Snicker snacks!

Friday I had the good luck to run into madresal at lunchtime. We had a lovely conversation (which is to say that she listened attentively to my rambling and pontificating) which left a lot of questions unanswered. One of them was the origin of "snickerdoodles". She knows of only one bakery in El Salvador which makes them and wondered if they might be the province of a particular ethnic/religious group.

Possibly. Preliminary web research suggests that they are associated with the Pennsylvania Dutch and, thus, the Amish. However, like the funnel cake, they have spread throughout the Midwest. Perhaps the nation (monshu doesn't remember encountring them before he moved to Chicago, however). I can't tell; they were an unbiquitous part of my childhood, but, then, so was gooey butter (a.k.a. "sugar lasagne"). There's a lot of stuff out there that one doesn't recognise as regional until one spends some time out of the region.

Relative normalcy

As I mentioned to grunter today (everyone go and cheer him up; he's coming over all mopey again), I dreamt of interviewing Martha Stewart last night. (I blame some supermarket tabloid I saw at the convenient next to monshu's which had a doctored photo of her looking all bloated.)

She was fixing canapés on camera (for that, blame BBC America and the episode of Faking It they broadcast last night) with a friend of mine and I asked her, "What do you consider anal?" She rather dodged the question by mentioning her philosophy major in college and then going off on a tangent about how she almost chose to study law. I ventured, "If you had become a lawyer instead of a stockbroker, things would have ended up much different today, right?" And she didn't kill me! In fact, afterward she whispered to me what good questions they were.

When I think about it in the cold light of day, I realise that those really are the questions I would ask if I had the chance. I believe that most people see their behaviour as basically "normal", even when they acknowledge that it's not something most people in the world do. So what does someone who thinks it "normal" to tie together an hors-d'œuvre with a single chive consider to be anal, obsessive behaviour? I have to know!

After dinner last night (nothing fancy, just grilled cheese--that is, gruyère with a little dijon mustard on multigrain freedom bread--with artichoke salad, coleslaw, and limonata; dessert, lemon ice with fresh cherries macerated in Gran Marnier), I remarked to monshu, "See, it doesn't take a lot of money to live well, just a reasonable amount." We'd just finished watching another British series, one in which a character is having trouble deciding whether to blow £250,000 on a yacht or not, and that rather skewed my perspective. After a moment's thought, I said, "And by 'reasonable', I mean 'more than 9/10 of the world makes'." After all, it's merely "normal" to take home the pay of two dozen average Chinese workers, right?

Word of the Day

Gramadoelas [xrama'dulas] n. Afrikaans "boondocks, back of beyond, the sticks"

In the street

Too much stuff I'm letting pile up! (My fault for not having a PDA with internet connectivity on me at all times.) Let's tackle this thematically:

Recent urban encountres

Sitting in the Starbucks in the Uptown Bank building (not my first choice, obviously) talking with my realtor, I spotted what I thought was an old work buddy walking up Broadway. (He distributes needles to addicts in Blood Alley in his spare time, so his presence in the neighbourhood is entirely plausible.) Dignity restrained me from rushing out after him like a loony, but I thought he might toddle by again while I was waiting for the 36 bus. Nope. And no bus neither.

Then a bulky, bearded shape on a bike meandered across the street and sort of eddied to a stop at Lawrence bus stop. I went up to the guy and said, "Did you used to be at U of C?" He had. We reintroduced ourselves. His bag was ajar, revealing some handwritten Han'gul, so I said, "OOH, Korean!" Turns out, it was a flier for an upcoming talk by a former political prisoner at a nearby cafe. He asked me if I could distribute some for him and I said no. Then he said:
"How likely would you be to attend an event held by the Green Party?"
"Not very."
"Democrat? Republican?"
"Agnostic."
"I'm a rabid Chomskyite."
"Isn't the 'rabid' pleonastic?"
"Hey! At least I admit it!"

And admitting it is the first step, boys and girls! So cute, so sweet, and yet a hopeless freak. sigh

********************

Sunday afternoon. Bryn Mawr el stop. As monshu and I exit, there's the usual knot of sketchy types lollygagging about the entrance to the station. One skinny woman jumps in front of my man--presumably because he's smoking and she wants a cig--and starts panhandling him. He brushes her off and charges down the street, so she tries me instead, keeping pace as I try to catch up with monshu. In her idiolect, "no" apparently means "try harder". Finally, I halt and put out my arm to hold her at bay.
"Hey," she says, "I'ma citizen of the U-nited States."
"So what?" I replied, "So am I."
"No you're not!"
"How do you know?"
"I can tell! Yo' not from around here!"

I turned away and she continued after me.
"Stop following me!"
"Followin' you? Why would I want to follow yo' ugly white ass? I'm goin' this way."
"Then stop talking to me."
"You stop talkin' to me! [incoherent screamed invective]"

When I caught up to monshu, he said, "See, that's why I don't like to get out at the Bryn Mawr stop." He then wondered if such an aggressive panhandling style ever paid off. I opined: "There are some con artists, but, in general, I don't think people panhandle because they're good at it. I think they do it because they don't know how to do anything else."

She was proof.