Past blaster.

Am staring at the noxious orange grease stagnating in my waxed take out box that once contained risotto and tandoori chicken (shut up, leftovers, ok?!) and trying to cover it up with my orange peel. Ignoring the fact that it is now stewing in my stomach...

Had one of those rare, 'catching up' dinners last night with SFtoNY. SFtoNY is one of those people that pops into your life on an occasional basis-but always with funny, introspective and intelligent glimpses of life. We're friends that were sort of...accidentally meant to be friends. In that comfortable, we're of different genders but we can talk about pretty much anything, fairly candidly-dissing and smack talking included. We met under somewhat auspicious circumstances.

My second to last night of vacation in NY, October 2005, Spam and I are, admittedly, getting tired of each other's company and have been for about one and a half days. She mentions that she's going to call up a friend of hers for dinner-and I immediately balk. I assume he will be: fat, immature, arrogant, fobby...I don't know why. But I hear that he is an ex-pat Bay Area guy and you know, just ASSUME he's your typical spoiled ABC (American Born Chinese). Well, SFtoNY doesn't disappoint. At the last minute, after hearing we are in the East Village and he is roughly 1/2 an hour away, he bails. Day two: after an afternoon of Broadway shows and Gray's Papaya-I'm in a much more accepting mood and we meet up with SFtoNY at a cheap clothing shop where Spam is trying on pants.

Supplies! (as the joke goes).

To my shock, SFtoNY is NOT fat, NOT immature, NOT arrogant and NOT fobby. He may, in fact, be polar opposites of all these things. The biggest surprise of all being how considerate and upfront he is. We stop near NYU to catch our breath and wait for Hurricane (Spam's other East Coast friend), when she finally meets up with us she assumes that SFtoNY and I are old friends. We're not, but it feels that way. We talk about mutual acquaintances, familiar haunts and other such topics. At dinner, he tells us funny stories and badgers Hurricane into getting the bartender's number. It is a balmy night in Manhattan and we catch a marching band in Washington Square. SFtoNY donates to the cause; something that never fails to impress me about anyone. We stop by the peanut butter restaurant (such wonders exist in New York) There are no end to the bad Asian jokes at the comedy club, all three of us take them in stride. (Spam mostly by sleeping through the last sets).

We agree to keep in touch-but it takes two years, two blogs, 6 Yelp emails and a covert AIM conversation to actually make that happen. 6 months after SFtoNY actually came back to San Francisco. Dinner at Kitchen Kura is oddly perfect; homestyle, no frills, pretty good food. Conversation runs the gamut from Bruce Lee to work to parents to the culturally bereft to Seattle to acting class and back again. Work, career and dating are all sprinkled about-but take a back seat to Miyazaki films and the Crow.

Before y'all start getting dishy on me, SFtoNY has a girlfriend-that he's been seeing for the last two years. So don't get any ideas. It's not like that. But it's nice to feel this familiar with someone I barely know. To build a friendship based on one night seems odd, true. But there's none of that 'polite' bullshit going on. It's straight up, 'I trust you so you trust me.' - to find this rapport is so rare. I'll take it where I can find it.

He is, however, not going to beat me at karaoke.

Kitchen Kura
1525 Irving Street (@16th)
San Francisco, CA 94122
(415) 731-2054