renegadeRICEcracker

alvin the raccoon

this is what i get for reading dryope's blog while at work -- too much time spent on internet quizzes. but, we have determined that my daemon is a raccoon. well... i do love shiny objects.

yay rice noodles!

i LOVE my new place. and especially, i LOVE my new kitchen. i LOVE to cook, and i LOVE to cook for other people. i didn't cook that much for people in my old place because, well, i didn't like my kitchen that much, i guess. in the last ten days, i've had people to dinner four times. i made crunchy potatoes with green bell pepper (i used to have it in china all the time) and fried noodles for my coworker, then i made eggplant, cabbage and chicken (discovered that my broiler is hotter than my old one and waaay over-cooked the chicken) for a friend, then i made (first time!) baby napa with pork & vermicelli noodles, an egg & chive dish (childhood favorite!) and more chicken for ayumi and brian (brian broiled the chicken and demonstrated how to do it beautifully), and then tonight i made thin soft rice noodles (cao hefen) and baby bok choy for a different friend. i've planned out three more meals to cook for people this week. i'm soooooo loving my kitchen.

i'm also sooooo loving the rice noodles (i love rice noodles). i've been making a different kind of hefen (the wider noodles) for a while, but my mom showed me how to make this kind yesterday, so i made it for a friend today. so good. totally a new favorite.

also exciting is that my mom, who is a phenomenal cook and taught me the little i know, gave me a load of corningware and serving dishes today. she said she doesn't really have groups of people over anymore, so she doesn't need them, and she thinks i would enjoy them. she also recently got an awesome new wok, so she gave me an awesome wok she'd gotten last year (i have a calphalon one, which is great, but this wok she just gave me is, like, amazing. i'm excited). also included was a clay pot! yay! oh, and for my housewarming gift she bought me a zojirushi neuro-fuzzy rice cooker. yay yay! i am excited by all the cooking in my future.

this week i plan to make vegetable rice (you cook rice with vegetables and chinese sausage in the rice cooker and mix it up -- it's been a favorite for a while), more rice noodles, kongxincai (empty-heart vegetable -- i don't know the english name), and i'm going to try out my new clay pot on friday -- some sort of soupy napa cabbage/vermicelli/tofu type of thing. i can't wait.

also, soon comes a development of my bbq skills (i will be able to make more than shortribs!) -- my dad is giving me a bbq (with burner) for my housewarming gift! he is also bringing lots of serving dishes and things. i am going to be soooo set.

that's all. i have to be at work at 5:45 tomorrow. i don't know why i'm still up. also i have work to do. i need to stop blogging. i was just excited about the food. goodnight!

go figure, i actually am from the midland

anyway. i am very tired and am going to go to bed. i got very little sleep last night because i woke up super early after a late night at truck stop with sahar. it was so fun! i love that she lives close enough now for us to hang out kind of regularly. it's like high school sleepovers (but without parental presence) -- we walked home after closing out truck stop, and then ate in front of the tv (after rescuing a drunk guy in front of barney's beanery and seeing andy dick -- random!) and then talked way too late into the night before passing out. love it.

i do not, however, love how lots of alcohol makes me wake up so early. i got up and, like, cleaned and did laundry before sahar got up. then we made breakfast -- i tried a new creation my mom told me about (scramble and flavor eggs, dunk a tortilla in there, put it in the pan, add green onion -- i also added that chinese dried pork -- and then cover it with another egg-covered tortilla. so good!) and went furniture shopping. i did not realize that we could spend hours on end walking through furniture store after furniture store and NOT FIND A SINGLE DAMN DINING ROOM TABLE I WANT. ugh. but, the helms bakery furniture district is very cool.

hung out with my mom tonight and watched the terminal. very cute.

that's all. very tired. bye bye.

OH

i think i have an EAR INFECTION. that's what this is. half of my throat hurts, half of my face feels really tender to touch, and my ear hurts. ear infection. okay.

i was told by my wise coworker that "it will either go away or get worse." very insightful. i will wait it out.

i am so tired.

i have been exhausted since sunday. like, i-feel-like-i-have-mono exhausted. i also felt a little feverish sunday/monday, though that seems to have subsided a bit. i keep trying to skate by and get, like, 7 1/2 hours of sleep, which would be fine if i were feeling well, but my body is in a pretty you-better-fucking-let-me-sleep place. and i know i've taken it too far when, as yesterday morning, i wake up with my gums swollen and half of my face really tender to touch. (this morning, too.) hmm.

so yeah. i am really, really exhausted. and i may be sick. but then i was thinking, i may also just be super depressed. i was talking to someone the other day and they were trying to get a feel for how i am doing family-wise, and i was just sort of like... "i don't know. i'm fine. everything sucks, and i am sad, but this is nothing new, so i don't want to talk about it. blah blah blah, i get irritable about things, i recognize that it comes from depression, so i try to dissolve the irritation, and make sure i'm spending time with my mom, and i've been aware of such emotional patterns for a while now and it's all the same, and it's all the same, and it's all the same and i'm just... sick of talking about it."

but the thing is that it's not the same. i mean, part of me is fatigued from all this because to a certain extent, yeah, it's been over a year of dealing with grief, and sorrow, and living a half-in-limbo life... but a big part of me is also really freaked out because that far-away-sounding "and then eventually when there isn't another regimen to shift to..." is not so far away anymore. it's right here. and it's terrifying. and it's faster than i was expecting. my mom seems to be in more pain week by week, and her doctor has upped her pain meds, and she's uncomfortable anyway and in low spirits, and this far-away future, this thing i have talked about so abstractly for the last year or so, i feel like it's reared up and is looming over us, and we are huddled together in its shadow and bracing ourselves for it to come crashing down on us.

...

well that was cheery.

i mean, overall i think i'm doing alright. i've been trying to take a zen "be at peace and know that all you can do is spend time with your mom" approach to quiet the panicky feeling in my chest (of course, whenever anyone suggests to me how i should handle everything i then immediately want to punch them in the face). and i've been hanging out with friends and cooking and doing things around my new place that help me feel a little more sane. i do need to just take a night and sleep and sleep and sleep, though i don't think i'll be able to do that until tomorrow.

anyway. that's it on my front. i should get back to work. um... happy wednesday!

can someone find me a dining room table?

ayumi graciously drove down to torrance this morning to meet me at my sister's, and after we babysat for a while (my sister had to run into the hospital), we drove down to santa ana to look at a dining room table that looked fantastic on the website. in person, it did not look fantastic. it looked cheap. this made me sad.

after that i went to have lunch with a couple ex-coworkers in long beach. it was really fun and nice and i ate waaaay too much at a cute little creperie. mmm.

then i went back to my sister's, took my mom home, and paid my bills. that's it, that was my sunday. nothing too exciting, but i felt that i should blog something.

i am exHAUsted and about to go to sleep. i can't figure out if i'm getting sick or still hungover from, um, friday. yesterday morning i had breakfast with a friend and then headed down to torrance and, when i got there, my mom asked me if i'd been drinking that morning. i looked in the morning and i was, er, still red. like, red like when i drink. hmm. and my sister noted that i still reeked of alcohol (i'd showered!). hmm. i think i was STILL drunk. i mean, not drunk. but there was definitely alcohol still in my system. the unhappy hangover lasted all day long.

so my big lesson was not to pre-party when i go to truck stop on fridays, because my tolerance is just too low for pre-partying. and if i do pre-party, then i need to adjust how i drink when i get there. on the other hand, i earned a hundred bucks when my friend took advantage of the situation by challenging my drunken self to kiss a really, really shy looking asian girl there. ha. of course, that other hand doesn't matter so much because i think i would feel bad actually collecting that money.

and... there's my weekend in reverse. like that movie memento. only i didn't kill anybody.

good night!

eight-legged crawlies

so... some of you know that i've been irrationally freaking out about burglars. i finally got it together enough to know that i should feel safe in my home. i had ADT come out this morning, and will have a new alarm system soon. so that's good. i feel safe. the guy told me how safe i am already. things are good.

so that's that, right?

i just went for a drive. i came home. i went to hang up my jackety thing in the closet where i keep my jackets, and on the wooden bar where they hang, there is a BIG FUCKING SPIDER. and i mean BIG. and UGLY. NOT a daddy long legs. not a small solid black one like i used to see at my apartment once in a while. a BIG FUCKING SPIDER unlike any i have seen in a long time, and never in a home. i try to hit it with a stick, and of course, i don't kill it, i instead knock it somewhere i can't see it, i think onto my favorite jackety thing. so i use the stick to pull out the jackety thing and very carefully ascertain that the spider is not there.

but FUCK. it's where my CLOTHES are. if you know me pretty well, you know i am PETRIFIED of bugs. so now, i know there is a BIG ASS SPIDER where i hang my CLOTHES! ach! ACH! OH NO!!!!!!!!!!

i am going to bed. there isn't really anything else i can do. i think i am going to try to bug bomb or something. i am all freaked out. and unhappy about this development. DAMN!

okay, i just did a little research, because i was freaked out because it was a big brown thing, but i don't think it was a brown recluse. dammit, it says that they like cardboard boxes. the thing was probably in there because i just moved a bunch of boxes there. guess what i am throwing away TOMORROW?????

asian-americans in the media

i thought this was a pretty interesting article. the virginia tech shootings were awful and tragic. i don't even know what to say about them.

What May Come: Asian Americans and the Virginia Tech Shootings
Link: http://www.aamovement.net/viewpoints/2007/virginiatech.html

Tamara K. Nopper
April 17, 2007

Like many, I was glued to the television news yesterday, keeping updated about the horrific shootings at Virginia Tech University. I was trying to deal with my own disgust and sadness, especially since my professional life as a graduate student and college instructor is tied to universities. And then the other shoe dropped. I found out from a friend that the news channel she was watching had reported the shooter as Asian. It has now been reported, after much confusion, that the shooter is Cho Seung-Hui, a South Korean immigrant and Virginia Tech student.

As an Asian American woman, I am keenly aware that Asians are about to become a popular media topic if not the victims of physical backlash. Rarely have we gotten as much attention in the past ten years, except, perhaps, during the 1992 Los Angeles Riots. Since then Asians are seldom seen in the media except when one of us wins a golfing match, Woody Allen has sex, or Angelina Jolie adopts a kid.

I am not looking forward to the onslaught of media attention. If history truly does have clues about what will come, there may be several different ways we as Asian Americans will be talked about.

One, we will watch white media pundits and perhaps even sociologists explain what they understand as an “Asian” way of being. They will talk about how Asian males presumably have fragile “egos” and therefore are culturally prone to engage in kamikaze style violence. These statements will be embedded with racist tropes about Japanese military fighters during WWII or the Viet Cong the crazy, calculating, and hidden Asian man who will fight to the death over presumably nothing.

In the process, the white media might actually ask Asian Americans our perspectives for a change. We will probably be expected to apologize in some way for the behavior of another Asian—something whites never have to collectively do when one of theirs engages in (mass) violence, which is often. And then some of us might succumb to the Orientalist logic of the media by eagerly promoting Asian Americans as real Americans and therefore unlike Asians overseas who presumably engage in culturally reprehensible behavior. In other words, if we get to talk at all, Asian Americans will be expected to interpret, explain, and distance themselves from other Asians just to get airtime.

Or perhaps the media will take the color-blind approach instead of a strictly eugenic one. The media might try to whitewash the situation and treat Cho as just another alienated middle-class suburban kid. In some ways this is already happening—hence the constant referrals to the proximity of the shootings to the 8th anniversary of the Columbine killings. The media will repeat over and over words from a letter that Cho left behind speaking of “rich kids,” and “deceitful charlatans.” They will ask what’s going on in middle-class communities that encourage this type of violence. In the process they may never talk about the dirty little secret about middle-class assimilation: for non-whites, it does not always prevent racial alienation, rage, or depression. This may be surprising given that we are bombarded with constant images suggesting that racial harmony will exist once we are all middle-class. But for many of us who have achieved middle-class life, even if we may not openly admit it, alienation does not stop if you are not white.

But the white media, being as tricky as it is, may probably talk about Cho in ways that reflect a combination of both traditional eugenic and colorblind approaches. They will emphasize Cho’s ethnicity and economic background by wondering what would set off a hard-working, quiet, South Korean immigrant from a middle-class dry-cleaner-owning family. They will wonder why Cho would commit such acts of violence, which we expect from Middle Easterners and Muslims and those crazy Asians from overseas, but not from hard-working South Korean immigrants. They will promote Cho as “the model minority” who suddenly, for no reason, went crazy. Whereas eugenic approaches depicting Asians as crazy kamikazes or Viet Cong mercenaries emphasize Asian violence, the eugenic aspect of the model minority myth suggests that there is something about Asian Americans that makes them less prone to expressions of anger, rage, violence, or criminality. Indeed, we are not even seen as having legitimate reasons to have anger, let alone rage, hence the need to figure out what made this “quiet” student “snap.”

Given that the model minority myth is a white racist invention that elevates Asians over minority groups, Cho will be dissected as an anomaly among South Koreans who “are not prone” to violence—unlike Blacks who are racistly viewed as inherently violent or South Asians, Middle Easterners and Muslims who are viewed as potential terrorists. He will be talked about as acting “out of character” from the other “good South Koreans” who come here and quietly and dutifully work towards the American dream. Operating behind the scenes of course is a diplomatic relationship between the US and South Korea forged through bombs and military zones during the Korean War and expressed through the new free trade agreement negotiations between the countries. Indeed, even as South Korean diplomats express concern about racial backlash against Asians, they are quick to disown Cho in order to maintain the image of the respectable South Korean.

Whatever happens, Cho will become whoever the white media wants him to be and for whatever political platform it and legislators want to push. In the process, Asian Americans will, like other non-whites, be picked apart, dissected, and theorized by whites. As such, this is no different than any other day for Asian Americans. Only this time an Asian face will be on every television screen, internet search engine, and newspaper.

Tamara K. Nopper is an educator, writer, and activist living in Philadelphia.
She can be reached at tnopper@yahoo.com

so now i can't sleep again

i'm all feeling sorry for myself. waaaaah. there. out of my system. have a good day...

why is outdoor furniture SO EXPENSIVE?!?!?!

on saturday i went furniture shopping with ayumi and brian. i had already picked out the patio furniture i wanted, but figured it would take us forever to find a chaise i liked. we picked out the chaise very, very quickly at crate and barrel. then we picked out an outdoor teak sectional, also fairly quickly. i didn't look at the price because i figured it would be roughly the same as the pottery barn prices. we swung by pottery barn to compare, and did not like that outdoor sectional nearly as much as the crate and barrel one. done. wait. wrong.

i went home and was poking around on the internet to figure out exactly what all i wanted to buy, and discovered that the outdoor sectional we picked out (nothing fancy, a 3x2 L-shaped thing) was roughly $3000. oh. that's not what i wanted to spend to put on my little outdoor balcony. crap.

i figured i could get cheaper stuff elsewhere. i just spent some time poking around on the internet. apparently... not. apparently wood outdoor sectionals that i like are all thousands and thousands of dollars. hell, crate and barrel is probably a steal.

crap.

oh well. i guess the patio furniture will take a little longer. :(

things are getting hard

work is a weird thing. there are people there that you see every day, creating some sense of familiarity, but you don't know them well, so there isn't really any intimacy, just the illusion of it. this isn't something that i generally notice so much, but over the last year this tension has been more apparent to me because i am having some intense and personal family things going on, which result in my fielding an array of well-intentioned i'm-so-concerned-how's-your-mom inquiries from people i don't know well enough to want to talk to at all about anything remotely personal. when it comes from someone i really don't know well and who in normal life sort of causes me mild annoyance, and then they go over the top and try to pretend we are REALLY close and won't leave me alone about my stuff, it starts to really irritate (or, i've also had people trap me into long, LONG conversations about how my mom should really listen to this series that x person's pastor did on cancer -- "is she a believer, or is she just giving up?" charming).

anyway. a couple months ago i was standing in the hallway waiting for my coworker, and i was pretty down. one of the assistants came by -- we are very friendly with each other, and she has a very no bullshit sarcastic straightforwardness that i appreciate. she asked me how i was doing, i couldn't muster more than a shrug, and she said, "are things getting hard?" i sort of smiled in return, she nodded, patted my shoulder, said "i'm sorry," and walked off. i really appreciated it. she was succinct and did not pry at all (she actually knows me better than most of the people who annoy me with this crap), yet showed genuine sympathy before leaving me alone. i love her.

but yeah. "things are getting hard" is the phrase that materializes in my head when reality starts to creep in on me. and i guess the very long intro into this entry is that... reality is creeping. or, not really creeping. whooshing from behind and catching me off-guard because i had my head turned in a cloud of denial that fuzzed out the timeline that i've been afraid of dealing with.

we are stopping the chemo, because it doesn't appear to be working. she's going to keep focusing on her chi-gong and chinese herbal medicine, but that's pretty much all we have. (we are also going to look into some medicine available in taiwan.) her doctor talked to her about hospice options, and said she should just enjoy herself while she can. and the reality of this, the fact that we're really going to have to deal with this, the fact that i can't just live in this limbo forever (as horrible and exhausting as it is, i would cling to it for anything), i'm just... drowning in it.

i hadn't cried in a few months. but on friday after my sister called to tell me what they decided at the doctor's appointment (i took her wednesday, my sister took her friday), i went into my coworker's office and cried on her floor. i feel so... awful. (of course, i proceeded to get wasted friday night, and then kept super-busy yesterday, so i didn't notice again until today.) my mom has been feeling worse and worse. my sister just called to tell me that my mom doesn't want to go over for easter brunch because she just hasn't been sleeping and doesn't feel well. and when i call my mom, who is so warm and so loving, and she is uncomfortable enough that she is abrupt and cranky on the phone, it breaks my heart. and there's nothing i can do about it. and i'm afraid that this is just how she is going to feel (i still think we're expecting that she will feel a fair amount better for a while, since she's stopping treatment, but i'm not sure). and i'm afraid of what's going to come. and i'm afraid for her. and i'm afraid for my sister and me. and then i get afraid that i'm going to make bad things come because i am thinking negatively. i just... am afraid. i am sad. i am overwhelmed. and there's no way to escape it.

anyway. i am sorry for all the depression. i was happier last week but didn't have internet at home, so i didn't blog about anything. next time. um. happy easter.