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habañeros and hairdos
Friday, March 12 2004
Gretchen and I had dinner with some new vegan friends tonight at New World (the big, ramblingly funky restaurant on 212 between Woodstock and Saugerties). For some reason I ordered the hottest dish on the menu, which was rated at 9.5 (out of a possible ten) on their "Richter Scale." It was a poorly-considered pasta dish featuring pineapple, but I had an open mind and was in the mood to "cleanse" my gastrointestinal pipeline (as health nuts like to say).
The intense heat came from habañero peppers and was the sneaky kind that grabbed me seconds after I fancied myself in the clear. This actually tended to make me eat the food faster as I tried to get it past the sensitive lining of my mouth and into my unfeeling esophagus as quickly as possible. For all its heat, the food wasn't really very good. Without the habañeros it would have simply been bland and greasy. And that grease didn't even taste especially fresh. As for the chunks of pineapple, they made no sense whatsoever. It's funny how my dining experiences at New World are always flawed, yet everybody thinks that place is the best eating suggestion since crotchless panties.
I saw something today that reminded me of the persistence of hairstyles preserved as visible time capsules on the heads of living, breathing human beings. Mind you, I'm no slave to contemporary hair fashion; my personal style swings from benign neglect to waifish DYI butchery. But those are essentially timeless looks (they've been around since the Paleolithic) and they come and go at no expense whatsoever. What puzzles me is when someone is still getting professional maintenance on an elaborate hairdo that hasn't been fashionable since 1983. This isn't the same as having a dayglo formica wetbar in your basement - these atocities are being deliberately cultivated and maintained on someone's head! The only explanation I can think of is that there is a powerful positive memory attached to the fashion. I think many people are frozen stylistically at the way they looked on their first date or the first time they had sex. With this idea in mind, walking through a crowd of oversharing coifs can make for massive informational overload.
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