Our region’s only Indian restaurant didn’t survive COVID. It now reopened with different owners. They are sweet, wonderful people. But they are from Nepal and Afghanistan, and the Nepalese side of the family is front of the house. The Afghani part cooks. I’m very interested in Afghan food but when Afghanis do Indian, it’s like me cooking Mexican. It all tastes like I’d rather have some borscht.

They should have totally opened an Afghan restaurant. We are a college town. People would definitely go to a more exotic place.

I’ll still go to the restaurant because Afghan Indian is better than no Indian.

The woke books we are being forced to read are incredibly parochial. What they mean when they say “white people” are white, native-born Americans, which are a tiny percentage of the world’s white people. What they mean when they say “black people” are African Americans, which are a tiny percentage of the world’s black people.

I was reading this passage about how whites always smile and use polite expressions, thereby oppressing the non-whites. This makes zero sense if you meet white people from my part of the world. Smiley and polite we are definitely not. The text makes absolutely no sense unless you add “Americans” to every statement.

It always strikes me as funny that the diversity and inclusion crowd is so utterly oblivious to anything even a tiny bit different from their narrow and boring life experience.

I decided to become more adventurous in food and only order new things on the mebu because I’m one of those sad sacks who always orders the exact same thing.

So I ordered something called “kung pao pork.” I don’t eat pork and I don’t eat Chinese, so this was very new.

The dish turned out to be extremely salty. No flavor but just very aggressive salt. Is it supposed to be this way? Is Chinese food very salty? I have nothing to measure the dish against. Of course, I’m not talking about authentic Chinese food but what Americans call Chinese food.

I’m glad I experimented but I’ll never eat this again. I’m planning to try Thai because that’s one cuisine that my brain doesn’t even visually process as food. It looks as eatable as glass. Then I’m going to a barbecue joint. I’ve never had what Americans call barbecue.