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intersection of entomology and etymology
Saturday, August 28 2021
It was too wet to do Saturday morning coffee out on the east deck, so we did it in the living room, where the panagrams for the New York Times Spelling Bee were "defying," "deiftying," and "edifying" (with "i" in the middle). This combination of letters produced an enormous nuber of words, and it was distracting enough that I didn't end up spending much time at my usual Saturday web haunts. At some point Gretchen started working on a crossword puzzle, which is how she learned that "myrmecophobia" is the fear of ants. This led me to research the etymology of "myrmecophobia." It's based on the Ancient Greek word for "ant," "myrmekes." I remembered that "formica" is Latin for "ant," and this led me to look up the etymology of both "formica" and "ant." It was, I realized, the intersection of entomology and etymology.
Then, for the rest of the afternoon until Mary and Keith arrived, I was in full-on cleaning jihad mode. I figured out away to install removable vent grills with magnets in the basement master guestroom & bathroom, bleached another wave of black mold that had appeared yet again in the drywall at the top of the basement stairs, and vaccuumed the all the stairs and living room.
Mary had actually been vaccine-hesitant about a month or so ago, which led to us not wanting to see her on an earlier visit. Her worldview regarding such things is all about personal health to an extreme that feels like a form of narcisism; this is very much unlike our attitude toward diet and vaccinations. Our attitude has always been about shared societal goals such as the minimization of suffering and the control of the rampant coronavirus pandemic. Even if the vaccine were to have made us suffer (which it didn't), it would've been worth the suffering to curtail the spread of the disease. But supposedly Mary is all vaccinated now, as is Keith. But there were other annoyances to deal with: Mary doesn't eat gluten and Keith cannot eat soy. For this reason, Gretchen's plan was for us to all go to the Garden Café tonight. But then Mary called us about the time she should've been arriving to say that she and Keith were eating a meal (a late lunch?) at the Garden. (Where Keith sent food back three times due to soy contamination; supposedly soy softens his stools in a way that he finds intolerable.)
So then finally Mary and Keith arrived, and we sat around in the living room talking with Gretchen, Powerful, and me. Powerful was doing most of the talking, mostly about the various civic projects he is involved with, particularly Thrift2Fight. Then Gretchen, Keith, and Mary went for a long walk in the forest with the dogs.
Later this evening, the plan was for all of us except Powerful to go out to dinner at La Florentina, because it turned out that Mary was no longer being gluten-free. (People not eating gluten often seems like a bandwagon move that has little basis in reality, and apparently that had been the case here.) I'd eaten some cannabis earlier today, and it was kicking in hard at about the time we were supposed to leave (so hard, in fact, that I lay for awhile on one of the new dog beds stroking Ramona's head and having a real moment with her). Normally I'm the one who drives everyone to dinner, but fortunately for me, our Bolt still lacks a backseat and it was (in any case) parked in by the Chevy Spark Mary and Keith had rented. So Keith ended up doing the driving. Nobody knew that I was sitting there riding waves of anxiety, some of which were so powerful that there was no way I could've answered a question. A question actually occurred during one these, and Gretchen was looking at me for answer, so I stammered out a "Yeah," and that was sufficient. It's actually pretty easy to pass a Turing Test in the real world.
It turned out La Florentina was closed for an extended summer break, so we ended up driving to the Rondout in search of Mexican food. I hadn't been to the Rondout in awhile, and the gentrification that has taken place there has left it resembling Beverly Hills. The first place we considered was a new somewhat upscale place called The Tortilla Taco Bar on the northeast side of Broadway (in the ugly brick buildings resulting from a 1970s urban renewal project). But the wait there was looking prohibitive, so we went to Mole Mole (the old-Kingston Mexican joint across Broadway). Unfortunately for Keith, everything at Mole Mole is cooked in soybean oil. But that wasn't a deal breaker; he ordered something to go from The Tortilla Taco Bar and the other three of us ordered soy-soaked Mole Mole food. (I got the guacamole burrito, which didn't actually seem to contain any guacamole) and a Goose Island IPA. Gretchen normally doesn't order alcoholic drinks, but this time she ordered a strawberry daiquiri, which was proved incredibly strong. By now I wasn't as fucked-up from the cannabis, so I was having a good time and contributing positively to the conversation, even if I was finding it difficult to articulate complex ideas (such as the extent to which social media has exposed America's serious problems with the Dunning-Kruger effect).
Gretchen directed a long sight-seeing drive back home through Uptown and Old Hurley. Then we sat around for awhile more in the living room before everyone went to bed.
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