Today.
Yeah, so it's been one of those days. Friggin' snowing out, cold and windy. I've got one of those pain in the ass head colds, you know the kind. You ain't really sick enough to stay in bed but you feel like crap anyway. So our older daughter needs a wig for her part in the senior variety show at the school this week. She went out and about yesterday with one of her girlfriends looking for a wig. They got lost, never found a wig. Today I looked in the yellow pages and found a place that's located right in the area they were patrolling yesterday, this place had the wig. I asked her why she didn't look in the phone book? She said she asked her friends and looked online, that place wasn't mentioned or listed. Well, we had to drive over there and get the wig. We got the wig. Because it's for a school event, the rental fee is only five bucks for the whole week, not a bad deal.
So while all this was going on, my wife was sleeping 'cause she works third shift and she's goin' in again tonight at midnight for six hours overtime. I took our younger daughter with us on the wig hunt too, we stopped for lunch at this all you can eat buffet place that they had never been to before, and they loved it. It has these really gaudy chandeliers that somehow seem to go with the strip mall decor. They have these colored lights that create a rainbow chain on the ceiling all around each of the four sneeze guard protected buffet tables. Each section in the dining area is divided by a four foot high wall and those walls are topped with glass panels that are decorated with pandas, birds and assorted Asian looking flora. The food is pretty good, and like most Chinese buffet kind of places these days the food varies. I mean it's like this. They will have Chinese dishes, American dishes, Korean dishes, Japanese dishes and Thai dishes all on display for your tasting pleasure under the same Plexiglas sneeze guards. When I was kid growing up in North Jersey, if you went out for Chinese it was just that. I don't recall being treated to such a diverse and varied Oriental smorgasbord. When we would go in to the city (Manhattan) and headed for Chinatown we knew what we were in for. When our crew hung out at Lam's Tavern we knew the Lams were Chinese, like from China. It's kind of sad that so many people do not know the difference. This place we went to for lunch today is staffed mostly with Vietnamese people. To many of the locals in this part of Pennsylvania however, they are all Chinese.
Our girls both use chop sticks, and they use them quite well. Our older daughter mastered the technique at a very early age having been shown by a young man who worked at a Chinese place near our home in New Jersey, she then passed on that skill to her younger sister. That was a real Chinese restaurant, we became friends with the owners who had a son the same age as our younger daughter. She attended his birthday party where we all met his maternal grandparents who spoke very little English. What an interesting and fun day that was. How cool is it for our kids to experience all that culture. I miss New Jersey, sometimes. It has gotten so damned expensive there, we just could not afford to stay there.
I have a relative who recently retired at the age of sixty-five. He has a pension and his house is payed for. He purchased that house in 1967 for thirty grand, it's now worth over half a million dollars because it's in North Jersey very close to the city, has a train stop right down the street. Well, he can't afford to stay there because his property taxes are in excess of $8,000.00 per year. That's right. Eight thousand dollars per year. When we sold our house, a house we had lived in for seven years, our property taxes were three grand a year. When we bought that house seven years prior? Nineteen hundred. Sometimes I really don't like yuppies. I remember what they did to Hoboken all those years ago, and Jersey City, forget about it. Yeah it's great, it looks real nice all gentrified and everything but the regular working class people got nowhere to go except the projects or out of state. Well, the day is goin' to come when all those real estate speculators who drive the prices up out of reach are goin' to have to fix their own toilets and cut their own grass, unless they want to pay the plumber five hundred bucks an hour. Oh wait, they can just hire illegal aliens to do all those jobs that "Americans don't want to do" and pay them near slave wages for their efforts. Never mind, I guess they have a plan. I don't know what I'm bitchin' about. Just sour grapes I guess.
Everything that made New Jersey, you know, Jersey is almost all gone. I doubt if Bruce could write those songs if he were coming up today.
".......the Magic Rat drove his sixty thousand dollar Escalade, over the Jersey state line........"
"Then he parked it at the fancy new mall, the one with the Bloomingdale's, built on what was once the swamps of Jersey......."
".......the Benz door slams, Mary's dressed in the latest DKNY. Like a vision she dances across the imported marble tile floor while the XM Satellite radio plays..................."
".......she said don't roll down the window I don't want the wind to mess up my hair.....she said I just had it done at that new salon and it cost three hundred dollars to get it to look this way........"
Yeah, the gritty and the real is all on it's way out. Bein' replaced with phony. Don't mind me, I'm just gettin' old and cranky. Before you know it I'll be prefacing my statements with; "When I was a boy".........Anyway, I had a real nice time being out with my girls today, they make me look good.
So while all this was going on, my wife was sleeping 'cause she works third shift and she's goin' in again tonight at midnight for six hours overtime. I took our younger daughter with us on the wig hunt too, we stopped for lunch at this all you can eat buffet place that they had never been to before, and they loved it. It has these really gaudy chandeliers that somehow seem to go with the strip mall decor. They have these colored lights that create a rainbow chain on the ceiling all around each of the four sneeze guard protected buffet tables. Each section in the dining area is divided by a four foot high wall and those walls are topped with glass panels that are decorated with pandas, birds and assorted Asian looking flora. The food is pretty good, and like most Chinese buffet kind of places these days the food varies. I mean it's like this. They will have Chinese dishes, American dishes, Korean dishes, Japanese dishes and Thai dishes all on display for your tasting pleasure under the same Plexiglas sneeze guards. When I was kid growing up in North Jersey, if you went out for Chinese it was just that. I don't recall being treated to such a diverse and varied Oriental smorgasbord. When we would go in to the city (Manhattan) and headed for Chinatown we knew what we were in for. When our crew hung out at Lam's Tavern we knew the Lams were Chinese, like from China. It's kind of sad that so many people do not know the difference. This place we went to for lunch today is staffed mostly with Vietnamese people. To many of the locals in this part of Pennsylvania however, they are all Chinese.
Our girls both use chop sticks, and they use them quite well. Our older daughter mastered the technique at a very early age having been shown by a young man who worked at a Chinese place near our home in New Jersey, she then passed on that skill to her younger sister. That was a real Chinese restaurant, we became friends with the owners who had a son the same age as our younger daughter. She attended his birthday party where we all met his maternal grandparents who spoke very little English. What an interesting and fun day that was. How cool is it for our kids to experience all that culture. I miss New Jersey, sometimes. It has gotten so damned expensive there, we just could not afford to stay there.
I have a relative who recently retired at the age of sixty-five. He has a pension and his house is payed for. He purchased that house in 1967 for thirty grand, it's now worth over half a million dollars because it's in North Jersey very close to the city, has a train stop right down the street. Well, he can't afford to stay there because his property taxes are in excess of $8,000.00 per year. That's right. Eight thousand dollars per year. When we sold our house, a house we had lived in for seven years, our property taxes were three grand a year. When we bought that house seven years prior? Nineteen hundred. Sometimes I really don't like yuppies. I remember what they did to Hoboken all those years ago, and Jersey City, forget about it. Yeah it's great, it looks real nice all gentrified and everything but the regular working class people got nowhere to go except the projects or out of state. Well, the day is goin' to come when all those real estate speculators who drive the prices up out of reach are goin' to have to fix their own toilets and cut their own grass, unless they want to pay the plumber five hundred bucks an hour. Oh wait, they can just hire illegal aliens to do all those jobs that "Americans don't want to do" and pay them near slave wages for their efforts. Never mind, I guess they have a plan. I don't know what I'm bitchin' about. Just sour grapes I guess.
Everything that made New Jersey, you know, Jersey is almost all gone. I doubt if Bruce could write those songs if he were coming up today.
".......the Magic Rat drove his sixty thousand dollar Escalade, over the Jersey state line........"
"Then he parked it at the fancy new mall, the one with the Bloomingdale's, built on what was once the swamps of Jersey......."
".......the Benz door slams, Mary's dressed in the latest DKNY. Like a vision she dances across the imported marble tile floor while the XM Satellite radio plays..................."
".......she said don't roll down the window I don't want the wind to mess up my hair.....she said I just had it done at that new salon and it cost three hundred dollars to get it to look this way........"
Yeah, the gritty and the real is all on it's way out. Bein' replaced with phony. Don't mind me, I'm just gettin' old and cranky. Before you know it I'll be prefacing my statements with; "When I was a boy".........Anyway, I had a real nice time being out with my girls today, they make me look good.
posted by Squarehead at 5:55 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home