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Schrödinger's box on that information
Sunday, May 7 2017
location: 9th Floor, Imperial House Condominiums, Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh, PA
By this point in the Pittsburgh weekend, I was all socialed out. But so even was Gretchen, and she managed to get us out of attending a brunch with some of the family. It was nice to just take a leisurely shower and then dick around on my phone and even (briefly) my computer. Eventually it was time for lunch, which Gretchen and I commenced at a nearby Thai restaurant in Squirrel Hill called Silk Elephant. The fresh rolls were flavorless and the sauce provided was like liquidified candy, so we held onto them until entrées with savory sauces arrived. Those were good, though I didn't think they warranted Gretchen going apeshit over them.
While we were well underway in our lunch, Dina and her young daughter M showed up, along with the woman (and her daughter) in whose house they had been staying. They all stood above us talking as we poked at our food. Though I really just wanted to be eating and instead of being party to the kind of meaningless smalltalk that happens when two strangers first meet, but it seemed impolite to keep eating. I also couldn't help thinking about the steady drizzle of spittle raining down from such high human clouds. Gretchen saw me scowling from across the table and tried to get me to eat, but I couldn't. At some point I offered that everyone should take a seat, but of course the woman who'd brought Dina had to run and couldn't stay. So she continued to stand there and talk. "You looked so miserable," Gretchen later noted. But eventually it was just Gretchen, me, and M, all of sitting down and eating. That was all that I wanted.
M, who is maybe ten, is significantly more socially mature than she was when I saw her maybe two years ago. She has her own vegan cupcake business, wrote an amusing one-page essay about Donald Trump that is significantly longer than Trump's "tax proposal," and, being a digital native, works effortlessly with her mother's smartphone (though she is too young to have one of her own). After they'd left, she quickly struck up a text dialog with the daughter of the seating-averse woman who had just dropped her off.
Dina had originally hoped Gretchen would drive her to the airport, that that would've been an hour-long roundtrip west from Pittsburgh, and we didn't really have an hour to spare. So we packed Dina and M and their considerable luggage into an Uber and said goodbye.
Back at Gretchen's parents' apartment, there was another low-key social gathering going on similar to the one that had happened 24 hours before. As had been the case with that one, the people gathered were mostly of Gretchen's parents' generation. Disappointingly, nobody was drinking any wine. So I returned to a cup of black tea I'd begun before lunch. (The tea leaves were just loose like turds & toilet paper in a toilet.) For awhile, the conversation was mostly about thrift stores, particularly how fussy they are at accepting donated crap (the assembled were more the kind who go to thrift stores to get rid of stuff, not to get stuff). Some are so particular that they only accept certain brands and then only in certain vintages. The Tibetan Center thrift store has no such rules; the only thing they won't accept, as I mentioned in today's conversation, is televisions containing tubes. I went on to talk about how, after my girlfriend moved out and took all her stuff, I'd outfitted my apartment in Los Angeles with things found in the nearby alleys, and how some of that stuff had gone straight back to the alley when I'd moved out. I didn't mention that this included my mattress, though it was nevertheless a bit of a shocking admission for woman married to Gretchen's father's brother. She's a very proper lady, and one just doesn't get stuff from an alley. But I live to shock such people.
Somehow Gretchen cut our socializing short and we were on the road back to Hurley before 5:00pm. Originally Gretchen had wanted to say for one more night to have more of a Pittsburgh experience, but that would've cut into my work week. Besides, Gretchen seemed to have had enough of the Iron City. Several times she made observations about how dour and grim the architecture is, though this might've just been because the 19th Century architecture near her parents' apartment is about as dour and grim as architecture gets (see, for example, 40.4334589N, 79.9248824W).
Gretchen drove the first leg of the trip, which ended at the Olive Garden in Buckhorn, PA. It was about 8:00pm, we were hungry, and just about to enter a largely empty mountainous part of central Pennsylvania. So Olive Garden looked to be our best best. If the place is good enough to dine at ironically in Kingston, it's perfectly adequate for road food. As always, we both got pasta marinara dishes (which, to the extent we know, are vegan) and then had endless soup and salad. The breadsticks taste buttery to me, but I'm going to keep eating them until someone opens Schrödinger's box on that information. The key to maximizing one's value at Olive Garden is to load up mostly on soup, salad, and bread, and take most of your pasta to go. I also ordered a pale ale off the tap, and it was surprisingly good given the context. Gretchen got up at some point and went to the bathroom, and on the way back she played a game with herself of labeling everyone she saw as either fat or non-fat. It being rural Pennsylvania, you can imagine that non-fat was a rare designation. There was guy visible from my seat who was so far that there wasn't enough room for his belly between his seat and the table in front of him, and so his belly was somewhat indented.
For most of the second half of the drive, we listened to old episodes of the Two Dope Queens podcasts, which give airtime mostly to standup comics, with an emphasis on African Americans, women, and LGBTQ types (sorry dude bros!). The most entertaining thing about Two Dope Queens is the banter and little in-jokes one picks up on after becoming familiar with the show. Whenever, for example, the word "white" (as in Caucasian) is used, the silent "h" is given a heavy emphasis. And then for a lot of words, it's interesting to hear how various syllables are elided. "Super" becomes "supes," "apron" becomes "apes," and "difference" becomes "diff." The actual comedy featured (performed by comedians other than the two hosts) was a bit uneven, however.
Back at the house, after days of no heat an unseasonably cold, rainy conditions, temperatures inside were in the 50s. And the cats seemed especially happy we'd returned. The dogs, meanwhile, would be spending another night at Michæl & Carrie's house.
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