the 'we miss pho' club

so my mom, in a mom-like quest, decided to bring pho soup spices with her to china because she'd heard through my sister my many laments about a lack of vietnamese food in shanghai. don't get any bay area kid started on how shitty vietnamese food is here - and we aren't even vietnamese - so addicted are we northern californians to our weekly pho lunches. and dinners. and saturday brunch. the only way to roll my ass out of bed on a saturday morning is with the promise of food, and good pho i will rise for. i will even shower.

we couldn't actually track down any beef bones for the broth until the last day of their visit, when my mom happened to wander into a hair salon for a wash 'n set that was owned by a fellow cantonese. they got to talking and he tipped her off to both an excellent nearby guangdong restaurant and a local butcher who sells beef.

when we finally located this 'butcher' i was a bit doubtful... he was completely passed out on his butcher block with one lone leg bone hanging on a meat hook behind him, and several empty seafood buckets in front of his shack. who sells beef AND seafood? as it turns out, cantos never lead other cantos astray, and he quickly whipped out an assortment of bones appropriate for soup, multiple strands of tendon, and several hunks of beef. despite lacking any proper tools (who says you can't beat a leg bone with a hammer?), we quickly made the guy's day by dropping over $10 USD on a ton of cow parts. beef in china is not cheap. and it's actually more like veal.

we spent part of their last day cheerfully lamenting the size of my soup pot (the bone stuck way out of the pot in some grisly jeffrey daumer way) and debating the wisdom of my mom's pho talents, browning the onion and ginger in my toaster oven, and taking turns sticking our faces into the pot.

today it was ready and i invited the girls over for dinner. one conference call, a huge thunderstorm, and a last-minute project later and it was just me and viv inhaling that distinctive anise-cinnamon-clove-meat broth smell that only fellow pho addicts understand as delicious. the approximations of the other ingredients were rough - the basil missing, the onions sliced too thickly, the bean sprouts overly mature - but the broth was there and right now i'm appreciating my mom and dad's thoughtfulness in lugging such a finely curated assortment of expat goodies for their kid.

thanks mom and dad.

ain't trying to hate

"Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints members left the courthouse on Thursday after a ruling in their favor in San Angelo, Tex." (unabashedly ripped from the ny times, both image and copy.)

...but i mean, damn. if any sect told my ass that i would have to sport THOSE outfits and that HAIR, i would immediately tell them to get lost. pound sand. stop freebasing. get real.

sometimes i wonder if general guidelines for life can't be at least somewhat based on the rules of fashion? like, when crazy people dressed like this tell you that you are going to be the 4th wife of some old fat fart and your 12-year old daughter is going to be married off to some beer belly crazyman, you take one look at the getups they're sporting and the warning signals go off.

right?

moms and dad

going to hangzhou tomorrow. no work for 2 days!

photos to follow.

half man half amazing

i dreamt (dreamed? my spell check gave me the thumbs down) that my sister and i had a well-swaddled baby in our trunk, and it was a really hot day. my sister wouldn't let me take her out of her many layers of clothes and blankets, but i unwrapped the baby and was showing my sister how sweaty she was. we were in a parking lot somewhere, and the baby was a newborn little girl.

it was the weirdest thing.

9:12 am and i'm leaving in an hour to pick up my parents at the airport. i hope my mom survived the flight ok.

the silence that follows

just got back from our friend viv's birthday dinner. everyone else headed to shelter to see cut chemist, but i bowed out. i love being around my folks, plus a few others that were visiting, but damn. it's really like jumping off a bullet train into the hush of being underwater. i was so hyper stimulated i had to come up with something to do (apply face mask and sit in a chair) to switch from 11 people talking all at once to me in my quiet apartment.

i wonder sometimes how mental illness isn't something more widespread. the swing from just the two environments had me off kilter for a minute. someone with more social anxiety would be in a bad place. i can't say that i'd ever notice something like this except for the fact that i live in the extreme right now - my social life here is like the bay area super-mellow scene x 1000. and my apartment that faces the garden courtyard is so quiet. i hear some noise from the street, like the rumble of trucks going by every so often, but silence in shanghai is hard to come by and this is damn close.

i'm stuffed. we ate at el willy's, one of the newer places that's opened up recently, a spanish tapas joint that features an actual spanish chef. it was delicious, but so rich. plus i fortified with some bloody marys and topped everything off with a slice of chocolate mousse cake. sleep actually feels like it may be an exercise in corralling the unwieldy.

chewing tea leaves

people in this country don't use tea bags or strainers. they just pour directly in the cup and top off with water. i don't understand how they are able to do this without eating a salad of tea leaves constrantly, which is pretty much what i do. its awkward, too; sometimes i take a swig while a coworker is around and try to talk around the branch hanging out of my mouth. so slick, this one.

speaking of eating, i just ate about a pound of eggs with chinese sausage (lap cheung for you cantos) and cha siu (also for your cantos). in mandarin they are something like la chang and cha shao. whatever. at any rate, it was delivery for dinner at the office and about 10000 calories but i don't care. i'm tired and my eyes ache and that makes me a big baby, which therefore entitles me to eat like a ravenous wolf.

i should shut up and finish my project and go home. bok bok.

abc bbd bbc

i get my info on the earthquake just like you - i watch my pirated philippines satellite channels - bbc and cnn - and read the times. the english-language local papers are fluff and useless.

it happened during work yesterday morning and i didn't feel a thing. some media folk who came into the office for a meeting said they felt it quite strongly, and they are in high rises. our office is in a heritage art deco building and on the fifth floor. i feel somewhat better - which may be completely unfounded - that our buildings are old, and i feel, more solidly built than a lot of this new construction. it goes up so quickly sometimes, you wonder what it's made of. when there's a new construction site, the first thing that gets done is a solid brick wall is erected around the whole thing, and then plastered over. usually - can't tell if this is just from a lack of foresight - no door appears to have been planned into the blueprints of this wall, so the next day or so after that lovely wall goes up and is plastered over, you see a big smashed-in part so the construction workers can actually access the site. trev and i usually have a good laugh over that one.

been watching the footage of the rescue efforts for those kids down in sichuan. sad stuff.

i won't say amen

"Whenever I conduct workshops with any group, I ask people how free they feel and to rate themselves on a scale of 0 to 100. The responses are usually about the same whether I am talking to people in a correctional facility or at a workplace."

- alison link
"why leisure matters in a busy world;" marci alboher; May 5, 2008; the new york times

...but i think the point miz link is making in this article is essentially what i learned on my own since i quit my job in 2006 and came to asia to 'unwind.' as most people observed, asia is hardly relaxing, but it was just what i needed for a switch in gears. and sometimes asia is very relaxing. i learned to be human again.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/05/business/smallbusiness/05shift.html?em&ex=1210478400&en=113569eae516e8a2&ei=5087%0A

this zen minute was brought to you by FRIDAY after a 6-day week, a pending weekend trip to visit cyn and puppies in zhuhai, and the hope of wakeboarding or other relaxing 'leisure activity' that is open, as has just been reinforced, to each person's interpretation. i find getting my ass beat in the water to be relaxing.

update:

it smells and tastes like a sweet potato hyped up on sugar. i think i may use the smaller sugar rocks for tomorrow's brew.

the cure

at dinner over at my ayi's house over the holiday weekend, she prescribed this for my asthma:





one pear (she prefers organic) cut up into pieces, one lump of rock sugar, and a piece of some herb that looks like an albino bamboo stalk. located at 11:00 in the photo. i'm boiling it right now, and i have to make it every night and drink one cup.

eat your heart out, glaxo smith kline! advair 500/5o ain't got shit on bamboo and pears!

i'm not making fun, tho. chinese herb medicine does work some crazy wonders. my uncle swears by this tonic that my pah pah makes from baby mice marinated in liquor. i am not joking.

those of you interested in beijing

part of an email from t-money yesterday morning:

"So [it's] storming, little bit of thunder [and] lightning. But the crazy part is at 10 am it is twice as dark as it was at any point last night. I'm serious, I've never seen anything like it. The last two days it has been gray with this heavy smog that blocks vision past 10 feet."

coming for the games? i recommend buying a totobobo, altho sherry prefers the look of a respro.