Last June, I bought a parcel of lettuce, that I immediately stored in the fridge, and left for a couple days. When I took it out to make a salad and washed it, I found a very small snail.
A New Hobby
A good friend once called it "the magpie instinct," for there are certain things—fripperies—women, in general, are suckers for and can often be found hoarding for no reason: tarot cards, pretty stationery, postcards, glorified vaseline in pretty tins. Particularly everything scented, from personal perfumes to stickers to diffusers to candles.
Tarot of the Imagination, by Ferenc Pinter, my favorite Tarot deck of all time, not a slumber party diversion so much as a work of art. I ask you, how could one not covet this?
I think you see where I am going with this: I am the first to admit my "magpie instinct" is quite strong, and thus it is that I collect all of the above, as funds allow. Note I say "as funds allow", for pretty things that do not directly contribute to survival are considered by others as "luxury goods" and are therefore expensive.
Let's do the math, shall we?
There are generally three things that go into a candle: wax, wick, and additives, such as fragrance and dye. For wax I chose soy, because I've found soy burns cleaner and doesn't give off the oily smell that paraffin does when burned, not to mention paraffin is a known source of environmental toxins*. For a wick, I chose wood, because in my experience wooden wicks produce almost no noticeable smoke—except when being lit and put out—while cotton wicks produce a low level of near continuous smoke. Plus, the crackling sound wood wicks make is really neat, almost like a mini fireplace. Additives are the most costly, costing me around 3300 KRW (about 3 USD) for every 200mL candle I make. I don't bother with dyes, because they're one more additive to morph into harmful compounds when burned, and when in doubt, the creamy surface of a plain wax candle goes with any container or interior decor scheme.
Though this pumpkin-colored candle by Luminology, against pastel mint porcelain, is quite adorable.
This brings me to a total of 8500 KRW for a candle that gives me about 50 hours of burn time. About 17 cents per hour is far cheaper even than the cheapest decent candle on the market, for a product that's tailored specifically to my tastes... not to mention that it's the making of the candle that's the fun part.
So lo, my first batch of candles:
Freezer Burn!
Now that "Figure Queen" Kim Yuna is all set to retire (though you can bet your imaginary gold medal that politicians will be demanding that she reemerge when the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics roll around four effing years from now), I thought I might post a retrospective of my favorite programs...
When is a Bolognese is not a Bolognese?
In my travels on the virtual spiderweb that the denizens of the planet Earth so like to frequent, I have come across a unique creature called a Heston blumenthal (note to self: assess the possibility that the Linnean name of this species will be subject to change based on phylogenetic evidence). What is most interesting about H. blumenthal is that it is the first discovered species that subsists on entropy: that is, in order to get from point A to point B, H. blumenthal adds several steps that increases the total amount of entropy generated, and by this process seems to thrive.
Greetings from Yangyang
There are those moments that are so perfect that the picture practically takes itself. This was one of those moments.
I think every summer, I make at least one visit to Gangwon-Do (Gangwon Province). I'm not the only one: the rugged natural beauty makes the place a popular summer holiday destination for nature-lovers: mountain ranges and cliffs overlooking a sea teeming with life, supported by freezing nutrient-rich currents that come following the coast from the north.
When I go to Gangwon-Do, it's usually to trek Seollak-San with my college's Alpine Association. This summer, my destination was a little further south, the quiet coastal village of Yangyang.
A quick note about eating out
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Good Eats
It's been quite a while since my last post, during which I did a rather hellish OB/GYN round and a physically exhausting but also highly entertaining GS round. And now it's finally summer holidays! So an update on what I've recently been up to, and things I would like to do during my newfound (and short-lived) freedom. Predictably, it's all about food.
In fact, it's high time I updated my bookmarks list, mainly because the traffic I contribute to certain food blogs and cooking channels on Youtube far, far outstrips the sum total of the visits I make to those websites to the right column in the past year. In addition to Smitten Kitchen, 101 Cookbooks and Simply Recipes, I've discovered Foodwishes, Cooking With Dog, ShinShine, and Eat a Duck I Must (the last title which I find really cute: a phonetic approximation of the Japanese "itadakimasu" into English). I've also found the various About.com guides to ethnic food to be a rich repository of surprisingly excellent recipes.
So some of the things I've recently cooked:
Hot Dogs with an "Asian" Twist
It is my philosophy that cooking should never be considered drudgery, and the difference between the work of an enthusiastic or resentful cook is most apparent with food. It's a great hobby, and as I've said before, it's a good way to relieve stress, being such an intensely sensory, hands-on experience.
But putting food on the table on a daily basis is a little different from doing it occasionally as a hobby. It's a commitment, and you have to suck it up and remind yourself not to weasel out when you feel like you can't be bothered and would rather have takeout. And I've found that in order to achieve that, you've got to pick your battles and make compromises, just like you do when working. And cooking for yourself on a regular basis is a sort of test of one's managerial and logistical skills, even more than one's cookery.
Case in point, I have a really hard time using up the ingredients I buy, mostly because I rarely cook for more than two people at a time and have to use small portions (and even then I end up with leftovers). It kind of broke my heart every time I had to throw away something that cost good money to buy, and after a recent cleaning frenzy in which I must have cleared out at least five kilos of produce from the fridge, and spent about an hour scrubbing the residue from the crisper, I resolved to limit myself strictly to cooking what's in the fridge that day.
Yesterday, browsing one of my favorite cooking blogs, I came across this recipe for a twist on the classic hot dog with an "asian" slaw and substituting ketchup for sriracha. I resolved to make it as soon as I got back to my own kitchen, not only because it looked really good, but because I saw an opportunity to deploy a lot of things I already had in the pantry: sriracha, mustard, peanut butter and toasted sesame oil, rice wine, and an andouille sausage that isn't traditionally used in hot dogs but which I thought would go fabulously with a spicy sauce.
Trouble is, I had no cabbage, nor Napa cabbage. Resisting the impulse to buy more (also, the hot humid weather and the long walk to the grocery store was a good deterrent), I remembered that a carrot I already had in the fridge could be a good substitute. Then I was at a loss to find a way to shred said carrot without a mandoline. Luckily, H.'s suggestion of using a potato peeler to strip long ribbons from the carrot worked like a charm. I also julienned an Asian pear, because I remembered that the Korean version of steak tartare is garnished with pear and sesame oil, which go together much better than you'd think.
The sauce was really fun to make, and to make a couple of improvisations to. I omitted the canola oil, substituted the vinegar for a mixture of mirin, soy sauce (the Chinese/Korean kind), and a dash of anchovy sauce. I tossed it all with the carrot and pear, and assembled it at the end: toasted bread spread with Korean mustard, the Andouille sausage, the carrot-pear slaw, some picked onions I had on hand, and a dash of sriracha.
It was messy to eat (like hot dogs always are when they have all the fixings), but it was pretty damn good... in fact, I think this was better because cabbage would have been too thick, too stiff, and blandly watery, diluting all the intense flavor of the other ingredients. H. gave it a 9.6 out of 10 (though he rarely grades my cooking below a 9, so I suspect he's biased).
So there remains dinner to cook today. I'm reminded of the three heads of cauliflower in the fridge. Maybe I'll combine them with eggs to make a cauliflower Spanish omelette. The possibilities are intriguing.
Ruminations of a Bud, Emerging From a Long Winter
Peter Callesen
if there is justice in some other world, those like myself, whom nature forces into lives of abstinence, should get the lion’s share of all things,
If only...
...that bastard with a bleached coxcomb hadn't looked me head to toe and sneered as we lined up in the field.
ㅅㅂ 새끼, 나도 나오기 귀찮았다고. 전혀 열심히 할 생각으로 나온건 아니었어, 근데...
I hadn't played soccer since the 6th grade, but damned if I was going to let a wet-behind-the-ears, musclebound shit look down on me just because I was the only double-X on the field.
네 이놈 오늘 나한테 제데로 걸렸다. 내가 여자가 얼마나 무서울 수 있는지 보여주마.
I wished I could have seen the look on his face an hour later, as I snatched the ball from under his nose and shot it straight into the goal.
In Which I Discover a Great Time-Saver
My two favorite soups: bacon-lentil soup and Dakgyejang, Korean spicy chicken soup. I also love the mirepoix-based chicken soup a friend gave me the recipe to, but that usually disappears before I get an opportunity to photograph it.
I like to cook, almost more than I love to eat. I like the soothing and monotonous labor of chopping vegetables. I like the smells and the sizzle of the frying pan, watching pale dough rise and turn golden brown in the oven. I like the feeling of turning raw ingredients into something far greater than the sum of the parts. When I'm feeling blue, cooking almost always gets me in a better mood.
The trouble with cooking is that the sky is the limit.
The True Measure of a "Gentleman"
To list all the assholey things Psy does in this video:
The "Han" Question
Excellent article by Gord Sellar about the supposed uniqueness of 정 in Korean culture, with a few mentions of 한 and 화병.
But as much as I liked the article, I found myself shaking my head its description of 한 (han), because to me "victimhood" was never not what 한 was, or at least, not the best way of summing up 한.
As I understand it, 한 is loss and sorrow, made all the more tragic because it is a sorrow so profound and so deeply existential that it can never be truly pacified. It is linked to the Animist tradition of seeing humans as mere vehicles for primal forces of longing and hate that transcend death, living on in nature, passed down through generations. It is also influenced by the Buddhist concepts of karma and the idea that peace can never be had until one fully renounces the world.
While this particular way of framing 한 may be culture-specific, stories of ghosts—souls stuck in a limbo between life and death because of unfinished business, regrets, or vengeance—are universal. And the canon of Western literature is positively lousy with stories of lasting grudges and sorrows tainting entire dynasties: Wuthering Heights, for one, and possibly the entire body of Faulkner's work.
So I have long been puzzled when Koreans assert that 한 is not just a word that stands for a culture-specific way of communicating an emotion that all cultures have an experience of, but a characteristic, even a defining one, of some collective Korean psyche.
Roundup of the Week: Part 2
H. has got me hooked on Bubble Bobble, a really old game from the time computer screens were black. It's the classic beat-a-whole-obstacle-course-full-of-monsters-and-rescue-the-girl kind of scenario, except the heroes are a couple of bubble-blowing dinosaurs that make happy sounds as they bounce and eat cherries and cake and ice cream, with the mother of all ear worms playing in the background:
When—that is, if ever—we get the chance to live together, H. and I are going to beat all one hundred levels of this game, which he hears is near impossible to achieve without two players.
I've passed by 팔당호, just beyond the eastern tip of Seoul, several times without ever really knowing what it was. I'm usually returning from a backpacking trip in the rural areas—the kind that are more fun to reminisce about than to actually experience—on a bus creeping through traffic along 강변북로, following the Han River back to Seoul and to the corrosive glitter and ease of civilization. It's usually evening—sometimes very late in the evening—and I'm usually heavy-lidded, worn-out, and about ready for a shower and a nice soft bed. Weariness sometimes turns me introspective and even poetic, and the weird blue of the falling dusk, the dark shapes of the mountains looming like sleeping forms—often, in late spring or summer, shrouded in a thick mist off the water—and the broad, still, mirror-like river provides a good backdrop for the peculiar mood I am in.
Before the coming summer is out H. and I will have at least made plans to visit the place, instead of being content with a glimpse from the window of a bus speeding by. I imagine us standing side-by-side, watching the outline of the mountains dissolve and their shadowy forms seep into the deepening blue mist. Holding hands but off in our separate worlds, each of us thinking our own strange thoughts.
Roundup of the Week: Part 1
The weather is getting warmer, though at night breezes still raise the gooseflesh on bare arms. I first heard this song on a summer night, when I was lonely and depressed but did not regret having taken the leap to being single for what was perhaps the first time in my adult life. I'm not single anymore, which I regard as a bit of a mixed blessing, but weather like this still reminds me of that feeling, and of this song.
Teresa Teng was such a lovely lady, in the truest sense of the word. It was a shame she died so young.
This rabbit feeds Chuck Norris clover. In fact, I bet it not only pumps, but eats pure iron on a daily basis.
How to beat a hangover
Last night, while he was out, H. sent me a text ("Miss you") for absolutely no reason at all, and even called once to ask "how I was doing," something he never does, at least by phone. It was pretty cute, until I remembered that H. dislikes electronic communication (instant messenger, internet phone, video chat, phone calls, etc.) and therefore he must either be drunk or otherwise not in his right mind. Indeed, I later found out that H. had knocked back three mugs of beer, three shots of whiskey, and four shots of Chinese liquor that night—and that was just up to the point where he could still count reliably. Which somehow made it all the more endearing, that the man could be sloshed out of his mind and still think of me.
Hello world.
I would not have had any reason to care, if it had not been for H. It's been years and many things have changed since he was at KEK, not the least of which was switching majors, but he still knows people from those days, some of whom were still in Ibaraki as far as he knew. It became apparent from the downing of the home page servers and the news reports coming in from Ibaraki Prefecture that KEK had not escaped damage, though how bad there was no way of knowing.
Some Thoughts about the Situation on the Peninsula
I had this sudden urge to see "Sophie Scholl" a couple days ago. I had no idea why, but then I fast forwarded to the interrogation scene... and the words of the interrogator sounded eerily familiar. No room for dissent. Fear and panic in the political climate. Eager reliance on a "strong" leader. War-hawking.
Juvenilia: Telephone Poles
The cool shade was left way back,
Back down the road.
I left it for
Parching sun
Parched grass
And an undiluted sky.
Ramblings of the day - Homesickness
I have never had any place I called home, probably because I moved so much as a kid. Which is odd, as nostalgia is such a strong force in my consciousness, especially my aesthetic consciousness. I suppose I had a series of homes, so I guess you can't technically call my odd fits of nostalgia "homesickness."
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