Feed on POSTS
Guess what?
I’m feeling better about lots of stuff. So much so that I had started up my 365days photo project on new year’s eve 2010. And for everyone’s voyeuristic perusal, I’ve been slowly uploading the images toFlickr. (Wrapping up March photos, gonna upload April images soon!)
Here are my monthly faves thus far:
January
(1/1/2010. Images like this one is the reason why I’m stoked my parents are technologically-illiterate.)
February
(2/17/2010. Gus and I briefly re-united as China Loca to play a 5-song set at Anna’s house party. Our friend Mullet played the beats through Gus’s iPod. This is us during “band practice” a few nights before the show.)
March
(3/4/2010. I started working for a chocolatier in February to earn some extra cash. I learned to make truffles, custom screening on chocolate, and chocolate mustaches (in the photo). I quit the job a few weeks after this photo because I decided I would rather date the chocolatier than work for him.)
[The following was written in April 2006 for this blog, but somehow got lost in the shuffle and was never published. For shame! This is good inspiration to start writing about food again- yummies of all yummies!]
Eight years ago I became a full-fledged vegetarian because I innocently stumbled upon a book at my community college about the horrors of farmed meat. I went cold turkey (pun semi-intended) and would occasionally eat fish at big family functions when distant relatives thought I had joined a cult because of the lack of animal flesh in my diet.
I began to nibble on chicken years later. When I moved out on my own and didn’t have mama to cook for me, a $5 whole rotisserie chicken that could last me an entire week sounded like a good deal to my broke-college-student brain.
But I’ve been able to abstain from beef and pork this entire time, and I haven’t eaten much chicken at all lately. Even if I did want to eat these big fat animals, there are two things keeping me: 1) I don’t want to get the poops. Bad, bad painful gut poops. 2) I don’t know how to cook meat.
Recently, I’ve comes to terms that part of the reason that I’ve been such a consistent “vegetarian” (fish are just very tasty vegetables with eyes), is because I get anxious in the kitchen and making a salad is way cinchy. So, imagine my mouth-watering surprise when I made a super-deelish noodle soup yesterday afternoon.
Portland has been beautiful lately with the sun casting a yellow glow on ever surface. A cool breeze was blowing through our house when I decided to make some soup with leftover catfish from when I made my mom’s best catfish soup, which is based in tomatoes and onions. I didn't have any tomatoes and so I decided to improvise an entirely new and different soup with ginger, leek, zucchini, catfish, udon noodles, mushrooms and fish sauce (in that order).
This noodle soup dish is by far the yummiest yum thing I've ever made! The ginger was the perfect subtle spice combined with the leek. Small chunks of zucchini offered a soft texture that fit well with the broth. The udon noodles was just right on the verge of being overcooked, absolutely tender with a silky softness and it had been infused with the flavor of the fish sauce in the soup. The mushrooms added an smokey flavor to the entire production. And the catfish was just sublime. My goodness! After I ate all the noodles, I had a second helping of just the soup and catfish.
My mama would be proud.
The secret to catfish soup, or any soup that may use fish sauce as part of the base, is to use quality fish sauce. Mama always says to buy the most expensive bottle (at about $3) because if you skimp on fish sauce, the soup will taste like you’re a cheap ass.
Here’s the brand mom told me to get:
I’m slowly starting to appreciate Portland, Oregon again, and it’s so easy to fall in love with this city. This is the first spring that I’ve spent in America since 2006, that’s three years of missing springtime in America!
These are the reasons how this new season back has been good to me:
27. Rainbows at 8:30 PM
28. Chai and soy lattes from friends at my every whim.
29. Blossoms.
30. Four-hour night bike ride from SE to N and back- and not a drop of rain.
31. Cheap sushi, veggie pho in beef broth, soy chorizo or curry and cauliflower burritos.
32. Awesome luck with vintage loafers at thrift stores.
33. Craft culture. Hand-made revolution.
34. “Free box” culture.
35. Berries! Oranges! Chinook salmon!
36. Patio lunchies and back yard picnics.
37. All of the hours of sunlight.
38. The chocolatier boyfriend.
More: Counting: The Little Things
Filed under: Big Bang, Fotorama, Music Junk, Party Party, PDXcitement, Razorcake Columns
From Razorcake #53
Published in November 2009.
Illustration by Bill Pinkel.
Hyperboles are perfect for emphasis or if you’re desperate to make a point. I have a propensity for overstatement because it’s more interesting to say that I’m practically a born-again virgin rather than explain how I was stranded in a Muslim country during the prime of my fertility. My own inclination for hyperbole sometimes causes confusion for myself even. Like I really have to think about it when I say that I didn’t sleep while I lived in Bangladesh.
I did sleep though, it just never felt like it. At the beginning, the work load left me with an average of four and a half hours every night. It got to a point where five hours of restless, fitful slumber felt like a godsend. I slept just enough to push through another day.
When the work finally waned and became manageable, other things robbed me of sleep: heat, mosquitoes, nightmares, anxiety, pollution and the constant ricochet of car horns battling it out in the chaos of urban, developing-world traffic. After nearly a year and a half of hanging on by an unraveling thread, I finally returned home and slept. And slept. And slept.
Though I slept, I couldn’t rest because I tossed and turned and mumbled my way through anxiety-ridden nightmares about the people I had left behind and suffocated beneath looming questions of how life is unapologetic and will discard anyone. When I would finally be forced awake, it wasn’t from the blare of an alarm.
I had been living in a place where there was so much noise pollution that I didn’t hear myself breathe—to the point where I woke to the startling sound of my own breathing.
* * *
Coming home has been tough in crippling ways I had not imagined. The first show I went to was at a house I had never been to. Art had set up the show and asked Gus and I to do the door in exchange for Hamm’s. I was relieved to have an excuse to not go downstairs to a basement full of people brought together by the false comraderie of DIY punk. Yep, I was depressed.
I was depressed and angry and frustrated and lost and wanted nothing more than to not feel that way.
The band that I had wanted to see played last. I waited in the kitchen, still collecting gas money and marking the insides of wrists until I heard them start their set. I shut the cash box and tucked it under my arm and climbed downstairs. I shouted along to the songs I knew and danced like crazy to the songs I had not heard before. When their set was over I waited for a revelation—for that spark in me to ignite again. But I felt nothing.
We filed up the stairs and spilled onto the front porch. I sat on the steps, with foggy eyes and a void inside my chest, and looked around at the people and their conversations and deemed that none of it was worthwhile.
What does a girl do if the one thing that used to bring her inexplicable joy has come to mean nothing? She goes home and stays in bed. She spends days inside, during a summer she daydreamed about but can’t bring herself to step into. She tries not to think because thoughts are painful and she doesn’t know what to do with them. She finds no comfort in music, being home, friends or sleep. She laid still, ensconced within the weight of blankets, and wonders whether time—how we orbit around the sun—is benevolent or malevolent.
Damn, I was a pitiful.
But I could only trudge through that daze for so long, kicking up bitterness and resentment and blinding myself in its dust. I did the only thing I knew to do—to push through days and nights one at a time. To hope against hope that the darkness couldn’t be blacker. I also started drinking again, and dancing too. Shakin’ my ass and booze, that helped.
Perhaps my faith in music, and all the stuff around it, is salvageable. And it was that faith that emboldened me so that I may con my way onto dancing onstage with Girl Talk.
My black-hoodie-black-t-shirt-black-bandana friends who may not know about this Girl Talk, I shall explain. He’s a white dude from Pennsylvania who treats music like math creating an alchemy of dance-induced euphoria. He’s a mash-up artist who creates music from songs that have bled into our collective consciousness by combining them into a soundtrack that would follow us through dreams about our young adulthood. Stuff like mashing The Zombies and Nine Inch Nails, Phil Collins and Ludacris. What I’m trying to say is that this dude takes the best (and sometimes worse) of pop music and makes you wanna dance your face off to it.
And the kids, the ones who are a decade younger than me and all look like aspiring American Apparel models, love Girl Talk. Hundreds of them crammed toward the stage at the Roseland Theater to catch of glimmer of the white dude from Pennsylvania hunched over a couple laptops. I lucked out and scored a photo pass that allowed me to shimmy around in that narrow walkway just in front of the stage, where dozens of bodies were pressed up against a long black rail, keeping the kids a comfortable distance from their salvation. But press folks were only allowed at the foot of the stage for a few songs so I had to figure out a way to avoid getting tossed into the single mass of swaying, sweaty bodies.
Even in my watered-down whiskey haze, I was able to summon the wherewithal to hash out a plan inside my muddled brain. I waited for just the right moment, sometime during the second song when one of the security dudes stepped away from the stage and I slipped pass behind him. My feet scurried up the side and I ran up a few steps only to be greeted by another brooding dude in a tucked-in polo shirt. He pressed his shoulder against mine, “You’re not allowed here.”
I pressed back, shouting, “I just wanna dance.” He pointed at my wristband and shook his head.
It’s not as if I had been pining for months for the moment where I could get onstage to dance with this white dude from Pennsylvania who’d figure out the algo/rhythm to pop music, I had not even considered it. But in that instance, that was all I desired.
“You don’t understand,” I pleaded, pretending like I was capable of forming coherent sentences. “I’ve been living in a developing country for a year and a half. I’ve gone through so much bullshit. I’m not gonna do anything. I just wanna dance!”
Security dude in a tucked-in polo shirt stepped back, and I flounced through. I marched right onto the center of the stage and looked out at all the hundreds of heads and arms, bobbling and flailing, hypnotized by this white dude from Pennsylvania and his computers. I joined the other revelers onstage, forgot about all the world’s burdens and just shook my head as I tried to recall how I got there. It was like I figured out the abracadabra of bypassing the normally rigid and humorless men who guard things—play the I’ve been living in a developing country card and watch the gates open. And then dance. And dance. And dance.
* * *
You get to this point— a wall. A wall so high you can’t even make out the top of it. And you stand there and stare and feel defeated. You throw stones at it, you grow tired, you try to ignore it. But you know you want to climb the fuck out of it because that’s what the wall is for and that’s why you’ve got arms and legs.
Climbing the wall isn’t going to be fun. It’s going to make you question all the decisions you’ve ever made. It’s going to make you think about whether you actually love the things you say you can’t live without and whether you actually despise the things you think make the world a terrible place to inhabit. You get to this point where you no longer feel passion nor vitriol. You’re overwhelmed in apathy and you don’t even fucking care about loving or hating and you just want not to feel at all. That’s scary.
The sound of my lungs expanding as I inhale and contracting as I exhale shouldn’t frighten me. But in these moments it’s a constant reminder that I’m alive rather just existing. Living and existing are two different beasts and I’m wrestling to figure out which I can plow through. Some days are easier than others, some days knock me down. At the very least I have sleep, and I can wake up to try again tomorrow.
March is Women’s History Month. March is also National Caffeine Awareness month and National Athletic Training month, which kinda cheapens the notion of recognizing the achievements of women for an entire month when it’s celebrated alongside the importance of stretching for maximum athletic performance.
We, as a country, ain’t perfect, but we’re trying.
Although America is no beacon of egalitarianism, it’s still relatively easier to live as a woman in the U.S. than in other places because:
12. I can laugh loudly.
13. I can wear clothing that does not cover my shoulders or my ankles.
14. I can go bra-less and wear a tank top and cut-off shorts.
15. I can get drunk.
16. I can have opinions.
17. I can share my opinions freely.
18. I can disagree and argue with men.
19. I can look men in the eye.
20. I can tell men to “Fuck off.”
21. I can cuss.
22. I can make my own decisions.
23. I can not say anything if I don’t feel like it.
24. I can walk outside alone at noon and at midnight.
25. I can tell my father that he is wrong and still love and respect him.
26. I can own property.
More: Counting: The Little Things
In the realm of things we take for granted, we seldom acknowledge the noise and sounds (and lack thereof) around us.
8. I can hear the sound of my own breath while I am sleeping. This may seem silly until you consider the massive amount of noise pollution in so many developing countries. Endless blasts of car horns, engines rumbling, pounding of metal, circular saws screeching, merchants shouting, the chorus of rusty bicycle bells. A week after I returned to Portland, I was taking a mid-afternoon nap and was startled awake by the sound of my own breathing because I had not heard it for so long.
9. Regardless of the time of day, I do not have to strain to hear the sound of the wind. While in Chittagong, there was quiet sometime after midnight and before sunrise, but there was always the persistent white noise of a fan whirling.
10. I do not have to strain to hear wind blowing through trees and the waves of rustling leaves.
11. There are trees.
More: Counting: The Little Things
In my ongoing effort to remain positive, I’m gonna be counting all the little things that make everything around me exceedingly beautiful and we’ll see how many things we ought to be grateful for but take for granted.
Let us begin with water.
1. Hot showers. Even after being home for eight months, I still marvel at how soothing and wonderfully comforting a hot shower is. I still think about how lucky I am to stand beneath the soft beat of a shower head while it’s gushing hot water. And all I have to do is to turn a knob. Which brings me to…
2. All I have to do is to turn a knob and there will be water.
3. I can drink from the tap.
4. I can brush my teeth from the tap.
5. The tap has cold and hot water.
6. Public water fountains. Desegregated.
7. Toilets. That flush on their own, or just by pressing a tiny lever.
More on its way: Counting: The Little Things
Filed under: Big Bang, DIY Mania, Fotorama, Operation Engrish Prease, PDXcitement, Razorcake Columns, When I Grow Up, WTFlux
From Razorcake #51, which came out in July 2009. This was a column I had written while still in Bangladesh in anticipation of returning home.
A convergence of greed, debt and consumerism—hallmarks of modern-day Americana—has exploded in our collective red, white and blue faces. The economy and us, we’re on a break. Our honeymoon, that flourishing period of my young adult life where jobs were to be had and money was made to be spent (not saved), was gorgeous and felt right. The economy and us felt invincible. We were in love with one another, we indiscriminantly lavished it with our ever-increasing expendable income and it gave us a living wage and encouragement to incure debt, Dang, it was to be.
Until it wasn’t.
Until we realized that the economy is a cruel mistress, that she was being bedded by irresponsible home mortgage lenders. We broke up, and it hasn’t been easy. The economy wants all its stuff back, like all that money it lent you. Or worse yet, it took all the friends you made together, like your job.
* * *
This is what I’m coming home to face: a poor analogy for the collapsed economy. I am conflicted because I am both ecstatic and anxiety-ridden about my return.
Ultimately, I am more stoked than not because having lived the past 18 months in a developing, conservative Muslim country leaves me wanting nothing more than to go home where even the toughest things, like finding gainful employment, seems easier than spending another day in a place where so much of who I am is constantly repressed.
It is with this infinite optimism of a more fruitful life back home in the States that I am reaching out to the Razorcake Readership ™. I need ya’ll to help me find a job.
I’m making a plea to my friends to let me know if they might know someone who might know someone who might want to employ me in the greater Portland, Oregon area. (I might be willing to move, but the job will have to be insanely lucrative and/or involves me being the personal assistant to Joyce Carol Oates or Michael Cera. [Or better yet, a benefactor is always welcomed.])
To help you to help me, I’ve attached my resume. Feel free to photocopy and distribute to anyone who has a payroll.
Objective: Get money. Get paid.
Education:
- California State University. Bachelor of Arts Degree in Journalism with a concentration in Photojournalism. Minor in Women’s Studies.
Accrued debt: $12,800 – Remaining balance: $10,800
Awards & Distinctions:
- Margaret Duff Elementary School Spelling Bee Finalist (1st-3rd Grade Division)
- S.A.N.E. Anti-Drug Use Campaign Poster Winner: A crayon drawing of an aluminum garbage can brimming with stuffed black plastic garbage bags, fish bones, generic pills, packs of cigarettes, empty “XXX” beer bottles with the slogan boldly written above, “Don’t Do Drugs / There Just Trash.” (Yes, I’m aware, wrong “their.” I was a nine-year-old ESL student, cut me some slack.)
- Honor Roll / G.A.T.E. (Gifted and Talented Education) Student / Chronic Asthma / Gigantic Geek
Employment History:
1997
Sunny Cleaners – Quality control robot who slipped plastic bags over freshly-pressed garments. The heat and humidity of working in a dry cleaner was compounded by its location in southern California. I’d end my shift with salt chunks tangled in my hair and a white ring around the neckline of my oversized black MTX Starship t-shirt. My awkward Korean boss, a man who found his wife through an arranged marriage, asked me, in all seriousness, “You don’t have many friends, do you?”
1998
Toys ‘R’ Us – It felt like a rite of passage when an irate customer accosted me on Xmas eve because he was forced to wait in a very long line. I smirked. A Latino goth co-worker tried to gift me a stolen VHS copy of Disney’s Mulan to prove his crush on me. I frowned.
Disneyland – The first job I had with a uniform dress code, but had the benefit of roaming the amusement park after work. But being at Disneyland alone is a sad reminder of our ultimately loneliness. Quit after two weeks.
1999
Insurance Underwriting Firm – Learned to use a foot-pedal operated transcription machine. Typed so much I couldn’t grip a pen. First exposure to cubicles and fluorescent lights. Realized that some people spend all of their middle age here. Terrified.
2000
Wound & Wound Toy Co. – A wind up toy store. I bought Gus the Nunzilla, a wind-up box-shaped nun that waddled about while shooting sparks out of her mouth. My boss was a professional at wearing ape suits in Hollywood films.
2001 – 2002
Ebay PowerSeller – Exhibited initiative and entrepreneurship by shopping. This job was an excuse for me to go to a thrift store every week to buy t-shirts for 99 cents and then resell them for $10. Paid the rent and upheld the American spirit of enterprise
Learning Resource Center Peer Tutor – If you graduated from an American public high school, you are more than likely lacking in the ability to write a cohesive academic paper as you had not been equipped with these skills. In comes your peer tutor—me! How’s it feel to be tutored in English by a non-native English learner?
2003
Screenwriter’s Assistant – The woman I worked for penned two qausi-well-known films, one’s about life from a parrot’s perspective and the other is a fairy tale. I know I signed a confidentiality agreement, but the film she was working on while I was her assistant had to do with competing sportscasters, one of whom was a female-to-male transman. When not taking dictation or transcribing her screenplay, I assisted her in errands and learned about the value of cobblers and affordable groceries at Trader Joe’s.
Los Angeles PBS Station’s New Media Associate – My first grown-up job. Salary, health benefits, rolling office chair. While on the clock: got told to “act my age”, bet on my first NCAA pool, regularly reprimanded for forgetting to turn on my boss’s computer for her, maintained and updated station website through content management system, watered boss’s cacti. Cried three times during first months. Mom suggested that menopause was the reason behind my boss’s cruelty.
2004-2005
Los Angeles PBS Station’s New Media Associate – Became an expert at killing time and subsequently developed an addiction to celebrity gossip blogs and a newfangled social networking website called MySpace. Used my salary to become a card-carrying member of the ACLU, NOW and Planned Parenthood, subsequently resulting in a deluge of junk mail from leftist organizations asking for donations. Began to suffer from acute fluorescent-light poisoning, symptoms of which included malaise and “working for the weekend.” Retired.
2005
High School After-School Tutor – Someone placed at-risk high school kids in my care and nobody got hurt.
Ebay PowerSeller’s Associate – Earned a ridiculous butt-load of money (by my lowly standards) helping a woman sell “vintage” purses. Ladies love bags, and we had sacks full of them. Consumerism is beautiful sometimes.
Green Noise Records – Blasted Reigning Sound, Bent Outta Shape and The Black Lips.
2006
Volunteer Oral English Instructor in Hunan, PRC – Taught 1,450 Chinese adolescent students. Managed to burst into tears in only four classes.
2007
Volunteer Oral English Instructor in Hunan, PRC –
Green Noise Records – Blasted Underground Railroad to Candyland, The Zombies and The Boys.
2008
Dishwasher – Operated the Jackson ES-2000 dishwasher. Operated mop and mobile mop bucket station. Smoked out with head cook and prep cook.
Volunteer Literature Teacher in Chittagong, Bangladesh – Learned that four hours of sleep and insurmountable responsibilities and stress might result in an optical floater which is the degeneration of one’s retina and over degeneration of one’s mental an emotional health. Created an academic literature curriculum geared towards south Asian students. Educated the next batch of female leaders of this region. Superhero.
2009
Volunteer Literature Teacher in Chittagong, Bangladesh – Survived.
American – Unemployed in an non-employing economy.
Additional Skills:
Sari wrapping, spring roll rolling, free-hand embroidery, block-printing novice, advanced ability to use Photoshop stamp filter,
Favorites:
TV Sitcom: Small Wonder
Running shoes: Brooks Adrenaline GTS
Thing to eat in a bowl: Pho
Xmas present: Long-reach stapler from my youngest brother
Means of sustenance: Employment.
Hire me.
