[NSPW19] where we go falling down (kawi, ii).

September 13, 2019

meal number five is the big group meal. there are six of us, and we come prepared to eat.

i’ve budgeted the meal out to roughly $60-80 per person, including tax and tip but not including drinks. i have an idea of what we’ll be ordering, and i half-jokingly let them know in advance that i’ll be setting the menu. whether in deference to that or because they trust me, they tell me, order whatever you want!

one of my friends has a soy and sesame allergy, which makes it tricky. soy and sesame are all over korean food, and i’m not entirely sure how much they’ll be able to accommodate—even if a chef is willing to accommodate, sometimes, there are limits to how much she is able to do so. they’re kind, though, and work it out. the server comes back with a list of foods that are available to her; he comes back later with an i’m sorry, there’s actually tamari in the spicy tuna kimbap. he isn’t an asshole about it. i always get nervous because, honestly, you never know. people can be assholes about allergies and dietary restrictions.

we order drinks, then we order food, and i become the asshole who asks, laughing but in earnest, if we could order the biji jjigae on its own without the rib eye. the server goes back to the kitchen, consults the chef herself. i look away. he comes back and says that, yes, they could do that, and i’m happy for it but also uncomfortable. i’m not someone who likes asking for favors, even favors i’d pay for. i don’t like to be noticed.

all i want is to be noticed.

people don’t typically think i’m korean. when i was in college in california, people would ask if i were cambodian, and then, later, it became, are you chinese? half chinese?

it’s happened on many occasions that i’ve been waiting for the subway and older chinese adults have come up to me and started talking in chinese. i always smile, say, i’m sorry; i’m not chinese, and they pause, give me That Look that says bad chinese girl! not knowing chinese! as they walk away.

i always want to protest, don’t give me That Look! talk to me in korean! i can speak korean just fine, thank you very much.

there’s a chicken dish on the dinner menu at kawi, and it’s served two ways. the breast is served as a jeong-gol, in a broth with glass noodles, mushrooms, vegetables, and tofu. it comes with two sauces. the rest of the chicken is tossed in a cajun seasoning and fried. they don’t waste any part of the chicken, so the head and the feet are fried along with the legs and thighs. we eat the feet, but none of us is brave enough to eat the head.

in 2012, my paternal grandmother passed away. she was my closest grandparent, the one who raised me and spoiled me rotten because i was my father’s first child and he was her only son. it didn’t matter to her than i was a daughter. she still loved me more than she loved my brother — or, at least, we were closer because i spoke korean, read and wrote it, too.

i forget who asked, but i was asked to give a eulogy at her funeral, and i wrote it out in korean. i gave it to my dad to read to make sure it sounded okay because, sure, i can speak korean but my vocabulary is weak, my spelling atrocious because i can never figure out the rules — is it ㅏ-ㅣ or ㅓ-ㅣ, and, god damn it, how is anyone supposed to know which is which, what are the rules?!?

my dad sat and read what i’d written and promptly burst out laughing. i stared at him until he finally explained, where did you pick up these words? you have the strangest vocabulary.

it’s a great group meal, one i’ll hold onto over the next few weeks. i’ve brought together five friends who’ve never met each other before, and the dinner has gone beautifully, everyone getting along, loving the food, eating to the point of being happily stuffed. there was none of the awkwardness that could occur with a group of strangers.

at the end of it, though, part of me feels off. i wonder if we stayed too long, if we were too loud, too boisterous, if i’ve been coming to this restaurant too often. i wonder if i’d worry about any of this if kawi were any other restaurant.

i don’t know that i would.

three weeks pass before i make it out to kawi again. this is a quiet lunch, just me and a friend, but we don’t really hold back, starting with the tofu and roe and cured madai, then splitting the oxtail and brisket jjim and wagyu ragu. we finish the meal with the blueberry bingsu. luckily, i didn’t eat a full meal at fuku right before kawi this time.

the tofu and roe is incredible, the tofu made in-house. it’s smooth and creamy, the roe adding a gentle brininess, and there’s a caramelized soy sauce as well to bring salt and sweetness. the wagyu ragu i’ve had before; the ragu reminds me of bulgogi marinade; and it’s served over rice cakes. that dish, plus the rice cake dumplings—rice cakes served in a cheesy sauce with parmesan and summer truffle—makes gnocchi feel non-essential, which is a statement i should maybe follow up with, i love pasta, but i’ve never been that enthusiastic about gnocchi.

later, as we’re leaving the restaurant, my friend says that the chef seems like a kind person, that she was watching her interact with her staff in the open kitchen. i say, yeah, she seems like it. i don’t remember if we say anything more about her. i wish i could stop being the person noticing others and start being the person who’s noticed. i wish i could be someone worth seeing. i really wish this didn’t feel like the theme of my life.

recently, i have been learning how nice it is to read books and recognize myself in them. i didn’t grow up reading asian writers, but i also didn’t grow up thinking much about it because i grew up watching korean dramas and listening to korean pop. i grew up in suburban los angeles, where asian people didn’t feel like a minority, and i went to schools where many of my classmates were asian, increasingly so as i got older and started taking mostly (if not entirely) honors and AP classes.

i didn’t need to see myself in the books i was reading.

it’s only now that i kind of see that as a privilege, not to have that added to my plate during my formative years. that’s not to say my adolescence was easy; i was body shamed starting my freshman year of high school, to such an extent that my entire sense of self was destroyed and disintegrated by the time i went to college. i was already so detached from my identity, unable to attribute any kind of value to myself, wanting so badly to disappear myself and my grotesque, oversized body.

spend over a decade of your life wanting to disappear and maybe you’ll learn how to be invisible. maybe that’s the irony of it. i’ve become so practiced in disappearing myself, at least in my mind, that i don’t know how to be visible.

i don’t know how to be someone worth seeing.

the blueberry bingsu is layers of soft, creamy shaved ice and whipped creme fraiche. there’s blueberry syrup that has a tang to it that borders on vinegary. there are macerated blueberries. when they first introduced the blueberry bingsu, they topped it with pancake croutons, i’m told.

my seventh meal at kawi wasn’t supposed to happen until maybe september, but, during my sixth meal, the server tells us that crabs are back in very, very limited edition. the crabs are marinated in a spicy sauce this time, not in the soy sauce-based marinade they were earlier this year, and there are only so many of them available — if they’re available at all. i debate coming back to kawi the next day to see if i can get the crab. she advises that i call before i come to make sure they’re on the menu.

it’s disgustingly hot and humid the next day, and i almost don’t go because it’s disgustingly hot and humid. i can’t get the crabs out of my head, though, how badly i wanted to try them earlier in the summer but missed them, so i head into the city, anyway. i try to take her advice calling before i head over to hudson yards again, but the call doesn’t go through. i almost go back home. i step out of target at hearld square, hear the flash flood warnings on hundreds of iphones go off, and i think, fuck it, and start walking over to the 7 at times square/42nd street. i get to the station just as fat raindrops start falling from the sky, and, fifteen minutes later, i get out at hudson yards to a torrential downpour, complete with thunder and lightning.

they have the crab, though, and it’s one of the last ones. i’m soaked through with sweat and some rain because i got impatient of waiting and ran through the rain once it let up, and i look like shit, and i’m sorry to everyone around me because i’m feeling self-conscious in my body, in how gross and damp i feel.

the crab is delicious, though, and it’s raw, called 개장 (gae-jang) in korean. i don’t typically like raw marinated crab, so i’m surprised at how much i like this, the gochujang-based sauce spicy and gingery, the rice, i suspect the same rice used in the hwe-dup-bahp. there’s a lot of crab in this bowl, and it’s a messy dish, three crab halves intact, meant to be eaten using your hands.

this is my last time at kawi over the summer, and i think it’s a great way to see the season out. as i’m leaving, i see the chef sitting at the bar, chatting with someone. typically, i’d walk along the bar, past her to get to the restroom and leave the restaurant. instead, i look away before we can meet eyes, speed-walk down the other aisle, leave the restaurant, and use the restroom on some other floor of hudson yards. i don’t know when i’ll be back. i’m afraid of having overstayed my welcome.

i’m afraid of having become visible because, even though i want so badly to be seen, i am also terrified of it.

i’m terrified that it’ll turn out to be true, that i really am not worth seeing but that it has nothing to do with my body but everything to do with me.

[NSPW19] the ghost in this love story (kawi, i).

September 12, 2019

there’s a scene i think about constantly.

it’s from the korean drama, my name is kim sam-soon, which was a huge hit when it aired in 2005, and i’d provide a summary were it relevant. the scene i think about, though, requires no context: the secondary character, played by jeong ryeo-won, returns to seoul after years abroad where she was being treated for stomach cancer. in this scene, she’s taken her doctor (and love interest), played by daniel henney, to eat 산낙지 (ssan-nak-ji) and 낙지볶음 (nak-ji bo-kkeum).

she’s excited to eat the foods she’s been craving while away; he’s worried because he’s new to this kind of food and because he’s a doctor—he’s concerned this will upset her stomach.

she laughs, though, tells him not to worry, and i forget how the conversation pivots (as well as the exact dialogue), but she’s still smiling as she starts to eat and says, “see, the thing is, i think i used to shine, but, somewhere along the way, with all the treatment, i think i lost all that. but i used to shine.”

he tells her in all seriousness, “you still shine,” but she shakes it off, tries to shake off the mood, and points at the food, saying they should eat, but it’s still there in her eyes, the sadness and disappointment and longing.

i think about this scene almost every day.

over the course of summer 2019, i go to kawi seven times.

kawi is the momofuku group’s newest restaurant, situated on the fifth floor of hudson yards and helmed by a female korean american chef. the first time i go to kawi, it’s for lunch, three months after they’ve opened. i’ll go back later that same day for dinner because i’ve spent the week examining the menu, trying to decide when to go and what to eat, the problem being that there are items i want to eat on both menus.

at lunch, i go for the rice cake with chili jam, a beautiful take on 떡볶이 (ddeokbokki). the rice is imported from korea and milled in flushing—on one of my later visits, a server tells me that they’re family-owned, that the chef wanted to bring them some business—and they extrude the ddeok in the kitchen themselves. i’m not the biggest fan of 떡 (ddeok) (i’m a “bad” korean that way), but i’m a sucker for ddeok freshly made in house.

i’m a sucker for a lot of things made in-house.

typically, this kind of ddeok is called 가래떡 (ga-rae-ddeok), and it’s typically cut into long strips. at kawi, they coil and smother it with a chili sauce then smother that with a furikake that pops in your mouth. there are paper thin slices of benton ham. the whole thing comes with giant tweezers and a pair of scissors (aka kawi) for you to cut and eat.

it’s a lot of ddeok for one person, especially a person who is not the biggest fan of ddeok to begin with, but it is delicious. it’s good ddeok with that proper balance of softness and chew, and the sauce is flavorful with a light sweetness but not very much heat. it’s the kind of sauce i want to spoon over a bowl of hot rice and eat with a fried egg, which is more or less the greatest compliment i can pay any kind of sauce, to want to spoon it over rice and eat with an egg.

ddeok is not a meal, though, so i also order the mackerel set. i’ve only recently started learning the names of korean foods in english, and mackerel is one of the few fish i know (it’s 고등어 in korean). it’s also one of my favorite fish; when my mum makes it in LA, she buys it fresh, gives it a generous dusting of salt, and cooks it on a hot pan outside in the yard. we eat it hot, as soon as she brings it inside, and i love it with rice (obviously) and ripened kimchi.

the mackerel set from kawi is fascinating to me (still, weeks later) because the smell has been somehow entirely eradicated from the mackerel. it’s not that the dish lacks flavor—the mackerel is meaty, soft, oily, just the way mackerel should be, and it has a nice hit of salt. the oily smell that’s so unique to mackerel, though, so pungent and so overpowering that my parents do not cook mackerel indoors but outside in their backyard—the smell that might offend and put people off is gone.

this is one of the things that will continue to fascinate me about the chef’s food—how her food retains all the soul of traditional korean food while being its own thing, while removing some of the elements of korean food that might put people off. like strong smells.

i never know how i should approach korean words anywhere, whether it’s here, on instagram, in a piece i’m writing to pitch. when i’m in the mood, i provide all the information—the 한글 (hangul), romanization, and translation—but, most days, i just want to provide one thing, sometimes the hangul, sometimes the romanization, and leave it for readers to figure out.

today, i suppose, you’re getting the hangul and the romanization, and that’s it, though i have zero consistency in hyphenating. i’m still figuring that out.

dinner is all about 회덮밥 (hwe-duhp-bahp).

i love hwe-duhp-bahp, even if hwe-duhp-bahp in most places is a giant mound of shredded lettuce over rice, the leftover ends of sashimi tossed haphazardly over the mix. at kawi, it’s a beautiful bowl of generous cuts of 회 (hwe) arranged over rice mixed with perilla and other things scooped over finely shredded cabbage. it comes with a side of 초고추장 (chogochujang) and toasted 김 (geem),

typically, you mix the chogochujang into the rice/fish/lettuce combo, but, at kawi, i start by simply dipping the hwe directly into the chogochujang, wrapping the rice in the toasted seaweed, and, basically, eating the whole thing piecemeal. i like that the seaweed has been cut unevenly, some of the pieces large and unwieldy, others the perfect size. when i’m halfway through the hwe, i mix my remaining chogochujang into the bowl, and i always wonder, whenever there is rice to be mixed, which is the right way to do so? with a spoon or with chopsticks?

it is rare for me to find a space where i feel comfortable; i always feel either like i am too much or not enough wherever i am—like, if i am in a room of korean koreans, i am too american, not korean enough. in a room of korean americans, i am too korean, not american enough.

and then there is also the layer where i often feel like too much, like i feel too much, want too much, whatever too much. i don’t exist in the middle but on the extremes, and i am too loud, too irreverent, too effusive. i am too obsessive.

earlier today, i stop by the strand to look for YA books—or, at least, i go into the strand intending to go upstairs and look for YA books. instead, i make a beeline for the cookbooks, though i have nothing in mind, and find myself in the “asian cooking” section. i start flipping through an, then the mission chinese food cookbook, then hawker fare, and, as i stand there telling myself i can’t really afford to buy books right now, it kind of hits me.

there is an extreme intensity to the food industry. chefs and cooks are known to work brutal hours for shitty pay. they work through holidays, miss family celebrations and milestones, don’t get nearly enough sleep. cooking itself is intense physical labor, and cooks are on their feet all day, exposed to extreme temperatures, can be susceptible to injury. there’s a tendency to romanticize all of this, to package it as some kind of dedication to craft, as passion, and i suppose, yes, it is passion because passion is obsession. passion exists on the extreme, and, sometimes, the singular drive that pushes some of these chefs to the top best exemplifies the obsession and, honestly, the sacrificial ugliness that passion is.

and the thing is, i feel most comfortable in that extreme. it is only when i think about that world that i feel at ease, like i’ve maybe found the place where my “too much” is just fine.

and yet, i also feel entirely invisible because i’m still only ever looking in—i don’t have access to the space that makes me feel okay as who i am.

i haven’t talked about the kimchi at kawi, have i? i wish they sold their kimchi by the jar. when i’m in new york, i crave good kimchi all the time because it is impossible to find, and the kimchi at kawi is, one, delicious and, two, perfect ripened.

the third time i go to kawi, it’s not exactly planned—a good friend is in town, and we decide to go for dinner because it’s been a month since i’ve last gone, and i miss it. i haven’t been so excited by one person’s cooking in … ever, i don’t think, and i want to keep coming back because i want to keep eating the chef’s food. i want to keep tasting what she serves next.

we split the fried cod with yuzu and the oxtail and brisket 찜 (jjim). the fried cod is hot and crispy without being heavy or oily, and the oxtail and brisket jjim has a really great heat to it. the spiciness is not overpowering (not for me, at least), and the oxtail is so tender, falling off the bone, the brisket soft and meaty. it’s a lot of food for the two of us, which isn’t helped by the fact that i arrived at hudson yards forty minutes early, was starving, and decided to eat a spicy chicken sandwich and waffle fries at fuku. i forget—or choose not to believe—that i can’t necessarily eat like i used to when i was younger.

we still get the blueberry 빙수 (bingsu), though. over the summer, i’ll eat the blueberry bingsu four times.

at one point, the chef makes a round of the floor, and i look up just as she approaches, make eye contact. i think i smile. my stomach goes flipping all over the place as my brain seems to short-circuit. all i want to say is, oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, hi.

this post (and the one that will follow) was supposed to be about something different. i originally started drafting it for national suicide prevention week, but i admit i’ve recently become very cagey about talking openly about mental health, especially given the potential consequences of doing so. if we’re open about our mental health, we could be fired, we could be rejected, we could be written off as liabilities, not as smart, creative humans worth investing in.

that’s partly why i find myself growing more and more angry when i think about how people just don’t know how to talk to or “handle” people who are suicidal. i find myself making lists of things i’d tell people not to do if they have someone who’s suicidal in their lives. like, don’t ever imply that suicidal thinking is something we can just think our way out of. don’t insinuate that we’re not trying to “get better” because we enjoy this pain. don’t treat us like projects, like problems to fix. don’t charge in thinking that you’re going to do this and this and this; meet us where we are; ask us what we need. don’t be offended when you aren’t showered with profuse thanks.

don’t give up on us, and don’t write us off.

i go back to kawi for the fourth time a week later, and that’s not exactly pre-planned either. i’m finally able to schedule a meal with another friend, and we decide to go to kawi because i’ve been talking about it non-stop and she was supposed to go a month before but couldn’t. we talk about everything from law school to plastic surgery to growing up asian american. the server gives us a complimentary flank steak kimbap. i wonder if that means i’ve been coming here too often, if that means the chef maybe knows who i am.

what else, what else: don’t approach us as people to be saved; you won’t save us. don’t tiptoe around us, afraid of saying the “wrong” thing and somehow sending us over the edge—stop centering yourself because this isn’t about you. don’t simply insist that we “get help” because, often, the best we can do is just stay alive, because therapy and medication require time, energy, and money, all of which we may not have at our easy disposal. and, by god, don’t report us to HR, especially if you don’t have a personal relationship with us.

the spicy tuna kimbap may be one of my favorite things on the kawi menu, and the kimbap, in general, maybe best exemplifies why the chef’s cooking is so damn cool. she’s not reinventing korean food; she’s not deconstructing it or trying to do something totally new, not in an obvious way, at least. she’s keeping the structures and forms of korean food intact and playing around with it from the inside—and that’s interesting if that’s something you’re interested in, but, if you’re not, that’s fine, too, because her food is delicious.

if you have someone who is suicidal in your life, just show up. let them know that you see them, that, even if they feel like they’re locked in darkness, you can see them in the light. be there and hope for them and believe in them. love them. meet them where they are, and, if they are in a place where they don’t appear to respond, let them know that’s okay—you’ll be there when they’re ready to reach out. you’ll be there, and you’ll get through this together.

the fourth time i go to kawi, the chef’s executing. every time she calls out a dish, i feel sparks go off in the back of my head. how do you articulate to someone how much her food means to you, how much she does?

what is it like to shine?

i love you, egg.

February 24, 2018

call me the egg lady.

i’ve been trying to write this post for over two weeks now, and that’s only if we count the time i “officially” sat down to try to write it. i often wish i was a faster writer, one who could work through her thoughts faster, poop out words easier, and i wish i could turn out more blog posts more regularly.

sometimes, i go down the analytics hole, sad at the dropping numbers and lowered engagement because i don’t have the time to generate more posts more regularly, and, sometimes, i go down the same hole when it comes to instagram, too, because i feel like my life has become so routine, so dull, so blah that i’ve got nothing interesting to share. i feel like i’ve become dull and boring — or maybe i’ve just always been dull and boring; it’s simply that life in a more interesting city while freelancing helped mask that.

it’s been a dry few months creatively, more than usual. december was dry, then january was eaten up by payroll tax reports, W2s, 1099s, and february has thus far been consumed by books (the accounting kind) and bank reconciliations and financial statements. i spend my days chasing cents and dollars, feeling the pettiness that is accounting and rolling my eyes at the ugliness of human behavior, CEOs who expense exorbitant amounts on entertainment, shopping, and other such things while paying their employees minimum wage, even their managers, the ones who likely keep their businesses running.

which kind of leads to … i spend a lot of time thinking about money, about consumerism, about economic class. i think about the things that divide us from each other, these notions we invent sometimes of what elevates one people above another, and i think about all the ways i’m guilty of this, too, me and my upper middle class upbringing and my iced lattes and mid-range skincare.

me and my ability to travel to the extent that i do.

me and my constant want for more when i already have more than so many others do.

me and my privilege, my selfishness, my discontent. me and my hypocrisy. me and all my many shortcomings.

this year, i’ve been thinking about vlogging, which means i’ve been watching a lot of youtube. claire marshall remains my favorite, and i rewatch her videos every so often, even her vlogs, because i find her relatable, interesting, normal. sure, she’s probably earning an income i likely never will, and she lives in an apartment i’d love to have, but she’s still just another human in los angeles who’s working, creating content, living her life.

and she’s a cat lady.

i’ve also recently started watching the frey life non-stop, and it’s great because they vlog daily. mary frey has cystic fibrosis, and, from what i understand, she and her husband started vlogging as a way of documenting their lives when they moved to scotland for peter to pursue grad studies. the vlogs were a means for their friends and family to know what their lives were like, how they were doing, etcetera, and they’ve continued vlogging over the years, recording mary’s life with CF, the daily hours spent trying to clear her lungs, coughing, going to clinic, and monitoring her blood sugar and etcetera etcetera etcetera — and, through it all, through all the pain and health scares and hospitalizations, though all of it, she glows.

last monday, i set up NBC streaming at the office, so we can watch the women’s half-pipe snowboarding finals. i don’t typically have two shits to give about the olympics, but i’ve been following chloe kim, and i want her to win. i want her to get those points and take home the gold. i want her to blow everyone away.

i stop and ask myself if it’s a korean-american thing because she’s korean-american and i’m korean-american, and, yeah, honestly, that’s probably part of it, but the real part is … i like the way she laughs. i like that she’s this tiny korean-american girl with bleached blonde hair who’s got this easy laugh, this grin that takes over her entire face, this joy and exuberance that overflow from her person. she kicks ass at her sport, yes, and she’s been winning medals left and right and setting records, and she’s only seventeen — but, at the end of the day, it’s her love and excitement for her sport that make her glow.

i love that. it makes me root for her even more.

what does it even mean to glow? i’m not talking about happiness or exultation at personal goals reached because, by that definition, chloe kim has no reason but to glow — she’s young and accomplished, and she’s the youngest female gold medalist in her sport. that isn’t what i mean, though, and, regardless, either way, success, prodigy, genius, whatever you want to call it — none of it is any guarantee of someone glowing from within because success, prodigy, genius, whatever you want to call it can be just as toxic as they can be positive.

and, while we’re on this thread, why wouldn’t claire glow? she’s built a successful creative career for herself, creating content and working with brands, and she lives in a gorgeous apartment in DTLA, travels a lot, and is physically fit.

but, again, it’s not about not having any material wants or living that supposed dream life — to glow is to have an effusive quality that comes through regardless of situation. it’s an inner quality that can’t be forced, though i do believe that we can train ourselves in ways to bring out our inner glow because i do believe that we all have that ability to glow — we smother it, though, with fear, insecurity, a lack of confidence, resentment, cynicism, etcetera.

because you could look at mary frey and say, what does she have to glow about? she lives with cystic fibrosis, and it’s a painful, chronic illness that will likely end her life early. you could say it limits her life, what she can do with it, how she can live. somehow, i doubt she would see it that way, though. her life is her life, and she’s only got the one she has, and she’s going to laugh and carry hope with her and find joy in her life as she’s been given it.

which all made me think that i do struggle a lot with malcontent, with resentment at being stuck in california, in a job i don’t enjoy, but that i think i’m lucky being surrounded by the people i am. both my parents have worked since i was a kid, and i’ve never really ever heard them complain about having to work. my coworkers are all really great people who are ungrudgingly, cheerfully putting in long overtime hours because that’s what the job requires. my supervisor isn’t so unlike me — she’s a pianist, not an accountant, but she’s here, kicking ass at her job because she has two kids and she wanted them to have the chance to grow up here in the states.

and, in many ways, i’m lucky that i’m unattached, that i at least have the freedom to keep pursuing what i want to do, that i am able-bodied enough to do so. i’m lucky that i know where i want to go and what i want to do, that i have the skills and ability to back up those wants and seek out opportunities with confidence. i know what keeps me going, keeps me trying, keeps me writing.

i know what keeps me here.

none of that means it’s easy to keep holding on, though.

if you’ve been following the news at all, you’ll know that, last wednesday, a teenager brought an AR-15 to his former school and murdered 17 students, injuring 14 more. you’ll know that the students are taking a stand, vocally and widely expressing their outrage that this — a mass shooting — was allowed to happen yet again, making clear that this government has blood on its hands.

you’ll know that the same talking points have been brought up again. conservatives have been trying to argue that guns don’t kill, people do, that maybe so many kids wouldn’t have died had teachers been armed, that SECOND AMENDMENT SECOND AMENDMENT SECOND AMENDMENT. GOP congresspeople copy-pasted their standard thoughts and prayers and went on with their bloodthirsty ways, lacking the decency to say they’d stop taking blood money from the NRA. people all across america and around the world rightfully asked, what the hell is wrong in this country?

you’ll know that, once again, people keep looping back to the mentally ill. they keep saying that there should be more regulations to prevent the mentally ill from getting their hands on guns. there should be more in-depth background checks for mental health. there should be more protections against the mentally ill.

never mind that the “mentally ill,” as they so condescendingly love to say, are more likely to be victims of violence, not perpetrators of it.

never mind that the asshole, misogynistic, violent, angry, entitled mentality that leads to men shooting up schools, theaters, and churches isn’t mental illness. it’s entirely symptomatic of the patriarchy, toxic masculinity, and hate.

it’s easier to pin shit like that on mental illness, though, isn’t it? it somehow makes it more palatable because it allows the belief that a “normal” person wouldn’t do that, a “normal” person wouldn’t retaliate against some perceived ill against him by committing mass murder, a “normal” person just wouldn’t do that, so he must have been mentally ill.

(unless he’s a person of color. then he must be a terrorist.)

it’s easier to think that these men must be mentally ill — he was depressed; he was schizophrenic; he was bipolar. he wasn’t racist, and he wasn’t a misogynist, and he didn’t have a history of domestic abuse. he was “mentally ill,” and, so, we need to protect ourselves, our children, against the “mentally ill.”

this logic and the evasion of -isms that supports it are as laughable as straight people acting like they need to protect themselves and their children from transgender people, so much that it must be against the law for people to use public bathrooms that align with their gender identity. it’s laughable because it’s outrageous; trans people are so much more likely to be victims of violence than to perpetrate violence. they’re so much more likely to be assaulted, physically and sexually, than to assault, and yet our society is so terrified of trans people, which, yes, maybe it’s true — straight people are terrified of trans people, just not in the ways that they claim or tell themselves.

as human beings, we invent reasons to justify our thinking, and these attacks on trans people are no different. straight people aren’t afraid of trans people assaulting them; they’re afraid of having the supposed social mores of this country up-turned and their dominance taken from them. they’re afraid of having their worldviews challenged, of having to step back and examine themselves, their thinking, their beliefs. they’re afraid of the possibility of realizing that they were wrong, that maybe they’re not actually the good, loving people they liked to think they were — they’re bigots to put it bluntly, and their love is conditional and warped with hatred.

i tend to believe that, if you want to see the character of a person, look at how s/he treats other people, people who are different from her/him, whether they’re people of color, queer people, disabled people, the Other in any way. does s/he treat them with respect and dignity? does s/he extend the same generosity and kindness to them as s/he does to people who look and believe and love like s/he does?

or is s/he quick to dehumanize them, to stomp on their rights, to treat them as lesser, as Other, as sub-human? does s/he treat them with disgust and vitriol? does s/he use queerness, transness, blackness, muslim-ness, disabledness, as an insult, as something undesirable that should be sneered at, treated as a joke?

because the you character can be revealed with one simple question: is your love wide enough, deep enough, expansive enough that it covers all people, or is your love so small and so afraid that it places conditions on who is allowed to receive it and closes you off to the ability to extend basic, human generosity?

how did we get here, though? i wanted to write about these three egg dishes and five books i’ve read recently, but, somehow, we’ve ended up here. maybe it’s all related, though — over the last few weeks, i read five books, and the common thread through all of them was, it’s easy to judge.

it’s easy to judge an alcoholic, an adolescent, a drug user. it’s easy to judge an addict, someone who’s dependent on something, on anything, whether it be a substance, another human being, a memory. it’s easy to judge a culture that demands that women spawn and, specifically, that women spawn sons, and it’s easy to judge women for wanting children so badly that they’ll do anything, believe anything, to conceive.

it’s easy to judge a person who doesn’t have the support system or the confidence or the bravery to stand up for herself and say, no, this is who i am, and i am not who you might want me to be. it’s easy to judge a girl, a woman, for selling her body to survive; it’s easy to judge her for closing her eyes, burying her self deep inside, and staying silent as her body is used and abused because that silence is the only way that she can live. it’s easy to judge survivors for the choices they make, for the collateral damage they inevitably, unavoidably leave behind.

it’s easy to judge.

it’s easy to judge women who went through trauma as girls and have carried that in different ways. it’s easy to judge a mother who’s rational and focused, who doesn’t emote or freak out when something happens to her child, who doesn’t react in the ways expected of mothers, of women. it’s easy to judge women who go against the demands of their societies, their cultures, who reject the things that others are so quick to embrace, who stand up for themselves and say, no, this is not acceptable; no, i want more, i want better for my life. it’s easy to judge them when they seem to succumb to those cultural demands, to give in to foolish faith when they’ve been educated, run their own businesses, are their own person.

it’s easy to judge.

it’s easy to judge when we haven’t been in someone’s shoes, and it’s easy to judge even when we have.

i often feel like i’m being left behind. other people are making advancements in their careers, traveling, taking on new projects, but i’m still here, still stuck in a dead-end place with a dead-end job in a dead-end life. others are getting new jobs, getting raises, getting somewhere, but me — i’m still nowhere, and i’m going nowhere.

i tell myself, keep going. just keep trying, keep creating, keep writing, but, after weeks like these, after hours after hours logged in traffic, in overtime, in an office chasing numbers, i wonder, what’s the point? why bother?

at the same time, i write these words knowing that i will keep trying, keep creating, keep writing, that, on days like these, i’ll go cry in the bathroom, make another cup of coffee, and spin writing projects in the back of my brain while hunting down every single stupid goddamn inconsequential penny.

and then, again, at the same time, too, i write these words knowing that there is always that other Thing that lurks in the shadows of my brain, that Thing that shrinks down to almost nothingness sometimes but sends out a flare every so often to remind me of its existence — there is always the option to stop trying to contain it and bring an end to all this fruitless endeavor.

and, hey, maybe before y’all go around saying this country needs more protection from the “mentally ill,” that there need to be more regulations in place to prevent the “mentally ill” from being able to buy guns and thus prevent them from committing mass murder, here’s the other thing about those of us who live with mental illness: we’re more likely to harm ourselves than to harm other people. i don’t see you wanting to protect us from ourselves, though, because your artificial concerns aren’t about mental illness, are they? you just don’t want to think about how you, too, as a human being carry the possibility of committing an act of heinous violence because you, too, are a human being, and you, too, as such, carry human darkness and the potential for brutality, and you don’t want to think that one reason gun control regulations need to be in place might be to protect everyone else from you.

does that seem hypocritical then, to say that it’s easy to judge but to proceed to judge evangelicals, the GOP, white people? or is that judgement or an appraisal of people’s actions? because i am not interested in the statements people release or the principles they claim to believe in — faith is easy to proclaim, and “thoughts and prayers” are easy to extend. i am interested in the ways people behave, how they consider and regard other people, the actions they take to demonstrate love and care and concern, not only for the people they know but also, and more importantly, for the people they don’t, the people who are unlike them.

i’m interested in the ways people move about the world, interacting with people, seeing them as people, not as souls to be saved or Others to be subjugated.

the older i get, the less i’m impressed by intellectualism. i frankly couldn’t care less how well-read someone is or how much time someone spends in deep, philosophical thought. i’ve had issues with theory since i was in college, and i continue to do so because i’m not interested in how things exist on the thought plane — i want to bring all that thought and drag it down to the ground so that it can become action, something tangible that creates change, becomes something that counts.

nothing matters if it’s just an idea in your head, and that’s how prejudice rots people from the inside-out, anyway, because you can rationalize anything in your head. you can find all the “evidence” you want to support your viewpoint, and it’s when you step out of all that, when you get out into the world and start seeing other people as fellow human beings, that you start getting in touch with your own humanity.

and so here is this: if you believe something, whatever it is, go out there and challenge that belief. if you believe queer people are monsters and sinners and gross people, go out there and get to know them. if you believe christians are narrow-minded, stupid bigots who use faith as a crutch and an excuse, go out there and talk to them. if you believe that POC are terrifying people prone to violence and crime, go out there and listen to their stories.

because here’s the thing. you’d be surprised to find out how we’re not all that different. it doesn’t matter whether we’re gay or straight, christian or muslim or atheist, asian or black or white, whether we speak english fluently or not, we’re not all that different. the vices we struggle with, the families we work hard to provide for, the challenges we fear — fundamentally, outside of systemic issues, of course, they’re not all that different; none of it adds up to something to be so afraid of that we need to feel like we have to regroup and double up on hatred and bigotry and prejudice, especially because we’re no better than each other. we’re not so much more righteous or good that we have any right to trample on the lives and identities of others and demand that they fit into what we deem “right.”

i always come back to this one passage in the bible, when the pharisees drag a prostitute in front of christ and say she should be stoned for her sins. christ responds, let you among you who has no sin throw the first stone.

not even a pharisee could dare throw that first stone. are you so convinced of your own righteousness that you could?

holy shit, this is not the post i thought i’d write. some other writer might say, okay, we’ll find other photos to go with this post, but, well, i’m not another writer, and i’m keeping these photos. two saturdays ago, i stayed home and didn’t go into the office and made three things from the lucky peach all about eggs (clarkson potter, 2017) book: egg tarts (pg. 24), a tortilla española clásica (pg. 76), and saltie’s scrambled eggs (pg. 107).

EGG TARTS.
the egg tarts were unsurprisingly awesome, and i loved the technique used to make the dough. it’s divided into “oily” and “water” because the former contains all the butter and the latter, well, contains none, and the two are laminated together, resulting in a flaky crust with body that doesn’t just fall apart. the custard was just sweet enough, with just enough vanilla flavor, and, yeah, my crust-to-custard ratio was all wonky because i only have six tartlet pans, but i’m not complaining.

egg tarts are so bomb. i still don’t understand how my brother doesn’t like them, but that just goes to show — we truly are opposites in every way.

TORTILLA ESPAÑOLA CLÁSICA.
i absolutely loved the tortilla española clásica, and it was a lot of fun to make. you poach sliced potatoes and onions in an olive oil/grapeseed oil combination (do this in your cast iron because it is an excellent way to get some seasoning on your pan), and, when the potatoes are soft but not falling apart, you drain them, let them cool, and toss them with some whipped eggs. pour the mixture into a smoking hot pan (with oil), and give the edges a little wiggle with a spatula while it sets.

after a few minutes, cover the whole thing with a giant plate; flip it over, pan and all; and return the pan to the heat, the tortilla sitting on the plate. add another tablespoon of oil to the pan. slide the tortilla onto the pan, so it can cook on the other side. give it a few minutes, not too many, then repeat the flipping gesture. slide the tortilla onto the pan one last time, give it a minute, and flip it again.

let cool. cut into slices. eat with tapatio.

SALTIE'S SOFT-SCRAMBLED EGGS.
my preferred choice for scrambled eggs are soft-scrambled eggs because they’re so creamy, velvety, and rich. this is a different method for scrambling eggs, in that you crack your eggs into your pan and scramble only the whites. when the whites have mostly set, remove the pan from the heat, and then stir your yolks into the whites. it results in scrambled eggs that almost have the texture of hard-boiled eggs, just softer and creamier.

and, oh, the five books i read?

julie buntin, marlena (henry holt, 2017)
kim fu, the lost girls of camp forevermore (HMH, 2018)
ayobami adebayo, stay with me (knopf, 2017)
shobha rao, girls burn brighter (flatiron, forthcoming, 2018)
kim fu, for today i am a boy (HMH, 2014)

to close, here is this: desperate times call for desperate measures, and i am desperate for a new job, for new work, even if it’s freelance work to do while i work my current full-time job. i’ve got experience editing and drafting all kinds of writing, from legal documents to business valuations to professional emails to marketing blogs to press releases, and i’ve also done a lot of administrative work. i’m looking for anything that involves writing, copyediting, managing social media, and/or creating content, and i can write damn well, take beautiful photographs of food, places, and plant life, and am willing to travel anywhere, not necessarily just to exciting locales because i believe that stories, whether written or visual, exist everywhere.

also, because this is the thing that always seems to catch me: what i lack in experience, i more than make up for in hustle.

so hey, if you or anyone you know is looking for a kickass writer, editor, content creator, let’s chat!

hold your shit together.

January 28, 2018

if i carry homesickness and heartache in my gut, i carry rage in the skin under my arms. it slithers just below the surface and occasionally likes to set off little flares, little fires everywhere, you could say, that need to be put out and smothered before they grow out of control.

“rage” maybe isn’t the right word for it, though, because it’s more this compound of restlessness, disappointment, resentment, sadness, and frustration. the whole thing put together often feels like anger because it feels like fire, maybe because there is indeed anger laced in there, too, anger at all the things that are out of my control, that keep me in this sinkhole of a life despite my best efforts to escape and stay away.

or so i rage on days when it’s too difficult to keep myself from sliding off this ledge. on better days, i remind myself that, no, i am not in the same place i was last year — hell, i’m not even in the same place i was three months ago. i remind myself that things happen slowly, that it’s better for them to happen slowly. easy come, easy go, after all, isn’t that what they say?

and then there is this: my therapist assures me that my anger, right now, is good, that, underneath anger lies hope. after all the years of hopelessness, of quelling even the possibility of hope, the anger is a sign that something inside me is alive and wanting more, recognizing that more is actually very possible. she assures me that this is a good sign, that the work is in channeling this into something positive, something good, something forward-looking.

she reminds me, not everything that seems negative and frightening and dark takes us to bad places. we get to decide where it takes us. we have the power to turn all that energy into a force for good.

but then there is also this: it’s tax season, and we’re in overdrive at the office, and, every day, as i sit in goddamn miserable LA traffic, i ask myself a thousand times, what the hell am i doing here? it’s a familiar despair, and the image that comes to mind is of a wolf slowly dying because it’s licking a piece of ice, except it’s not a piece of ice — it’s a knife frozen in layers of ice, and the wolf is bleeding to death as it’s lapping up its own blood.

gruesome, isn’t it? apparently, it’s one way eskimos would kill wolves, and it’s brilliant and macabre and kind, all in one.

i want to go home, i want to go home, but what i mean, what i’m grasping for, is not a place, it’s a feeling. i want to go back. but back where? maybe to the first time i heard stevie nicks, to watching the snow fall outside the window with a paperback folded open in my lap, to the moment before i tasted alcohol, to virginity and not really knowing that things die, back to believing that something great is still up ahead, back to before i made the choices that would hem me in to the life i live now. a life that i regret sometimes, i think, only because it’s mine, because it’s turned out this way and not some other way, because i can’t go back and change what will happen. what happened to her.
nostos algos — home pain, the pain at the utter core of me. (julie buntin, marlena, 91-2)

how can i describe the horrible pleasure of being not good? even at fifteen i wasn’t dumb enough to glamorize marlena’s world, the poverty, the drugs that were the fabric of everything, but i was attracted to it all the same. i always wanted more, more, more; what i had was never good enough. instead of public school, i had to have concord academy, with its courtyards a whirl of fall leaves, my initials monogrammed on my collar, the textbooks full of whole worlds of language i was desperate to understand. and yet, how easily i’d replaced my desire for that place with my desire to fit in seamlessly in silver lake.
perhaps that was why i was so afraid of the terrible electricity, the terrible self-rootedness, that overtook me those sleepless nights, when i slid my hand down my stomach, below the band of my pants, and discovered a need that was completely my own. with it had come the sense that if i surrendered to that edge-of-cliff feeling, afterward i would be transformed. i would belong to myself in some new way. every time, i stopped too soon. (170-1)

being an adult — it is not the same. it is not, actually, anything like what we wanted, what we imagined for ourselves. but, marlena, mostly it’s better. sometimes i’m so grateful it feels like a miracle. for the dumbest things — a cup of hot coffee, a funny text from liam, that i can read george eliot again and again, every sunday afternoon, that i hate my body less, that i love my mother more, that i still have time to choose. the colors are less sharp, but i’m glad i’m here.
you’re trying too hard to convince me, i imagine she says.
i forgive her for being a skeptic. she’s still eighteen.
the thing is, marlena, i’ve messed a lot up. but every day i get to try again. (246-7)

this is my fourth attempt baking this potato brioche, though it’s only the third attempt i’ve baked. the first attempt was a total bust, a combination of lazy technique and an inability to understand my new ingredient (potato flour), and it landed with a thud in the trash can after one bite of one slice. the second loaf was a fiasco in san francisco, still a victim of kind-of-lazy technique and an inability to understand potato flour, and that also ended up in the trash, though not before it was ferried down to los angeles with false hopes that it could somehow be consumed.

the third didn’t even end up in the oven, went straight into the bin.

the fourth is what you see here, and it was the most optimistic attempt i made. i cut down the amount of stupidly fine potato flour and replaced it with regular all-purpose, gave the whole thing a little more liquid, and finally managed to get that smooth, glossy ball of kneaded dough. the first rise went well, and it rose slowly overnight in the refrigerator. it gave out gas when i punched it down the next morning; it was malleable, allowing itself to be shaped into a loaf pan.

it rose nicely for two hours in a just-warmed oven, but then i left it in there for too long, went to do a quick market run as it was still rising, after the two hours had ended, and, when i got back with my groceries, the nice dome it had been forming had collapsed. it never revived. and so we have this, this still dense loaf that would be acceptable had i been attempting to make a loaf cake, not a brioche loaf.

we ate it, though, buttered it, slathered it with jam, ate it with eggs. it was okay, fine even. it wasn’t brioche. i haven’t gone for attempt number five yet.

restlessness is in my legs, in my knees and calves specifically. sometimes, my legs ache so much i can’t sleep — when i was younger, i attributed that to growing pains, but now — now the pain is a mystery, something that haunts me and tethers me to wakefulness when i want so badly to sleep.

the plus side to tax season means overtime, and overtime means overtime pay, which means traveling. i make a list of all the places i want to visit, and i break that list down into three parts — short-term travel plans, mid-term, long-term. i think about my allotment of vacation days this year, how to break them up and parcel them out, attaching them to long weekends, so i can take more trips because, for me, that’s better than one long trip the whole year. i need to get away from los angeles as often as i can, and that, surprisingly, honestly, has nothing to do with los angeles itself — i’m a restless creature, and i have a world i want to see.

sometimes, i think the thing that bums me out most about getting a rejection is the knowledge that that is going to sit with me but the person who rejected me won’t think twice about me. i’ll bear that sting and flail a little or a lot, depending, and it’ll hurt me, and i’ll remember it, especially if it’s about a position i really wanted, that i would have been great at, but the rejection for them was just an email and they’re going on with their business as usual.

sometimes, i think the thing i’m most afraid to be is forgettable.

because what counts? what makes a life count? some would steer me towards faith, towards religion, saying i need god, i need church, i need that god-based community. others might point towards a career path, towards work that makes an impact in some way. others yet might say it’s people, it’s finding that partner, it’s having that family.

i still don’t know the answer to that question. all i know is, for me, it’s not quite faith, it’s not religion, and maybe it’s more community, just community, than anything else. it’s work that means something to me, work that says something, comforts someone, resonates in some way with some fellow human. maybe it’s love, not love in the romantic sense but love as love, the love that sustains all manner of relationships, the love on which we build homes and families and communities, the love that drives us in whatever work it is we do, that compels us to make the sacrifices required.

and, sometimes, yes, i think i’m a sap for thinking that, but i think i’ve also hit that point in my life where, if i’m a sap, i’m a sap, so be it because, when i look back at the people who have meant the most to me, the decisions that have brought me here to this point, the work that keeps me going even when i want so much to give up and quit, underneath all that, there is love.

hope is a funny thing, and i’m still not sure what to do with it. i’ve spent much of my life trying to resist it because, to me, it still often feels like a lie, the quintessential human delusion as agent smith says so pithily in one of the matrix movies.

it’s been a dry few months, by which i mean, holy shit, i feel like i’ve been creatively tapped. i rerouted energy into starting a food zine, yes, and i did launch it, though i immediately started feeling pretty ambivalent about it, am ready to take it down and tear it to pieces, which, maybe, is why i can’t really say i’ve been writing. i can say, though, that this dryness has been adversely affecting me.

maybe this is hope, too, though, this continued attempt to try, to challenge myself, to keep coming back to this space and creating content for it and trying to see where this year will take me. maybe it’s not about big, grandiose plans and ambitions sometimes, but simply the act of coming back to the page, the kitchen, the camera, of coming back and showing up and creating something new. it doesn’t have to be a full-blown book or even an essay; a blog post will do.

and this is hope, too — trying out soulcycle for the first time, continuing to go to pilates (even at 5:30 in the freaking morning), trying to eat better (and failing) (and trying again). taking care of myself is hope; working twelve-plus-hour days and thinking about future travels are hope; and they count just as much as showing up at my writing desk and doing the goddamn work that might not yet pay the bills but actually means something.

so let’s do this — let’s keep going. let’s keep practicing the thing that fueled much of my 2017 — i’m going to take whatever it is in me, whether it’s brokenness, rage, joy, whatever, and keep turning it into art.

how far i've come, how far i'll go.

November 6, 2017

and the call isn't out there at all
it's inside me
it's like the tide, always falling and rising
i will carry you here in my heart
you remind me
that come what may i know the way
- "i am moana (song of the ancestors)"

keeping it brief tonight because i don’t have many words to attach to this, but i made cappellacci yesterday and wanted to share photos from it because it’s the first time i made stuffed pasta and i liked the photos. i also watched the netflix adaptation of alias grace yesterday, and it’s a show that makes you think a lot about the patriarchy and power structures and how they filter down to affect us in so many ways, how we (women, POC) internalize all that crap and turn on ourselves and on each other and participate, whether unwittingly or knowingly, in reinforcing the same power structures.

i also played moana three times while cooking, and i’ve had several songs on loop today. the hair is incredible in that film; i’m still in awe of how they animated so much realistic texture into all the hair.

and those are pretty much all the words i have today. the pasta shown is cappellacci stuffed with corn, shallots, and thyme and served in a camembert sauce with poached radishes. the recipe is from the kish cookbook, and, you know, therapy is therapy, but pasta making is therapy, too.