Notes From A College Tour (Part 1)

So here I am, at the aforementioned coffeeshop, writing on my laptop like any other coffeeshop patron. ^__^ And why yes there is a cappuccino nearby.

I'm not sure the following anecdotes will be organized by anything except the order in which they come out of my head, but we'll all do our best to follow along.

Notes From A College Tour.

(Editor's Note: This appears to be Part 1: The Food. Go figure.)

1. If you pay close enough attention to these little stories, you will be able to figure out my (non-Blue) identity. If you were on this particular campus, you might have figured it out already. I can't go ten feet without seeing my name in print. To put it in the vaguest terms possible, I'm here for an event at which I am also one of the honorees--and there are posters advertising this event, with my name in prominence, at every turn.

2. At the same time, five years out of undergrad, I'm safely assured of my own anonymity. I'm good at blending in, and I don't look much like the person I was in 2004. The people I've gone to meet have had to look twice before figuring out who I was.

3. The biggest difference--or psychological difference--is the way everything feels smaller. In two ways. When I was a student, the university town was twice as big as my hometown. (It had a movie theatre! With four screens!) After living in DC, it seems tiny. More interestingly, everything seems smaller now that the price factor is no longer aspirational. This is a town where the highest-priced entree at the nicest restaurant is $15. It's almost laughable--and, in the case of my frugality, delightful.

4. This makes it very easy for me to take the Proust Tour, as it were; to go into all the restaurants I used to frequent (on special occasions) and into the ones I aspired to frequent and--in the case of the former--see if the food tastes the same. Consider the Magical Sandwich Shop, which I will not name because it is the only one of its kind and thus easily googled, but which is known for doing a particular thing to its sandwiches which involves a special pressing kind of machine and lots of cheese. Today I had a Magical Sandwich which, as far as I could tell, tasted familiar but lots less magical. I think it was because it's much less appealing to eat something which contains five layers of cheese and one layer of mayonnaise.

5. What does surprise me is that all of the restaurants, which are all locally-owned (sure, there are fast food chains here too, but I'm not going to bother with that), still have the exact same menus that they did five years ago. I think I was expecting, on some level, a reflection of the way food has changed in the last five years--and don't tell me it hasn't! We are in a post-Pollan world, after all. Shouldn't the corner bistro with its six female-named sandwiches (the Dinah, the Paula, etc.) have added a seventh sandwich (say, the Barbara) made with all-local ingredients?

Have to go now, for a... um... thing... will catch up later with more notes and better stories. (There are actual stories coming, not just descriptions of restaurants!)

Cabbage Thing

The Farmers' Market has stopped selling cabbage. I guess it's out of season.

I kept this bunch in the freezer for a month or so, not wanting to use the last cabbage in the house, until the other night when I needed something I could cook in ten minutes.

So... no cabbage now until fall? I should have frozen more. How will I survive without my weekly allotment of "cabbage thing?"

On the plus side, it's almost asparagus season...

I Am A Provision of Living Personification

So I was doing a vanity search and discovered that somebody out there was taking my blog posts and reprinting them on his own (spam) blog--but he appeared to be doing that old trick of "translating the text into another language and then translating it back into English" first. Or, possibly, the college student trick of "running most of the words through a thesaurus so it isn't really plagiarizing."

The TMBG quote "Every jumbled pile of person has a thinking part that wonders what the part that isn't thinking isn't thinking of" (from this post) thus becomes the very delicious Every jumbled provision of living personification has a philosophical factor that wonders what the factor that isn’t philosophical isn’t philosophical of.

Almost makes the spam worthwhile.

Jyoti Update

Bleh. The raisins did not work. I suppose I'll be Pollyanna about it and say I'm glad I get up extra early every morning (so I have time for yogas).

Serves me right for publicly complaining about the rice!

Me And Jyoti: Any Rice You Can Cook, I Can Cook Better

Two recent dinners.

On the left, an aloo paratha (oddly shaped, perhaps, but a paratha to be sure), yogurt, raisins, and some more of that stuff that would have been mattar paneer had the cheese not melted.


Here on the right is leftover dinner from Jyoti. Aloo gobi, naan, and rice. (I added the raisins into the rice for what will soon be obvious reasons. Also squirted some honey on top.)

I'm going to avoid making comparisons. After all, we all know the story of how that fantasmic "mattar black bean" dish came to be. I am still at the young grasshopper stage of cookery. That's part of the reason why I ended up at Jyoti; I wanted to steal the taste memory of "real" aloo gobi so I could try to improve my own.

But... that gobi was all soggy and mushy, and the rice was terrible. Oh-my-that-rice-was-awful. Thick and overcooked and chewy and not at all fragrant. When I was plating the leftovers for dinner tonight I almost chucked the rice to replace it with my own delicious steamed basmati, but (say it with me, people) IN THIS HOUSE WE DO NOT WASTE FOOD. We do, however, dilute it with raisins to avoid constipation.

One of the more unfortunate things about teaching myself to cook is that it has made me like restaurant food less and less. I know I don't always create perfect meals and my samosas don't always close, but I don't make food that tastes like it's been sitting in an industrial vat all day long, either.

At the same time I want to go out to eat other people's cooking so I can learn more about my own; so I don't get stuck in a "food culture" of half-Madhur Jaffrey, half-Barbara Kingsolver, and half-weird. But when I go out to places (Indian or otherwise) I find myself thinking things like "well, this is mushy" or "this is bland" or "this rice is a crime against humanity."

I am becoming a food snob.

(BUT SERIOUSLY WHAT WAS GOING ON WITH THAT RICE????)

What do I do now?

Money Is Also A Strange Loop

So I was looking at my finances the other day, and calculating up the amount of money I could have in my savings account at the end of the year if I continued to save 1/5 of everything I earned. It was pretty impressive.

Then I realized, rather obviously, that if I continued to do this for five years I would have a full year's salary in my savings account. That was more impressive.

What was even more impressive was the realization that, no, I wouldn't just have a year's salary. I'd have a year's worth of money that I could live off of (if I needed to) while continuing to put twenty percent of it back into savings.

That's strange loop territory. ^__^

(The stranger loop is that, of course, no I won't actually have a year's salary. Assume I get a COLA at the appropriate intervals, and you see the problem. Like Zeno's Paradox, the numbers will get pretty close--but as long as I only save twenty percent and no more, they'll never meet.

And then, of course, there's the unpredictability of it all; in this economic climate making the presumption that I will have a continued salary for the next five years is, after all, presumptuous. But let's leave that alone for now.)

The next thought, however, brought me back down to earth.

If five years of working earns me enough savings to live on for one year, then how many years will I need to work to be able to have enough savings for retirement?

Never mind the variables or inflation or 401(k)s or anything like that. Let's even ignore things like getting married, having children, buying a house, traveling, major medical expenses, etc. Let's just look at the basic math.

5=1. 10=2. 20=4. And even after working for the next 40 years (which would make me 67 years old) I'd only have enough money saved for 8 years of retirement.

Again, we'll leave the variables out (and the response "but people usually spend less money per year when retired," which I will balance out with "yeah, but stuff is going to cost more in forty years").

What does one do when looking at an equation like this? Try to invest? Try to save more? I can't be the first person who's stared down the end of this equation.

It got even sadder when I started looking into the ING Orange Account, which is supposed to offer the best returns on both savings and checking accounts (which, according to the blogosphere, it does), and saw this:

Read the small print. For every $10,000 you put into the account, you'll get $150 at the end of the year. Here I was going to be all excited about the magic of compound interest, but this is on the level of a fourth-rate magician pulling quarters out of people's ears.

It's got to be investing, doesn't it. Maybe CD ladders, but probably a combination of CDs and investing, which means I really need to sit down with the pen and paper and do some research.

Hmm.

Coffeeshops

See, when I was in high school, in a town ten blocks wide, I discovered the cappuccino. Except my cappuccino came from a metal box in the town gas station, one spigot next to the regular coffee. It cost twenty cents more than the regular coffee, and tasted like coffee with cream-flavored cotton candy mixed in. My high school boyfriend used to buy them for me.

We picked the coffeeshop at random when my father and I went up for the college visit; I think it was the closest restaurant to our parking spot. I'd never been in a coffeeshop before. The gas station sold coffee, all the restaurants in my little town sold coffee, but this was a place with pages of coffees on its menu, the number of coffees by far dwarfing the number of fair-trade sandwiches. There were musical instruments painted in mural around the walls.

I ordered a cappuccino. An iced, mocha cappuccino. It came in a glass eight inches tall, fat and thick as a milkshake. I feel like there must have been a cherry in there somewhere.

This coffeeshop was, in my mind, the epitome of everything I had heard about college. Musical instruments painted on the walls! I knew it would be my favorite restaurant.

But--despite my scholarships and general frugal living--the economies of my own student life meant that I never went back into that coffeeshop, not on my own, not for over a year. I think I went four times during the four years I attended that school, and whenever I went someone else paid, which meant the only drink I dared to order was water.

In grad school there was another coffeeshop, this one utilitarian and hippie and activist, the only decorations hand-painted signs which read things like "meat is murder" and "abortion is not murder." The coffee was much cheaper here and came in water-stained tumblers. The "Mexican" coffee, done up Chocolat-style with the chili powder, was delicious; but the economies of grad school were even worse than those of college and I rarely ever went--and never on my own, just to sit and savor. I've tried to recreate that coffee on my own but it turns out dumping chili powder into a cup of coffee isn't quite the same.

Now I go to Tryst every weekend and drink a chai that is better than any other chai I've ever tasted, with foam two inches thick that can be cut with a spoon, and two animal crackers on the side. I go in with a book and sit next to four other people on a squished couch or at a long table, and we talk sometimes and read sometimes and I scoop up chai foam with the head of a giraffe. I do this in part because I spent eight years not being able to do this, not once, and in part because... it is nice, after all, to sit and read in a warm room filled with other people, and to do it with a cup of something rich and hot and foamy.

Next week I'm going to be back in my undergrad college town for a few days, and I'm going back to that coffeeshop with the musical instruments and the iced mocha cappuccino. It's still there. And for the only time in my life, I'm going to go back as often as I want.