of this damage, it turns out, is a lot easier to fix than others. One form of damage happens when ultraviolet light strikes two base pairs and fuses them into a single molecule. There's a protein that looks for these odd fusings and cleaves them apart again. Another kind of damage consists of mismatched base pairings. These mostly happen during DNA replication, and can usually be fixed because the older, correct DNA strand is more stable chemically and the newer strand is regarded as suspect until a certain protein scans it while another seals it chemically. The most complicated forms of damage occur when there's a deleted segment of DNA. But even for these errors the cell can cope, particularly in diploid animals. Believe it or not, there's even a mechanism for reading an analogous part of the genome on the complementary chromosome and rebuilding a deleted DNA segment based on the information contained in the "backup." Of course, if the DNA is too fucked up to repair, the cell around it can always be killed, at least in a multicellular animal.
We four met up with David the Rabbi and had dinner at Rosewater, directly across Union Street from where we'd had lunch only a few hours before. I wasn't even the slightest bit hungry, so I ordered a calamari appetizer. It's always stressful to order less than everyone else; waitresses have a way of making you feel like a schmuck in situations like this.
Dinner conversation mostly concerned rabbinical and Jewish issues. I never ceased to be amazed how much Jews can go on and on about the trappings of Judaism. In a way it reminds me of the Hoosiers in Cat's Cradle and Kurt Vonnegut's fictional religious concept of the granfalloon. Common ethnic culture is all well and good, and I understand the appeal of belonging to a long-suffering minority, but as for me, I prefer to cast my lot with groups not directly dictated by the chance circumstances of birth.
Later we all drank glasses of South African port at David's apartment on sixth avenue. He's only lived there a few months but it looks like he's only been there a couple of days.
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