Sunday, May 27, 2007

Mysterious Ways

I had dinner at my favourite Thai restaurant last night. It reminded me of the time that C, my girlfriend at the time, and I were making pad Thai and I said there had to be sweet peppers in it. She swore up and down that there just weren't supposed to be peppers in pad Thai. We asked a jury of our peers and the verdict came up that no, in fact, there simply weren't peppers in pad Thai.

We went out for Thai food a few weeks later and I order pad Thai, as usual. And lo and behold, in it where nice strips of sweet pepper. C decided that prior to that there never had been peppers in pad Thai, but the Universe had changed, in accordance with my insistence, and now there had always been peppers in pad Thai.

I was out for Thai food last night because I had two friends in from out of town, J and S.

I have known S since grade 3. She and I competed all the way through grade school and highschool and are as close as brother and sister now. She always won the popularity contests — she's way hotter than me — but I kicked her ass at calculus. S is now back living in our hometown and working at a really cool consulting company.

J has been one of my best friends steadily since about grade 10. His birthday is a week after mine, so we have managed to make sure that no matter where we both live, at the very least we have a joint birthday party every year. One year we celebrated by driving to Queens University and... creatively redecorating parts of the campus. J is now living in Ohio and doing his dream job — designing boats.

J actually drove a company truck up to Toronto this weekend to make a delivery somewhere just outside the city. It worked out nicely cuz he got to come visit and didn't have to pay for gas or put any miles on his car. S was already in town when J arrived and he managed to find us walking up Spadina. We ran out and jumped into the enormous company truck and road with him up to the parking garage. He'd expression some concern, prior to this point, that his truck might not make the clearance for the garage.

"How tall is the truck?" I asked.

"Dunno."

"Well, how are we going to know if it'll fit in the garage?"

"Only one way to find out!' enthused J.

It turned out there was about 3 inches of clearance. We nearly clipped a number of cars and ran over a group of pedestrians trying to make the turn into the garage off the crowded, cramped street. In the end it was alright. We had a bit of a scare when the antenna scraped a few beams, but you get used to the noise of metal scraping across cement after a while.

I've been asking the Universe for a lot of non-pad Thai-related favours lately. This weekend I asked it help S run into a nice man so that she can move to Toronto and be happy. Evidently, the Universe felt this was a funny request. While the 3 of us were at the Eaton's Centre, instead of running into a nice man for S, we managed to run into a guy from our hometown, which is about 200km from here, who was in town for the day with his wife to see Phantom of the Opera. What are the odds?

As we were walking home from the Eaton's Centre, up a side street that I almost never walk on, who should walk by but my ex-girlfriend, C, and her boyfriend. She managed to not even say hi to us and only made eye contact with J, not S or me. I hadn't realized we weren't on speaking terms. Ouch.

I suppose I should stop asking the Universe for favours for a while. Fortunately, I've already fixed the pad Thai problem.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Fatherly advice: Be careful what you wish for, you might just get it...

A.K.A. the Principle of Unanticipated Consequences.

BTW the addition of sweet pepper to the recipe for pad Thai does not seem to have propagated to recipes on the internet yet -- I only found one that called for strips of red pepper.

Anonymous said...

I must hear this decorating Queen's story. Are you sure it wasn't defacing?

Also - still on for heely goodness tomorrow??