Because the Warriors, heartbreakingly, did not win, I was reduced to making bad conversation with the Chinese girl sitting next to me in the sports/oyster bar.
Now, I've spent a fair amount of time in "Chinese" bars, both here and in Taiwan. And I know there's a certain kind of girl who spends most of her time in the bar doodling freely, yet intently, on her placemat and/or napkin, while her boyfriend and his pals are busy talking. Or by herself, because for whatever reason no one is talking to her. The doodling usually takes the form of a) soul-searching Cure-esque poetry or b) slinky women with one eye. Invariably a large, double-eyelidded, Bette-Davis-type eye with huge peacock-feather eyelashes.
I get the poetry thing. I also get that many women have a repressed interest in fashion design and/or the world of couture that inclines them toward drawing slinky-looking women with long hair in evening gowns. But my question is, why only the one eye? This woman's doodlings strongly resembled a Marvel Comics femme fatale called Madame Hydra, who wore her hair draped over one eye because the other side of her face had been HORRIBLY SCARRED BY ACID. But she didn't look like much of a comics reader. So, in the moment where her boyfriend had gone to the bathroom, and the TV was recapping the Warriors' humiliating collapse at the hands of Aryan Officer Nowitski, I lunged up and asked her, "Why only the one eye?"
She said, "I don't know how to draw the other eye."
This was satisfactory to me, and I laughed. We made a little more clumsy convo in my bad Chinese and her bad-but-far-superior-English, and then her boyfriend came back from the bathroom, and I left the bar.
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