quiet luxury
I popped into the bedroom in time for Wheel of Fortune. I had my navy-blue zip-up hooded sweatshirt on, with the oversized hood pulled up over my head. My teeth had been slightly chattering all day.
"You look like a monk," my best friend's mom managed to say.
"Hey, thanks!" I said. I hesitated. "I should look like a person who is freezing cold on a... pretty mild-weathered day."
My best friend's dad choked and then sputter-laughed. "Oh my God," he said. Between strangled spurts he exclaimed "It's sixty degrees today!"
"I know!" I said. "I thought I was ready!" For springtime. "But I got out there today and it was like, whoops, nope, not ready yet, I keep forgetting I'm still a Californian." I'd kept him on a continuous roll, but using the keyword "Californian" to describe my weakened constitution gave him a fresh wave of hysterics. "I'm slower to recalibrate now!" I said to him, feigning indignation.
The category was "same letter."
"Cash, Coin, Currency..." I said. "What is that last word? Cabbage?"
The last word was cabbage.
"Cabbage!" my best friend's dad said. "How does that make any sense."
"I think it's slang for money," I said, "because cabbage is green and... fluffy."
"Oh, old slang," he said.
"Yeah, old-timey," I said, "like 1930s. With a Chicago accent and a gatling gun. Now listen here, see, that's a LAHT of cabbage. Rat-a-tat tat." Now we were both going "see?" and shooting the air in front of us. I've noticed that I typically communicate to my best friend's dad using advertising jingles from the '80s and '90s.
Now he was teasing my best friend's mom about her hatred of cabbage. Or was it Brussels sprouts? I volunteered that our family had always made boiled cabbage on New Year's Day, for good luck. His family had always made black-eyed peas, he said—
"Did you ever eat at the Black-Eyed Pea?" I suddenly asked, of the restaurant franchise that had once proliferated across the American South. Aw, man. We agreed that place was terrific.
Now he was telling a story about King Ranch Chicken. Years ago a friend had ordered it in a restaurant, and then his wife had said "but I made King Ranch Chicken for you yesterday," and the friend had blurted that the restaurant's was better. I'd heard this story once before, but this time I enjoyed it more. Actually, it's possible we'd had this entire conversation before, beat-for-beat.
"She never made it for him again," he said.
"Well of course not," I huffed. "Every time she steps into the kitchen she'll remember the hurt—" and we were off to the races.
"Rookie mistake! You always tell your wife her cooking is the best you've ever—"
"That's right, you have to finesse the narrative, finesse your wife—"
We were shouting at each other from opposite sides of my best friend's mom's bed, as per uszh, which I'm sure she loves. Finally I squealed out, just as quickly as I could, "See, that's the kind of media training I can get behind," and we both erupted into shrieking giggles.
When I first moved in, I was still pretty tender, pretty raw. One time, in the hallway outside her bedroom, he whispered to me that he didn't mean me any offense, that he says shit to deliberately tick her off, to help her "keep her 'fight' up." To see the color return to her cheeks.
I hugged him.
Not too much later in the evening, I was alone with my best friend's mom when her dog started choking. The treat might've been a little dry and crumbly.
"What is happening?" my best friend's mom asked, struggling to get a view of the floor in front of her bed. I looked down at the dog, who was giving me the horse eyes, a little frantic-looking. She was gagging and kind of hunched. This had come on really suddenly.
"Hm," I said. I dropped down onto one knee so we could be eye-to-eye. I wasn't sure I remembered what to do first. I tilted her head back, exposing her neck. I lightly massaged it, three or four strokes to encourage the mechanical movement of swallowing. I don't know. Sometimes, with a mechanical motility disease, you can massage your own guts and it actually works.
With great effort, eyes on me, the dog swallowed. I felt alarm. Had this caused her some injury? The dog visibly relaxed. Oh! Well, okay!
"Good girl!" I exclaimed, really meaning it. I scratched her ear, then started to leave the room with her. "Oh, you want a treat?" I asked her. She was looking up at me with one of those proud dog grins. "Uh...! Maybe not yet."
The dog and I left, then returned.
"Is she okay?" my best friend's mom asked, trying to see.
"Huh? Oh. She's fine," I said. "I was just freshening up her water. You know, to encourage her to wash it down."
"Is she still choking?" my best friend's mom wanted to know.
"Oh! No, she is not," I said. "She is fine. I think she just overestimated her ability to swallow stuff without chewing first." To put it mildly. My best friend's mom laughed in relief.
"Thank you for helping her," she said.
"I didn't do anything," I said, aghast, "I just tickled her throat a little." I was getting very squirmy. "I've googled a lot of pet emergencies," I finally said. "Between Tootsie, Bobby, and all the cats. You pick up a dog and you shake them. Obviously you can't do that with a big dog." Did this count as an explanation? I retreated from the scene of the crime.
The next day I returned, a little more resolute, my Snoopy mug of coffee in-hand.
"I wanted to talk to you," I said, very slowly, "about choking dogs."
My best friend's mom looked stricken.
"I looked up the steps," I told her. Just to refresh my memory. "I actually did the first step right, where you rub the throat. Next step, you do a sweep of the mouth, feeling around for the foreign object. Ted always did that part, actually." I hesitated. "You can use tweezers," I added. This detail did not seem to help her nerves. "After that, with a small dog, you shake them to try to dislodge the object." I rolled my eyes. "With a larger dog, and this is how I actually always did it with Tootsie, since the regular way felt too much like shaking a baby, you lift the back legs, like a wheelbarrow, and you try to shake it out." I just feel like the big-dog way gives you more leverage, even with a small dog, circumventing the risk of breaking a hip or rib.
I was pantomiming all of this as I spoke. Her face looked real grim, so I continued—trying to make it better by offering more information, which only sometimes helps, I realize. "You keep checking the gums, and if they go from healthy pink to pale or blue, you drive the dog to the vet. So. That's the plan. If [the dog] ever starts choking, have someone come get me."
Can you do the Heimlich maneuver on a dog? Supposedly! At this stage, however, I'd be much more likely to attempt to wheelbarrow a human. In a restaurant, though? In an airport? I wonder how that would play out. I should probably learn CPR.
"I was so scared," she said. "She's my baby."
Yes, the feeling of witnessing something frightening and not being able to do anything to intervene—that would be torturous.
I nodded. "I know she is," I said.
"I love her," she said, and her chin trembled.
"She loves you," I said. Then I said something about it being obvious because of all the... the licking.
Now I spoke more slowly. "This isn't the first time she's choked," I said very carefully. "Last time I went to [the head nurse]. And then I just stayed up and watched her all night." I sighed. "I am very hypervigilant about pet health, to the point that everyone else is annoyed by it. If her gums ever start looking weird, I will drive her to the vet."
An agreement was made.
"There is nothing to fear," I told her. I excused myself.
I have all kinds of other stuff I am supposed to be doing, but I've decided to put it on pause and finally re-season my carbon wok already. I will be, as ever, using grapeseed oil for this, because of its high smoke point. I will also be using an oven to expedite the process, even though this is considered cheating.
I'd spent a number of months painstakingly seasoning my wok the way you are supposed to, on a stovetop, the wok's black surface glimmering like a mirage over heat. Later, when I returned to LA from a protracted stay in Florida, I found that my wok had been left outside in the yard, in the mud. I brought the wok inside, literally SMHing. I cannot begin to describe my confusion—although in retrospect it most likely had to do with my having gone radio-silent while in Florida, and my host's sense of having been ghosted. (I guess she observed once, to a mutual friend, that each time I went to Florida it was like I'd disappeared into a vacuum.)
It was all good. I realized I needed to look for my own apartment, with its own kitchen for me to be my own pain-in-the-ass in, and I picked out a one-room bachelor, much of its floor space a charming kitchenette with appliances maybe 70% of their usual size. The oven was situated diagonally, i.e. the maximum possible distance, from where my sleeping head would be.
I stripped the carbon wok in my friend's oven before leaving (this was not intended as punitive, as I also fully cleaned the oven afterward. Basically I needed a working oven to start my wok over).
Eager to get started on reseasoning my wok, I turned on my apartment's brand-new oven. It was clicking, but it didn't seem to ignite. The stovetop worked fine, however.
Confused, I read the oven's manual from cover to cover (the manual had been in the oven). I could not help but notice the words "explosion risk," and I decided I didn't know enough about ovens to set up my own oven for first-time use. I reached out to the head maintenance guy a few times about this. The maintenance team seemed to think I didn't know how to use an oven, which seemed close enough to the truth that I just gave up and bought an overpriced toaster oven instead. I shelved my wok.
Later, my neighbor's oven exploded. She wasn't home at the time, but all her windows blew out, and her dogs tore off the back door escaping. I was in Florida when it happened, so I literally missed everything. To say that my neighbor was still a little shell-shocked three months after the event would be a gross understatement. I assured her that the explosion was not her fault. She protested: All the neighbors certainly seemed to think it was her fault! She'd only used the oven once!
"I read the manual. The ovens weren't installed correctly," I told her, my contempt for these ovens palpable. "That's why I refused to use mine." She might've felt like I was saying she shouldn't have used hers, or that she should've read the manual, when what I was trying to express is, an exploding apartment is generally not due to user error.
Anyway, all of this is why, in the ensuing two years, plus an additional nine months of just dilly-dallying I guess, I have been toting around a carbon wok, unseasoned, stripped down to the studs. It is all very obnoxious for me.
That is why I do not plan to spend months upon months reseasoning my wok. I am doing it in an un-explodey oven, too, which is, just, the ultimate luxury.