zeldafitz

Thursday, November 10, 2005

Notes From the Underground

Literally...geez. Miss Fancy Pants goes and gets a new job and doesn' t have time for the important things! Like this! Man. Plus there is a firewall at work that prevents me from directly accessing this site. Annoying! I can still get there, but I haven't even had time to compose as I would like. So I'm here in our basement of a Thursday morn, furiously typing away.

The new job is swell and if there is ANYTHING at all you want to know about menopause or chronic fatigue syndrome, I want you to write me. Are they the same thing, you ask? No. The most important thing about my new job is: there are LOTS of sushi restaurants nearby!

I work in Bethesda, which is a tony li'l suburb of DC that hugs its northwest quadrangle. Scrumptious! The reason I like Bethesda is because, since it hugs that aforementioned quadrangle, where I grew up, I have spent a lot of time in Bethesda! Just incidentally and because it was so close to home and all.

My mother's favorite Chinese restaurant was there, China Village. The owner was a stooped little feverishly busy man who would come out from the kitchen when word that my mother had arrived got to him. He would greet her heartily with her last name and then ask, ignoring any daughters at the table, "How your SON?" Then he would put his arm around my mother and say, "Your mother STRONG! Like tiger." And then rip up the bill.

Often my mother would then say, "Do you want to sashay over to the Opp Shop?" Groan. But we would go and linger among rich people's sensible cast-offs in a church-run thrift store. That's where I went yesterday on my lunch hour. The Opp Shop. I was sorely tempted by an Asian "old" framed print of a Canada goose (you know how I love them) sort of toppling over with unlikely grace. I think I might actually go and buy it. I liked it because it would represent my moving on from the goose preserve and all.

There is also a HUGE Caribou coffee nearby. Every single solitary person in my office has a giant Caribou coffee cup on their desk. It's hard not to get sucked into the cult.

The nearest li'l sushi place looks like it was just yanked out of a Tokyo alley. The crammed front is a store with weird fixins like small dried crab shells coated in sesame seeds called "Party!" Yum. In the back there is a small sushi counter where a very Japanese woman takes your order while carping "Hi!" (that means yes, in my extensive Japanese) into the phone.

The excitement of coffee! And sushi! And staid preppy patrician charitable hand-me-downs. WHAT, I ask, is not to like?

I missed ya.

More anon.