Martinis w/a Belgian.

So, on Thursday night I went with a Belgian student I know to a local ritzy restaurant that was doing a coupon-deal all this week where you brought it in and everyone at your table would get a free martini the place created in honor of Michelle Obama.

The place, it turns out, was packed with a reception for a local school board, and pretty much all the custumors beyond even the reception were black, which was a lot different from the one time I was at the place like a year ago (then it was more mixed).

This time, I particularly appreciated how black the music was that they had playing over the sound system... Something really black was playing when I came in (slips my mind now what, though), and later I heard a lot of R&B, and right before we left, Diana Ross's "I'm Coming Out", which a whole table of 50-something dressed up chunky black ladies were lip-synching and bobbing their heads to.

Anyhow, the Belgian student I know has been dating an Asian undergrad with fat cheeks for over half a year now, and since she's a vegan and they're practically living together, he's become vegetarian, and he broke this to his mother like last week, and she started crying because he has de facto repudiated Belgian's meat-based cuisine, and it hurt her.

That said, he said he still couldn't make up his mind how much of a vegetarian to be, so I said it was an admirable move, but it's nothing to be dogmatic about, so I ordered mussels in wine sauce for an app to share since he had mentioned he really liked mussels, and he ate a ton of them.

I then shared the story of how many desert fathers who used to live on like half a pound of lentils a year and water they licked from a crack in the stone walls of their cells would be reprimanded by their bishops if they refused what was put in front of them when they travelled.

"The moral of the story," I was like, "is eat what's put in front of you."

He then said that he's always liked the story of two buddhist monks who were travelling and one took a girl on his shoulders when they were crossing a river because she asked them, and like an hour later, the other monk had said that that was wrong (i.e., because of contact with the opposite sex), and the first monk said something to the effect that "I put the girl down an hour ago, but you're still carrying."

"I always liked that," the Belgian guy said, and he said he read a lot about Buddhism in his teens and would have become one except he can't bring himself to believe in reincarnation, though otherwise the system makes a lot of sense.

He also added when we left that it makes sense not to be dogmatic about vegetarianism.