Of tea, social skills, and the right type of food.
CULTURAL ACHIEVEMENTS: I went to a Coffee shop called "Dakota." It is apparently popular with the psych grad student crowd. It's a fairly spacious place with lots of people using lap tops and chairs all made out of some substance that is either raw tree branches, or a moderately convincing simulation thereof. They're quite comfy, so my guess is the latter. They even had a good selection of loose leaf tea! For just 2 bucks (approximately fifty thousand Canadian dollars) you can get a "globe", which is a round glass tea pot with a perforated cylinder in the middle full of tea leaves. There's also a plunger on the cylinder so that you can squash your tea leaves if you think the tea is getting too strong, or, I don't know, you have rage issues associated with tea leaf readings.
It's weird ordering a "globe" of tea though. It really threw me until I saw one. I guess they are sort of like those little "snow scene" globe things, except that if you shook them hard enough the "snow" drifting down would be brown and chunky. Which would be somewhat disturbing, now that I think about it, if not as much as the scalding water you would have sprayed all over yourself. I guess it's one of those "if a tree falls in the forest, and you're too busy dealing with second degree burns to notice it..." type of questions.
LATEST EPISODE OF CULTURE SHOCK: My roommate may be a laid back guy who's quite happy using the box the microwave came in as a coffee table, but he seems to buy into all these crazy rules about what you're supposed to eat when. For example, I went to the kitchen and lo, there was peanut butter and jelly ("jam" to the English-English speaking world), and sliced ham. So I put them into a sandwich. My roomie thought this was funny. Apparently you're not supposed to put these things together. I had a glass of orange juice with it, which was apparently also odd because you're supposed to drink milk with this meal. Orange juice is to be drunk with breakfast, I was told. Who made these crazy rules? Milk is for breakfast, everyone knows that! It goes on your cereal.
But it continues! I lamented that we don't have sugar for tea. "What about honey?" says roomie, "or lemon." Now I've heard of this before, but it just seems a bit... well, fancy. I tell him this. But, "drinking tea at all is fancy". Aie, the culture shock! I pointed out that tea is only fancy if you drink it from a tiny cup with an impractically small handle. Tea out of a big mug is just a cuppa, and there's nothing posh about that.
Then I tried to persuade him to go out and chuck a frisbee in the park across the street. He looked at me like I was missing even more screws, but I told him it's fun and I'm missing ultimate. He'll "think about it" [sigh].
LATEST COMMENTS DEVELOPMENT: Some poor girl posts a nice little compliment here, and all of a sudden is subject to a suggestive debate about my virtues. I'll apologize for that now. And then I'll roll with it some more because it's quite amusing.
Are there any lessons to be drawn from this whole fuss? Here's what I have so far:
I am single. "How could this possibly be," you ask? "Does he not have it all?" A a microwave? An office with 2 (TWO!) windows? A BLOG read by upwards of 3 people? "What more could anybody want in a man?"... Well lets consider the BLOG comment exchange. Here is some totally random girl whom I've known for about 100 written words at a distance of somewhere over 700 miles, and already I have her pouting. Go go bachelor social skills! A mystery no more.
It's weird ordering a "globe" of tea though. It really threw me until I saw one. I guess they are sort of like those little "snow scene" globe things, except that if you shook them hard enough the "snow" drifting down would be brown and chunky. Which would be somewhat disturbing, now that I think about it, if not as much as the scalding water you would have sprayed all over yourself. I guess it's one of those "if a tree falls in the forest, and you're too busy dealing with second degree burns to notice it..." type of questions.
LATEST EPISODE OF CULTURE SHOCK: My roommate may be a laid back guy who's quite happy using the box the microwave came in as a coffee table, but he seems to buy into all these crazy rules about what you're supposed to eat when. For example, I went to the kitchen and lo, there was peanut butter and jelly ("jam" to the English-English speaking world), and sliced ham. So I put them into a sandwich. My roomie thought this was funny. Apparently you're not supposed to put these things together. I had a glass of orange juice with it, which was apparently also odd because you're supposed to drink milk with this meal. Orange juice is to be drunk with breakfast, I was told. Who made these crazy rules? Milk is for breakfast, everyone knows that! It goes on your cereal.
But it continues! I lamented that we don't have sugar for tea. "What about honey?" says roomie, "or lemon." Now I've heard of this before, but it just seems a bit... well, fancy. I tell him this. But, "drinking tea at all is fancy". Aie, the culture shock! I pointed out that tea is only fancy if you drink it from a tiny cup with an impractically small handle. Tea out of a big mug is just a cuppa, and there's nothing posh about that.
Then I tried to persuade him to go out and chuck a frisbee in the park across the street. He looked at me like I was missing even more screws, but I told him it's fun and I'm missing ultimate. He'll "think about it" [sigh].
LATEST COMMENTS DEVELOPMENT: Some poor girl posts a nice little compliment here, and all of a sudden is subject to a suggestive debate about my virtues. I'll apologize for that now. And then I'll roll with it some more because it's quite amusing.
Are there any lessons to be drawn from this whole fuss? Here's what I have so far:
I am single. "How could this possibly be," you ask? "Does he not have it all?" A a microwave? An office with 2 (TWO!) windows? A BLOG read by upwards of 3 people? "What more could anybody want in a man?"... Well lets consider the BLOG comment exchange. Here is some totally random girl whom I've known for about 100 written words at a distance of somewhere over 700 miles, and already I have her pouting. Go go bachelor social skills! A mystery no more.
posted by X | 11:36 AM
1 Comments:
The disadvantage of a quick wit is that you will most likely offend someone somewhere along the line. I always say, “But it was funny! Doesn’t it count since I was funny?” Normally, no. Yet, a man who consumes the peanutty version of the monte cristo, who embraces the joy of Ultimate and who has friends who so fervently stand up for his ape-manness (or lack there of) should not be held accountable for his bad manners each and every time.
The Girl
Post a Comment
<< Home