Hookahs and Belly Dancers

All I want to say is we really don’t have enough Hookahs and belly dancers in restaurants these days.

I’m just saying, if I’m going to eat falafel and I want white peach and blackberry hookah and a belly dancer begging me with hip jitters for dollars I don’t have. In fact, why can’t I go to Applebees and be entertained by belly dancers? Granted Applebees has the devastating effect of all its food tasting exactly the same, be it chicken-fried steak or a salad- it all tastes like the soggy nachos. Perhaps giving me a hookah and having an Applebees gal belly dance would entice me more to go and suffer through half-priced appetizers and twofers. Come to think of it, I don’t think there is an Applebees in Los Angeles… What a crazy world!

A quick note on reading…

Today, before my tutoring shift, I knocked off 20 minutes at the Coffee Bean down the road from the education center. It was just me, a cup of coffee, a fake bagel and a book on the backdrop of the outer limits of Beverly Hills. I’m currently reading David Eggers’ book of short stories How We Are Hungry.
Sometimes I don’t what to think of David Eggers’ works. I’ve read him on and off over the last few years, starting with his classic memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, which I loved – but even though I know loved every word I read, it’s one of those books that I can’t remember much of what actually happened. If I flip through it, the events and emotions come flooding back, but as soon as I shut that cover, it’s gone.

I started his latest, What is The What, right after it came out, but due to a busy schedule I ended up pushing it aside. I was going to read it on the way to L.A, but I left it in NY.

Last year, at about this time, I read You’ll Shall Know Our Velocity! - Again, I loved this book, the world, the characters, the way they thought and lived- but again as soon as I finished I lost it all from my mind. Well, there were a few parts that I stuck to my brain, but for the most part it was gone just as it arrived.

At the same time I picked up How We Are Hungry. Finally, a year later I opened it up and started to read. Right now, in the midst of the experience, I remember exactly why I love Eggers’ work. He takes you into different lives, of people, a little too detached, a little too over dramatic within their own heads, and lets you wander around for a bit, than pulls you out. It connects with my own floating detachment the world a little too much. It makes me annoyed at the nonsensical feelings of lost that you can have, because it’s all in point of view. I want to slap his characters out of their self-conscious subconscious drift through their slice-of-life circumstances. At the same time I want to live with them, thankful that we all exist in some form or another- me in the words on the page, and them in breaths of life.

Then again, as soon as I’m finished with the book, I’m sure I’ll forget it all again.