Matt Ruby's blog

Sambar

I've been thinking lately I need to learn how to cook more Indian dishes. My wife seems to be thinking along the same lines, since she recently said while we were eating at an Indian restaurant, "We need to learn how to cook this." (One inside joke around our house is that "we" really means "you" in most contexts. To emphasize the humor, we often append to statements containing the phrase "we need to" with "...and by we, I mean you.") I've cooked Indian meals before and I don't know how long I'm going to withstand the constant chopping of onions and dicing of potatoes and cauliflower, but the end result may just turn out to be worth it.

Recently I've been craving the South Indian soups, sambar,  a spicy vegetable soup with lentils in the broth and fairly inconsistent ingredients, and rasam, a simpler, tarter broth with a more noticeable tomato flavor. I'm planning on attempting at least one of these while my mother is here for the week of Thanksgiving. She seemed interested, but drew the line at trying anything more challenging.

I'm also planning to take my mother with me to a grocery store I discovered that is not too far from my house. It's called Cherian's International Groceries and, despite the name, seems to be entirely devoted to Indian cuisine. It's also the absolutely largest Indian grocery store I've ever been in, which was exciting (my wife cannot at all understand my love for grocery shopping, as she detests it)! I'm looking forward to returning and spending more time there.

On my way to work this morning, I noticed smoke in the distance, right about where Cherian's is. I thought to myself, "Now wouldn't that just be my luck, to have them burn down right after I discovered them." Luckily, though, as I drove closer, I could see it was the building next to Cherian's that had been burning. There were probably twenty Fire Department vehicles gathered and run-off of water the size of small streams was flowing out into the street. I'm sorry for whomever owned that building, since the damage looked devastating.

Just Doesn't Happen Every Day

The year-old daughter of a coworker of mine was in surgery this morning for removal of an extra big toe on her left foot. It was a short and relatively procedure and she came out of it fine.

He said immediately after she was born, the doctor asked if extra digits ran in either of their families. I can only imagine how they must have reacted.

Excuse

My daughter is home sick from school today. I was just wondering what would happen if I wrote the note for her tomorrow thusly: "Please excuse [daughter] from school yesterday. She stayed home because she felt like ass."

Juno

My eleven-year-old daughter and I saw Juno together yesterday. We both loved it and we had a good discussion about it on the drive home afterwards.

In the movie, Juno handles her pregnancy largely with great aplomb, so much so I had to ask my daughter immediately as we were walking out of the theater if she thought the film was appropriately cautionary or if it instead romanticized pregnancy enough to make it not entirely unappealing. I don't know if that was too much to ask of someone her age or if maybe she thought she had better tell me what I wanted to hear, but she didn't sound entirely convinced when she said it didn't romanticize pregnancy.

It was interesting to hear her impression of some of the scenes in the film, especially since some of them revolve around Juno's inexperience with relationships and my daughter -- who has yet to be in a romantic relationship -- and I -- who has been married for over ten years -- had completely different feelings about them.

Anyway, I had a great time seeing it with her and I've been thinking about it often since then. I thought Ellen Page was tremendous and now I think I might have to see Hard Candy, too, even though it might be potentially uncomfortable.

Surrealism

This week has seemed kind of weird to me. Christmas was good, though I felt a little queasy the whole day and didn't enjoy the eating and drinking as much as I had hoped. I didn't receive much, a few books (for example, Franny and Zooey, which was on my Amazon Wish List and my mother confessed helped her pad out her order so she would qualify for free shipping and A Spot of Bother, which is by the author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and of which I've already read a few pages), a few shirts, and a few beers, making it pretty typical present-wise. The company was especially good, though. In addition to my wife and three children, a couple of women friends of ours (who are, in fact, a couple) spent the whole day, along with their dog and another dog they are looking after this week. The house felt really full, but it was a nice full.

Anyway, one thing happened yesterday to sharpen my feeling of weirdness: While I was walking to my car from the Mexican restaurant in the supermarket strip mall where I had my lunch, a young woman in a shiny red car came barreling through the parking lot and past the stop signs in front of the supermarket, causing one man to yank back his shopping cart and yell...just like in the movies! She just kept on going, out of the parking lot. I suppose she was in a monumental hurry.

Then today, I saw two men walking along the highway, presumably back to their car that had run out of gas, since one of them was carrying a little gas can. Not so unusual, except they were identical twin brothers, dressed exactly the same, right down to the jackets they were wearing!

Odd, I tell you.

Journals

I'm just not a journal-keeper. I've never kept one, private or otherwise, even as a requirement for school. I process most things in my head, some with conversation with other people, and none on paper. I post here not because I feel any burning desire or compulsion, but rather an inclination or a whim. Is there a way of remedying this?

In other news, it was my birthday this past Friday. Less than a year now until I'm forty. How will that play out?

Conundrum Resolved

I decided to keep my "Do Not Push" page as a Blogger site, but one of a decidedly technical nature.

A Post's New Home

I've moved a couple of posts here I had written on a Blogger page I set up a while ago. Probably best to keep it all in one place, no?

Anyway, what to do with the domain and web space (http://www.do-not-push.com/) now?

Bizarro World

While driving back to work from lunch this week, I was behind a brand new Mercedes S550 ($85K) while the two of us passed a baby-blue Bentley Continental GT ($165K). It can be so surreal driving through a community with that sort of affluence, these people who pay amounts for their cars that most of the rest of us might pay for our houses.

The president of our company lives around there somewhere. Interestingly, he's sort of a family man: his wife often picks him up at the office in her late-model Escalade and the two of them go out to eat together. Recently, I ate lunch at the same restaurant they were eating in and their teenage daughter and a boy I assumed was her boyfriend were with them. The daughter has affected a look so similar to that of the Lindsay Lohan we see in paparazzi photos, I couldn't stop sneaking glances.

Finally, I need to note this wasn't any high-brow establishment we were eating in, just a run-of-the-mill Mexican place. I see the president and his wife there often, as well as in a local pizza place I also frequent. This brings to mind a comment the proprietor of a high-end wine store in the neighborhood made to explain why the place was going out of business: despite their wealth, the locals would only buy the cheapest of wine and beer. Champagne wishes, indeed...more like Budweiser!

Matt - Monday, November 20, 2006 10:36:16 PM

That "offensive or otherwise not for the public" option is so tempting. How to be offensive, though, without being repulsive?