Musings

Usually when it’s my birthday, I like to do some self-reflecting. Maybe it’s because I’ve been in the marekting/PR field for all of my young professional life - I can’t help but take a look at the prior goals and aspirations that I had before and benchmark it with the past year’s accomplishments.

Although I am late with my list, as the saying goes - better late than never, right?

In my 25th year of life I ….

• Tried (and, sadly, failed) at learning how to ride a motorcycle
• Had a tour of San Francisco with my friends Lauren and Jon
• Ran another half marathon … and had my photo up on the SF Chronicle because of it!
• Changed jobs and took on new challenges
• Went on an immensely personal trip to Taipei for the FIRST TIME with Gogo and Didi
• Saw my grandfather’s grave
• Visited where my mother grew up
• Ate tons and tons of street food
• Rang in the new year by watching the fireworks at 101
• Soaked in all the sights of Tokyo, Japan
• Went to the public bath for the first time
• Walked around the streets of Tokyo by myself
• Visited the Ghibli museum and saw Totoros everywhere!
• Celebrated 6 years with the BF
• Had an amazing view from the Fairmont Tower from one end of the city to the other
• Went snowboarding again…multiple times
• Had a memorable camping trip with friends
• Moved to a new apartment

It’s been awhile since I’ve put together a post, let alone a food post. In an effort to be more healthy and a tad more frugal, the BF and I decided to go to the gym and go grocery shopping in order to start cooking more at home. One of the things we decided to do was oxtail soup.

Oxtail (or ox tail, of course) is a rather gelatinous meat that boils into a really nice broth.

First, you fill a pot with ox tail and boil it for about an hour.

Afterwards, you drain the meat.

I think traditional recipes call for daikon, but the BF’s mom’s recipe called for potatoes, tomatoes, carrots, onions and two slices of ginger (that uh, we kind of forgot to put in).

After washing and boiling longer, we first threw in the tomatoes and onions to let the flavor seep out. Then we added the carrots and potatoes, and boiled it for…even longer.

Throughout the whole process we added salt and pepper. Although the flavor is light, the conglomeration of meat and veggies (with rice!) is always a comforting sight.

Although time consuming, definitely a worthwhile endeavor.

Yum!

I’m not sure why this is, but lately I’ve been switching to the country channel on my commute to and from work. Well, okay. I take it back: I know exactly why I started to listen to the country station. It’s because a person can only take so much of California girls, wishes on airplanes and some singer bemoaning how much they want to be a billionaire so freakin’ bad.

Anyway, the country station tends to be a welcome reprieve from all the pop/rap gibberish (and yes, I know I sound like a cantankerous old person here).

I remember my old college roommate absolutely adored country music, and I could barely hold in my disdain or keep my eyes from rolling into the back of my head from hearing the twangs and thick southern accents set to a melody. But I do give her credit for being right about the storytelling part. If you’re not a country fan, you might not realize that a good portion of popular pop and traditional country songs tend to weave stories in the lyrics which is, well, pretty cool.

I guess taking ballroom dance also helped develop my affinity toward the genre of music. After all, it’s much more fun to twirl and move about a room with a partner beyond the basic dancing skills we glean from awkwardly swaying at junior high dances.

To my point: I’ve been listening to some country songs, and I’m not sure if I happen to be much more moody lately or just becoming more of a wuss….but a lot of times these song really get to me. NO, not bawling in the car or anything…but just a little tug at the heartstrings.

Though it won’t be the same, here are the recent lyrics to one song I heard:

He was standing in the rubble of an old farmhouse outside Birmingham
When some on the scene reporter stuck a camera in the face of that old man
He said “tell the folks please mister, what are you gonna do
Now that this twister has taken all that’s dear to you”
The old man just smiled and said “boy let me tell you something, this ain’t nothing”

He said I lost my daddy, when I was eight years old,
That cave-in at the Kincaid mine left a big old hole,
And I lost my baby brother, my best friend and my left hand
In a no win situation in a place called Vietnam
And last year I watched my loving wife, of fifty years waste away and die
We were holding hands when her heart of gold stopped pumping
So this ain’t nothin’

If you managed to read through that, props to you. If not, well, the basic gist is that there are more important things in life sometimes, and we ought to be grateful for what we have. Not only that, but sometimes it’s amazing what people are able to get through.

I read through some of my old blog posts from college earlier today, just on a random whim. While I flipped through a few of them, I chuckled a bit at myself for some of the things I stressed over. I sent some to my friend. He half-joked, “you sound like a spoiled, whiny brat.” And, unfortunately, he is absolutely right. I was a spoiled, whiny brat and even more so in all the little ways I vented online. And perhaps when I’m 40 or older I’ll find a way to dig up these blog posts and cringe (and laugh) just as much at I did today.

More than anything - aside from the glimmer of hope that I’m no longer that whiny, self-indulgent spoiled brat from before - I hope that in 20 years, when I read my blog, I can look back fondly on a time where I felt a little lost as to what I want to do. And perhaps the reason I look back fondly is because I was able to pursue something I enjoyed and found fulfillment doing each day.

Also on a side note, I have a little pet project that I’ve been brainstorming up. Fingers crossed that I’ll have the dedication, energy and time to get it started. That’s the problem with me, I suppose - the “Jack of all trades” curse that has followed me for years. I always tend to have fleeting interest in something, promise myself that I would dedicate my energies toward it and then it never really comes through (yet, hopefully).

Downers and self reflections aside, in a bit of the same vein as my last post, I wanted to try to remember the things that matter and appreciate the small things in life. Here’s a photo I snapped of my companion at work.

Planty!

For you dear reader (or two if I’m lucky), I hope this post was able to nudge you to see the tiny sliver of silver on a rainy cloud.

I know that a lot of people talk about not sweating the small stuff…but honestly, sometimes the small stuff is just pretty neat.

On my way home today I was driving down Van Ness and I hit every green light possible until I got home.

Cool.

I noticed recently that I tend to write most of my blog posts in the earlier part of the week…and it usually tapers down during Friday and Saturday.

Probably because I spend most of my time on weekends doing random stuff or being lazy.

To change things up, I thought it would be good to recap how the weekend is going so far.

First of all, I have to say that there has not been a more welcome weekend in a long time. It’s been a pretty hectic past weekend as well as week.

After an early release day on Friday (hooray!) I headed down (ironically headed down when I normally try my hardest to stay in the city) to Palo Alto to meet some people for happy hour. After two hours or so, I came home to spend some time with the boyfriend. We had some really good drinks and appetizers at Waterbar, and afterwards had a final drink at Murphy’s Pub. Unfortunately, the good night was a bit tainted when we realized we locked ourselves out.

Yup… locked out on a Friday night before a holiday weekend at 1am in the morning. Awesome.

So awesome that it *only* cost $200 to get a locksmith to wiggle a rod under the door and open it for us. Probably the most expensive 2 minutes of my life. Sigh.

Today, we woke up at noon and spent the first part of it just being lazy. Finally, I managed to motivate myself to go outside and soak up some rare San Francisco vitamin D. I ran with a friend for about a mile or so, then headed home to change. We met some others up at the Fillmore Jazz Festival, a lively long street of food, music and wares. Although it was tempting to eat my face off, we limited ourselves to two buns and I indulged in some funnel cake.

Nothing screams summer like funnel cake.

After reaching the end of the festival we walked back and had a wonderful meal at Woodhouse (Yelp review to come) with oysters, clam chowder and a crab roll. Luckily we had to walk home, otherwise it would have been game over and food come would have won.

Good weekend so far…and I’m incredibly pleased that it’s only 1/3 of the way through!

Odd thing I learned this weekend: to check to see if you have bad breath, you lick the back of your hand, wait for it to dry and then do a tentative sniff. It’s not very pleasant but definitely an effective measurement of nastiness. Yeesh.

Have you ever really needed a moment of calm? I did today.

So I felt the urge to post this video.

I always thought that the idea of random college roommates was an insane idea. Let’s take two strangers who may or may not have anything in common and cram them together in a tiny little space during one of the biggest transitions of their life. Let’s see if they survive or end up driving each other to the brink of insanity.

Okay, sure, a lot of these random pairings do end up working. But then I end up hearing the friends that had to deal with months of torment as their roommate did all sorts of crazy things.

It’s as though someone thought it’d be an interesting social experiment and convinced the rest of us that this was a practical idea.

Kind of like red eye flights. In theory, a flight overnight seems like a fantastic idea. 99% of the time, you end up doing nothing during a flight. Why not sleep and make the time go by faster? An additional bonus is that the airlines are able to ferry more people around, therefore they are able to make more money.

After my recent experience with the red eye, I can name several reasons why taking a flight like this by choice (silly me) is masochistic.

Here are four:

1. You are in close quarters with, most likely, a RANDOM STRANGER.  Yeah.  Imagine sitting on a park bench next to someone, arm to arm, passively aggressively vying for space on your already too small space.  Sometimes, if you’re really unfortunate, said person might…”overflow” into your personal space and guess what?  There is nothing you can do about it.
2. Sleeping in the seated position (even with the 10 degree incline) is just not natural.  Helloooo, swollen feet and cankles.
3. People do funny things when they sleep.  In fact, I would say that sleeping next to someone is one of the most intimate things you can do.  I would like to keep this roster of people strictly to my family, significant other and closest friends.  On a red eye, you end up doing this next to a stranger (yes, see #1).  So now not only are you vying for personal space, you also experience the joys of someone snoring, drooling, twitching and…from unfortunate first hand experience…farting during their sleep.  AWESOME.
4. Babies love to cry at the most inopportune time.  You know, like when you’re trying to sleep.  So why, dear God, why do people bring babies on this flight?

Basically, it just costs you more to fly.  Oh, I don’t mean price.  I mean emotionally, physically, and mentally.  And what’s even better is the fact that they play an in-flight movie.  That’s nice of them…to the 1% of insomniacs that forgot to bring another source of entertainment.  For the other people that may have forgotten their eye mask, I can only say FYL.

I think it is time that I go find some water and food.

I’m feeling a cold coming on. Wasn’t it just a few weeks ago where I had to recuperate from a summer cold? I feel like my body decided to give me hell … just because it would be very ill-timed.

As a lot of people who interact with me during this time may notice, feeling not-so-great has a direct relationship with my mood. And, as expected, I tried very hard not to be a little thundercloud of grumpiness (but not so sure about how successful I was).

Now that I’m finally home in pajamas on the couch and under a blanket, I feel a whole lot better. A vitamin pack is calling my name (Thanks, Terry!) and I do believe I see a bit of silver lining.

On a random side note, as I was starting to spiral down into a full blow pity party, my mind suddenly started to think about what it meant to be successful. This also has to do with another conversation I had with some people earlier, but I won’t delve into that too much. At any rate, sometimes I find myself frustrated with myself because I feel as though I can clearly see my limitations. However, my aspirations for success and greatness (or what I think is success is greatness) far exceeds what I believe my capabilities to be.

This all boils down to the fact that I tend to latch onto that one sadistic deadly sin: envy. A part of me wishes I were as innovative as the entrepreneurs out there making billions, or as talented as the A-list Hollywood royalty. I would love to be a best-selling New York Times author, giving speeches around the world. Alas, a little voice inside of me whispers one word that makes me shudder…mediocrity.

Even around my peers, sometimes it’s hard to not compare myself. In fact, comparing myself is the one thing that I tend to do, despite the fact that I know it’s not healthy AND beyond the point. After all, we’re all different people given different talents. Whether or not we’re a gas station attendant or the next Stephen Hawking doesn’t really matter, as long as we try our best, right?

At least, that’s what I have to keep telling myself. In the meantime, I’ll just try not to drive myself crazy by constantly playing the game of “Keeping up with the _______.”

Instead, I’m going to watch this video, drink my vitamin-packed water, eat something heavy and try to sleep as close to 12 hours as possible to ward off this tiny bug.

Curiosity might have killed the cat, but I think that the little boxes on websites kill productivity.  And it’s due to curiosity (that fiend) who nudges me to click on these enticing and random stories.

As a result of my curiosity or mild adult ADD (I can’t tell which) I tend to find the most random things - like the daikon that Japan rallied around, or the super cool Forbes infographic that shows migration patterns.

But of course, out of all the random places that I peruse on the Internet, one of the deepest black holes of procrastination would have to be either sites like eHow or something to do with health.

I always thought that I had a random overactive imagination as a child.  If I felt a random pang, I would contemplate if that meant that some internal organ was surely going to fail or trigger some sort of reaction that would plunge me into a seizure (only to be brought back again by the paramedic *cue the dramatic music*).

Sometimes I wondered what it would be like to break a bone (knock on wood).  For those of you who have and swear by the fact that it’s NOT fun, I believe you.  But, as I discussed with someone recently, as a child you feel left out over the silliest things….glasses, braces, broken bones….and although I was blessed with none of those (*ducks and covers as verbal curses are hurled my way*) at the time, I really wanted to fit in.  Even if it meant that I looked funny.

Ironically, I ended up looking funny after all my peers had their vision/teeth/whatevers corrected thanks to puberty.  Oh, Mother Nature…you diabolical tyrant.

Anyway, as a result of the combination of my mild hypochondriac ways, fascination with doctor shows and laziness/inability to even contemplate the field of medicine, websites with articles about health were like a field day for me.  As silly as some people may think it is, I’m already starting to panic as age beings to wrap its cold clammy hands around me, making everything sag and sit funny.

All of this build up is to delve into my latest idea of drinking from the hypothetical fountain of youth - um, somewhat literally. In short:

I’m drinking a lot of water to be healthy!

I’ve always heard snippets about the benefits of drinking water.  Truth be told, I never really liked water as a kid.  I used to prefer any sort of juice, real or fake, apple or orange (or grape, or mixed…you get my point) over water.  Heaven forbid, I would even take a Coke over water.

After awhile, I noticed that I would sometimes be dizzy in the mornings.  Or I would get mild headaches.  Finally, after an urgent trip to the doctor thinking it might have been meningitis (the benefit and detriment of having a med student as a roommate, given my aforementioned ways) when it turned out to be EXTREME dehydration, the message started to sink in.

Uh, of course, it took a few years for it to sink in.

Anyway!  I started on my regiment of trying to consciously drink water.  So far, it’s had some benefits.  I noticeably feel a lot more awake in the afternoon versus the normal 3pm slump, and it’s nice to take a breather and walk around the office (you can read about how horrible it is for your health is if you have a regular desk job here…I told you I had issues).  The downside?

I have to pee.  A LOT.  If I thought health sites with headlines like “FIVE TIPS TO STAY YOUNG AT ANY AGE” weren’t detrimental to my focus enough, five trips (yes I counted) to the bathroom is probably a lot higher up on the list.

I thought it was weird, but my friend said it was because my kidneys couldn’t handle it.  I called him a liar.  Then I googled it.  According to WikiAnswers:

Your liver is the organ that deals with metabolizing fat, and your kidneys deal with straining the toxins out of the water you drink. However, if you do not have enough water in your system already, your kidneys will not be able to do their job. In this case, your body shifts some of the work over to your liver.

We all know what happens when we are working on a project and someone comes over and dumps their half-finished work on the pile; our project doesn’t get the attention it needs. Same here. Your liver was dealing with fat, but now it has to do that AND deal with the extra filtering that the kidneys would normally do. So the efficiency of the liver is compromised, and it winds up leaving a lt of fat in your body that normally would have been burned away.

Interesting, isn’t it? Here’s more:

It may be inconvenient at first because you will have to pee more often, but the reason that you are running to the bathroom is actually great; your body is finally letting go of all the old, toxic water that its been holding onto. The water that you are drinking is usually not the first water that you excrete after being dehydrated. Now your body knows that you will be replacing the water, so it isn’t panicking and storing it, it is letting go to make room for the fresh, clean water you are sending in. After a few days or a week, the bathroom trips will slow down and your body will get into a great rhythm, which includes reduced appetite, more luminous complexion, and better muscle tone, as well as a more efficient metabolism.

Sweet. I can’t wait to drink my way to a skinnier, muscular and more luminous me.

And apparently I ought to move to Seattle or Austin.

Dear Paul -

I’m an asshole. And the funny thing is, I can imagine you smiling at that and shaking your head and saying, “no, you’re not.” Because that’s just how you are, and always have been.

I still remember all those times that we chatted into the night over coffee at J’s. Remember the random nights where we’d watch episodes from adult swim? Or drove around the suburban neighborhoods of Carrollton, trying to figure out things to do? We’d visit Erin at her work, grab meals, play video games…and even had a random midnight swim with friends.

You were there when I needed a friend, always lending an ear or giving a hug. You took off your shoes when you visited my house. You reassured me, you laughed with me. And you were there with me through tears and more.

Because that’s the type of person you are: You are one of the best people, ever.

I miss you.

Thank you for your friendship, and for you being you.