The food is getting cold

Are people ok

While looking for parking in a very crowded Fishtown neighborhood a couple nights ago, I slowed to make a right turn at a stop sign on one of those intersections with three intersecting one-way streets. Two white women on the other end of the wide intersection started walking toward my car. The shorter of them suddenly sped up her pace and made a beeline for my window. I thought she was going to tell me my car was damaged or something. Perhaps she knew me and wanted to say hi. I couldn’t tell. She vaguely looked like someone I might know. I slowed to a stop. She got up to my face and through the closed window yelled, “WATCH WHERE YOU’RE GOING. THERE ARE PEOPLE WALKING HERE!”

I looked over at James (a Black man) in my passenger seat and we half-laughed in shock, in disbelief we’d just been Karen-ed. As we drove off, he rolled down his window and yelled back that she was an idiot.

As I continued to scan the streets for parking, we continued to guffaw about the plaintive white woman. I started to take notice of all the blu lives matter bumper stickers on the cars I’d soon be nestled amidst. I found a spot, finally, behind a red Chevy with one of those black and grey american flag stickers. I stopped being afriad of these flags when I saw one with a rainbow stripe where normally it’d be blue, and found out proud gay police fans were a thing.

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Did I share this anecdote already? The one where I was at a Mexican restaurant in Venice Beach CA with my sister, and sitting near a table of four middle aged white women? Well, in this story, one of the white women cheerfully harassed her waitress—a Latina woman—that if the other Latina woman servicing the restaurant—a busser—didn’t smile back at them, she would have to “just go over there and tickle her!! Why isn’t she smiling?!”

I can’t stop thinking about this interaction because the waitress, in a bit of panic, reacted with forced laughter and said “oh no! She just doesn’t speak English! Don’t mind her!” In Spanish, the waitress commanded the busser to laugh at the white customer that had just threatened to tickle her. The busser gave a disaffected smile and the waitress said, “See? No English.”

“If that girl doesn’t smile back, I’m just gonna have to go over there and tickle her!!”

If a stranger threatened to tickle me I’d kick them in the anus as hard as I could.

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I’m as preoccupied with the Luigi Mangione stuff as everyone else right now but a friend made a good point last night that we might-should worry about white vigilantism, and it made me think of the angry pedestrian, the angry restaurant patron.

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At Thanksgiving dinner, several of us paid pithy compliments to the cooks in the room (two white women in their 80s), and asked an age old question that usually implies praise:

What’s your secret?

I laughed when one of them said the secret to her baked ziti was Trader Joe’s premade sauces, and the other said her secret was to microwave the turkey before baking it. To these older women, secrets were cheat codes. What’s my secret to putting together dinner of such high expectation with family and unpredictable dinner conversation? Why, a machine-proofed flavor, of course. When my generation asks for secrets, we expect them to be Himalayan salts—no more difficult to procure than a bottled Bechamel but so much more daring in our imaginations.

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I watched air bubbles surface on a hot coconut jello and almost ripped my hair out, repulsed by the organization of round dots on the surface of this smooth dessert. Skin crawling, disgusted by food that will not calm down.