|
|
|
different kind of sausage party
Saturday, May 15 2021
The lovely weather continued, meaning we could have our morning coffee & Spelling Bee ritual out on the east deck. The panagram was "unequaled" with "n" in the middle, which didn't seem to produce many words, but then when Gretchen entered the words we'd found, we were only at "nice," meaning we were missing whole swaths of them.
A little before noon, our friend Eva came over to walk dogs with Gretchen. (She and Sandor now have two dogs, but she'd left them back at her house.) This was the first socializing we'd done with her since we werea all vaccinated, and there were no masks in use. Once they were off in the woods, I mowed the lawn (the second mow of the year; Gretchen had done the first) as part of a light jihad to get the house in shape for tonight's activity. In celebration of Powerful's first year of freedom, Gretchen had be preparing an elaborate multi-course meal for a dinner party at our house and in attendance would be a group of friends Powerful has developed on his own. These were four white Bard students who are building a thrift store to support racial justice work. Gretchen had worked for days on the various dishes, which would have a Middle Eastern vibe. Gretchen had managed to talk Powerful out of his desire for an eggplant dish, thought there would still be tabouli. (Gretchen has such a strong aversion to cucumber that she had me cut it into the necessary tiny cubes.)
At around 7:00pm, the first of Powerful's guests arrived, a young woman and a man who was apparently her boyfriend, and we moved out to the east deck to eat. Running late were two other attendees, including Masha, a young woman who had apparently grown up in Belarus but had no discernable accent (other than pronouncing the "t" in "clothes"). The food wasn't really keyed to my tastes; I didn't much like the carrot & croutons soup, I actively dislike tabouli, and didn't much like the lentil & pasta dish either. Also, I was at one end of the table and it was too much trouble to get more of the few things I did want.
When it got colder and a few insects started bothering us, we moved the party inside, where I fed a raging cardboard fire in the woodstove. Someone brought up the topic of poison dart frogs, so Gretchen found the page featuring such a frog in our coffee-table book of pairs of pictures intended to be viewed through the included 3D glasses. But not everyone present was able to see in 3D through the glasses; it turns out being able to use such glasses is a skill, and it's not an easy one to teach. One of the women present who was able to work the 3D glasses said that it reminded her of the optical illusion where one puts the tips of two fingers in front of his or her face while focusing on something in the distance, at which point there will appear to be an oblong mass, a "sausage," between the tips of your fingers. That got all of us trying to form and see the "sausage" on our own. Gretchen was having trouble, so I told her the guaranteed way to make it appear was to hold her fingers in front of her face while focusing on me, some ten or so feet away. Apparently she'd never seen this "sausage" before because when it appeared to her, she squealed with delight. All this experimenting with stereo vision and the weird artifacts of human vision went on for some time. At one point one of our guests asked if I knew any other vision tricks. As said that I had a trick, but it was unrelated. I said that I could pull a match out of a match book and light it using my toes. I'd done this in the past using a big box of farmer matches, but it turned out that all we had was smaller boxes of relatively thin matches with short, narrow strike strips. I couldn't fumble a match out of such a box using my toes, and when I tried to strike one, I couldn't develop enough speed on such a small strip and my toes quickly started to cramp painfully (the way they do when I bend my toes while stretching my legs). I ended up breaking four or five matches without even one of them catching fire. But I kept trying long after most anyone else would've given, which is something Gretchen was sure I would.
Soon after that, Gretchen gave a tour of the upstairs (but just the teevee room and the laboratory) to show off my copper pipe lamps, which one of our guests had asked about. I'd straightened up the laboratory earlier today, moving much of the stuff I'd pulled out from against the ceiling-walls (so I could repaint the floor) back. With its fresh floor paint uncluttered by boxes and crates, it looked stunning. There was, of course, too much for anyone to really see in in just a few minutes, so just stood around and took it in. At some point, Gretchen reminded me of my disco ball, so I turned it on and made it briefly into a trippy holodeck.
As for Powerful's young friends, they seemed like an impressive group of people. They're into photography and fashion and social technologies like TikTok, and when they lapse into shop talk about the thrift store they're organizing, it can be a bit hard to follow. But they're also fun, have a thoroughly enlightened view of recreational drugs, and are (amusingly) into astrology while also thinking it makes no sense. The fact that seven people, some of them strangers to each other, could socialize together in a livingroom maskless, never really even talking about coronavirus (aside from wacky sometimes-homeopathological things done by parents) seemed to indicate that, for our social group at least, the pandemic is finally over.
I should mention that Masha took lots of photographs throughout the evening, although sometimes when she was pointing her camera in his direction, Neville would bark at her menacingly. Evidently he's no fan of paparazzi.
[REDACTED]
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?210515 feedback
previous | next |
