Wednesday afternoon things

 * Roger, I don't think it's "too late" to read Watership Down. In some ways it's kind of allegorical and it is a pretty good story. (I would warn: if you don't like violence, it might not be for you; there's both human violence against rabbits (snares, shooting) and rabbits fighting each other. Some have also noticed that it's basically a sexist world where the does are second-class and yeah, but again, maybe allegorical for the times it was written (allegedly real rabbits have a matrilineal society). 

* I'm maybe 1/5 through the cowl - I'm on row 12 of the first pattern (21 rows); the second pattern is 20 rows and the third and final is 16. I also admit, when I was at JoAnn's this weekend and their Woolease was on sale, I picked up a couple cream colored skeins to eventually make one for myself. It's a pretty fun pattern; I've just been tired and taken up with other work (grading) and didn't get as much done on it as I might hope.

* I'm currently trading off reading between "Legends and Lattes" (which is still entertaining but I admit now that we've been shown "The Madrigal" I'm bracing for things to break a little bad - even if it's presented as "cozy fantasy") and "Fell Murder" (and again I ask: why have people almost forgotten ECR Lorac? Her writing is better than Christie's and while she doesn't have eccentric detectives - her main one is Chief Inspector MacDonald, who is a competent and fairly calm Scotsman- the books are good, and they seem to very atmospherically show an area of Britain (mostly the North Country). I have a couple others of hers to read; they're definitely comfort-reading for me).

* I don't know if you can read this without paying a subscription (or maybe it will eventually become free for everyone) but I was struck by this article: What we think about when we think about Red Lobster. It's about chain restaurants, and 9/11, and also about grief and seeking "normalcy" and comfort. 

It's a little bit of a chronological jumble in places, but the writer describes being in New York and seeing the towers fall (and one of her friends' husbands....he was a cop, and it's never said whether he came home or not). And she talks about another friend, an ER doctor, who noted the horror of that the only thing they had to do that day was rinse out the eyes of first responders who got exposed to dust. Because - that being the only task meant everyone else was dead; there were no treatable injured being brought in:

He was a young doctor working in an emergency room close to the World Trade Center, and he sounded a lot like Jesse. “We kept waiting for people to come in we could help,” he said over tapas and drinks, “but there were only firemen with dust in their eyes; we had restrain them so they wouldn’t try to go back to save their buddies.”

 There must be a very particular anguish, and sense of futility, in being trained to help but everyone you might have helped is actually now beyond your help.

 Dimand (the author) writes about persuading a friend to go to Red Lobster with her about a month after the attacks:

I told Jay I thought it would be funny. We were, after all, too good for Red Lobster. We were a doctor and lawyer in New York City, we were Manhattanites, for God’s sake. It would be the ultimate in irony, almost performance art. I was still deeply committed to irony and snark, like any good liberal arts student. I ironically collected snow globes, 1970s lunchboxes and doilies from thrift stores, mocking the people who came before me for liking these things. Going to Red Lobster would be a natural extension of this, of turning up my nose at things that were the province of suburbia, of people who watched too much television.

I wasn’t the only one who acted this way; the entire 1990s seemed to be filled with twenty-somethings who did the same thing. 

 

.....

 

As snotty as I was about the idea of lobster mac n’ cheese or anything else Red Lobster had to offer, I also secretly craved the cozy feeling I knew was waiting for me at any chain restaurant.I craved large booths, with room to slide around in on the upholstered seats. I craved a parking lot, a laminated menu created by corporate HQ, waitstaff in uniforms. I craved the feeling I had as a kid when I went to places like the Cheesecake Factory. Everything was consistently simple and sane

 

And you know? I kind of remember that. I was a 20-something in the 1990s. I.....mostly avoided it because I was one of those nerds who liked things unironically (I still do. I still think that genuine earnestness is preferable to that sort of above-it-all superficialness, and you are ultimately happier caring about whatever it is you care about, even if everyone else thinks it's dumb. I think I've mentioned how I got laughed at in fifth grade for liking "The Muppet Movie," which was declared to be "for babies" though now I meet a lot of people who talk about how happy the movie made them, or in one case it may have "saved" them. And yes, I do still tend to hide some of the more nerdy or odd aspects of who I am; I cannot be fully out about "I am cringe but I am free" but I still like what I like, and if going home and watching "Kiff" on Disney channel makes me feel happier than watching the news would, I'm gonna do that.)

 

.....

 

As snotty as I was about the idea of lobster mac n’ cheese or anything else Red Lobster had to offer, I also secretly craved the cozy feeling I knew was waiting for me at any chain restaurant.I craved large booths, with room to slide around in on the upholstered seats. I craved a parking lot, a laminated menu created by corporate HQ, waitstaff in uniforms. I craved the feeling I had as a kid when I went to places like the Cheesecake Factory. Everything was consistently simple and sane.

Later she talks about "corporate kindness" on the part of the servers, and yeah, even as part of me totally GETS that it's unpleasant to work at some of those places, and some of the servers probably mercilessly drag the patrons to their co-workers behind the kitchen door.....sometimes it's nice to have at least the illusion of niceness, of having a kindly woman seat you, or a 20-something guy wish you a "good rest of your day" as you leave, or have someone come and ask you if you'd like another iced tea. One of the secrets I think of life today is that a lot of us don't GET that kind of treatment on a regular basis - if you live alone, you're alone a LOT, and meals are like....meals are hard some times. You have to buy the food, and you have to fix the food, and once you have eaten the food you have to clean up the dishes, all on your lonesome, and it does sometimes feel like a lot.

Especially if you're in a profession where you're doing lots of things for lots of people, and where (sometimes) you just have to squash down the Big Feelings you might be having at the time and put on a smile and go to the meeting or go teach the class or go work on the research. And it can be hard because you don't really have anyone much to get those feelings out with. (And yeah, I know: I over-romanticize things but some days I think even if I couldn't really talk about the Big Feelings (because the other person might not understand fully), having someone else there to *distract* me from them would be a thing.

 

 She also writes about her father's extended death (Parkinson's, complicated by a UTI) and I admit I had to kind of skim those sections - even almost five years on it's still painful to me to read of someone else's father's death. Oh, I recognize that my father is "in a better place" as they say, he was in bad health those last couple weeks, and he had a "good death" in the sense that he was at home (it was his choice NOT to go to a hospital where things would likely just have been prolonged)

 

And yeah, for me, fall of 2019 was LOTS of Big-Feeling-stuffing-down. Perhaps less than I do now; I know I let the façade crack a few times when I just couldn't keep it up any more. 

But also, yes, I understand the need for comfort and familiarity and normalcy. And she writes again about going to a corporate chain restaurant in the wake of her dad's death: 

Unsurprisingly, the young college student who seated us was sweet and bubbly but not too bubbly. I remembered why I craved Red Lobster after 9/11: reliable kindness. The waitress had the same corporate kindness, noticing that we were novices and helpfully pointing out what appetizer we should get....

I think it was around the time we both tried the garlicky shrimp that we looked at each other and finally admitted it: Red Lobster was (redacted) fantastic. The staff was nice. The seats were comfortable. The food was good. My shoulders relaxed, and somehow I thought that everything was going to be okay — even though I was in a world without my father, even though I might have murdered him, as the people at the assisted living facility seemed to think.

 

("I might have murdered him" because she requested palliative care only, I take it)

Later, the server tells her she looks "tired" and immediately apologizes, but Dimand responds "I know you said it with love" and yes. Sometimes we do look tired because we ARE tired.....and we need to know that someone sees that. 

And I remember in the wake of my dad's death in July 2019, two places my mom and I ate - the then-fairly-new Red Robin (it was okay, though I find hamburgers made at home better) and a place in the Hy Vee store that no longer exists (during the pandemic a Wahlburger's replaced it). I remember getting some Asian inspired appetizer thing - spring rolls, maybe? They were good, that's all I remember. But yes, after someone has died, after your life has taken a big shock, food and general life-maintenance are *hard* and it's nice to be able to go somewhere, and be greeted, and be handed a list of possible things to eat, and pick one, and have it arrive.....and then, when you're done, have the dishes go away. 

And I'll admit it: I do kind of like Red Lobster. I eat there, once in a while (not as much in the before-times; I don't eat in restaurants as much as I did pre-2020). Part of it is I do remember it from childhood; it was my brother's favorite for a while (popcorn shrimp and hush puppies) and while the decor has changed (it feels a lot more upscale now than the one in Ohio we used to go to - it's more dimly lit, the colors are less bright, there's less gimmicky-bordering-on-pirate stuff), still.....there's a sameness there and a connection to my childhood. And really, sometimes, don't we want a little predictability? Chain restaurants prosper in part because I think we've all been burned when traveling going to a place local to where we're staying and it Not Being Good. But chain restaurants - well, sometimes they're not that great, and they're never really *transcendant* in the way a really good small place that, like one of our local downtown places, makes all its sides and even its salad-dressing in-house - still, they have a decent chance of being fairly good.