Bethie and I met up with a bunch of my college friends at Eric’s new condo, for lots of shrieking and hugging and laughing. Oh, and wine.

It took about six seconds for me to feel at home again. A lot had changed, of course, but a lot hadn’t. These are still some of my favorite people in the world, even if we’re not talking about final papers and getting trashed (Note to parents and prospective employers: Don’t worry! I always did it in that order!) anymore. My college friends have, bizarrely enough, gotten married (There was a bit of teasing about whether I time my travels abroad to miss weddings. I swear I don’t! I love weddings!), bought houses,  got proper jobs, and settled in the Boston suburbs. Wow. I could never really picture that for me, and now is the time to build what is for me, and it’s simultaneously exciting and scary.

Then Bethie and I took the T back to her house. We were the only people in the car, so we got a little bit hyper.  Did I mention that my sister is awesome?

From the blog Simpson's Paradox, please comment here:

Ten Years

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Sometimes when people whine about how their town sucks or there’s nothing to do here, I secretly think they’re just not trying hard enough. Only boring people are bored, and so forth. Also, that feeling of  I-hate-it-here is inextricably tied to my high-school angst. (Other things I hated at that time: My parents. Being at home. Being at school. Boys who didn’t pay attention to me. Boys who paid too much attention to me. I must have been a real delight, don’t you think?)

But admitting to myself that Cary is not for me has actually made me feel better. It’s allowed me to reset my expectations, so I’m pleased by finding something nice, instead of constantly disappointed by comparing Cary to other places I’ve lived.

Zen of the cul-de-sacs. That’s me.

Anyway, one of those nice things is Cool Breeze, a Indian vegetarian fast-food place. It’s small and a bit hard to spot if you don’t know it’s there, which is often a very good sign for a restaurant. Inside were plastic pizza-parlor style benches and no-frills tables, handwritten signs offering specials, and Bollywood music videos.

I really like Indian food, and I think I’m pretty familiar with the tandori and vindaloo and dosas on the average menu, but I was pretty lost here. We ordered almost at random, trusting that the good smells meant the food would be good. The menu was almost no help, Cool Breeze would really benefit from a picture menu and proper descriptions of the items. I’m too laoweito know if  “paratha” is better than “chaat”, and with all the tasty options, it’s a shame that it’s not more user-friendly. In their defense, the guy working the counter was knowledgeable and happy to answer our questions, but I imagine he has better things to do than describe fifty-something menu options to us.

Food is surprisingly inexpensive, so don’t do what we did, and assume that a three dollar order will be a small portion! Everything is served on styrofoam plates, and almost everything comes with green chutney (the sharp minty kind, not the cilantro kind) and yogurt.

The paani puri, described as round shaped crispies and spicy water, turned out to be small hollow fried breads, with an assortment of sauces to eat with them. There’s also a paneer paratha, which is a tasty wheat bread stuffed with paneer cheese. Batata vada was a lot like a potato pakora.  (Downside was listening to Stick say “batatavada” over and over.  He’d like you all to know that it’s lots of fun to say and that he’s cursed with a no-fun girlfriend.) Overall, it was filling vegetarian fare with a great mix of flavors. Did I mention the background Bollywood music videos?

Like everywhere else in Cary, full-length windows look out on the parking lot, but my newfound mindset means expecting every place to be in a strip mall, so that’s ok!

Cool Breeze
740 East Chatham Street
Cary, NC 27511
(919) 463-9130

Edit 2/16: My wonderful boyfriend Stick finds it necessary to read the internet to me, sharing his stream-of-consciousness whether I’m listening or not, whether I’m in the room or not,  whether I have cotton balls in my ears or not.  This morning he was on his laptop and I knew he must be reading this post because he said “Oh yeah, Cool Breeze. That’s delicious!” as if we hadn’t eaten there again last night. A few seconds later, he started saying batata vada over and over. This was followed by an impolite word, as he read the next line, where I mock him for saying batata vada over and over.

From the blog Simpson's Paradox, please comment here:

Cool Breeze

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A few weeks ago, I was trying to pin down what I don’t like about Cary. I know some of it is feeling like Cary is an extended blank verso between the close of our Beijing adventure and the beginning of the next chapter. I’ve been trying to put into words exactly what it is I’m not getting from perfectly nice complexes of shops with manicured grass in the lane dividers, or from perfectly nice houses on branching cul-de-cacs.

What I meant to say was, I wanted this.

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NoDa, Charlotte

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Look, another post where I hold up something to which I’ve contributed to in a tiny way!

My Craftsman Farms blog and I are mentioned in this business communications textbook! I’m on page 5, so this will be covered early enough in the semester that everyone will be on top of their reading assignments!

When I got this book… oh, who exactly am I kidding here? When I was doing my happy dance around the apartment and pointing this out to Stick over and over, I wondered why the book didn’t include any links to these social media projects. Yes, I forgot that paper doesn’t have hyperlinks. I should really consider getting out more.

The paragraph isn’t entirely clear on this, but I’m in Cary, NC, not the Stickley Museum.

Related:

Business Communication Today (10th Edition) on Amazon

Stickley Museum at Craftsman Farms blog

From the blog Simpson's Paradox, please comment here:

Textbook Case

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I just heard from Orin of I Heart Chaos (NSFW) that the Awesome Street sign was stolen!  Cary has now become less awesome.

PS I’m in New Jersey this week, I have an alibi!

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Cary Is Now Less Awesome

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We drove by this house on Maynard today. I’m just guessing here but I think someone’s unhappy.

Edit 8/6: Hi to everyone who’s finding my blog by googling for “screwed by the town of Cary!” I snapped this just because I loved the sloppy neon orange protest, you can practically hear the local Homeowners’ Association gasping in shock and preparing to draft a strongly worded complaint letter. The full News&Observer story is here.

Other local area attractions include Awesome Street, the last guy with an angry sign, and my plants that aren’t dead yet.

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Screwed By The Town Of Cary

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Stick and I went to Play! A Videogame Symphony at the Koka Booth Amphitheatre a few weekends ago. We joined the crazy quilt of blankets, over a carpet of drying pine needles, and unpacked our cheese, olives,  Nintendo DS, and those mini wine bottles I keep calling chardonnay shots. We must have been flying the nerd flag, because a fellow passing out flyers for a gaming and music fest in DC in a few months, came right to us. And after telling him no thanks, we realized we might actually be in DC in a few months!

Once it got dark, the performance began. The conductor opened by asking everyone to feel free to clap and cheer if they felt moved to do so, and everyone did. I was so impressed with the range of games chosen, with the wild shift from metallic beeps to symphony, and with the music in general.

Sometimes when I’ve lived abroad, I’ve had moments of glowing amazement that I was really in that place.  This is me, walking across the St. Catherine’s quad to go to a lecture in Cambridge, I remember thinking, or this is me, on the Great Wall of China. I’m always amazed to find myself actually at place I recognize from books, walking in the steps of history.  (Yes, it’s true, my self-centeredness knows no bounds.) it’s best when I’m traveling, of course, but even in Amherst, I would sometimes be amazed by real New England fall leaves! Just like in books!

In this past almost-year in North Carolina, I haven’t felt like that at all. Probably because it’s hard to feel any connection with the past in the brand-new sameness of Cary. It’s hard to feel amazement and wonder that I’m driving on a highway.

But finally, lying on the blanket looking up at the tall, skinny Carolina pines, and listening to the swell of the symphony and the applause, I felt amazed that I live here. This is it. The Carolina pines, the endless Southern twilight.  Just like in books! With the cheering nerd-crowd as an added bonus.  I sighed with total contentment.

“I think I felt a raindrop,” Stick said.

The other part of Southern summers in books are the surprise, torrential thundershowers.  Within moments, we were drenched. We tried to tough it out long enough to hear World Of WarCraft: Stormwind, but soaked jeans are not fun and we joined the mob running for the parking lot.

From the blog Simpson's Paradox, please comment here:

Play! A Videogame Symphony

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Last night we went to Awesome Street for a party. I was a little nervous since I didn’t know anyone, but that dissipated when we arrived and saw a couple of backdoor smokers, wearing white fuzzy bunny ears.

“If I’d known,” Stick said. “I could have worn my Hugh Hefner smoking jacket,”

Although Stick and I found Awesome Street endlessly hilarious (“There’s no room for the car here! We’ll have to park over on Mediocre Street!”), some of the other guests told us that the town of Cary was less than thrilled with creativity cutting into their cutesy themed-named subdivisions, and the Awesome Street residents had to apply several times to get the name approved. We also learned that Awesome Street beat out runner-up names Floppy Drive and Hard Drive.

“Yeah, sometimes I’m working and I see people pull up and take photos of the street sign!” one guy told me.

“That was me.” I said.

I’m of the school of thought that social gatherings require me to put on lip gloss and bring a six pack (see also: ways in which I will never fully leave college), and I was totally impressed with this one’s Sno-Cone maker, margarita machine, and all kinds of toys. What really set it apart from our last our last Playboy-themed office party, though, was Mama Hoffmann’s twin circling and insisting that we all eat! More! Have another one! Do you want something else? Eat! You should eat more! Have another one!

It was a nice crowd, and we talked about the joys of Bosphorus, Unaabi Grill, and how Cary, for all its soulless sameness, really does have great food. I met a lot of –  can’t resist it any longer– awesome people. (If you were at the Awesome party, and I was not swift enough to trade contact info with you, I would love to get in touch!)

Later on, I met a girl who — and I could not make this up — was an element bridesmaid for her best friend’s pagan wedding. (She was Earth, but when I was in Allison’s wedding, I was Air) The former-element-bridesmaid and her now-husband decided to get married at the courthouse. I am not saying those two facts are connected, of course, just mentioning two things I learned last night.

“So, how do you know the Intelliscanner crew?” another girl asked me.

“I drove past one day and I got out to take a picture.” I said.

“Oh. Oh! I thought you were kidding about that.”

From the blog Simpson's Paradox, please comment here:

The Awesome Party

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I once had an English professor who told us that foreshadowing, symbolism and irony are literary terms, and by definition, can not happen in real life. It is our desire to see our life as a coherent story, he believed, that made us look for such things in hindsight. I disagree, but then, I think I’m the protagonist.

I recently learned that the city of Cary, NC was originally named Bradford’s Ordinary, which seems to disprove Professor Harris’s theory. Ordinary is just too apt. I often feel like life here is generic, flavorless American, a landscape of interchangeable strips malls and industrial parks and the highways leading there, the lifestyle I wanted to escape by moving to China.

But summer has arrived, unlike any summer I’ve seen, with long, lingering twilights. The light fades so slowly I only realize it’s nighttime by the appearance of lightning bugs.

Reading about North Carolina’s extra-long growing season doesn’t describe the gardens here, bursting with larger versions of familiar flowers of Massachussetts and New Jersey. In patches between concrete convenience, I find wild vines with glossy green leaves and delicate white Southern flowers, or huge blossoms with almost tropical petals and sweet, heavy scent.  Even our balcony basil and mint are touched with the wild growth here.

Evenings bring lightning flashes on the horizon from distant thunderstorms. Summer storms arrive, they come with the intensity and suddenness of the Kate Chopin story, a golden sunny day turning to wind-tossed trees and heavy, fat raindrops in minutes, and clearing just as quickly.

From the blog Simpson's Paradox, please comment here:

Bradford’s Ordinary

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As months go by, I’m getting more and more soured on the endless parking lots here, opening into shopping or office complexes and strip malls without sidewalks, a city designed for a life like that of the old Peking emperors, where our feet never touch the ground. My wanderlust is frustrated by roads that don’t actually go places, cutely named loops with housing cul-de-sacs on either side. Cary makes all these lists of the nicest places to live in the US, which reminds me that this suffocating sameness I feel is not you, it’s me.

I try to focus on the things I like here. Working in the Chocolate Bean, good meals at Bosphorus and Unaabi Grill, the Middle Earth poster in my boss’ office, my wonderful students, driving past Awesome Street, walking around Hoffman Lake (yes, that’s the real name!). Playing with Isabelle. Our apartment, a happy bubble of Meg and Stick. The simple enjoyment of English conversation hasn’t entirely worn off yet.

And I like the little town library here. It’s between the school and the train station, across from the post office, an ESL lesson come to life. This is also, perhaps not so coincidentally, one street that’s good for foot traffic. I love reading the liberal bumper stickers and seeing the reusable book bags.  I remind myself to really enjoy the easy access to English books now, because I hope I’ll soon be missing them again.

From the blog Simpson's Paradox, please comment here:

Checking Out At The Library

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