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leftover noodle mini-party
Monday, January 20 2025
This morning while Gretchen and Marisa were walking Charlotte, I walked over to Alison's house to retrieve our Chevy Bolt. Alison's driveway was already plowed, but the cars were covered in about four inches of snow sitting atop crusty ice that needed to be scraped off the windshield to make the car driveable. As I was doing this, a couple Hispanic workers were doing something near the front door to Alison's house. After I'd cleared our car, I thought it would be nice to also scrape the ice off Marisa's car (it's some sort of fancy all-electric BMW). But I hadn't been scraping it long before its car alarm started making a penetrating high-pitched beeping sound, so I stopped. The workers probably thought that was pretty funny. I drove the Bolt back home but parked it only a little ways into our driveway so it wouldn't get stuck.
Later, after Gretchen and Marisa drove off to Woodstock, I shoveled out the driveway, something I probably didn't need to do.
Both dogs came with me when I took them on a mid-afternoon walk a little ways up the Chamomile Headwaters Trail and then over to the Stick Trail. eville seemed to enjoy plodding through the snow; he actually got a spring in his step when we turned off the plowed Farm Road onto the unplowed trail. As for Charlotte, she's broken off another of her claws, which was now hanging by a string and she kept putting flecks of red in the snow. (Gretchen and I suspect she has some nutritional deficiency that is causing her nails to split and break.)
We'd run the boiler yesterday so Gretchen could take a shower, so there was still enough hot water for me to take a much-needed bath. I was still in the bathtub when Gretchen got home.
Meanwhile Gretchen had invited Fern and a woman named Emily (they're staying together at that wacky house along Rondout Creek in High Falls) over for a dinner of leftover noodles and wine. They arrived around 6:45pm, and we ate like proper human beings at the dining table. Emily is in the same anthropology PhD program at Columbia as Fern, and they're both working on theses, grant proposals, or both. We talked for a fairly long time about the titling of theses, with Emily saying that she absolutely abhors the colon that everyone feels compelled to include in such titles. But, she said, her thesis is still untitled and, when all is said and done, its title may well end up having a colon in it. Then Emily talked about a tyrannical housemate who is living rent-free in a house while charging marked-up rents to all her fellow tenants, a situation that reminds me of a succession of two different tenants at our Brewster Street property. The tyrannical housemate is from a wealthy Afghan family but also claims she is a "person of color." I was skeptical that Afghans are "persons of color." I said that they have about as much claim to that category as Italians. The others disagreed, so I asked if Persians were people of color. They thought so. Then I asked if Turks were people of color. That seemed to be about where they all drew the line. Turks are not people of color.
Later, after we'd all moved into the living room to be closer to the fire, the conversation turned to the subject of the recent movie Conclave, which I have not seen and which has a twist at the end that Emily said had come from the "woke mind virus," a joking reference to whatever turned Elon Musk into a Trump-supporting incel. Emily would've preferred it had the religious element played a bigger role in the movie. For her part, Gretchen found the twist at the end satisfying and felt that it wasn't a tacked-on gimmick to attract woke people into the theatre. Having not seen the movie, I had a different view: perhaps the twist at the end, good or bad, was necessary for the movie to get the buzz it has so that so many people would see it. (In that sense, it might be a selected-for trait in the Darwinian sense.)
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