Vocabulary School got a little summer makeover this week. Next thing you know she’s going to be pouring liquor into a Hawaiian Punch Slurpee and eating tomatoes and peaches over the sink. A girl of the people! If you’re just enrolling in Vocabulary School, check out some recent editions!
On Saturday mornings in late May and June, I am awake and fighting for my life at the farmers’ market on the hunt for strawberries. So early, in fact, the farmer’s market isn’t actually open but you cannot tell the 25 suburbanites in front of me in line. We should be embarrassed to be lined up before the official opening of the farmers’ market. However, shame does not exist when discussing late spring strawberries. Shame doesn’t actually exist at all in this space, just wait until you see the person I become in the face of local stone fruit.
After the market but before the roads filled with weekend errand doers, I like to sit in the parking lot, facing a strip mall to eat one chocolate covered chocolate cream donut. It is the best donut available in my area—I need to know as little as possible about this bakery lest it ruin my enjoyment of my solitary donut. While eating my donut and studying The Tortured Poets Department, a man parked his Porsche SUV at the most insane angle and attempted to rip the door of the seafood market off its hinges.
He also banged on the window for good measure. This place doesn’t open until 10—we checked to make sure. What would possess someone to show up to an unopened store over two hours before opening? The best idea we came up with is unhelpful husband disease where the claim could be made that he “tried” but was unsuccessful—all unhelpful husbands are. Perhaps I’m being unfair because I will be lining up early for strawberries come Saturday but whose newsletter is this, anyway? I’ll be a strawberry hypocrite with my chin held high.
This Week’s Vocabulary List
Free Food For Millionaires by Min Jin Lee
Abstemious: (adjective) marked by restraint, especially in the eating of food and drinking alcohol
In context, Hugh, a senior coworker of Casey’s treats luxury and pleasure like a religion and restriction or “abstemiousness” to be something worthy of hatred. Hugh is the kind of man who gets out of bed to go buy ice cream which is so hot to me. He likes that Casey has a rich person’s hobby in golf and enjoys the expensiveness of her wardrobe as he’s objectifying her on company time.
Casey restricts herself in order to indulge in other places. She’ll skip meals but spend $1400 on an outfit. Set in the early-mid 1990s, Casey is the precursor to quiet luxury even if her luxury should be screaming, “Girl, you cannot afford that and you haven’t eaten a vegetable in a week—step away from the summer weight wool suit.”
When someone says they work in finance, I literally have no earthly idea what they mean by that. I was astounded by the all-night psychos I went to college with to get jobs with unbelievable starting salaries doing whatever it means to do that kind of thing.
Practical Applications
We ultimately decided to not go to Las Vegas this week. The universe simply refused to bend to our will and nothing aligned with our hearts. But we definitely got dangerously close to spending four days and three nights with our eyes pinned open to party with boomers who aren’t my parents. It got to the point over the weekend that I had spent more time looking at pictures of seafood towers than I did planning to get my body from Pennsylvania to Nevada. To psych myself up to go to Vegas this week, I opened no fewer than 13 windows on my phone to search for seafood towers in Las Vegas: crab legs, oysters, for me to enjoy like the world’s smallest killer whale.
Not only are seafood towers aesthetically pleasing to me, but in my abstemious Weight Watchers addled brain, it’s zero points so I can have 3 glasses of wine with it. According to an AI search result, a seafood tower has about a bajillion grams of protein if you take it down yourself. The eating disordered fitness community that is constantly trying to harpoon my self esteem on Instagram would be so pleased! I cannot stress enough how much I love seafood towers. It is my favorite thing to order in a restaurant, if available and a top tier thing to eat when the heat of our ceaselessly heating planet creeps into meal time.
After running through extant episodes of Bridgerton, we’ve been watching Palm Royale on AppleTV+ and the best thing that’s happened so far is the panic catering for a cocktail party. Maxine, played by Kristen Wiig, orders 400 American dollars worth of seafood tower accoutrement that NO ONE EATS. A sin! According to the CPI Inflation calculator, $400 in 1969 has the same purchasing power as $3,390 in 2024. I’ve spent a lot of money on seafood towers but I haven’t spent that kind of money, even adjusted for inflation. Though, an Orca Platter from Old Ebbitt Grill in DC is $184 ($164 for happy hour), so if I were to get that, a bottle of wine and a train to and from DC, it’s basically free. An abstemious choice if I’ve ever heard one.
Love,
Andrea
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This post is super fun, stem to stern. ORCA PLATTER!
(FWIW, we live in Prague, and as it's landlocked, it's not the best place for seafood. I've been daydreaming about an ice cold shrimp cocktail for weeks, and this post did nothing to assuage that desire. Thank you, I guess? ;-)