What am I doing here?

Goodbye

2006-02-05T14:12:00.000-05:00

This blog is closed. Thank you for having visited.

We're moving!

2006-01-30T21:58:00.000-05:00

It is time for me to move my blog to a new forum - a place that allows me to be freer in my expressions without getting fired/killed by relatives/sued/whatever.

After almost three years of staying with Blogger (free), I still say it is one of the best tools around. For some reason I have decided to experiment with another tool, however, as I realise I want to continue blogging and would like to try out other things (photos, finally? who knows?).

Please leave your email address in the comments section below if you would like me to send you the link to my new blog - by leaving your email address I don't mean leave it in the blank space where every Jack and Jill can see it, I mean, please fill in the space in the form for the comment! Alternatively, if you have decided (as I almost did) that this is one blog flogged to death, it's time for adieu and so forth, and thanks for having read this blog. Oh, er, thanks to everyone who reads it (although I'm sure not everyone agrees with its content).

I think it is going to be exciting, and my first post is already up and running!

Looking forward to seeing most of you on the new site.

Only the good die young

2006-01-16T21:47:00.000-05:00

"Dust thou art, and unto dust thou shalt return."

So says the Bible, but it is not comforting. Who says letters in cold black and white are reassuring? And yet, this cliche is something people think of when the inevitable happens.

I am thinking of my friends who have lost their mothers. Those mothers who have died young, leaving their children behind to hold a dark shrapnel of pain in their chest instead of the joy of feeling maternal love.

When I was in high school, the mother of one of my high school classmates passed away from cancer. My classmate was calm at the wake - it was eerie. I asked her (me, at that age, never having lost someone close) whether she felt awful.
"I feel sad, but we knew it was going to happen," she said, calmly. "She suffered a lot of agony, and it is good she is now not in pain."
I didn't understand that then. How can you feel better for someone because they died?

It took until my own grandmother passed away for me to understand that my classmate wasn't saying that necessarily because she really felt that was the best thing to have happened, but because that was one way of rationalising the death. My mother and my aunt sat together at a small table set with beer and fruit, a year after their mother's death. My mother's hair was long and grey.
"You know, sometimes when I think of Mum, I feel sad that she had to suffer so much, it still hurts," my mother said to my aunt.
"Sister, you mustn't think of these things. She has passed now," my aunt said. They were still, silent in their sadness, not even looking at each other.
"She was in pain, it was better that she did," my aunt finally said.

As a child, I realised my parents would inevitably pass away, but it was a far, distant prospect, as remote as my turning thirty some day, and chilling on top of that. Now I am reaching that milestone, I realise the idea of losing my parents is as scary as it ever was. Maybe even more so than when I was ten.

Today I wrote a note to a friend whose mother passed away a couple of weeks ago. As I did so, I felt guilty towards another friend of mine, L., whose mother had passed in similarly painful circumstances. I wondered whether I had done anything right then. Had I been understanding for her? She has always been open to deal with any of my problems.

I think I have another note to write.

Belated ruminations on 2005 and the new year

2006-01-08T23:58:00.000-05:00

It is difficult to comprehend how fast time goes by until you sit down and make the effort to take a look at your life. At least, that's how it has been for me.

I started 2005 by being delirious - I crossed over half the planet to be with M. in a country I'd visited only twice before. I gave up an opportunity to become something other than a corporate lawyer to become a corporate lawyer, yet again (why oh why oh my). Then the complete madness surrounding the planning for the wedding in late August was something else. I'd like to think that 2005 was the year I finally sorted out my personal life for good. It's a great thing when your friends can breathe a sigh of relief for you when you tell them you're happily married.

What should happen this year?
"You don't know how to ski, do you?" My mum asked me when I called her this weekend.
"No," I said.
"Well, don't bother to learn. Stick with golf." She'd been to a ski resort for the first time in her entire life that day, and her body was aching in ways she hadn't anticipated. OK, Mum.

I suspect though, this year may well be the year M. and I will have to figure out a way to deal with the already thorny issue of my work hours. I'm not sure in what way. The funny thing is, I got a pretty good evaluation from the office - it's funny because these days all I am doing in the office is trying hard not to look as exhausted as I feel and getting a good evaluation is not really what I'm focussing on. It's been a tough end of the year for me, and really, the break from blogging was not because I was thinking of giving it up, but because all I did when I was at home was to pass out on the sofa. Honestly, it felt as though I was being punished for having had such a lovely holiday before.
"You're going to quit if you get sick again," M said, the night we discovered I had to take the second round of antibiotics in two weeks for yet another infection brought on by stress.
"And then what am I supposed to do, give free yoga lessons on the streets?" I said.
"I'm serious. You're going to quit if you get sick one. more. time," M said. "I'm sure we'll find you something else to do."
So that's one major issue. I find that when my personal life is going really well, my work life nosedives, and vice versa. It hasn't ever really kept to a happy equilibrium. At the moment I'm compiling a list of things that people I know who used to be lawyers have done after leaving the law, in the hopes that it will inspire me. So far the inspiration hasn't struck. But then we are still in January 2006.

So, 2006 will be the year of learning to play golf, getting hit by a majestic inspiration, and some travel. Travel will always feature in my yearly plans because although I usually hate the process of getting to a destination, once I'm there I'm happier than a squirrel that found a stash of nuts. I resolve to get good presents for M. to make up for the fact that I have given him no Christmas presents this year (oh yes, on top of not sending out any Christmas cards this year, I had no time to buy presents, not even online). Oh and some major reconnecting with family members (who have probably given up all hope of decent communication with me) and friends (likewise). I also resolve to focus my reading to cover more of the subjects that I am interested in - art and history - rather than give in to all the popular books of the moment. Apparently I'm going to be allowed to do some pro bono work this year, on the assumption that I will have the time to do it.

This is also (in my mind) the time to be thankful. Now my grumpiness has subsided somewhat (with the help of St John's Wort), I think I can be honestly thankful. I am glad my parents are still alive and 'relatively' well. I am glad my sisters are out doing their own thing and trying to live their lives. I am happy most of my friends are fine and alive, despite the bombings in London and the tsunami in Asia. My biggest resolution this year must be to remember more often how many things I have in my life to be thankful for.

And we become older

2006-01-04T22:11:00.000-05:00

Something fitting a new year needs to be written - a song of hope and cheerful promises. But my winter blues (or is this a mid-life crisis?) does not allow me to write such material. Instead of counting my blessings, I am counting my chickens before they are hatched.

Although I am just back from a holiday, I feel as if I need another one. A wintry cold January in Manhattan can be hard to adjust to after some sun in the Caribbean.

And she comes up for air

2005-12-26T00:39:00.000-05:00

Dear friends and family,

I am so sorry this year I did not get to send you a Christmas card, let alone a gift. I feel this is a terrible slight on my part and I am really embarrassed by the pile of cards I received.

There is very little to excuse my lapse but I was hoping this story would make you understand the extenuating circumstances. Happy holidays.

Love,
J-A

- The Paper Monster -

A large, spacious office filled with light. A young woman is sitting with her feet propped up on her desk. She is playing BrickBreaker on her BlackBerry. A ten foot shadow, whirling papers all around, suddenly appears at her side.

Paper Monster: "You. There."
J-A: "Hey." (She jumps up from her desk, clutching her BlackBerry). "You can't come in here. I just got back from a relaxing holiday."
P.M.: "You came back yesterday."
J-A: "So?"
P.M.: "You've been assigned to this File No. 666-666."
J-A: "Ha! You think? I checked my assignment email this morning and there is no such file on my list."

P.M. squints, lifts a finger at J-A's computer on the desk. A red light flashes the room and a second later, both J-A's computer and BlackBerry beep.

P.M.: "It's there now."
J-A: "Oh, sugar. But wait. I don't know anything about this file. Wasn't it meant to be some senior associate's file?"
P.M.: "It was. But the senior associate told the partner he couldn't take it anymore. So now you're the lead associate."
J-A:"But I just told you, I don't know anything about this file!"
P.M.:"Who does? Here are the documents the senior associate was revising before he walked out of the building for a three day hash and drinks sesh."

P.M. squints again, lifts a finger at J-A's desk. This time after the red flash clears we see J-A's chair and desk covered in paper. J-A lifts a paper off her head.

J-A:"So what am I meant to do?"
P.M.: "Be proactive. Close the deal? Whatever it takes. I'll be back to see what's going on. And oh, I think that's your phone." P.M. disappears.

J-A's phone starts ringing and J-A's computer and BlackBerry start beeping. J-A sighs, and answers the phone. Meanwhile, daylight fades outside the window and the moon and stars come out. Then the night fades away to dawn. This happens a couple of times. The figure of J-A is kept in sillhouette, but we can tell she is becoming shaggier - her hair is becoming tousled and her posture is more like crawling on her desk rather than sitting.

It is day time again. P.M. reappears by her side.
P.M.: "Well? Where were you?"
J-A: "Look, I just disappeared for a couple of hours' kip, all right? I mean, for chrissakes, I didn't want to stay in a hotel."
P.M.: "But I booked it for all the minions. There were at least twelve minions who stayed there for the past two days during the transit strike."

J-A jumps up from her desk. She is standing face to face with the P.M. in her most menacing way.

J-A: "Well I'm not one of them. So what are you going to do about it? As it was, I got home just as M.'s alarm clock was going off."
P.M.: "So have you closed the deal?"
J-A:"Yeah, I've closed the deal. I feel like crap though."
P.M.: "Great. No minion should ever feel happy."
J-A: "Look, I've only been doing these deals for the past eight months, right? I don't know what I'm doing! You can't make me do this!"

But P.M. has disappeared. A partner has just walked into J-A's room. He has clearly heard the outburst.

Partner (nervous attempt at joviality): "Well, hopefully, you don't tell everyone our secret, that we all guess what we're meant to be doing, har har."
J-A: "Er, hi, Mr. Partner." She sits down.
Partner: "I've been trying to get into your office the whole day but you were so busy."
J-A: "Ah well."
Partner: "I was looking to give you your bonus letter. Here it is, and thanks for all the hard work you've done. I hope you're happy with the figure."

Partner walks out. J-A tears open the letter, then stuffs it into her bag. She stands up and shakes her fist at the ceiling.

J-A: "I don't care how much you pay me! I'm going to become a fishmonger! Serves you all bloody right! I'll be a fishmonger and I'll have the freshest fish in the world!"

P.M. ( voice only): "No you won't. You've been saying stuff like that since September 1999."

Snow, blue sky and travels

2005-12-10T11:35:00.000-05:00

We are going away to stare at lots of blue water surrounding an island. I will think about how it is that I cannot talk to people without sounding like a corporate drone, why it is so difficult to change yourself into someone different from your current self.

The snow fell so hard yesterday, you couldn't see across the Hudson. And yet after all that, the sky is still clear today.

Is part of ageing just learning to accept how little you can change about yourself?

A review of HP4

2005-12-02T00:27:00.000-05:00

Scene: Foil trays at the buffet for a private showing of that latest cinematic sensation, Ha_rry Po_tter and the Go_blet of Fire. One tray is filled with biscuits with butter topping, the other is filled with regular biscuits.

Normal Buttermilk Biscuit: "Oy. You all right there, matey?"
Biscuit with Butter Topping: "Ah beg yer pardon?"
NBB: "I was just wondering, you're sitting at a precarious angle somewhat, you know."
BBT: "Aam allrecht."
NBB: "Pardon?"
BBT: "Aam allrecht. Aam awe rite. Ye ken?"
NBB: "Er. OK."

The trays are lit up with the bunsen burners.

BBT: "Sae, whit did ye hink ay th'film?"
NBB: "Er. Say what?"
BBT: "Th'film. Whit did ye hink of it?"
NBB: "...You mean the film?"
BBT: "Aye."
NBB: "Well. It was a lot crammed into two and a half hours, wasn't it?"
BBT: "Aye."
NBB: "Oh wait. There was that Scottish girl - Cho Chang - she was interesting, wasn't she? That Potter is looking to get into her knickers all right, don't you think?"
BBT: "She hud a strang glaswegian accent. Ah didne hink they woods cest someain Scottish. Aam surprised. Aam canty fur'er."
NBB: "Er, right. You're surprised and you're er, what? Sorry mate, didn't quite catch what you said there - must have been the old earwax, you know."
BBT: "Canty. Aah said aam canty fur'er."
NBB: "Right. So. Of course...The merpeople were strange, though."
BBT: "Ah thooght mermaids woods be prettier."
NBB (looking visibly relieved to understand BBT's last comment): "Yeah, me too."

The trays start steaming.

You want to navel gaze? Well, this is how I do it

2005-11-29T00:59:00.000-05:00

It is fair to say I am not very light-coloured (pardon the pun, had to be done). On top of having relatively dark skin I am also marked here and there like a Swiss cheese with little scars and bruises. When I was a teenager I used to wonder why I didn't have the luminous skin tone that all my peers seemed to acquire effortlessly; then in 2001 I met my old flatmate who introduced me to foaming cleanser, toner and lotion. While my face has yet to shine with the light of flawless perfection I think the skin on it is nicer now than that of my feet.

But I digress. The real reason why I write is because I want to catalogue my scars. I have a lot of scars. Not lots of humungous ones, just lots of little ones. And I'm not going over my scars because it is something amazing to do; it is just easier to write about this than what is really, truly keeping me up at this time of night.

I divide them into the following categories: those which are the result of self-inflicted stupidity and those that came about through no fault of my own, destiny. The list of scars I have incurred through self-inflicted stupidity is as follows - the ones on my legs which I got from scaling up the stone lions in Trafalgar Square (it seemed like a good idea at the time); the ones on my knees, acquired as a result of falling straight through a thorny rose bush; the one on my lip marks the tasting of a piece of pasta from a boiling pot; the tiny one around my laughter line that my cousin gave me when I was a toddler (his upper cut to my face was most probably provoked); the ones I got from picking at my measles even though my mum told me not to; the one on my ankle representing the deep cut I got from walking into (rather than onto) the steps of a podium during a drunken Christmas party.

The list of scars I was destined to have is not as long, it seems - the ones gained from the sore wounds of allergic reactions to mosquito bites; the ones that are the result of surgery on my heel; the one I got from falling off a bike as a teenager that healed badly in the humid summer; the one that people keep saying looks like a cigarette burn on my hand as a result of a dog attacking me. I'm sure there are some more, but at this point, I forget the rest and besides it seems a sufficient enough record of some of the more salient scars I have.

Wounds heal, but they leave a scar. If the scar is small enough then it's not too much of a problem. But what if you get a really big scar? Then what? I don't know, I haven't received a really big wound yet. Would it make a difference to the scar if it was a result of self-inflicted stupidity or destiny? Judging from my scars, I'd say, a scar is a scar, no matter what you call it, and you don't ever think they're great souvenirs.

A drop of Brit for a very American holiday

2005-11-23T18:34:00.000-05:00

Sod it all, peeps, and get pissed. Enjoy the holidays.

Handy British phrases to learn over the holidays

"He couldn't organise a piss-up in a brewery" (1)
"It's a f***ing bear garden here" (2)
"Use your loaf" (3)
"Innit" (4)
"She is swanning around, as usual" (5)
"[Insert actor's/actress's name] couldn't act his/her way out of a paperbag" (6)
"Bloody hell" (7)
"That is one dodgy pudding" (8)
"Barmy old codger" (9)

_____________________________________________
Translation notes:
(1) "He is a bloody incompetent git*"
*Contemptible person
(2) "It's such a mess, we'd have to call in the Marines"
(3) "Use your head" (loaf of bread - rhymes with head - Cockney slang)
(4) "Isn't it" as per an Eastender**
** Someone from the East of London
(5) "She is wandering about, not doing much, as usual"
(6) "He/She couldn't act to save his/her life, his/her mother's or his/her father's"
(7) "Holy cannoli"
(8) "That is one strange, weird pudding***"
***Dessert, unless it is used in connection with Yorkshire pudding or black pudding
(9) "Crazy old fogey****"
****Old fashioned, strange man

Things to think about when you have a cold sore

2005-11-20T01:37:00.000-05:00

It's great to have a mum who takes me so seriously. Last week when I called her, I told her about my tentative (at most) plan to move to Fiji for a couple of months while I figure out how to set up a salmon farm in Alaska. My mum said, in all earnestness and without a trace of irony, "Do you think going into such an industry is a good idea? You have to think about the competition coming from Asia and the rest of the world."
M. on the other hand just told me that he wouldn't want to eat salmon every day. It's nice to know that my nearest and dearest are of the type to gently let me realise the folly of my ways.

The week before that, I had watched a Food Network programme featuring a young lady setting up her own cookie company. I told M. that I should set up a cookie company - I know there are cookie factories in New Jersey that I could work on. M. said he didn't want to eat so many cookies. The months before my resignation at my law firm in Hong Kong, I spent hours creating an elaborate plan to undergo a career shift - I would study for an art history degree and intern in an art gallery. Oh, and the month before joining my current law firm, I was contemplating applying for a job in public relations. There was also that one time I was thinking of setting up a company for cooking classes using M.'s chef friend as the teacher. And let's not forget the creative writing class I took for a while.

Even now, I can think of at least five things I could be doing otherwise:
1. I could go into publishing and work as a lowly assistant. That way I could read books all day and get paid for it.
2. Make a T-shirt store online like David & Goliath. I love their 'boys are smelly' socks.
3. Retrain as a lawyer for domestic violence victims at a charity.
4. Learn how to make chocolate, set up a chocolate shop.
5. Import textiles from Laos.

It is clear from the current state of affairs that none of my alternative career plans will ever be put into use unless something drastic happens (law firm goes kaputt, I get sacked, M. agrees to move to Alaska etc.). As I sit here nursing the cold sore I have acquired over my frenzied working week, I feel a bit shocked at all these plans I made. What is also clear is that the sheer pressure of my work is leading me to these flights of fancy. But what I want to know is this - is this my coping mechanism, so that I can get through the late nights at work, or is this symptomatic of a genuine malaise that has to be cured (as in: am I pathological)? Does everyone else dream about having a different job as obssessively as I do? M. never seems to think about it - I asked him, and he just shrugged his shoulders.

I suppose I'm just more impressionable than others. Food Network seems to have a major influence in my life lately.

Nearly all set up

2005-11-17T01:58:00.000-05:00

The whole process of my moving to the States, starting from the very moment that M. and I decided that I would be joining him in New York, has involved immigration law. I haven't written anything about the process mainly because up until now I have been too busy dealing with it, and also partly because I felt that once I started I would not be able to shut up about it - it is a process that has required much of my (and M.'s) time.

The reason why I write about it now is because yesterday M. and I reached a critical milestone in the process - we attended my green card interview and I received the stamp in my passport that says I have 'temporary' permanent resident status (this in itself merits another post. What a ridiculous title?). I feel this is a good point for me to sum up the experience.

I understand why people hire lawyers to go through this process. I am a lawyer and I still found it initially difficult to understand exactly what I was meant to do at every step. Even though the immigration department sent me letters with instructions, you have to go online and scroll through pages before you can find out in what format and in what order you need to submit everything. And after all that research, you still don't get the answers you want so you end up joining discussion boards on the topic to find out exactly what you need.

I also understand why the process is necessary. On those discussion boards I found lesbians advertising for gay men to join them in marriage fraud. I found people discussing methods of obtaining illegal IDs. I found pretty much everything under the sun. At my initial interview at the American consulate in Hong Kong, the girl next to me being interviewed for the same visa was a Filipina who had met her American boyfriend through an internet chatroom. The contrast between her situation and mine could not have been clearer.

Preparation for every stage was tough. You don't feel confident that you've filled in all the forms correctly, you don't know if your supporting documents are adequate, even if you check them time and again. The initial file we submitted had to be about three inches thick. The second file was about the same. And the third. The waiting time spent in between wondering when you'd find out the results felt incredibly long, but it appears we were lucky and were processed quite quickly compared to some others.

We still have the final stages to go for my 'temporary' condition to become permanent. But now I feel a lot more confident about everything going smoothly.

Not that M. ever worried about anything, mind. After today's interview he said, "See? Everything turned out fine. And you were so worried."

Proof that human telemarketers still exist, and that M. is a creature of habit

2005-11-13T16:35:00.000-05:00

We have a landline which we never use. I can't remember the exact reason why we had the landline installed but I think it had something to do with getting cable television. The first time it rang, I looked at M. and asked him who it was, since I hadn't had the chance to give out the number to anyone I knew. He went to pick up the phone, then put it down abruptly.
"It's a telemarketer," he said.
Then the phone started ringing morning and night. Every time, M. went to the phone, listened to it for about one nano-second, then put it down and carried on as if nothing has happened. I thought this was rather rude of him - even if it is a telemarketer, they are still humans, and you should at least say "No, thank you,"? - but then he explained it was usually a pre-recorded message. So when I'm at home, I don't pick up the phone anymore. But M. still picks up the phone if it rings when he's near it, as if anyone we know would have the number to call.

This afternoon, the phone rang and M. duly got up from where he was to pick up the phone.
"Hello? No, I think you have the wrong number, there's no one here with that name....No, well why do you want to know that? Why are you calling?...No, I don't want to participate, and while you're at it, can you take me off of whatever list you found this number on?"
I was getting worried he might become rude. What on earth is wrong with me? I'm worrying about M. being rude to a telemarketer! M. was saying, "No, I actually don't know what this number is, but you called here so shouldn't you know what this number is?"
That's true, I thought. Besides, when would we have had a reason to use the number enough to memorise it?
"No, I don't want you to call me back," M. began, then he looked into the receiver. The guy had hung up on him.
"What did he want?" I asked M., as if I hadn't been listening to a word.
"He was looking for Carmen someone, I think whoever it was that used to live here," M. said.

A hundred dollars says M. will still pick up the phone when it rings the next time.

Sun Tzu's Art of War

2005-11-08T00:34:00.000-05:00

He will win who, prepared himself, waits to take the enemy unprepared

Weapons: 20 pairs of dry socks (woollen and cotton, coloured and patterned).

Launch site of attack: Sofa.

Target codename: M.

Target position: Sitting on west side of sofa, watching Monday night football, apparently unarmed.

Reconnaissance strategy: Folding up clothes (potential weapons of the target) on east side of sofa.

Report on Operation Thunder Socks: Successful. Target was unaware of potential attack when the tagline "Oh, I think it's raining socks" was deployed at 2230. After throwing socks at target, went into defensive mode. I was hit by a few (5?) back but overall objective achieved as target was unable to watch television for fear of flying weapons. Recommend hoarding socks and use of protective blanket for future attacks.

Somewhere between cute and creepy

2005-11-05T11:10:00.000-05:00

I pointed to a pale pink silk quilt circle covered in black netting. It was decorated with pearls and tiny fabric flowers. "What is this?"
The artist, a youthful looking lady wearing what appeared to be a flower covered apron instead of a dress, nodded. She took out a piece of paper and began to unfold it.
"Worm. Oom. Womb," she said, reading out from her notes.
"What? You mean like, a womb?" I asked, pointing to my stomach region. She nodded and grinned. I pointed to the pearls. "Then what are these?"
She didn't need to look at her paper for that. "Eggs."
I stared at the psychedelic pink and blue quilt and embroidery. The lace and ribbon trimming had been sewn carefully in line with the felt. What else had she been thinking of?
"And these mushrooms?" They looked like enoki.
She had to look up that one. "Sperm."
"Indeed."

Minutes before, we had got out of an ancient elevator to get into the gallery of the:artist:network. The small space was overwhelmed with the bright light and works of Sakico Kawashima, an artist who had started painting with oil paints and moved on to creating her 'paintings' with embroidery and fabrics instead. What had initially seemed to be pretty if somewhat eccentric patchwork quilt, had taken on a new turn as we had found the artist wandering about the place with a plastic cupful of red wine.

"Do you intend to make this kawaii?" My companion, a photographer, asked. The artist seemed confused, then smiled.
"Yes, kawaii, and sexy, and pretty," she said, fumbling for words.
"Do you also intend to make it strange?" I asked.
"Strange? Yes, and..."
"Like a hentai?" I asked. She beamed.
"Yes, hentai!"
Hentai means pervert in Japanese. The works themselves are in varying scale, large enough to fill an entire wall sometimes, and every now and then, the 'wombs' would appear in the size of one's head. Or was this something different?
"Woman's genitalia," Sakico said, happily correcting me as she read out the words from her notes.
The embroidery was done with a machine, still, despite careful planning and sketching beforehand the work was not easy. Some of the larger pieces took at least a month to make. Those spectators newly entering the gallery were looking at the pieces as if they were confused. Indeed, had I not had the opportunity to talk to the artist herself, I suspect I would have thought it was all fine sewing skills and pretty colours.

"Maybe I should buy one of these," I said to my friend.
"I don't know if M. would approve," she said.

Things to think about when you're going through food poisoning

2005-11-02T14:11:00.000-05:00

Around 2am last night, I woke up with the horrific sensation that my gut had decided to wrench itself out of my body to crawl crazily out of the bedroom into the bathroom. It turned out it was actually me who was making fast progress into the bathroom, clutching my tummy. Everything after that followed the natural course of things that happen when one has fallen victim to food poisoning. I woke up in the morning feeling less pain, but I was drained. Ginger ale and some cereal helped me feel more coherent but I decided overall, I deserved the day off. Besides, my tummy was still audibly threatening riots every now and then. Time for TiVo and surfing the web, fantasising about other more glamourous jobs I could be doing.

The show I chose to watch was one of my favourites - 'Without a Trace'. It features FBI agents searching for people who go missing. I like it because usually the person does not end up dead, and it is less gory than some of the other prime time shows. On this occasion, however, the show let me down. The Korean girl (a one time fashion designer engaged to a gay Korean guy who was afraid to come out to his parents) who goes missing turns out to have been murdered by her own brother who works at the family owned deli.

At least everyone who was Korean, spoke Korean, although it was patently obvious to me that the mother was definitely not Korean. It was a much more thorough presentation than the 007 film set in North Korea where the extras were all talking in Chinese, which to me implied that from a non-Asian point of view, Asians all sound the same and it doesn't matter that there are all these different countries and cultures in that region.

At least they did bother to raise the fact that "women in our culture don't have it easy", according to the gay ex-fiance. Yes, it has been an uphill struggle on many fronts and still is. But no, that doesn't mean most girls end up trying to only date Caucasian men on the Internet. And what about the gay guy? Now that would have been interesting, while the sado-masochistic sex scene with the girl was merely pandering to stereotype.

At least they did bother to make the girl have a mind of her own, someone who didn't want to be whatever it was her parents wanted her to be. But killing her off by her own brother, just because he gets enraged with jealousy that she doesn't want to help out in the deli? Come on. Korean men aren't that stupid. Or are they?

But what is this fascination with Korean owned delis? When I was taking the ethics exam for the bar in Guam last year (it was the closest U.S. territory from Hong Kong, and it had to be taken on U.S. soil other than the embassy, of course) one of the janitors at the courthouse asked me, upon finding out that I was Korean, "So, do your parents run a deli in New York?"
"Er. No. I'm not from New York. My parents don't run a deli." I said, wondering what the heck.
"So what does your daddy do?" He asked. Mind, this was an old, old guy with bad eyesight.
"He's a banker. My mum is a housewife."
"Ah."

I sometimes wonder what it was that made me decide (after years of having dealt with being a stranger, an immigrant, an expat) to move to a country where I have to deal with even more layers of confused stereotyping. There are people full of the urgent need to maintain links with their culture, but don't know how to go about doing it without being traditionalist. There are people who are trying to be sensitive to minority culture but end up being offensive. Who says it's easy?

With so many ways to evolve your identity, why shouldn't everyone have an identity crisis? I asked M. what we should do if we had children and they had an identity crisis.
"Well, if we stay around here, there will be thousands of other Korean kids to share the identity crisis," he said, half jokingly, half seriously.
Maybe.
Or maybe not.
Who says we're going to have kids?

Just kidding.

Welcoming autumn, belatedly

2005-10-31T07:16:00.000-05:00

Lunch in the quiet town of Cold Spring, New York, was shattered somewhat by the harsh roaring of Harleys.
"Do you think bikers know they are a nuisance?" I asked M. as I cut my bagel into half.
"Yes," M. said. He looked over his omelette. "I think they forgot to give me sausage with my omelette."
"Oh. Maybe they ran out of sausages." They had run out of smoked salmon benedict, my first choice, earlier. I saw the black leather mob park their massive bikes in front of the tiny cafe we were in. Six burly men were being escorted into the alcove we were sitting, their gothic outfits clashing badly with the pastel blue and white interior. The waitress seemed to know them.
"Here are your menus," she said, handing out the flimsy plastic sheets to the group.
"Don't give me the menu," one of them said. "I don't have my glasses with me so I can't read. Just tell me what you have."
I raised my eyebrows. M. grinned.The waitress put her hand on her hips.
"If you can't read, how are you driving your bike? I'm leaving here at six, and you'd better be home by then."
Another waitress passed us by, struggling with an apple pie the size of all of our heads put together.

Earlier on our way to Cold Spring, we had driven through truly convoluted roads around Bear Mountain, passing by Fransiscan monastries, country clubs and warnings against Lyme disease posted on trees.
"Look, we could buy three point five acres here!" I had pointed out to M. after reading a sign for sale. "When would we ever own three point five acres?" We had passed by roads with improbable names like 'Susan Lane', 'Jack Road', 'Fine Place' and puzzlingly 'Forest Farm Road'. What could you be farming in a forest?
"There's like, nothing here," M. had said, as we drove through fields with nothing standing in them.

After lunch we walked down to the river where a small family of canoes were heading upstream along the calm waters, following the trail of the gentle humps of mountain. The autumn colours were still brilliant. We sat on a wooden bench dedicated 'To Our Beloved Son, Joseph C.'
"Do you want to look around at anything else here?" M. said.
"No. I just want to look at this," I said, nodding towards the river.
"Well, I guess there isn't anything else around here really," M. said. The small scattering of shops on Main Street were not really worth the trip, but the view was. So we sat there, staring at the scenery spread out under the blue sky, squinting our eyes in the bright sun. It was warm enough for me to be sitting in my tee shirt.

Wee hours of the morning

2005-10-23T03:14:00.000-04:00

Hey, Liddle Sis, did you know that 'Teen Spirit' is actually a deodorant? Just wondering.

The urge to pass out on the bed is coming back again. I managed to fight it during the day when I was working in the office (oh but of course, I was not the only one - everyone who was there looked as if they'd been plastered to the walls for quite a while, still in their jeans and sweatshirts) but it's coming back now in full force - "Bed is Best! Bed is Best!" chants my bed from behind me. Yes, I know dear, but let me just finish my blog post. M. is still in Montreal with his mates - "I can't wait to go home. I'm tired of going out!"he said, when he called me today - and I was going to joke to him about his going to the many strip clubs in that city (so did he go? What was it like? I've never been to a strip club) but I forgot because just then I spotted a yellow cab through the rain. We drank in a bar that had cheap and awful red wine and my ever so stylish friend said she was going to see a fashion show in a club which made me realise it was time for me to leave to see my other friend who I haven't seen in a while. I haven't seen any of my friends for over a month because I've been working the most horrendous hours (although it doesn't qualify as the first time I've worked such hours, I remember) and I wonder if M. realises that. It's a good thing he's away then, because I managed to catch up with three of my girlfriends all in one night. "Are you sick? Don't stay out too late," M. warned me, after I'd brightly announced to him that I am sick. But I am sick. I feel my body trembling with the combined effort of typing and sitting upright when in fact I had aches and fever earlier in the day. I guess I want to type this before I pass out: Women, stop being so nice (naive?) and realise this - if a guy whom you've been 'friends' with since you were seven years old tried hugging your knees when he's sober, chances are he's looking to get into your knickers. It's bye bye so-called friendship time. But my friend decided she would pass out on her sofa instead so I left her there (she refused to brush her teeth, silly woman) and took a taxi home, wondering if I had been too harsh in telling her the truth.

I'm going to buy 20 lottery tickets. If I win the jackpot I promise to do what M. said we'd do - "We'd give half of it to charity, of course." I love the way M. is so randomly assertive about the most obvious things in life and the fact that what he considers obvious usually coincides with what I consider obvious. Yay for coincidence. It is also a very good thing I have a king-sized bed to fall into and that I have enough bottles of water to last the inevitable hangover tomorrow. Good morning, New York.

It's all about the beer.

I'd like to be under the sea

2005-10-16T21:17:00.000-04:00

"So what's it like living under the sea, then?" I asked Roger. He shrugged (that is to say, he moved his relatively tiny fins up and down in a flutter).
"Oh, I don't know," he said. "Hectic. Stressful. Sometimes I feel like getting away from it all, you know what I mean?"
"Yeah." We both floated around in the deep blue water for a while.
"Hey, but at least you get to eat a lot of seafood. That's healthy," I said.
"True," Roger said. "I try to keep up my strength. You know, being the alpha male of this lot." We had at least five or six female whales quietly floating up to us.
"I see. They keep you busy then?" I said.
"Well, you know...Some of them can be right cows, but they're allright, at least for the mating season."
"Ah." I knew Roger, like all other male sperm whales, tended to wander around on his own when it wasn't mating season.
"They don't really help me get giant squid. I have to get that on my own, 'cos they give theirs to the kids over there." He nodded towards the direction of the blue-grey calves swimming closely next to their mums. "I normally prefer listening to music," Roger continued. "You know, classical music."
"I listen to classical music too, sometimes," I said.
"Yeah?"
"Yeah. Sometimes. Opera." I felt a bit silly admitting to liking opera to Roger. I should have known what his reaction would be like.
"Oh, I don't know about opera. Some people like opera, but I think I'm more of a chamber music bloke." Roger said, a bit less effusively.
"Yes, chamber music can be good."
"But not Mahler."
"Perhaps not." I tried to remember whether I had listened to Mahler outside of school.
"So are you going to South America this season?" Roger said.
"Er, I don't know, should I be?" I asked.
"Yes. Everyone who is everyone is going to South America," Roger said.
"Maybe I shouldn't go then - sounds like it'll be quite a crowd," I said. Roger chuckled.
"You're a smart one," he said. "I'm not going to South America this time."
"Why, have you found a nice little place all to yourself?" I asked. He nodded, his little eyes glowing.
"It's a secret of my own," he said.

It's raining sideways

2005-10-13T07:25:00.000-04:00

What is the point of fighting rain that is coming down sideways? Yesterday I felt the futility of the exercise, and it seems this morning is more or less a repeat of the same.

My favourite fictional inspector, Inspector Montalbano, is a character fairly susceptible to the changes in weather. His colleagues know to avoid him on days when the wind is whipping up the Sicilian coastline into grey waves. Perhaps that is a bit extreme, but don't most people feel let down when they wake up to a leaky sky and lashing winds? I certainly end up pissed off on my way into work. Splash! There go my boots which I had most lovingly polished. Splosh! My bag is wet from the rain. Swoosh! The wind lifts up my umbrella, and my hair is sprayed with dirty water - my black temper is now a livid red. I've lost a coat button, too.

It was different when I first witnessed the monsoon rains in Seoul after moving back from London. I was excited to see the fierce torrent, so unlike the gentle drizzle I was used to.
"Can we go out to play?" I asked my mum, expecting her to say no. Afterall, it was pouring outside - never mind cats and dogs, these were elephants. But she said yes.
"I think you should wear your raincoat and wellies," she said. So I ran out with my yellow raincoat on and my red rubber wellington boots (and only my white underwear). My little sister joined me on the street, which was empty of cars and people, and we jumped straight into the largest puddle we could find. My mum just stood outside the door, saying, "Don't go out too far!" but we were busy getting as wet as possible, soaking up the monsoon, whooping and shrieking like little banshees.

What can I do to brighten my mood on a rainy day like this? I don't know. I may crawl back to bed. Would life be better with a comfort blanket in the office?

The ramifications of a traffic violation

2005-10-05T23:28:00.000-04:00

Last night M. forgot to turn on the headlights of our car as we were driving to the supermarket, so we got a ticket. When we looked around to give the policeman the insurance card for the car, we realised we didn't have it in the glove compartment as we had thought all along. The policeman was surprisingly apologetic to us.
"I know you think I'm not helping you out sir, by giving you this ticket, but really, I am," he said, even though both of us had been sitting quietly in the car (M. probably wondering how on earth he forgot to turn on the headlights, me wondering how much do tickets in the States cost and where did we put the insurance card?) without any remonstration. "By law I could have your car impounded right now since you can't show me your car is insured."

I had read in the newspaper that morning a word which I always struggled with (when would I ever have used it?), and had vowed to (yet never managed to get around to) find out the etymological roots of the word: gubernatorial. I had been silently muttering it under my breath the whole day - it had been a refreshingly quiet work day - gubernatorial, gubernatorial, gubernatorial, until it had become gubnatorial, gubtorial, gubtornarial, gubtarnorial. The words all silently sat on my chest for the rest of the day, like ducks waiting for the sound of the hunter's gunshot to spread their wings. I didn't remember to find out the origins of the adjective.

M. worked out his wrath on getting the ticket by shuffling through the flat in some idiosyncratic order for the rest of the evening, trying but eventually failing to find the insurance card. We both went to bed early, discouraged.

'That's what it is, that's it!'
I grudgingly woke up in the middle of the night because of the pressing need to go to the toilet but, even as I stumbled out of the bedroom with my eyes half closed, my foggy head told me that I had had a moment of eureka. As I peed, I remembered my fantastic answer to the problem.
"We lost the insurance card because we have to spell gubnatorial," I said to M. as I climbed back into the bed.
"Gubernatorial," he said. In that instant, the sham logic of my dream was shattered.
"Yes, gubernatorial," I said, now fully awake and embarrassed at what I had blurted out moments before.
"Right," M. said. He laughed.
"I think I'll go back to sleep now," I said.

Control freak?

2005-10-03T21:46:00.000-04:00

My sisters think I am a control freak. They come to this conclusion after many years of living with me, so I suppose you could say they think so with some amount of reliability. My dad says it is a form of industrial injury caused by my work. Unfair, I say. I just have highly enhanced organisational, proofreading and timing skills.

I don't know if M. thinks I'm a control freak. I think M. is more on top of some things than I am and vice versa. I know he thought of me as bridezilla during the pre-wedding phase. But then, he was the one who came back with a seven point email for the caterers (perhaps we deserve each other).

Would it qualify as being a control freak if you don't like to show your emotions to other people? I just saw an episode of 'Desperate Housewives' where Bree's mother-in-law questions Bree's lack of grief over her husband's death.
"You seem so cold," the mother-in-law said. "People wonder why you don't cry."
I found Bree's answer perfectly understandable.
"I just don't like showing my grief in public," Bree said.
I enjoy sharing my happiness with other people, but sadness seems something extremely private. I don't want to share it with others unless it's someone I know will be sympathetic, as opposed to pitying.

An example of how I lose control over the content of my own blog

2005-10-03T20:48:00.000-04:00

Kristen did this to me. Sob.

7 things that scare me:
1. My temper.
2. Other people's tempers.
3. How deluded I am in thinking I am liberal and understanding when in fact I'm probably more of a snobbish sod than anyone else.
4. People's willingness to be snobbish sods without caring about it.
5. The ineptness of mankind's existence.
6. Matt Damon.
7. Elton John.

7 things that I like most:
1. The fact that M. and I can hang out together and not get on each other's nerves.
2. Reading a good book.
3. Cleaning out the hoover really well so that it is not clogged.
4. Meeting friends for dinner.
5. Talking to my family on the phone (it'll have to do).
6. Planning holidays and taking them.
7. The fact that we are insignificant specks in the universe and time will forget us. Thankfully.

7 important things in my room:
1. Let's just say it's got everything in it.

7 random facts about me:
1. My life is random, in a way. Who says we have control over anything? You just have to do the best you can at whatever you get thrown at you.

7 things I plan to do before I die:
1. Write, just for my own satisfaction, something longer than 20,000 words (10,000 words seems to be where I stop thinking writing is a worthwhile activity).
2. Induce M. to go on a diving trip with me.
3. Go diving in the Red Sea again (with or without M.!)
4. Travel to Burma, ideally with my mum. She wants to see the sites. I want to see the scenery. Not yet though.
5. Do pro bono work again.
6. Stay sane.
7. Grow old with M.

7 things I can do:
1. Talk the hind leg off a donkey.
2. Read for Britain.
3. Be surprisingly calm when confronted by very irrational circumstances. My family think I would pick a fight in such situations, but actually, when things go wrong and there's no one else to handle it, I do.
4. Kick - left, right, front and back.
5. Laugh with girlfriends over their dating mishaps. For years I was their source of mirth.
6. Read cvs and spot spelling mistakes, formatting errors etc.
7. Make M. laugh.

7 things I can’t do:
1. Fake enjoyment at seeing someone I don't like.
2. Pretend everything is fine. If you ask me on a day that's not good, I'll tell you I've had better days, although I probably will not elaborate why.
3. Stop drinking. Heck, I try, but I'm a lawyer.
4. Read Latin or Greek. That's why we have Liddle Sis in the house - the classicist is here.
5. Do any percentages or divisions in my head. My lack of maths skills leave people dumbfounded.
6. Win M. at any game - chess, Monopoly, pool. It's annoying.
7. Fit into those teeny weeny jeans that I once never fit into.

7 things I say the most:
1. Spell out my name in full, then repeat it.
2. "Holy cannoli". I love that phrase. I have found many occasions to use it.
3. "Why are you even thinking about this guy? He's such a waste of space." (said to girlfriend with yet another story about freakish date).
4. "Wait for me..." (said to night secretary who takes dinner orders).
5. "No, I don't think you're sick. I think you're stressed." (said to hypochondriac associate).
6. "Hello, baby." (said to M. after getting home past 11pm).
7. "Please, don't tag me with memes. PLEASE."

7. Celebrity Crushes:
1. New Kids on The Block. You mean you didn't like them?
2. Backstreet Boys (see a trend?).
3. ?
4. ?
5. ?
6. ?
7. Clearly I am mourning the dearth of good-looking boy bands. Life has never been the same since the Backstreet Boys turned a day over twenty.

7 people who could do this:
As ever, the buck stops here. PLEASE DO NOT TAG ME with MEMES. PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE....

Look shot?

2005-09-29T07:54:00.000-04:00

So the past couple of weeks at work have been pretty much a series of long days and tired nights. Yesterday as I was walking down the corridor the partner I work for passed me by, saying,
"Jeez, J-A, you look shot."
"Huh?" I stared back at him, instinctively clutching at my sweater front.
"I mean you look tired," he said, with a wave of his hand. Oh, I just thought I was bleeding, or something.

The last time he confused me was when he was questioning my decision to post something.
"What do you mean,you're going to post that letter?" He asked. I stared back at him, completely in a fog. He started laughing, as he said, "Do you mean, you're going to FedEx it?"
"Er, OK, I guess I'll FedEx it," I said. But what was the problem with posting it?

I see on the Today show that Jamie Oliver is in town. Maybe I should go up to the Rockefeller Center to talk to someone who at least won't question my idea of sending things by post and looking tired without appearing mortally wounded.

My New York morning

2005-09-21T10:48:00.000-04:00

I have a habit of trying to beat the traffic lights. I stand on the edge of my toes, waiting to see if there is a slim space for me to fit into the row of cars to cross to the other side of the road, then when there is even just a split second's difference in the flow of vehicles, I make a run for it. This morning, as I was skimming over the asphalt surface, I saw the mashed body of a pigeon, unrecognisable save for one ridiculously whole clawed foot raised up from the otherwise flattened corpse. While my stomach was still churning over this sight, I walked into a solemn man with a t-shirt on that said "9 months: Ready or Not" over his bulging overhang. In that instant, I was ready to laugh, but then I remembered the pink claws of the dead bird and my insides turned again.

My building, like so many buildings in Manhattan, requires all its tenants to carry around silly plastic cards with mug shots of themselves (as if anyone could be identified through those fuzzy, strangely magnified faces) to slide through the entrance barriers. I fumbled around in my red leather bag for the pass, but unlike every other morning where I simply manage to grip onto its black clasp, I could not find it. Removing the contents of the bag - a red nectarine, still cold from the fridge at home, my orange purse, the brown hair clasp I try not to break, my small mobile phone and clunky Blackberry - produced no results. Did I leave it at home or at the office, I wondered, as I asked the guard to let me through, saying I had left it upstairs.

In the lift, a man pressed for the thirtieth floor but got off at the twenty-fourth, which is the first stop. The other girl in the lift looked at me with raised eyebrows. I shrugged.

"He probably didn't mean to get off on the twenty-fourth," I said.

"He'll probably have to wait for the next elevator," the girl says.

I have turned my office upside down but I haven't found my building pass.

I need a pensieve

2005-09-19T23:57:00.000-04:00

Freud might have said something interesting (or insulting) about the fact that the past couple of days I've had dreams of black cats clawing at me (I am fond of cats, so this is bizarre) and during the day I get flashbacks. Is it just me, or do other people also plop down on the sofa ostensibly to read a book only to be unnerved the next second by a suddenly acute memory of something you said or did, or someone else said or did, a long time ago?

This was when I was in school in Korea, when I was nine. One day in the first weeks of the school term, I made friends with a girl in my class by smiling at her (she smiled back at me). One of the other girls in my class pulled me back as I was about to walk in her direction, and hissed into my ear, "J-A! What do you think you're doing! That's the Retard!"
"What do you mean?" I asked. "She looks fine to me."
"She's stupid. She pooed in her pants last year," the girl said.
"Eurgh," I said.
"She's gross," the girl said.
But the 'Retard', H., kept smiling at me, and it seemed just not a very nice thing to do to turn away from that smile. So I shrugged my shoulders and walked up to her. I ended up sitting next to her, sharing a desk for the day (she didn't have anyone else to share the desk with, because no one wanted to sit next to her). She didn't smell or anything, but she did speak with a tough lisp, in somewhat disjointed sentences. But she kept smiling angelically, and I thought, well, she can't be half as bad as the popular mean girls make her out to be. My memories of being horribly bullied because of my incompetent Korean the year before were still fresh. At break time, some of the boys wandered over to my side of the desk.
"Hey, J-A, do you smell of poo now too?" one of them asked.
"Not as much as you," I said (probably very unconvincingly, as I was still somewhat linguistically challenged). The boys laughed and went away. H. grinned at me, then drew me a picture, but I had no idea what it was, so I just grinned back at her.

School was over, and I walked out to the playground to go home. But H. was following me. She kept poking me in the arm, in a friendly way, and was trying to say something. Finally, I understood what she said.
"You want me to visit your home?" I asked. She smiled again. I thought about it. "OK. Let's go over to your place."

It was an incredibly neat and brightly lit house that H.'s family lived in. Her mum was neat-looking, too, and wore thin glasses over her made-up face. My mum never wore make up except for special occasions, so I just stared at her rudely. She smiled at me, and said, "Well now, I think you're the first friend H. has brought home from school for a very long time. We must celebrate."
I grinned awkwardly. H. had a little brother who was a tiny bundle of energy. He darted in and out of the room we were sitting in, staring at me with utmost curiosity. H.'s grandmother came into the room, followed by her mum, who was carrying a tray of sliced fruit and rice cake. I don't remember what we actually played with, or if we ever got to play at all because of H.'s grandmother and her mum grilling me with questions.

To be honest, I can't remember what happened after that, which is puzzling and troubling - did I stay away from her, like every other mean kid in the class, in the end? Or was it just that playing with her wasn't a terribly distinguishable event anyway? What I do know is, at some point very shortly after, H.'s parents decided to send her to a different school (possibly that of a different kind altogether). I don't remember seeing her in the graduation album that we received two years later.

Wanted: lots of new braincells

2005-09-14T00:10:00.000-04:00

Not content with having gone through a ceremony and after party in Seoul, M. and I threw a post-wedding party in New York last Saturday. A bunch of people came to my flat for the post-post-wedding party, at which M.'s friends spiked his Gatorade (M. was desperately trying to drink something non-alcoholic at this point) and two people were left lying on the living room carpet (they left cheery morning after photos on M.'s digital camera, we found out later). Needless to say, both M. and I were one of the many people in Manhattan who felt last Sunday was a tortuous exercise in hangover practice. You'd think that someone in our group of friends would have had the good sense to stop drinking after the first rosy tinted cheeks appeared in sight, right?

After such a weekend, it is no wonder that I have had a less than lacklustre start into my working week. I have just felt exhausted for the past couple of days. The two braincells that contained all my legal knowledge have been killed off and fluttered away from the top of my head like dandruff so it has been a real struggle to understand the simplest of concepts. A colleague of mine who had just come back from her younger brother's three day long wedding celebrations stopped by my office today.
"I just can't understand anything today. I'm just waiting for today to end so that I don't have to talk to anyone," she said.
"Join the club," I said.
"I feel like I'm getting stupider," she said. Well, she had a point - she may have possibly killed off her legal knowledge in the same way I had.
"I know what you mean," I said.
"I think I was more intelligent last week," she said.
"Same here," I said. You could tell we weren't increasing our intelligence any more by our conversation, either.

My very simple minded research on Google tells me my braincells will crank out some new cells to grow into neurons in about 30 days. Until then, it may be slow around here.

Ignore the fat lady

2005-09-07T07:56:00.000-04:00

So Barbara Bush has a couple of things to say about the Hurricane Katrina victims in the Astrodome. But don't get mad - think of Marie Antoinette and her sorry end. So just donate.

M. and I are giving to the American Red Cross.

They should ban brides from phoning their grooms on the night before the wedding

2005-09-05T12:22:00.000-04:00

"But it's not the actual ceremony that proves that I love you," M. said down the line. "It's our every day life together that we have which is meaningful, where I show how I love you, don't you think?" He was trying to be patient, I knew, even though he felt the urge to give in to his frustration. And I knew he wasn't trying to upset me, this was just the way he felt. But why did he have to feel this way?
"Are you saying that this ceremony doesn't have any meaning at all for you? Then why the hell are we doing it? Am I getting married to myself?" I yelled. I felt my eyes well up.

My real problem was, I was sitting on the floor of my sister's room, while my dad was outside practising his thank you speech to the guests in his great, rumbling voice; I had less than four hours to go before I had to wake up to get to the hairdresser's to have my hair and make up done, and yet I had still not finished my wedding vows which the professor who was officiating the ceremony had told us to write.

"J-A," he had written in an email the following day after M. and I had gone to meet him, "I think the wedding vows are the most important part of the ceremony. This vow is not something you are meant to just recite aloud for one day and then forget; this is something you are meant to keep for life."

It was all very well for him to say, I thought to myself as I sat on the floor with salty tears overflowing on my face (I had already sprouted a tension pimple) while M. tried to fix the mess I was in by comforting me as much as he could (without reiterating his views that we were showing our love more publicly by leading a happy life together than by one day of overblown felicity, as that was sure to make me cry again). The professor could tell us to write our oh-so-meaningful wedding vows within the next twenty-four hours because he wasn't the one who had been getting up at six thirty for the past five days to make sure the bouquet was ordered, the hair and make-up sorted out, the hanbok hired, all the relatives had been met and regaled with food, and the bride was not going to have a nervous breakdown. Or was this the nervous breakdown?

"I'm just saying, we know we love each other, and I'm going through this for you, OK?" M. said. "It's going to be OK."
"I have no idea what I'm going to be saying for my wedding vows," I said. I realised after I'd said it that this was not very helpful. I wasn't trying to be unhelpful, I was just in that kind of state.
"I've written mine down," M. said. "It's something personal, from me to you."

After we'd finally hung up on the phone, I went into the living room where my dad was still loudly reciting his thank you speech as my mum looked on.
"Can you please do that somewhere else? I've got a wedding vow to write!" I yelled.
"I have to memorise this thing!" My dad yelled back. I glared at him, but there was no point, he had started off again - "My most esteemed guests..."
It was an important thing to say, I had to make sure I was saying the right thing. I wrote what I first thought of, then scratched it all out, to delete any references to 'best friend' or 'soulmate'. I wrote it out on a clean sheet of paper. (As it turned out, M. decided to use 'best friend' and 'soulmate'). He's probably not going to say much, I'll bet, I thought to myself, seeing how he doesn't think much of this ceremony in the first place. It's probably better if I restrain what I say, too. And anyway, I'm too fond of hyperbole.

I did sleep, but I woke up as soon as the alarm rang. The whole time I was getting my makeup and hair done, I was amused at the process of my transformation. I decided, afterall, as M. said, this was just one day. Things would happen today, but we would be just as we were - in love.
"Oh my goodness," I said, to the ladies who were doing my hair and makeup, "you're making an excellent effort to paint stripes onto a pumpkin *."
The ladies laughed, then looked appalled. "You shouldn't say that," one of the ladies protested.
"I know," I said. "But you should definitely call the newspapers."
"Why?" The bewildered ladies asked.
"To tell the world you've changed a pumpkin into a watermelon, of course," I said. The ladies started laughing again, in spite of themselves.

At the site of the ceremony, great pains were taken to make sure M. only saw me standing at the entrance of the hall. I was surprised to see him look so cheerful - his face was lit up with some energy I hadn't expected. He smiled widely as he took my hand. And then, before I even knew it, it was time for him to say his vows. From the first word he uttered, I felt great surprise and even some resentment.
"Hey, that's not fair!" I wanted to shout. "You said this was just a ceremony!" But it was too late for that - M.'s vow to me was personal, and its emotional content made his voice waver, causing my little sister to cry a little and one of my best friends burst into tears. I held his hand as he finished saying it, although I'm sure mine trembled more than his.
"Why is it that when you give me these little gifts, mine seem always smaller, drabber and not as spontaneous? I am still so crappy at being the generous lover. I'm sorry, I'll be better," I wanted to say to him, but I had my little piece of paper to prevent me from bursting into such incomprehensible gibberish. My voice cracked at the seams as I read out my paragraph. All I wanted to do was give him a big bear hug, but I resisted this, and instead said to him in a low voice, "I love you," at the end.

*In Korean, you can say to someone who is ugly but well made-up, 'If a pumpkin is painted with stripes, does that make it a watermelon?' as an unattractive woman is referred to as a pumpkin in slang. Naturally, these are fighting words and not to be used for complimentary purposes.

Gone fishing

2005-08-22T20:21:00.000-04:00

M. and I are in Seoul now.

Life will resume its normal pace once we are back in New York. Until then, it is an uphill battle against jetlag, pushy wedding vendors, meals with relatives and constant fatigue.

And then we'll be married (again, if you count the civil ceremony).

Going Bananas Part II

2005-08-16T23:41:00.000-04:00

On the one hand, it's terribly exciting to be seeing my family again after more than eight months, to be walking, talking (and fighting) with them in person rather than the telephone calls. But the thing is, M. and I are not going for a holiday to Seoul - we are going there to be the main performers in a massive, overblown drama as bride and groom. So my mind seesaws between joy and anxiety ("Whoo hoo! I'll be having mum's cooking!" "Shoot, I don't even know where the hairdresser's is, or whether the bouquet has been ordered!") all day long.

The painful thing at the moment is that, despite my conversation with my parents and M.'s parents having a talk with my parents, my mum decided to send M.'s parents a dowry anyway.
"Your parents are just trying to make sure everything is done in the traditional formal way, since it's the first wedding in your family," H., a friend of mine from Seoul, said, in an attempt to soothe me when I called him in a fractious manner.

I know why my parents are doing what they are doing. They're trying to make sure we follow tradition impeccably. I never would have consented to my parents presenting M.'s parents with a dowry. This is too medieval, too undignifying. Why should anyone have to pay for consenting adults joining in matrimony? It's frustrating, but it is too late now to do anything about it. So M.'s parents now feel they should do something in return, and M.'s mum called to tell me she's expecting to see me at an appointment to tailor a hanbok, the flouncy Korean dress. I've never worn one, and I don't know if I'll ever have the occasion to wear it past this wedding, but all this is really beyond my control.

They say in Korea the wedding isn't about the bride and groom, it's about the family. I can testify to that, and I would recommend eloping to combat the situation. Go to Bali or Hawaii you unmarrieds, and be wed in peace.

Early morning

2005-08-14T02:26:00.000-04:00

So I went out for a night with the tiny number of girls outside of work that I know in New York. We drank copious amounts of champagne, wine and had our belly's fill of pasta, cheese and salmon. We laughed at ridiculous jokes, jokes that make no sense when you're sober but somehow are the funniest when you're tipsy, and we made insulting comments about each other's breasts (there are definitely among us some wannabe-lesbians).

I came home and washed the dishes. M. is still out with his friends in Heaven-knows-where, since his friends thought it suitable he should be having a night out with the lads about town. I finished cleaning the kitchen from the mess of dinner and sat down to rest my legs. The first thought that came to me was the one that had popped up in my mind earlier in the day: "I wish my friends from Hong Kong and London were here."

It's not that I am dismissing the friends I have made in New York. It's not that I regret moving to New York. It's just simply the fact that I miss my other friends.

Wherever you are tonight/today, I miss you and I hope things are going well for you.

I guess I should send sappy emails to my friends.

E. McPan interviewed me later on in the afternoon. M. decided it was boring, I think - he walked off halfway through. I am surprised by how much I stutter and use filler ('er', 'um' etc.). But it was fun!

Matchmaking

2005-08-11T18:37:00.000-04:00

"So, this guy, he's a nice guy really, and I would date him if I could..." My friend starts up. She tweaks my curiousity with her opening line, but I break in.
"Wait, so is he good-looking? When was the last time he broke up with a girl?"
"Well, he's not that good-looking, but girls love him. He hasn't dated in a while."
"Hmm."

While I certainly don't play the matchmaker often, I'm the sceptic, the ultimate snob and cynic when it comes to picking out men for blind dates with my girl friends. In my own personal life pre-M. I didn''t exercise such judgment, which resulted in many a tragi-comic relationship. For my girls, though, I turn into the Republican father (though perhaps not quite as WASPy).
"Where does he work? Is he intelligent?" I interrogate.
"He's smart, very sophisticated, really." My friend's voice is almost pleading.

On the one hand, it's a bit suspicious that the guy that 'girls love' hasn't been dating for a while. On the other hand, my friend is quite smart herself, so for her to say he is sophisticated counts in his favour.
"So? So? What do you say? Come on, comeoncomeoncomeon," she urges.
"OK," I relent. "But no expectations. And the initial communication is by email."

My girl, in turn, is also cautious.
"No expectations, right?" she emails me.
"No, of course," I email back. But if you guys get married, I'm matron of honour.

Animal sightings and McMansions

2005-08-08T00:24:00.000-04:00

A deer, its graceful long neck stretched out over its stocky caramel-coloured body as if it was interrupted by the car while performing the 'Dying Swan', its dark eyes no longer luminous. I saw the broken animal lying by the road as M. and I drove into the town of Madison, New Jersey.
"Just how can someone not see a deer on the road, for heaven's sake?" I said.
"Well, you know, the road isn't lit, there aren't any street lights, and it's late at night when the deer prance around," M. said. "You have to rely on the headlights and that's what happens."
"Who said people should be driving around so fast anyway?" I said.
"I'm not disagreeing with you," M. said.
The road became more like Surrey, England, as I saw it become narrower and more winding along nothing but fenced greenery. I said as much to M.
"There were lots of English living around here," M. said. "A hundred years ago, I mean."
"Indeed."
The surrounding houses became larger, more ostentatious and older.
"Do you know that if a house is over three thousand square feet it needs external help to clean and maintain it?" I said. "That's how maid agencies see it."
"I can see that. Think about it - that's three times the size of our apartment," M. said, as we passed several elegant houses which were most certainly over the threshold. "In that case, maybe we should buy a house that is two thousand nine hundred square feet so that we can make sure we never need external help, or maids."
"OK," I said. The house on my left was sporting mock-Tudor style exposed wooden beams. "I don't like that house. I hate mock-Tudor."
"Well baby, we can't afford any of the houses here, you know."
"I'm still entitled to have an opinion on the type of house I would like."

Later, at home, I read through the catalogues from Pottery Barn and Restoration Hardware while M. was fiddling with the computer.

Is the deer still lying by the road, its broken neck resting on its heavy body?

English

2005-08-04T21:34:00.000-04:00

After having dinner with M. we were idly wandering around our neighbourhood, looking at the shop windows. The posters were advertising a 'lighter sale', only the spelling seemed truncated.
"Lighter...lighter...lighter?" I said to myself. I thought about the poster again. How was it spelt - L.I.T.E.R. Lite, lite-r? But there were bottles...

I smacked my head and started laughing.
"It was a litre sale, not a lighter sale!" I yelled to the startled M. beside me. He said, "What?"
I told him what my mistake was. "Why don't you spell it as l-i-t-r-e here, darn it?"

When I'm focused, I know how the spelling differs. But I can't help what my subconscious thinks.

Idle chat

2005-08-02T09:42:00.000-04:00

So the chef-wannabe friend of M.'s who cooked us fantastically elaborate meals while undertaking his culinary education has been deciding what he wants to do with his life. He's decided he can't open a restaurant yet since he doesn't have enough experience. I nearly spit out my food when M. told me this over dinner.
"Who needs chef experience to become a restauranteur?" I spluttered. "Most of the famous restauranteurs are businessmen, not chefs. I need to talk to him, if that's what he's thinking."
"Yes, I guess," M. said. He always gets pre-occupied with the pad thai at the restaurant we were at - it's unusually good, it comes with a spitting hot sauce and reminds us of our holiday in Phuket.
"Think of Jeff Chodorow! He used to be a lawyer!" I continued. "And Sir Terence Conran! He's not a chef!"
"He runs Habitat," M. said suddenly, for a split second tearing himself away from the fragrant noodles. "He does furniture."
"That's right, honey," I said. "And think of that horridly expensive restaurant in the City, remember? That was set up by three former investment bankers who hired a chef."
"I know where you're thinking of," M. said, mid-chopstick. "I think I've been there. The food was awful. And it was really expensive - it's an expense account kind of place."
"I know, but it's still there!" I said. "The point is, Q. shouldn't be thinking of gaining more chef experience. At his age, he won't be able to make it to a grand chef. But he can surely become a good restauranteur anyway. He needs a good business plan."
"Who'll fund him?" M. said. He looked down at the phad thai. "I think the portions here are getting smaller."
"You and me," I said.
"Right," M. said. He looked at me. "Do you want the last shrimp? I hear that most restaurants fail."
I sighed. "I know. Maybe I need to go to business school to learn how to write good business plans. Then Q. and I can set up a restaurant."
M. just gave me a look.

GOING Bananas

2005-07-30T11:51:00.000-04:00

As much as I tried for this not to happen, a lot of my time has been spent on wedding preparations which consist mostly of emotional phone conversations with my parents:

J-A is drafting an email to send out to a client. The phone rings.
Dad: "We may have too many guests. How many people do you think M.'s parents are going to invite?"
Me: "Oh my god. We are going to have too many guests? You mean more than the hundreds we are going to have?"
Dad: "We aren't going to have thousands."

J-A is writing out the addresses on the wedding invitations while M. is folding the cards and sticking gold stickers to seal the envelopes. The phone rings.
Mum: "So the wedding hall was offering to provide you with some sort of cake cutting ceremony, a candle-lighting ceremony and a champagne toast..."
Me: "Wait, who said I was going to do such cheesy crap? No way! If you make me do this, I'm going to... I'm going to break something!"
Mum: "I thought that's what you would say, so I told them you wouldn't do it. I said that my daughter lacks the necessary acting abilities to carry off such a thing."

J-A is looking up addresses on the internet. M. has given up and is lying on the bed. The phone rings.
Dad: "Do you think you could invite some more young people? How about your high school friends?"
Me: "What are you talking about? I haven't spoken to them since high school!"
Dad: "Still, there will be so few of your friends coming."
Me: "Well, it's not my fault I don't have many friends in Seoul!"

J-A is trying to blog. The phone rings.
Mum: "Do you think you want extra photos?"
Me: "No!"

I can't wait for the flipping thing to be over.

Good grief

2005-07-21T10:56:00.000-04:00

Not again.

Stupid questions

2005-07-20T22:00:00.000-04:00

Sometimes, the so-called dumb questions can be life-changing. For example, wouldn't your life be different if you knew the answer to questions that seem simple, such as "Which comes first - the chicken or the egg?" or "Is C-3PO gay?" or, more closer to home, "Why do some people become corporate finance lawyers and spend nearly all of their time in the office even though it makes them as miserable as sin?"

Now, I'm not a biological expert, so I'm not sure I can answer the first question re chicken-or-egg-first. The second one I may have a better shot at answering. So, is C-3PO gay? M. has come up with the following reasons why C-3PO must be gay:

1. He always hangs around R2-D2, who is clearly male.
2. He's a bit effeminate.

I don't think of R2-D2 as a gendered entity. I suspect R2-D2 has more in common with a pet amoeba than with a male or female friend. Granted, C-3PO is rather effeminate. He does afterall, have a tendency to be a scaredy-cat about everything and talks in that dodgy gushing way. But being effeminate is no indicator of gayness - Prince wears funny clothes but he married a beautiful chorus girl. Even if we assume R2-D2 is a male robot, we can't assume that an effeminate C-3PO hanging out with a male R2-D2 is automatically gay. There are people who are 'asexual' (as in, they don't feel interested in sex) and there are people who swing both ways, so to speak, and there are people who repress their inner gayness (and thus do not appear gay, although I'm not sure whether one should count these people in as part of the gay population nevertheless. Does one count non-practising Christians into the Christian congregation?). So my answer to the question is that C-3PO is not 'definitely' gay.

I will write a book* once I find out the answer to question number three. Right now I'm a bit at a loss.

*It will become an instant best-seller. I will emancipate thousands of corporate finance lawyers.

Life goes on (a.k.a. We are Not Afraid)

2005-07-14T01:22:00.000-04:00

Although I had my long distance shell shock (I had large tears rolling down my cheeks in front of those colleagues who had figured out my London connection and stopped by my office to ask how things were) last week, there was still much work to do, a dress fitting to go to, and yet more work to do.

On Monday, despite the billing frenzy, I managed to get out for two hours for the first fitting of my wedding dress. I will obviously not describe the dress here for M. security reasons. It was lovely to wear the dress again, but I was pinned down so much I felt like the lady was trying to make an outline to do a paper cutout.
"Can you breathe? Can you move?" my friend F., who had come along to watch, asked as she observed the lady adding yet more pins to the skirt.
"Yes, just," I said. "If I put on any more weight though, I think the dress will pop."
"You look like you have boobs," F. said.
"Hurrah," I said.
The lady just looked at us, then said to me, "You look beautiful. Like a film star."
I tried on different veils and other accessories, then it was time for me to get out of the dress. Now, when I had changed into the dress earlier, I had just managed to avoid tearing it by opening it wide from the top and sort of jumping into it. Since I had been pinned down to the last milimetre, this was no longer feasible. The lady unzipped me and then both F. and her took hold of my arms, and I had to wiggle my bottom out of the dress first, before jumping out of it. How I'm going to get back into it for my second fitting, I'm not sure.

Then it was back to work at the most gruelling pace until this afternoon when my last deal closing ended. My partner found me sitting in my office looking a bit dazed. I hadn't slept much in the past forty-eight hours and I suppose despite all the make-up I was wearing the fatigue showed.
"What are you doing still here? Go home and get some rest," he said.
"I will, I will," I said. I was already shutting down my computer before he had appeared but he waited for me to get out of my office before saying I should have dinner with M. tonight on him (some day, I'm going to remind him of this offer).

There's nothing like having an afternoon nap, then some Haagen Daz icecream in front of the telly - t'is the best.

No Words

2005-07-07T11:35:00.000-04:00

My hands are still trembling.

This morning M. came to the bed and said, "Are you awake? I have some bad news."

The first thing I thought of was my friend H., who travels to Russell Square, sometimes by bus. My hands shook violently as I thought of the unthinkable and I burst into tears when I read the first email in my inbox - someone had already anticipated my panic and written to let me know who was all right. H. wrote back to say she was fine. Three hours of waiting for everyone to send back replies to my emails, and I know nearly everyone I know is unhurt - hopefully, the ones who haven't written back are just trapped somewhere in the City for lack of transport. But I can't begin to explain how relieved, angry, bitter and sad I am.

P.S. (9th July, 3.11 am) Since writing the above I've run the whole gamut of emotions and I think I'm not yet ready to talk about this without being troubled. If I don't write about it, it's not because I'm not thinking about this, it's because I just don't know how to. I think even with this postscript I'm not really adding much to anything, but it felt like I needed to explain more.

I blame it on the North Carolinians

2005-07-06T00:08:00.000-04:00

I mean, really, did you think I would have come up with the idea by myself? Me, the Korean-British-whatever, snap my fingers and say, "I know what, I'll wear seersucker and drink Jack Daniels and ginger ale all day!"

No, it was definitely not my idea. It was a bunch of North Carolinians who turned up one day around the other corner of the bar where I was, upon hearing me ordering a gin and tonic, and shook their heads, wagged their fingers into my bewildered face, and said, "You ought to have a Jack Daniels."
"Really? I've never tried that, to be honest," I said, by way of starting an explanation that I do not normally drink 'heavy' stuff (not at this stage in my life anyway, since my liver has started pleading for its own), but the North Carolinians took this statement to be a blunt put down of their drink.
"But Jack Daniels is the best on a day like this," they said. "Try it."
The bartender raised his eyebrows at me. I shrugged my shoulders.
"Jack and coke?" he asked. I was about to say, "Whatever - I don't usually drink this stuff," when the North Carolinians butted in again: "Jack and ginger is much lighter stuff.""Yeah, not so sweet.""That's a real summer drink."
"You see," my new-found friends began, as I started sucking the amber liquid through the straw (as unseemly as it is, I detest icecubes and my glass was heavy with ice, leaving me with no choice but to use the straw), "You're meant to be wearing seersucker while sipping Jack and ginger on a hot summer's day." "Or mint julep." "But at the Kentucky Derby, mind. That's good mint julep.""And it is the best thing for summer, don't you think?"
"It's a very nice drink," I said, nodding.

Somehow the idea lodged itself so tightly in my brain that the next time I ordered a drink I ended up asking for a Jack and ginger. Then I saw a seersucker skirt, and bought it. I wore it on a bright sunny day during the Independence Day holiday to go for lunch with M. But M.'s friends called to suggest a game of pitch and putt (translation: golf for idiots, not quite children) and I ended up on a golf course, wearing a pink and white seersucker Grace Kelly skirt with a red handbag and sandals. I could not have looked more ridiculous.
"I see you aim to be stylish when you play golf," M.'s friend Q. said, as he moved away from my swing - which I was attempting with the bag slung across my right shoulder.
"Yes," I said.
"And you accessorise, too, with the handbag! Nice touch!" he said. I tried not to think about what I looked like on the green. Focus, focus, focus on the ball, don't lift your head up, relax your knees, swing without stopping. It was the last hole, a short distance to the flag, but in my nervous concentration I ended up hitting the ball out of the course - a fair hundred yards? Two men on the putting green nearly got hit.

After that, I really needed a Jack and ginger.

Gone Fishing

2005-07-02T00:21:00.000-04:00

Middle-Aged Man tagged me. I'm following my normal rules of play: I do not tag anyone else. This post stands alone.

What are the five things you miss about your childhood?

In no particular order...

1. Summer holidays. When I was in elementary school in Korea, I absolutely despised going to school. I couldn't make out what the teacher was saying most of the time (my Korean was shaky after years in London), I didn't know how to communicate without sounding like a freak and none of the homework made any sense (why would you have to underline the 'important' passages of a textbook for your homework?). So even though the school gave me tonnes of homework for the summer, as soon as the bell rang for end of term I would just chuck everything into a corner somewhere at home and go out to play all day and night.

Of course, two days before (and sometimes, even, the day before) the start of school term I would be sitting in the dark, panicking while trying to cobble together the homework (which also consisted of a daily diary detailing the weather for each day). But on one occasion I outdid myself by forgetting the day the term started - I went out to ride my bicycle as usual and saw all these children heading towards the school...!

2. Using my imagination. I miss the flying carpets, flying beds, castles made out of bushes in the garden and princess dresses from lace curtains in my make-believe play. My favourite game was "Let's Pretend". Anywhere was a set and everything was a prop for my fantasy world. I feel I have changed - not necessarily 'grown-up' - into something other than the kid I used to be when I realise how long it has been since I've imagined anything.

3. Playing with my sisters. We always had so much to talk about, too. Sometimes I wonder why we have made the choices we have to be in such different situations, but then, we were always different from each other. I still think my sisters generally understand me better than most other people.

4. Knowing I could be anything I wanted to be. A naive thought, perhaps, but I'd say for a child it is better to have some hopes for the future than none. I changed my mind frequently on what it was I wanted to become later on in life, without giving much thought as to how I would achieve it. Now of course I know better. But perhaps it would not have hurt for me to have been a little bit more daring in my choice of career.

5. Icecream. We used to get cheap lollies from the local shops in London on a hot summer's day. My favourite one was shaped like a foot - it was fun biting off the toes. In Korea I loved eating the old-fashioned 'ice cakes'. They're really more like frozen milk and sweet juice than anything else and have a very clean, refreshing taste. Sometimes when I have the extravagant chocolate chip and almond ice creams here, I feel it is a bit too much. I just want the simple fresh taste of ice to cool me.

Work: it's like diving, but not quite

2005-06-30T10:31:00.000-04:00

The first time I put on a scuba mask inside the training pool, I was nervous that I would somehow manage to forget the elementary thing to do - to breathe out. Once I took my first breath underwater I realised that, not only was it impossible to forget to breathe, it was also difficult to stop giggling. I spat out the regulator while coming quickly up to the surface and my diving instructor followed me out of worry, and asked me what was wrong with his hands.

"I sound like Darth Vader," I explained, once I had controlled my mirth. But the instructor was French and the joke was lost on him. Another girl on the course, a strong swimmer, suddenly pulled her head out of the water.

"I can't do it," she said as she took out her regulator from her mouth, her voice rising as she bobbed on the surface of the pool. "It makes me feel...I feel....I just can't."

The instructor told her they would both go under the surface to the bottom of the pool (where everyone else on the course was already waiting) together. He looked at me, but I had already put my regulator back into my mouth and was preparing to join the others.

Wearing all the scuba gear slows you down in the water somewhat, but it was fun to pretend I was a big, fat, lazy carp somewhere in the South China Sea, moving my thighs and calves instead of fins. The others were getting restless and were circling around near the floor of the pool. I waved at them, and they waved back. Finally, I settled on a white square tile and waited for the instructor and the girl to join us. But she had a couple of false starts. She started out swimming down with the instructor, then at a couple of feet under she would jerk her head sideways, pushing away from the instructor who was trying to calm her down, and head back to the surface. Then a couple of minutes would pass, and she and the instructor would be on their way down for a couple of feet, only for the girl to push away from the instructor's hands to the surface again. One of the men on the course made eye contact with me and shook his head when this happened for the third time. I shrugged as well as I could with my heavy shoulders. My thighs were throbbing from the unexpected use of muscles in that area and I was thirsty.

The instructor came down by himself. He made us circle the pool in file, then go back and forth, then pick up objects from the floor and finally, circle the pool without touching the tiles at different depths. When we got out of the pool, the weight of our tired limbs made us realise how much exertion the seemingly weightless movements had cost us. But it was a happy moment, as we realised we were one more step closer to being certified. Despite our aching tiredness we looked around and said to each other, "That was fun, wasn't it?" And we looked forward to the day where we would be out swimming with the beautifully coloured fish in the Red Sea, admiring the sprouting seaweed and oddly-shaped coral. Maybe we would be able to spot a shark (we didn't). Or an octopus (we didn't). Or a turtle (we didn't).

The girl never joined us again.

The only time I didn't feel tired after working late on a Friday

2005-06-25T23:37:00.000-04:00

Last week at work was as pressured as grains of rice inside a pressure cooker or a lump of iron being pounded by a hammer to form a thin sheet. So I missed a golden opportunity to catch up with Daniella and others to watch a free outdoor opera performance on Friday and instead came home at an ungodly hour feeling exhausted. I rarely get headaches but this was a night where it felt like an angry garden gnome with his beard chopped off was rattling my skull with a plastic Hello Kitty umbrella.

M. had called during the day, although it seemed like millions of years ago by then, when I was still dealing with a barrage of emails and conference calls to tell me that, "There's a surprise waiting for you at home." I remembered his call as soon as I got home and found him still awake. I hugged him briefly before asking, "So where is my surprise? What is the surprise? Is it still a surprise?"
He grinned and said, "Of course it's still a surprise. Look," while pointing at the kitchen counter. There was a small lacquered wooden box sitting next to the incense and matchsticks I always leave there. As soon as I saw the box, I felt like I had known what the surprise had been all along.
"It's my ring! It's my ring!" I said, delighted that I had known, and surprised that I had had to ask.
"Open the box," M. said.
"You open it," I said, suddenly superstitious. "You're meant to put it on my finger for me, too."
He opened the box and slid onto my waiting finger a beautiful silver circle crowned by a fantastic, obscenely perfect gem. Almost instantaneously, what had to be the world's most cheesiest, toothiest grin spread across my face. I felt as though I had drunk the elixir of life and was giddy on its energising power.
"It's so pretty!" I said. I stared and stared at it. M. grinned along with me, although perhaps not with such a wide stretch of his mouth.

M. said it, and I'll say it. I'm glad I agreed to marry him without the ring. The ring came afterwards! So there.

Tag, you're it

2005-06-22T00:02:00.000-04:00

A l tagged me.

So, what is the one spark in the midst of darkness?
That there is the work-free weekend at the end of the tunnel. Boy, am I going to enjoy retirement.

Jokes aside...that despite the darkness and horrible viciousness of it all, life is really worth living, because of wonderful friends and family. And good books.

What is the one thing that made you smile today?
M. was so happy to be eating pork chop in kimchi soup he grinned like a kid during dinner. It was pretty funny the way he lit up because of a pork chop.

Damn it, I'm going to tag some people back now. Kinga, Fern and Pea are all IT!

I'm a wannabe sport

2005-06-21T22:50:00.000-04:00

When I was at school in Seoul nearly every year my gym teachers would assume that, because I happened to be one of the taller girls (or sometimes, the tallest girl) in the class, I would be good at sport. So regardless of my protests that I had never played a particular game before, they put me up for the basketball team (where I ended up fouling left right and centre before spectacularly missing the net, spraining my hand in the process), the handball team (where I was assigned goalie and the very first thing I did was get knocked out when the ball landed smack in my face) and the volleyball team (where I spent all my time smacking the ball out of the court and bruising my wrists so severely my mother was scared). Finally some bright spark decided I should be put on the athletics team.
"You have long legs, you should be able to run!" the gym teacher would say, just before I was out on the track. What she never mentioned was that all the other athletes were real athlete-wannabes, training every morning and weighing at least fifteen pounds less than me. Not knowing any of this, I never really worked out why I was sometimes in the middle, sometimes in the top, and sometimes even won the 100m dash.

I was very glad to let the whole 'sport' thing drop once I finished school, or so I thought. Actually, it was a slower process. In London, I joined a mixed hockey team which was about as haphazardly organised as my old school teams and created the same old stink due to lack of experience and knowledge of the rules while playing with my younger sister's old wooden sticks from her school days. One day I came back from a game with such a big lump on the side of my head my boss asked me to go to the emergency for an X-ray to confirm I didn't have a concussion.
"If you're going to come back beaten up like that every time you play, I don't know if I should let you be on the team," she said.
"I'll be fine, really," I said. She shook her head, and said something typically Australian (for she was one), "Oh J-A, you're such a dag."

It seems I have somehow been indoctrinated by the gym teachers that I am meant to be good at sports, no matter the reality that I have never mastered a single game. My suspicions that I am a sado-masochist when it comes to sports was confirmed last Sunday, when I joined M.'s friends in their game of football (that's soccer to you Americans). Despite the fact that the last time I had kicked a football I had managed to break my right big toenail into two, I still joined in several games of three-a-side. M. and the boys had to teach me the correct way to kick the football. Needless to say, my right foot is covered in painful pink bruises, and as a result of catching a well-aimed American football to the chest after the football was over, I have several bruised ribs, too.
"I think I've cracked my ribs," I said to my secretary on Monday. She shook her head.
"If you had cracked your ribs, you wouldn't be standing there telling me that, hon. That would really hurt," she said.

Ever heard of the one where the good sport took it a little too far? He ended up running past the finishing line, of course.

You can hear the heart murmur

2005-06-18T01:15:00.000-04:00

I am in the process of going through routine check-ups of my body. Although it is true that my lifestyle has in no manner followed the 'my body is my temple' school of thought, I assumed that given certain factors (that I don't smoke, do drugs, limit my alcohol to social consumption and have no discernable illness other than megalomania) the long overdue M.O.T. on my body would not reveal anything alarming. So I was not prepared to hear what my doctor had to say.
"Hm... Did you know you have a heart murmur?" He asked.
"No," I said, resisting the urge to jump up and shake him, yelling at the top of my voice, "A WHAT?"
"Well. You do. I think you need to have an EKG. Schedule it with the nurse at the front when you go out," he said. "And it's nothing serious. People with your build and height usually have this sort of thing."

I went and scheduled the appointment, laughing nervously as I said to the nurse, "The doctor wants me to schedule an EKG appointment with you." But all the while, I was thinking, 'What the heck? Me have a heart murmur? Is this doctor a quack?'

I went home and said to M. calmly, "I have a heart murmur. I'm going to have an EKG next next week."
"The doctor just said you need a check, right?" M. said. He is not the type to blow things up. I nodded, and sat down in a corner to think about why it was that I had a heart murmur. A congenital defect? I was certainly not stressed enough to cause one. Some sort of infection? Why? In the end, I just ignored whatever it was that I found on the Google search threatening potential heart surgery. But it was strange no other doctor had told me I have one all these years. My friend Q. told me she thought the doctor is just using this as an excuse to claim more money from the insurance company. But surely you can't have an unjustified EKG?

The weeks passed by quickly enough, and I found myself wearing a paper gown, my chest slathered in cold gel, while the EKG technician pressed down hard with a scanner onto my skin. We had a random conversation that resulted in her telling me about this friend of hers who studied in London to become a lawyer and ended up a partner in a New York law firm (why is it that when you tell someone you are a lawyer, they assume you must become a partner? Is there no hope for off-track associates to become something else?) while I wondered what was going to be the results. The doctor came in holding the scan results in his hand.
"You have a murmur on both sides of your heart, but it's nothing serious. It was quite a boring study, actually," he said. He told me to go home and not see him again.

The quick to condemn are the first to fall. I have since learnt that such 'innocent' heart murmurs as mine are quite common, but that it usually takes further tests to determine that they are not caused by structural problems of the heart or any type of disease. Perhaps because the innocent heart murmurs are so common, most doctors ignore it unless there are other symptoms of heart problems. At any rate, I'm glad my problem is only that you can hear 'a whooshing, humming or rasping sound between the heartbeat sounds, caused by noisy bloodflow within the heart'.

Ack, icky nuptials and the like

2005-06-14T23:03:00.000-04:00

It is happening at last - my parents have booked a venue, we have set a date, I have paid the hotel an obscene amount of money and we have almost lift off! I say 'almost' because I don't have a dress, M. hasn't bought the rings yet (or has he?), we haven't worked out the guest list and no one has booked flights or days off work. I have been pondering about a number of things nevertheless:

- TOP FIVE NIGGLING THOUGHTS ON THE AUGUST NUPTIALS -

1. It is highly likely that on the day I will look like a man in drag with my caked make up and oversprayed hair. I may not even recognise myself. Surely there must be a way to avoid looking like a mask wearing a souffle.

2. The amount we're spending on it could have been the down payment for a (tiny) home (definitely not anywhere near New York). Just thinking about it makes me shiver.

3. I will have probably all of two friends attending. M. will have none. The 300 odd guests are really my parents' and his parents' guests. I hope that at least both sets of parents think the wedding is a success.

4. Will M. understand what the master of the ceremony is talking about? His Korean can be shaky. Actually, I'll bet the older relatives are hard of hearing. Maybe we should do subtitles.

5. At least in Korea people give you money as a wedding gift, no questions asked. I only hope to break even.

Having said all that, I am still happy to be having a wedding. It's a good thing to be celebrating - being married to M. is the best thing ever and I was sorry at even the suggestion of not having some sort of celebration of our marriage. So I hope to get drunk afterwards on some excellent champagne with my two friends, M. and my sisters in honour of the event.

Eureka!

2005-06-11T05:18:00.000-04:00

Ladies and gentlemen, I am proud to announce that I can confirm the following exposition by way of self-experimentation:

"That working in a Manhattan law firm warps time and space so that one finds oneself wondering how Monday becomes Friday every week, and how every week evaporates into months faster than the speed of light (which is 299,792,458 metres per second)."

Let me tell you, if you ever have a serious case of time dragging, you can send yourself to a Manhattan law firm and you will watch time whizz by in chunks. I am ahead of everyone else who are non-Manhattan law firm workers by 299,792,48 metres times 60 times 24 times 7 (if we ventured to calculate time travelling distance). Naturally, all this time flying by makes one quite exhausted, which is why I plopped into bed at 9pm last night.

If I carry on at this rate, I can expect to be much older than most of you lot very soon. I will then expand on my wealth of wisdom (rumour has it that with age comes wisdom) here.

I'm going back to sleep now.

As goslings grow into geese

2005-06-09T00:18:00.000-04:00

The proud geese which were once herding their flock of grey fluffy offspring around the ferry pier, stopping the morning traffic with their slow squats across the asphalt at random intervals, are now accompanied by goslings almost as large as themselves with the grey baby feathers streaked with a mature black band around their necks. The geese display no sign of fear as they contentedly dot the car park with green ashen poop regardless of the people walking or parking their cars. I was surprised to see how quickly the goslings had grown.

But then, humans change very quickly, too. It had only been two years - a blink of an eye in terms of the Earth's 4.5 billion years - since my friend and I had seen each other, but we immediately yelped in surprise at each other's appearances.
"You've chopped your hair off!" I gasped. All this time I had remembered her to have shoulder length hair. She, on the other hand, had her eyes wide open at me.
"You have long hair? Since when?!"
They say I can talk the hind leg off of a donkey. Well, my friend L. can talk the ears off of one, I'll bet. It was twenty minutes before we could finally stop to give our orders to the waitress who had been walking to and fro.

A true friendship is one that, allowing for passage of time, enables the friends to see each other as they are, without resorting to past memories or diving into the different present in order to construct a good idea of what the friend is about - each friend has a clear understanding of the essence of the other. With L., it is easy to understand what she is about. She is one of the few people I know who does something for a living that genuinely betters the lives of others, and despite her initial shy demeanour and physical frailty, is an active political, intelligent yet uncynical person. While talking to her made me cheerful, it also made me slightly sad as I realised that I was listening to a fair amount of heartache condensed into several of her sentences that I had not known about. We talked until late, but it was not enough, so we resolved to talk more tomorrow.
"Don't you feel that you've changed a lot since your early twenties?" she asked as we dug into an overwhelmingly chocolatey dessert.
"Of course. I mean, I'm so different compared to what I used to be like even two years ago," I said.
"There's still so much I want to do," she said. I nodded.

How much will we have changed in another two years' time? Will we recognise each other still then?

After seeing the film 'Taeguki'

2005-06-05T00:13:00.000-04:00

One of the first things I remember learning at my elementary school in Seoul - just after getting back from London, long before I learnt what the Korean War was about - was how bad communists are.
"Remember Seong Bok Lee, the child who dared to say 'No' to communists!" the teachers trumpeted every June, around the 25th (the day the Korean War begun in 1950). Seong Bok was a young child in the Fifties when he was shot dead by invading communists after he screamed at them that he hated communists. We had posters in the school corridors telling us to be vigilant anti-communists. There were all the anti-communist children's cartoons the broadcasting stations showed throughout the day, some of them depicting the hungry life of North Koreans, some of them showing crazed Kim Il-Sung ordering soldiers to destroy South Korea and its imperialist ally, the U.S. There were the government reports showing North Korean efforts to build a dam to flood the South (I vaguely recall we had to donate money so that we could build 'a dam for peace'). But really, I wanted to hear about the Korean War right out of the horse's mouth.

"Did you see any communists?" I asked my grandmother.
"No," my grandmother said. "What makes you think I'd be alive if I saw any?"
I pondered this fact.
"Did you have to evacuate?" I asked.
"Yes," my grandmother said. "We all had to. Even if it meant losing children on the road. You just had to abandon them if they couldn't walk any further, you couldn't take them with you. And it was just so cold in the mountains."
"Did you have to fight in the Korean war?" I asked my grandfather.
"Of course!" He slapped his knee. "Everyone had to fight! It was a war!"
"Did you get really close to a communist?" I asked him.
"Once, we were in the mountain foraging for food," he said. "We stumbled upon a bunch of them surveying the local area. We hid behind the bushes, but they were so close, I could smell the cigarette one of them was smoking."
I held my breath. "And then? What did you do?" I asked.
"We waited for them to leave and we ran for our lives, of course," my grandfather said.

Towards the late Eighties, the public way of remembering the Korean War changed somewhat. The posters at school focused on preventing wildfires (how that was relevant to a school in the middle of a city was somewhat debatable). There was still the big military parade, but the broadcasting stations stopped showing the ghastly anti-communist cartoons depicting bloody trauma. Instead, on 6.25 day, lots of black and white documentaries about how everyone suffered so much from hunger were shown. I suppose it was a way of showing how Korea had become more democratic - it was more publicly acceptable to focus on the suffering of the average Korean during the war than talk about the conflict of ideology.

"Did you really have to grind up grass and strip tree bark for food?" I asked my grandmother. She shook her head, not to deny, but in distaste.
"What do you think we had to eat? There was nothing! People died of hunger all the time. The poor souls on the roads...I was so worried about your grandfather."
My grandfather was just about animatedly starting on an anecdote when my father stopped him.
"Dad, we've heard it all so many times before! You always talk about the past so much," he said.

Finally the day came when the government announced 6.25 would no longer be a public holiday. It was time to lay the beast to rest, apparently. No one talked about anti-communism anymore, apart from my grandfather. The Red Cross made several appeals to the international community to deal with the famine-stricken North Korea. Kim Il-Sung died, only to be replaced by his son, Kim Jong-Il, but nothing really changed. I doubt my little sister had a similar experience of school to mine. We took off to London again, and I didn't think about the Korean War for a very long time.

The heritage of the Korean War is something that we have to deal with, even if we try to forget. The Koreas are still divided, without a peace armistice signed between them (which is why any soldier that falls in the allegedly De-Militarized Zone - the most fortified DMZ ever - still counts as a war casualty). I hear one South Korean telephone company is using a North Korean actor to film an advertisement emphasising the strength of communication between the two Koreas, and it makes no sense to me because I have just read that North Korea issued a statement on June 3, 2005, that it will not allow U.S. forensics experts to return to its territory to recover the remains of 8,000 U.S. soldiers from the Korean War. It seems as though there are two time lines of reality: one where the gruesome past is somehow wiped away enough for a collaborative twenty-second slot on prime time television, another in which hearts broken more than fifty years ago are still not allowed to be mended.

The effect of monkeys drafting documents

2005-06-01T16:49:00.000-04:00

It is a truth universally acknowledged that poring over documents which appear to have been drafted by monkeys on holiday in Hawaii* will bring the reader down to the depths of despair**.
"I'm reading documents drafted by monkeys!" I cried out to M. as I sat at home last night, reading the ill-crafted writing. M. was watching ESPN on the sofa far, far away.
"Mmm," he said, with as much sympathy as he could muster. I went back to my reading until I could stand it no more.
"But I have to read more documents... and they're all drafted by monkeys!" I cried out later, as I flopped into the bed.
"OK, if you're going to whinge, I'm not talking to you," M. said, as he turned over to the other side.

Such is my fate, I lamented to myself on the ferry on my way in to the office to read more monkey language. Then sadness turned to anger***. Why is it that I have no one to complain to? Where have all my good friends gone? I kicked my desk. Where's the love? ****

As if by magic*****, the phone rang.
"Hi J-A, it's K., here, just calling to see how you're doing." K. lives in Singapore, and she had bothered to call me long-distance. I was touched but I was still not fully consoled. Just as I was firing off emails to a friend in London and several in Asia complaining about my monkey-ridden life, I received another call.
"Hi J-A, it's R. How are you?" R. lives in Hong Kong, and she had also bothered to call me long-distance, just to catch up. O ye of little faith indeed, I scolded myself. I am loved, afterall. It's just them dratted monkeys.

* an all-inclusive holiday at that, with free pina coladas.
** not to mention the mis-quoting of Jane Austen and use of hyperbole.
*** luckily, not hate, as we all know, hate leads to suffering - per Yoda in 'Star Wars - Episode II'.
****you should all know, there was a time when I used to dance to this song by the Black Eyed Peas in clubs, once upon a time. Ah, the good old days.
***** only the English will know what children's programme this comes from - 'Mister Benn'.

Happy Memorial Day Weekend

2005-05-27T22:47:00.000-04:00

Finally, I am in a calm environment. I am sitting in my living room, typing away after a dinner with friends in Manhattan and an incredibly hectic week which saw me close two deals in a day (this means I have closed four deals since starting work in April). The washing machine is on and M. will probably tumble home at some inordinately late hour after having been out with his friends.

It seems most of Manhattan have gone away in one fell swoop - we could have easily walked into any restaurant without a reservation. The traders and bankers had a half day. My deals closed at 1pm so I was left to sit under the sun with a box of pasta in Bowling Green during lunchtime. Even the usually crazy email stream - this week, I can safely say I had a minimum of one hundred emails per day - finally stopped at 4.40pm.

I can think about doing the rest of the laundry and vacuuming the flat tomorrow before going away to the southern tip of New Jersey, Cape May. I will stare at the ocean and smell the salty breeze. M. and I will wander around the beach, clasping our hands together, and maybe see some seagulls. We will sit in the sun. I can do nothing.

Then, as if three days were nothing but an accidental blip in the billing system, the holiday will be over and it will be Tuesday. I will be back in the office, no doubt to face more emails and documents. But until then, I will do nothing.

One of the first things I do as an attorney is...

2005-05-25T13:40:00.000-04:00

Liddle Sis had bought M. and me loads of chocolate and sweets. I was wrapping them up in a red knapsack (I know, how old-fashioned) when it suddenly occurred to me that M. might not like both the cinnamon-covered apple slices and the chocolate-covered apple slices. So I turned to M. to ask, "Do you like cinnamon apples or chocolate apples?"

Plop!
"Ow!" I opened my eyes and yelped.
"Wha-wha-what is it? Are you OK? What are you doing?" M. shouted.
I had fallen off the bed, taking the quilt with me onto the carpet. M. looked at me over the top of the bed with eyes that were glassy with sleep and shock. I stretched my neck to look back at him in the dark. My left leg ached at the place I had landed.
"It's OK. I just fell off the bed. I was going to ask you whether you want cinnamon apples or chocolate apples," I said, leaning back into the quilt on the floor.
"What are you talking about?" M. said.
"It made sense a couple of minutes ago, honest," I said. He pulled me back up onto the bed.
"Are you OK?" he asked.
"I think so. I have no idea how I fell off the bed, I was just turning around to ask you about the apples," I said.
"You sometimes do that. When you sleep, you sometimes think you're awake and you try do things," M. said. He pulled the covers around me tightly, as if to stop any further sleep-driven activity. "By the way, I like the chocolate apples."

The last time I fell off the bed while sleeping was quite a while ago. I'm regressing.

Newly minted J-A, Esq., at your service

2005-05-23T17:21:00.000-04:00

I woke up in the morning with a sinus headache. The birds outside my window kept up a cacaphony of bizarre tunes as I tossed and turned before finally getting out of bed at the sound of the alarm.

In contrast, the office was quiet when I got in. I sat down and filled out my registration form, then realised I had forgot to bring in my cheque book to pay for the registration fee. One of the papers said I should have sent in the cheque before the swearing in ceremony today, anyway. I panicked, then called M., who did not pick up his phone. Then I had a brainwave.
"Hey, are you awake?" I asked T. T. is a friend of mine who lives nearby the office, and is an LLM student.
"Not really. I am now. What's up?" he asked.
"I need a cheque. For 350 dollars. Now. Well, before my swearing in ceremony. I can give you the money in cash. Can you come up to my office?" I said.
"OK." Luckily, T. is also a former lawyer, so he knows what I mean when I say 'now' (i.e. within the next five minutes). M. called back.
"What's wrong?" he asked.
"I don't have a cheque to pay for my registration fee, " I said.
"You can come by my office. I can write you a cheque," he said. Me go to M's office versus T. coming to my office? I decided it was easier to wait for T. He called five minutes later.
"I'm downstairs," he said.
"What are you doing around twelve o'clock?" I asked.

Which is how for my swearing in ceremony as a New York attorney I had T. join my other friend S., who is visiting from Hong Kong, to attend as my guests. The courthouse was completely packed from the stairs outside but the guard saw me pushing through.
"Are you here to be admitted?" he asked.
"Yes," I said.
"Congratulations and it's through those doors," he said as he pushed away the guests who were blocking the entrance. I walked in through the heavy wooden double doors to find myself inside a ceremonial court, complete with stained-glass Art Deco ceiling lit up with dozens of amber coloured bulbs, dark wood panels framing the walls and washed out pastel frescos detailing the names of eminent judges. I sat down in a stuffed chair, one of many lined up in front of the bench and quickly filling up with attorneys-to-be. No one asked me about when I had sent in the cheque.
"Who are you having as your guests?" I asked the man in the expensive suit and Rolex next to me. He smiled, and I realised he was much younger than I had thought him to be.
"My parents, uh, and oh, there's my aunt and uncle," he said, as he waved. I waved to T. and S. like a child whose parents are attending the school play. They grinned back. There were so many guests most of them ended up standing behind the spectators' galley. We all rose for the judges - four old men and a woman - as they quietly filed in. The secretary of the committee on character and fitness tabled a motion for us to be sworn in as attorneys.
"Normally we retire to consider the merits of such a motion, but since I can see from your faces the anxiety that would cause, we grant your motion," the judge said, and the guests, the lawyers, and the bailiffs relaxed into laughter.
"No photographs!" the old bailiff said, seconds before the attorneys-to-be stood up en masse to hold up their right hand and repeat after the court clerk, "I solemnly swear I will uphold the Constitution of the United States and the constitution of the state of New York as an attorney and counsellor at law to the best of my abilities."
"Attorneys, sit down." The bailiff declared it as such, and so we were - a newly minted batch of attorneys. We were reminded briefly of our new status while the guests were told to get out of the courtroom first.
"Congratulations," I shook hands with the new attorneys on both my left and right. We beamed at each other for a brief second before heading out to the hall, where the gathered friends and family greeted us with applause.

"Can I have my phone back?" I said to T. as soon as I found him and S. standing outside on the white steps. They both glared at me.
"What?" I asked.
"Congratulations!" they said.
"Oh, that. Yeah. Thanks," I said. I called M. to tell him I'd succeeded in becoming a New York attorney for real.

We had a leisurely three course meal with a bottle of chenin blanc. The partner working with me congratulated me on being sworn in, but politely failed to mention my flushed cheeks, as I discussed the deal with him four hours later.

I've been approved to be a New York attorney

2005-05-18T13:34:00.000-04:00

I was going to write about my admission interview but since it wasn't much of an interview (Judge: "You've picked up a British accent, haven't you?" Me: "Well, I am a British citizen") I'm going to write about the matter most closely pressing my nasal passages as of now.

There are some of us who do not understand what torment hayfever sufferers go through because they are fortunate enough to not suffer from such allergies. The wise among the afflicted arm themselves with all kinds of the strongest medicines and go out into the world to play sports. Then there are people like me, who try to believe they are fine, and carry on with their daily lives as if nothing has happened, until they collapse in one heaving, congested heap while inhaling Flonase/Beconase/whatever.

My excuse for such irrational behaviour is because I don't want to admit to the fact that I have allergies against flowers (which I absolutely adore and love), cats (sorry Daniella I didn't tell you this on Sunday, but the thing is, I love cats), most pollen and insect bites (I should not be allowed to take walks in the countryside). Because that would be tantamount to admitting defeat - I have a broken immune system. Because M. doesn't ever buy me flowers ("I don't want to see you break out in hives", he says, coldly but sensibly) anyway. Because I will never get to own a cat, anyway. Because I love being out in the sun, smelling the sweet air, be it ever so full of pollen and bees.

So instead of doing the sensible thing, that is, taking anti-allergen medicines in the morning before getting out of the house, I end up waiting until mid-morning when my nose and ears are bulging with congestion and my face is swelling up. Then, and only then, will I sniff or take medication.

Gah. I think the Claritin is starting to kick in now. I can breathe through my nostrils again.

Don't trust a lawyer to do your sums

2005-05-16T22:01:00.000-04:00

This is a gratuitous advertisement for Daniella. If you ever want a five star luxury champagne brunch, go to Daniella's. But there's a catch - you have to get invited first (smug grin). M. and I were, and life was good on Sunday.

Despite being one myself, I have always had a somewhat disparaging stance regarding corporate finance lawyers. When I hear stories like the following (and as with all good stories, this is a true story) I feel rather vindicated.

There is rule that a company listed on the London stock market has to have at least 3 independent directors, and the recommendation is that you have at least a third of the board of directors be made up of independent directors.

My friend had a client shoot her the following question:
"We have 3 independent directors here. The total number of directors we have is 7. Do we meet the legal requirements?"
Her colleague sent out a reply to the client: "You need 9 directors."
My friend went to the partner in charge and pointed out the colleague's error*. The partner told her colleague to send out a rectifying email. The colleague sent out the following email: "Apologies for the email below. 3 is fine, but you need 9 directors."

I know, I know. I'm getting old. I found the story funny.

*The simple answer to the client's question, is of course, YES, you comply. The client has at least 3 independent directors, which make up more than one third of the total board of 7, since 2.333333... is one third of 7. The colleague calculated instead that 9 was needed because 3 times 3 is 9. If you think you need me to call you to explain why my friend's colleague was wrong, consider becoming a corporate finance lawyer (unless you already are one, in which case you should embrace your calling wholeheartedly).

$10 says S. will find a boyfriend first

2005-05-13T10:17:00.000-04:00

It's always the case in a group of friends - someone drifts off into coupledom and leaves the others behind to fend for themselves as singles in the mad jungle of the meat market. I am the guilty one here, as I do not venture out into Manhattan after twilight on the weekends, leaving my single friends S. and G. to go out to bars and clubs by themselves. Naturally, S. and G. are becoming closer, but that's fine - I cannot stand to sound presumptious or smug when the conversation inevitably turns to what it is like being single. Usually, I enjoy having dinner with one or both of them, before leaving them to head off to their parties. Last week, I had dinner with S., and imagined I would hear more about the new bar that she had been at. Instead, I found her in a mood.
"We had brunch at a friend's house, and everyone there wanted to have their cards read," she said. "I hate tarot cards."
"Mm," I said, instead of what I thought: they are tools of the Devil, and for superstitious people. Why is it that some people find these things so fascinating?
"Do you know why they wanted to have their cards read? It's because they all wanted to find out when they were going to find the right guy! I mean, how stupid is that? It's so desperate, you know? I ended up saying to them, 'Do you think guys sit around at home and wonder if they're going to meet the right girl?'" S. punched her hand up in the air.
"Ooh. I bet that didn't go down very well," I said. She grimaced.
"It didn't go down very well, no. One of the girls there said, 'What does it matter what the guys think? We're having fun,' but the problem was, I wasn't having fun. It was just so pathetic, I left."
"Well done," I said.
"I mean, it's not healthy, is it? If the cards say you're going to meet someone this July, you're going to subconsciously be thinking about it in July, and it's just silly to think that because of some cards," S. went on. "Why should I have to think that? I think the girls sometimes just get obssessive about this."
A group of girls giggling over tarot cards telling them when the right man will appear in their life, and S.'s rationality blasting through it all... I shook my head.
"Let's drink," I said.

On Being A Newbie

2005-05-11T10:00:00.000-04:00

I have a friend who arrived in New York last week from Seoul because she was transferred here by her company. I had assumed she knew a lot of people in Manhattan because she had lived here before, albeit many years ago. It took me a week to look her up and meet with her for dinner.
"So, what have you been doing? Partying away?" I asked. She is well known for being a party girl. But she shrugged.
"I've been looking at four or five apartments every day," she said.
"And?"
"And...my boss from Seoul came here on a business trip, so I had dinner with him a couple of times. And met up with this one guy I used to work with."
"That's it?" I hadn't expected that sort of answer. So I made plans with her to have dinner again, soon.

"So are you going to look after every person who randomly turns up here without knowing anyone else?" M. asked yesterday as we drove to dinner.
"Well, you can't just leave them alone," I said. "Besides, what's so different between her and me? I came here without knowing hardly anyone."
"You're not in the same position as her. You have me," M. said.
"It's the same thing."
"No it's not."
"It's the same thing. I still hardly know anyone. I have some friends now, yes, but it's going to take more time to make more friends. And it'll be the same with her, you know. Soon she'll have tonnes of friends of her own."
"You're not in the same position," M. said. But we are, in a way. Just as I struggled to get used to the subway, understand what topics people talk about, walk around the different areas of Manhattan without losing my sense of north and south, she will struggle to find her place here. I know I am still working out where I fit in. Hopefully, in time, I won't have to wonder whether I am so very different from the tourists in Times Square.

As you can see, I have finally fixed my broken internet connection

2005-05-08T10:06:00.000-04:00

I take the ferry into Pier 11 downtown every morning. I walk along the gently wobbling pier onto the white ship, and sit down inside the cabin, sometimes reading the free newspaper, for fifteen minutes while the ferry passes by Governor's Island to arrive at the southern tip of Manhattan island. It is a perfect commute - not cramped or bothersome, but a luxurious mini cruise during which I can stare away into the bright sky and sea if I chose to.

The waves can be fierce, and the windows get sprayed with the Hudson water. I name the waves things that need to be done once I get to the office, or people I need to call. And so I make my lists, but occasionally my mind wanders away into other more interesting things to think about. Like how, instead of going for a celebratory Mother's Day dinner, I will be attending a Korean ceremonial for M.'s grandmother who passed away on this day and how I have to prepare my black suit. Or how my mother said on the phone, "I feel frustrated sometimes because I can't see you" and how I choked back tears as I told her I'd be there in August. Or whether M. is having fun on his conference in Washington, D.C., and how it would have been nice to join him had I not started working.

It is quiet in the Financial District as I walk towards my office. Who would have thought the physical reality of Wall Street was this practically empty neighbourhood? In my mind, the symbol of capitalism that it is, I had pictured a bustling, loud quarter - and so it had been, until two planes ended the world as we know it. You don't need reservations to have lunch in the restaurants - they're never full. The place is empty after seven o'clock, except for limousines and taxis lining up to take weary workers home.

In my office, I can walk over to my window to see the Statue of Liberty in the distance.

Yanks go home emptyhanded but for one run

2005-04-29T11:08:00.000-04:00

It was the moment when the Yankee sceptic and optimist alike joined in their love for the home team to pour out their outrage at the Los Angeles Angels.
"Aaaahhs-hole! Aaasss-hole!" the crowd started chanting and booing at the Angels' pitcher as the fans' darling Derek Jeter, leaning his injured head to the side that had been hit by the errant ball, slowly walked to first base. Then the crowd cheered, and it was back to business as usual, as the spectators huddled in the chilly evening air on their hard plastic seats with beer and peanuts in their hands.
"Come on, sucker! You suck! You suck!" someone from high above screamed as the next Yankee player became strike number two.
"You suck! You suck!" chanted two young boys sitting next to us, their freckled little faces intent on trying out the word more than anything else. We raised our eyebrows, but they were only copying the people swearing around them. Then the ambitious fans on the right field started a Mexican wave, triggering a ripple of half-hearted shouts and standing up of each section of the stadium, and then another, and then a third which died halfway through.

"Do you know, I used to date this girl who lived next door to Bernie Williams," M.'s friend S. said. "I was helping her take in the groceries one day, and she stops and says hello to this guy taking out his trash. And I see it's Bernie Williams! So I say to her, 'Do you know who that guy is?' and she says, 'Oh, I think he's into some kind of sport'."
"Crazy," P. said, shaking his head and laughing. We cheered loudly at A-Rod, hoping he would demonstrate Tuesday night's skills, but he was very quickly struck out.
"You know, we used to come here all the time, and it was so cheap then. Tickets were like, what, twenty dollars? And now it's over forty dollars! Everything's gotten so expensive," M. said, and his friends nodded glumly while drinking their beer. I sucked my own glass, and
started screaming with everyone else as the third strike out ended the inning.
"This is depressing," I said. "Not one single score."
"No, it's not a score, it's a run," M. said.
"What's the difference?" I said.
"It's a run, when you get a player to go home after going through all three bases," M. said.
"So that's a score, one point, right?" I said.
"No, it's a run," M. said. P. intervened.
"It's basically the equivalent to one point, yes," he said. I glared at M. but he looked back at me and said, "It's a run."

A foul ball came soaring through the air, and for one hopeful second it looked as though it would land straight on our first row laps, but it veered ever so slightly to the right and a happy old gentleman dressed head to toe in Yankee gear held up the ball in his baseball glove.
"Do they look fat now?" M. asked me. I always teased his beloved baseball players when he watched them on televised games, saying they looked overweight.
"No, I guess not," I said. "They don't look fat."
"I tell you, if you sit next to the dug outs, you'll see these guys are built like, like... from their buttocks to their knees, man, they are powerfully built," P. said. "They have all their power in their upper body and from the middle, you see?"
"I know, I know, they don't just have fat arses," I said.

Yankees v. Angels = 1:3

S-K-O-O-L spells 'school'

2005-04-27T18:17:00.000-04:00

Just because Centinel has mentioned law school, Pea talked about her experience with a professor and E.McPan wrote about her exams, my mind cast itself over my own memories of attending university in London.

Overall, I think the experience was a lesson in how to study as little as possible to aim for an overall median grade, rather than to be profoundly academic, and this prepared me well for my bar exam (which is exactly an exercise in learning how to pass, rather than aiming for the top score).

The first term, I was so stressed out that I lost around five kilograms (11 pounds). I'd like to blame it on one of my crusty old professors who gave me a C for my first essay on the English Legal System. She had written in the margin in spidery red ink, 'Did you read the cases? I don't think you understood them at all'. That cursory deflection of my five hours' efforts in the library, together with the glowing praise and 'A' grade received by a fellow classmate who had spent all of thirty minutes typing his up, made me realise one thing: it is not about how much you study, but what you study. But getting to that realisation was tough. I had also underestimated the amount of homework I was to get and had joyfully joined the committee of four student societies in Freshers' Week. Time management crises ensued, but by my second term I had worked things out to the point where I was carefully coasting along by getting 'B's and 'C's instead of 'A's. My aim was to be respectable, not knowledgable.

The first year exams were a disaster. I barely passed, not because I wasn't used to the essay exams - all exams in UK secondary and tertiary education are based on writing four essays in 3.5 hours in one subject - but because I had no clue how to write the essays the way the professors wanted it. Luckily, the first year in the British legal education is only marked as 'pass' or 'fail'. I reflected on my downgraded student achievements (downgraded from my brilliant marks as an 'A' level -high school - student, that is) with a French friend who had come to my university from a lycee.
"These exams are really tough, aren't they?" I mused to her. She looked at me carefully, before saying in her accented English, "Well, in my old school we have five hours for each essay. So I ran out of time after I had written the introductions to mine."
"Wow. That's a bummer," I said. She nodded.
"They gave me a B," she said, a little sadly. I choked - my grades had been stable Ds.

The second year rolled around, and by that time I had found out the appropriate case-to-essay ratio (maximum quote of eight cases in an essay) and learned how to abbreviate. Things were looking up, so I decided a little slacking was in order. All the while I had noted with puzzled amusement how my fellow classmates cut classes for a multitude of reasons and somehow survived while I diligently attended every single lecture and seminar without fail. One glorious Monday morning, it was my turn to give playing hooky a go. I spent the day running around far away from school grounds. Indeed I had completely forgotten that I had skipped a class when, the following week, the European law professor called me aside after a lecture. I was more shocked that he knew my name (out of two hundred students, what was the odds of that happening?)than by anything else.
"J-A, I noticed you weren't in class last week and I wondered if there was anything the matter," the professor said, in a pleasant but concerned manner. Christ, I swore to myself. I miss one class and he notices. I gave some lame excuse about not having felt well and ended up promising to let him know if I had to miss any in the future!

In my final year I fell in love with the publicly-maligned Public International Law('P.I.L.' to those in the know) and had fantasies of studying it for practice, although I already had accepted a job to work in finance at a City practice. In the end, I got a respectable degree because of my outstanding grade in P.I.L., otherwise my usual academic torpor would have resulted in a damaging final degree.

What's cooking?

2005-04-26T10:17:00.000-04:00

Over the weekend, M. and I had the pleasure of having our new kitchen 'test-driven' by M.'s friend D., who is a student at the Institute of Culinary Education. D. had inspected the kitchen while having drinks at our place the night before, and decided it was just the spot for him to complete his final project - whipping up different dishes and photographing their presentation.

"Do you have butter?" he asked M. from the supermarket while shopping for the ingredients.

"I don't think so. Do we have butter?" M. asked me.

"No," I said, somewhat emphatically. Butter is evil.

"We don't have butter. Oh, and we don't have mayonnaise. We don't believe in mayonnaise," M. said.

Half an hour later, D. called again. "Do you have a rolling pin?" he asked.

"Do we have a rolling pin?" M. asked me.

"No," I said.

"We don't have a rolling pin," M. told D.

An hour later after that, D. came tumbling in to the flat with a pile of grocery bags and his girlfriend H., who helped him set up the kitchen, including his formidable cookery tool set (he actually had the knives, peeler and other tools labelled as his own, wrapped in a canvas post bag).

"He kept telling me to hurry up," H. said to me. "He didn't want the lobster to die."

"What lobster?" I asked. D. unwrapped a gigantic blue specimen from the plastic bag it was in. It was still waving around its scalloped claws.

"This lobster," he said. M. looked askance.

"I'm not a big fan of lobster," he said.

"But I am," I said.

"You'll get lobster," D. said. He stuck on to a cabinet the list of dishes he was planning to make - miso grilled scallops with creamed asparagus, minute steak and rosemary with egg, marinated short ribs with chestnut, lobster with potato gratin, chinese fish with sweetcorn, braised pork with risotto and duck, and stuffed chicken rolls with spinach, sweetcorn and apple and wild rice. I knew that list meant the kitchen would look like a tsunami had swept through it, so I carefully placed myself in the living room where I could not see what was going on (what I don't see doesn't bother me). The kitchen started steaming and smoking like a locomotive so, despite the chilly breeze, we opened the patio door to let out the oily air. I sat at the table fiddling with the blog template while, one by one, M.'s friends who had heard of D.'s project dropped by to say hello and taste some of his concoctions. All I could hear was chopping and occasional pleas from D. - "H., please, help me?" - while the guests mulled over the baseball on the television or went outside to the patio to avoid the smell and the noise. Finally, the dishes began to come out to be photographed one by one as D. put on the finishing touches to each one.

"Scallops," he said curtly as he dropped a picture perfect plate of pan fried scallops and sauce next to me at the table. It was delicious, and I told him so. He chuckled while wiping away his sweat and said, "You know it's because it was pan fried in butter, right?"

The lobster plate looked stunning and was polished off without a breath to spare. The entire living room started smelling of fried food and cooking vegetables. At four o'clock, I realised I'd eaten three plates and three hot biscuits (D. decided we needed comfort food and made a whole tray of them, with plenty of butter) and was stuffed to the gills. At seven o'clock, M. and H. had to finish off the last two plates by themselves - and this was after having had a steak and short ribs. The three of us sat at the coffee table, puffing and panting with our extended stomachs while the chef went outside in the patio for a smoke. He looked tired and the front of his t-shirt was covered with various different stains of mixed colours.

"Don't you want any? You haven't eaten all day," H. said when he came back in. He shook his head.

"I know what went into that stuff," he said, and laughed.

How to tell if you are psychic

2005-04-22T22:24:00.000-04:00

There is a silly Korean game that I play on M. to bamboozle him. It's the verbal equivalent of the card game Snap: whenever someone says the same thing as you at the same time, you have to say "Chi-chi-bon!" first. If you just sit there dumbstruck, you're going to get pinched. If you react in time by saying, "Mat-jang-gu!" then you are saved.

Every time I've played this on M., his reponse has been, "What?!" and indignant outrage at the fact that I pinched him. Now, that's not the way to play. You have to learn to say the right thing at the right time. Fortunately for M., the occasion triggering the game has happened only about three times. We haven't forged a scary twinning of emotions, it seems. But imagine what would happen if you were the sort of couple or pair of friends that are paired at some sort of subconscious level - you'd learn the game pretty fast.

Of course, it is probable that this so-called psychic link is merely a series of coincidences - if you spend a lot of time together with someone and if you are sensitive to what happens around you, your subconscious picks up on the subtle things. But it's fun nevertheless, and sometimes make-believe strengthens the gossamer veil of fact - by being more aware of what the other person is saying all the time, you end up knowing better what they'd say. That's my excuse for carrying on playing that game with M.

Chi-chi-bon!

The morning commute

2005-04-20T20:42:00.000-04:00

I was in the carriage of the N train, quietly partaking in that communal state of mind that everyone seems to attain while the train runs in between stations; where one blindly fixes one's gaze into something innocuous (like the top of someone's head or a brightly coloured toenail) while one's mind runs through grocery lists, weekend tasks and where to get coffee. Suddenly, a little bit before we were hauled back into reality by the announcement of the driver that we were at Union Square, two women started shouting at each other.
"You bitch! You try stepping on my shoes once more and I'll kill you!"
"I didn't step on your shoes! Are you crazy or something?"
"You stepped on my shoes all right. Take that!" and the bristling, red-haired dumpling of a woman shot out a great black shoe-clad foot to kick into the young girl's shin. The girl screamed, and the ginger menace made a face, glared at everyone else in the train and walked out of the carriage. The girl looked at the other people in the carriage and said, "She's crazy! She just got up and started yelling at me!" while rubbing her leg.
"I saw it coming, I knew she was strange," a woman with butterfly sunglasses sitting next to me said to no one in particular. "She tried to wriggle me out of my seat when I was sitting next to her."
Clearly Ms. Ginger was in a foul mood and readily dispensed it to others that happened on her path. I gave a sympathetic smile to the young girl who was still rubbing her leg.

I think of times I've infected others with my bad moods, times which happen all too often. I growl and snarl when I am feeling upset, and whine if things don't go my way. Only last night I had been picking a fight with M. and ruined an otherwise pleasant evening. I think of the red-haired woman and frown, not at her but at the reflection of myself I see in her angry eyes.

What J-A did next

2005-04-19T07:09:00.000-04:00

After four days of non-stop packing/unpacking, the new flat is finally looking like a dwelling place instead of a rented storage space. We have new lamps and new cushions and the living room and kitchen looks vaguely presentable (but let's not talk about the bedroom). Most of the move went by without a hitch; of course, we had to create one. All the physical exertion made M. and I ravenous with hunger, so we bought a whole load of groceries on Sunday. It was when we were carrying them out of the car into the building when M.'s yells and the sound of cracking glass coincided.
"What happened?" I said before I realised I was looking at the answer: the smash of glass was the fate of the two kilo-jar of kimchi that he had been carrying. The plastic bag had split. A bright red streak of pickled cabbage was spread out on the cement like blood on a crime scene.
"Oh God. I think we have to clean this up," M. said.
"No." Denial seemed the best solution to my horrified mind.
"Yes. We should," M. said. Drat. We can't run? The next thirty minutes was spent scrubbing the floor with newspaper rolls. I think the stairs still smells of fermented garlic so I am avoiding that entrance.

Dragging my tired body into work was another matter. It wasn't getting up on time that was the problem: it was the problem of how to look like the equivalent of a reliable sedan instead of a beat-up banger. The solution was a mask-like face that shimmered with eyeshadow and blush. The day passed by at rocket speed - one minute I was in computer training, the next at lunch - perhaps because I had three cups of coffee. At the end of the day, I was so tired I felt nothing: I had reached nirvana, I was numb to the world. I had received my first work assignment already but I decided to take the assignor's statement at face value. He had said, "Don't worry, it doesn't have to be done tonight," so I went home instead of troubling myself with the subtext of the statement (which, in case you were wondering, would be: "Please have it on my desk by tomorrow morning"). M. told me I passed out on the sofa after dinner.
"I tried to wake you up to brush your teeth but you were knocked out," he said.

Maggie Gyllenhaal joined my yoga class yesterday

2005-04-13T09:03:00.000-04:00

It's true. After my lunch with Miss THB I went to my yoga class and Miss Gyllenhaal turned up. She's very flexible, if you wanted to know.

One of these days I will invent the Mother of all Memes and then you lot who keep sending me these will be dead sorry. Mark my words, Centinel. Mm ha ha ha.

- AT LEAST THIS IS A BOOK MEME -

1. You're stuck inside Fahrenheit 451, which book do you want to be saved?
Since it should be something that is a great work of art...and completely personal, I would choose.... The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene. I find literature which conveys a little something about the essence of living as a human being is most rewarding.
2. Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?
No. I'm not crazy yet.
3. The last book you purchased?
Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress. I like the style of writing and the quirkiness of the story. That's all I'm ready to give away.
4. What are you currently reading?
Something that M. managed to read as a teenager - Plato's The Last Days of Socrates. It's the first time I've ever read anything by Plato. My classical education is sorely lacking, and I feel it all the time. Last year's mission was a humble one - to finish reading The Iliad. I didn't finish it, although I did manage to get to the nineteenth chapter. Hopefully this year I will get to complete it at some point.
5. Five books you would take to a deserted island?
If I'm on a desert island, I think I would definitely be looking for the book equivalent of comfort food. And to be allowed only five books is rather cruel and inhumane. The list that follows is validated by my state of mind as of this morning, rather than for absolute literary value (i.e. it is not a 'Top Five' list).
The Interpreter of Maladies, for its heartbreakingly precise yet accurately varied renditions of the immigrant experience.
Beloved, for lyrical, haunting writing at its best.
The Secret History. One should always have access to a good mystery novel, especially one featuring a midnight drunken orgy.
Atonement, for rich, beautifully fluid writing and an excruiating storyline.
A Tale of Two Cities, because where would we be without Charles Dickens, and because it is a childhood favourite.

Of course, I inflict memes on no one else other than myself.

Back to school

2005-04-12T11:07:00.000-04:00

I have found out many things about myself while being an indolent wastrel during the past four months. I had all these misconceptions about what I was like as a person - I thought I was hardworking and ambitious. But no, time has proven that I am definitely lazy by nature. At some point in my life, being diligent cracked something in me and now I have virtually no will power left to drive me on to achieve.

When I was younger I thought I would do so much more with my life once I had free time. "If only I had 24 hours a day at my disposal, I would become a successful baker!" I would cry out in my office opposite St. Paul's. That was when I first started out as a lawyer - but six months later I was put on a gruelling deal that required no sleep, and my idea of becoming a baker sounded half-baked. "If only I had 24 hours a day at my disposal, I would become a writer!" I would cry out in my office high above Victoria Harbour. But then I was put on a crazy deal involving Koreans, Americans and maniacs, and the idea of becoming a writer sounded half-witted. Now see what I have done during the four months of free time - I attended a writing course, read some books, experimented with food and M.'s stomach, and went to a few yoga classes. I haven't even bothered to get my driving license yet.

Oh, but it has been great being lazy. I haven't helped save dolphins, worked on conservation sites, worked pro bono or donated my time to teaching children to read. Nor have I embarked on cooking courses or travelled around. Those things can be done later, although maybe with not as much leisurely indulgence as I would have liked. But what has been great is that I spent so much time with M. - and after over a year and a half of being on the other side of the planet, this is important - and that I never felt the pressure to achieve anything other than that. I have been very happy being lazy like this.

This time next week I will be in my new office, wearing my new shoes and suit for the second time (the first time was at the interview). So far I've only had one nightmare involving an impossible research task and being trapped in an office with two other lawyers, but I'm hoping this time round things will be more manageable.

No pets here

2005-04-08T18:26:00.000-04:00

I find photos of dogs, cats and other 'aw' inducing subjects (Anne Geddes'
baby photos, for example) generally repulsive. But every now and then, a photo such as that of Lapsed Cannibal's featuring an adoring beagle will hit me with its Snoopy factor and I end up silently oohing and ahhing with the rest of the sentimental populace. The constant moving around the world that has been the pattern of my life so far has never been conducive to having a pet.

As a small child I fantasised a great deal about how wonderful it would be to have a pet. I read all the articles I could find on dog training, horse grooming and cats. And budgies. And fish. And don't forget esio trots. As an adult, I would frequently walk around Hampstead Heath with my flatmate, and we used to joke about our lack of those two essentials for every woman of a certain age strolling around the heath - a pet and a pram. "Can't we rent them out for a day, just so we would fit in?", we wondered. It was the idea of having an intelligent golden retriever lolloping by my side, not the pram, that sounded so comforting and warm. I would buy Rover (of course, it had to be called Rover, not Reginald) loads of dog biscuits and we would go grocery shopping together on top of our walks on the heath - we would be the ultimate Pedigree advertisement.

Of course, these are all mere fantasies. For one thing, I am probably allergic to something carried by these animals, or indeed the animals themselves. I am intolerably lazy at picking up after myself: how on earth would I manage the needs of another being? (M. is remarkably tidy - I am the messy one). Large dogs are scary - I always tense around the bigger breeds, especially bulldogs and German shepherds. Even the cutest kittens like to flex their claws way too often. Fish smell. And budgies nip you with their beaks if you come too close...

How To Dodge Missionaries

2005-04-06T11:00:00.000-04:00

I am a lapsed Protestant (C of E) who has managed to read both Old and New Testaments three times and had several copies of the Bible, sung hymns, read and wrote prayers, and attended church, Christian youth camps and the like, so before the religious ones cast their stones at me because of this story I am about to relate, I just want you to know that.

One of the many reasons why I stopped being even a faint-hearted Protestant was because I encountered the evangelical Korean brand of Christianity. This particular brand of evangelism believes in the following lovable and Christian-like things:

1. You must bring all your friends, relatives and acquaintances to your church. Otherwise you will Burn In Hell.

2. You must bring lots of money to donate to your church even if you are a student. Otherwise you will Burn In Hell.

3. You must tell those friends, relatives and acquaintances who refuse to go to your church (unless they already go to another church) or donate money (unless they are very, very poor and on the verge of dying) that they will Burn In Hell.

4. Reading the Bible is something incredibly difficult to do, and it can only be done properly by having lots of soju (Korean rice wine) and barbecued beef. But if you don't 'study' the Bible that way with your fellow Christians, you will Burn In Hell.

After having consulted in private with God, I decided that this form of worship was not for me. So despite my missionary school education I successfully evaded going to church for about a decade.

Then, just for fun, I followed a friend to his church in Hong Kong. The first couple of times while listening to the sermon was illuminating - I was happy to have found an open-minded church which had an English speaking Korean American pastor and a multinational congregation. But one afternoon he showed his true (Korean) evangelical colours, and after a two-hour session where I was literally trapped in my pew surrounded by weeping people with their hands up in the air screaming gibberish for the Holy Blessing, I decided that this was probably not the way forward for me. Especially after when the pastor said all gays are probably going to Burn In Hell. I was cynical and worn out enough at that point to swear to never think about religion again.

Having arrived in the States neither M. nor I practice any religion so I figured we were relatively 'safe' and I would not have to think about dealing with Korean evangelists. But then, I hadn't encountered the Korean Missionary Brigade in front of Hanahreum, where we sometimes shop to buy Korean food.

When we go shopping at a supermarket, M. usually follows me, pushing the cart while I whirlwind around picking out fruit and vegetables. So I didn't think much of it when as, we were coming out, I saw M. far behind me talking to some stranger. When he got to the car though, I could see he was slightly upset.
"What's wrong?" I asked.
"This guy, he was a missionary. I just couldn't shake him off, he was so persistent," M. said, gritting his teeth. The man had cornered M. and the cart and started talking to him about his church and how he should believe in Christ. M. couldn't pull away fast enough. I, on the other hand, had whirled away from these people so fast I hadn't seen them and they hadn't spotted me. Frick, I come all the way to the States and I have to deal with Korean evangelists? I shook my head and decided it was just too bad.

So the next time we entered Hanahreum we decided I shouldn't walk off too far - if needs be I can retort back in Korean to them far quicker than M. can. This time round I could see the K.M.B. lining the entrance and exit holding yellow flyers in their hands from far away; I couldn't believe I hadn't seen them before, there were just so many of them.
"Walk behind me," I said to M., and I steered our way in.
"Do you believe in Jesus? Believe in Jesus!"
"Do you go to church?"
"Please, take this flyer and believe in Jesus!"
Suddenly, a swarm of middle-aged Korean ladies crowded in front of us, but I put on my war-mask (frosty glare, twisted eyebrows and tightly gripped lips) and told them all, "No thanks! No thanks! No thanks!" as one tried to push a flyer into my hand, another waved one in my face and someone else tried to block my path. I ended up swatting them away like flies. It was a success - neither M. nor I ended up with any flyers. On the way out though, we were slightly worried - we had a full shopping cart and it might not be so easy to snake our way out of the K.M.B.'s path. But I glared at them rudely enough and we managed to get by without a hitch.

Missing

2005-04-05T09:46:00.000-04:00

I received a letter from the admissions department of the New York supreme court telling me my law school certificates are missing. How can they be 'missing'? Does that mean they lost the documents, or that they never received them, I wondered. So I phoned them and found that the department had never received them. Since the schools did send the certificates, the papers are indeed missing.

And I think about other things that have been displaced recently. Like my blue crystal hairband. I remember using it one day a couple of weeks ago but yesterday when I looked for it at its usual place, it wasn't there. Now if I placed it somewhere else, I should remember, but I don't. So where is it?

What happens to things that go missing? Do they get sucked into one big hole in the universe or do they get allocated their own separate space? I used to puzzle over why I always managed to end up with one sock that could not be matched to any other in the pile. Whatever happened to the other pair - if I had lost it, wouldn't I remember? It's not every day you would see a sock running down the street by itself.

LOST: a small chunk of memory
that recalls where missing items are.
IF FOUND, please return to owner.

Happy April Fool's Day

2005-04-01T13:24:00.000-05:00

As an April Fool's Day special, I decided to reveal my true self to my readers through chillingly graphic pictures.

This is what I looked like only 24 hours before; a curly-haired, happy-go-lucky kid:

This is what I now look like, after a cheap haircut on Mulberry Street; a displaced extra from a Hong Kong police film:

Clearly it is the last time I will spend less on my hair (that's right, from now on it will be Vidal Sassoon all the way). Sadly, M. saw no difference until I pointed out to him that my hair was no longer curly.

Puppy dogs' tails and sugar and spice

2005-03-30T12:14:00.000-05:00

It is strange how you don't recognise stereotypical behaviour in your life until you see a parallel course running through someone else's.

"So H. plans his entire year through sports," proclaimed S. as we sat at lunch. "It starts with football, golf, basketball. And I don't even want to know the details, but I do! Seriously, just because he's talking about it so much I get to know the players' names, what they did or didn't do..."
"Wait," I said, a sudden flow of recognition in my head. "Does your husband watch ESPN so much that he would never realise if the other channels went missing?"
S. nodded.
"Oh my God." I sank deep into my chair. "This is exactly what is happening to me. M. watches ESPN all the time. That's why I know who A-Rod is. I don't even call him Alex Rodriguez - it's just A-Rod."
S. laughed aloud. "I mean, tell me about it," she said. "Who would have thought? But do you know it works the other way round? When I complain about this to H., he says, 'Wait a minute, I didn't want to know who this Manolo Blahnik guy is. I'm a guy, why the heck do I even know this name?'"
"Ah. You've trained him," I said, nodding. "I think M. has yet to recognise that name." But then I thought about it and realised I had educated him on the important matter of designer jeans - specifically, 7 for All Mankind jeans - to the point where M. sent me an article about the company being bought up by Bear Stearns.

I thought about this some more last weekend as M. went off with his boys to spend hours over the fantasy baseball league draft while I went shopping with my friends.

A roof over your head

2005-03-29T10:28:00.000-05:00

I see 'R' and 'E' in everything: EvERything. See?

It seems if you are not talking about real estate in New York these days, you're not talking about anything worthwhile. During the first couple of years into the current millenium, I'm sure the talk in town was "Where should I buy?" "How much do you think property prices will rise?" and all that. Now it is "Do you think it will continue to rise?" "The bubble will burst" "No, I can still keep buying - the market will continue to rise". We are certainly in the middle of a frenzy.

Manhattanites simply cannot help dropping into the conversation how much they think their house is worth. Or how someone has bought a new flat for yet another shocking sum:
"F. bought a flat in Chelsea for $780,000."
"What? How big is it?"
"650 square feet."
"[J-A utters an expletive]."

"My neighbour sold his 300 square foot studio for $290,000."
"[Expletive]."
"We offered him $250,000."

New Jersey is certainly riding the boom:
"A starter home in this community sells for $550,000."
"[Expletive]."
"I know. It's so not worth $550,000. It's crazy."

Buy, buy, buy while you can, sang the demented goats of real estate investing. The market will carry on rising, we haven't reached the peak yet. We'll be OK for several more years. I wished I knew how they know so well. Then, as if on cue, the New York Times printed an article analysing the effects of the bubble bursting. Bewildering, conflicting predictions abound. In the meantime, people just keep buying.

Identity

2005-03-24T11:55:00.000-05:00

"I'm having an identity crisis."
"So you think going to Hong Kong is going to help? Heck, everyone in Hong Kong has an identity crisis."

"I'm having an identity crisis."
"Yes, I think everyone who is Asian has an identity crisis. But they get over it."

"I'm having an identity crisis."
"Why?"

In the end, my identity crisis went away, partly because I got distracted by meeting M., partly because I had a new job to get used to. I can hear the meshing of identities in my voice, in my accent, every hour - it quavers between the Pacific Rim and rolls around the Atlantic. A bastardised English accent with English grammar going to pulp, but, as M. says, "it is what it is".

I think I would have suffered more if I had not experienced living in Seoul and in Hong Kong. Being in Asia as an Asian is a great thing - you are the mainstream. You really don't have to explain anything to anyone - everyone already knows what you are about. It is comfortable, like wearing a tailormade suit. I was sad to move to the States (and I think my parents were sad for me) because I would be in the minority again, living with whatever that entails. I know what it's like to be in both worlds, though, and that makes me more confident in me being just me. I do wonder if my identity crisis would have ever gone away had I not met M. - being with him makes it possible for me to eat Korean food every day yet complete the crossword from the New York Metro together.

My dad was terribly excited about 'Native Speaker' being reviewed by the New York Times.
"Think about it," he said. "He's a Korean, and he's being taken seriously! The New York Times!"
I didn't think of it that way - in my mind, I thought that was how it should be (not knowing the meaning of what it is to be a minority, I thought it was normal for Koreans to get something into the New York Times), and if I were to read the book, I would read it for its merits, not because it was written by a Korean. But when I actually started reading it, I realised I couldn't be as detached. As I read the novel it became more clear that the narrator had his own identity crisis - the awkward and sometimes incorrect use of Korean, for instance, and the obvious misunderstanding of Confucian culture. It astounded me as to how the narrator had such a chip on his shoulder about being an Asian in a predominantly Caucasian society - the narrator blamed his Koreanness. He saw his Korean heritage in such a negative light. M. thought it had something to do with the attitudes of the time.
"You know, they used to say the States was the melting pot of cultures," he said. "I think now the approach is more the 'mixed salad'."
If you had been brought up not to appreciate differences in culture, but rather see the differences as an anomaly, something to be removed and replaced with the mainstream culture, you would resent your own background.
"I think I would have been pretty unhappy if I was brought up that way," M. said, indicating that times have changed since then.

I thought about other Korean Americans I know - how some of them grew up never mixing with other Koreans because they thought it was 'uncool' and they didn't want to be branded 'the Asian'. Over time, and with age, they came to realise their attitude only made them more unhappy, so they tried to meet up more Koreans. One of them even made me talk to her mum on the phone as proof that she was making more effort to make Korean friends. It struck me as so ridiculous then - the mother was so happy I was Korean, she was extremely emotional - but maybe now I can see what it was all about.

My identity crisis was just one of many, a loop in a wider chain felt everywhere around the world by people who are in the minority. One thing I do know is that it is easier to embrace the different facets of yourself, rather than to replace them with something else. You are what you are.

Mind games

2005-03-22T08:35:00.000-05:00

Yesterday I was walking around in a bit of a haze: missed an appointment to see a flat (I know, how can you miss an appointment when you're not working? Ridiculous) and lost track of time generally. But I did get to discuss dating strategy with my friend D. over dinner.

It's fun to discuss these things, even though you know ultimately your friend is going to do whatever she wants. One of the first things I did when I thought something was going to happen between M. and myself was to go over to a friend's house and brood over it the whole day (M. did likewise). You wonder whether what you did was right, what's the next step and generally whether you've lost your mind in deciding to go out with this person.

We were talking generally about Manhattan men: in D.'s experience, all the men she has dated treat the first date like an interview. They talk about which school they went to, where they work, where they live, drop hints about how much money they make and they ask her the same questions. Then they say something about how the women in Manhattan are so materialistic. I just couldn't help laughing: is it that 'Sex and the City' was reinforcing existing cultural traits, or is it life imitating art? The idea of someone asking me such questions on a date is slightly crazy - why, if I give you the right answers, are you going to marry me on the spot? It's all just a game, isn't it, if you're strangers.

One date even talked about his exes. I thought that was taboo.
"He said she cried and accused him of not loving him because he hadn't bought her flowers on Valentine's Day, even though he had taken her away on a trip the weekend before."
"Wow."
"He says he can't deal with women because they are too emotional."
"Wait, was this a date?!"
"We had coffee."
"Why did she cry over not getting flowers? I don't understand."
"Well, I guess she was demanding."
"Really demanding."
"She was. She wanted him to buy her lots of gifts, like a $3,000 handbag."
We both roared with laughter at this crazy woman. D. said,
"I told him I'm too blue-collar for that. I don't know anyone who spends $3,000 on a handbag."

Fridays make me remember stuff

2005-03-18T15:51:00.000-05:00

Until I visited him last December, I had always had the impression that my grandfather was a tiger that accidentally got changed into a human. When we were very young, maybe once or twice, he displayed signs of affection. On visits to his house in the Korean countryside he would take us for long walks along the red dusty road (which has since been paved over) and scare us by catching grasshoppers or dragonflies - being girls, my sister and I didn't take to insects kindly - and offering the trapped animal into our faces.

As we got older, I suspect he became more irritable because we were no longer small people who did his bidding but instead tried to argue our way out of doing things his way. Although he wasn't a military man, my grandfather ran his house like a barracks: breakfast was served before seven o'clock for him, while we had to rub our eyes to get up at around eight. No snacks were allowed - he would say, "If you eat three bowls of rice every day on time there's no need for snacks," which was probably true but not really taking into account the fact that we were children with an appetite that demanded frequent calorie intakes. He turned off the television at nine o'clock and that was that - we had to go to sleep. He considered my little sister and me to be lacking in discipline every time he examined us during our summer holidays. "How can the children be still sleeping at nine o'clock?" he'd thunder across the house, and we'd realise we had to get out of bed. He examined our socks and decided we needed to learn to wash them ourselves, even though there was a washing machine, because he did so himself.

He tried to educate us when we got to the age of ten or so. Even though I was examined on the matter every summer - as a child with the memory of a goldfish and the attention span of a bee - I was petrified every time he asked me to recite in Chinese characters his name, my grandmother's name, my other set of grandparents' names, my parents' names and my sisters' names. I had to recite where our family was from, and what our tribal name was. I got it wrong every time - I had a heap of notes stashed in random notebooks with his spidery calligraphy showing me how to write out some name or other. Sadly, I won't claim to know how to write them now. He reminded me to do the proper kowtow every time I greeted him for the first time, which has to this day made me pretty unsure about how I do my kowtows. He tried to tell me about the ancestral rites, but my sieve-like mind drooled it all away.

I think the one time I impressed him was when I took him to watch a football game during the '88 Olympics. He was surprised I could navigate around Seoul by myself.
Later on, when I was a teenager, we would clash even more openly - he disapproved of my wearing shorts, for example. But he stopped going on about socks. Then I didn't get to see him as often, for long stretches of summer were no longer available for holidays - I had grown up.

I don't remember the last time I saw him before last year. He showed his considerable age with his baldness, which took my breath away, for the last time I had seen him he had a full head of hair. Frailty was not something I associated with him, yet he was white and wrinkled in the manner that denotes that one's energy is finally spent. The rest of the household was looking fairly relaxed as they had their breakfast at eleven o'clock. I sat in front of my grandfather on my knees. He tried to recall my birth year, but failed. He decided to consult his Chinese horoscope almanac at length to find out my zodiac sign.
"We'll see you at your [wedding] ceremony," he said, as he bade me goodbye.

R u riting if u kant spel?

2005-03-16T13:44:00.000-05:00

I know that I am a pedantic old goat.

After having completed seven out of the ten weeks of the creative writing course, the last class being next week, I have decided it is time to take a look back at what I have learned during the course.

It was successful in getting me to write one short story - the first short story I have ever completed, even if it was very short. So I suppose that gives me some sense of achievement. And it was also the first time I let anyone else read any completed piece of fiction I had written. The lectures were also interesting - if not always illuminating - and served as a somewhat narrow backbone to the learning process.

(Note: The pedantic old goat within is charging forward.)

The main problem, however, is that after having read and criticised other classmates' work as well as my own, I have now been left with the unshakeable feeling that the course is nothing but a huge exercise in self-delusion: that we amateurs could write something printable at some point in our lifetimes. It seems ludicrous that any of us would be able to polish our nascent craft with the fervour or knowledge required to make it to the point of publication. For one thing, no one had any concept of grammar or spelling. Good stories can be written but who will be able to make sense of it if you can't differentiate between 'compare to' and 'compare with'? Or 'too' and 'to'? Editing may be the answer, but if writing is a craft as well as an art, this lack of understanding of the basics is nothing but a demonstration of lack of requisite skill, especially when it is coupled with an inability to formulate a logical storyline. None of my classmates were able to come up with a sustainable plot. An example - taken out of a story written by one of my classmates - of the ridiculous storyline: Hero was a rowing champion at school. Now he is a successful, ass-hole lawyer who suddenly has midlife crisis after going through a McDonalds' drive-thru. Hero had claustrophobia. Meanwhile, hero's wife is talking to dry cleaners. Hero decides he loves his wife and will stop being an asshole. So he phones home. The end.

So much drivel has driven me to distraction and despair. Nonetheless, I have realised through the course a couple of things about myself which may help me lay down the notion of my being a writer trapped inside a lawyer's body. I do not have sufficient desire to write to apply myself to the task as required in order to become a published author - to sit and write and polish what I wrote and continue to write, take the criticism, write some more, take more criticism, continue to write, experience numerous rejections and eventually find joy in being paid 100 dollars for a month's work. But I do love reading good writing, and I love talking about what I read (poor M. has to hear it all the time). And I like writing enough to carry on with this blog, which seems to satisfy the itch for now.

Thankfully, none of my classmates have quit their day jobs.

I don't eat sarnies, I eat po' boys

2005-03-14T13:08:00.000-05:00

A loud jeering crow came from the mass of people on the balcony who were shaking their gaudy coloured beads. The woman standing below obliged, screaming, "Yeah! Yeah!" as she took out her left breast from her shirt, a mass of white flesh with an aureole stuck on it like a discoloured maraschino cherry, swinging her plastic cup of beer with her other hand. Unfortunately for M. that was the only time we saw a live naked nipple on display in Bourbon Street. We probably didn't look hard enough.
"I'm so glad we're leaving here on Tuesday," I said to M. as we were eating dinner at Muriel's. "If we stayed here a week I'd be the size of a house."
Over the course of one day we'd sampled - with plenty of Tabasco sauce, as you do in Louisiana where hot sauce is on every table, together with any number of peppery seasonings - shrimp po' boys (fried shrimp with lettuce, tomato, mayonnaise in French bread), crawfish pie (crawfish flesh stuffed with spices into a pie crust, then fried), jambalaya, seafood gumbo (with plenty of filé seasoning and oysters poking out of it), pecan crusted puppy drum (a type of fish), macaroni cheese, barbecued shrimp, and beignets (fried dough served with heaps of icing). My tongue and lips were burning but my stomach cried out for more Creole shrimp. There was a distinct possibility that we would have to be rolled back to New York, as over the next couple of days we continued to stuff ourselves with crawfish etouffee, corn, fluffy hot biscuits, pecan pie and chocolate brownie.

We walked around Jackson Square, past numerous shops selling shoes, handbags, antique chinaware and terribly garish paintings. The Mississippi was as muddy as I'd thought it would be. The people said "Y'all", all the time, called me "Baby" and "Sweetie" and were friendly enough to be qualified tour guides. The service was excruiatingly slow by New York standards.
"It's just that New York is so fast, it seems slow," M. said when I pointed this out to him. "Outside of New York, I think everything works in a more relaxed pace."
Certainly, the warm weather and cooling breeze makes it much easier than in New York to wait outside for your food.

Every watering hole in the French Quarter competed for customers with music - live music, jazz, blues, pop, rock and the occasional semi-nude MCs on the stage. We didn't have to go inside to hear the clamour of the crowd and smell the sweat mixed with vomit and beer breath.
"Where are you going - tell me where you're going and I'll show you," an inebriated local offered to help us out as we peered at a map. M. shifted away saying,
"We know where we're going."
I could smell his drink before I even looked at his bright pink face.

Great bangers and mash

2005-03-10T12:12:00.000-05:00

I saw Nigella Lawson on Live with Regis and Kelly yesterday morning. It was memorable for one thing: when Regis asked how London restaurants are these days, Nigella replied, "London restaurants are still lovely. And every bit as good as New York restaurants. And I have the knife, by the way." Or something similar to that.

It's a truly touchy subject - British cuisine. Ever since Tony Blair came into power the UK has been declared the land of the hip - it's the Swinging Sixties all over again, but this time with Kate Moss - but no one really talked about the food. Last weekend one of M.'s friends remarked how, when M. had been living in London, he'd come back on his visits 'shrunk', stay in New York for two weeks and regain his appetite and figure, go back to London, come back shrunk, stay in New York and gorge etc. etc. It's true M. was definitely not eating as well as he does now (in spite of my pitiful culinary efforts, he is still managing to look 'unshrunk'). This week a friend who had visited London recently did not say anything terribly flattering about the cuisine. So why is it all so bad - or is it really all that bad?

I'm not a food historian. There are people who have written great books on the history of British cuisine. But I have my own theories.

Britain was a great power for quite a long time, so it is fair to say the 'decline' of its cuisine was in fact a fall from grace. Samuel Pepys, a 17th century diarist and renowned public figure, wrote extensively in his famous diaries about the food he ate, and the pies his wife Elizabeth would make - all of which featured incredibly dear ingredients such as spices and displayed a varied diet of meat, fish and fowl. The average Englishman was extremely well fed compared to his European counterparts. The Royal Family celebrated their Christmas dinner with swan, although turkey was later introduced in the late 19th century. The regions had their own strong culinary traditions which continue on to this day - the Scots have their oatmeal porridge and haddocks for breakfast, the English continue with their fry ups of egg, bacon and sausage.

The World Wars hit the British Isles hard, especially in culinary terms: the British experienced their first food rationing in 1918, and again in 1940, ending in 1954. The British economy was in ruins for much of the Fifties and the Sixties, due to its fixed exchange rate which created a huge trade deficit. The IMF had to bail out the UK during the Seventies. Huge waves of industrial strikes went through - from coal miners to rubbish collectors - during the Eighties. And in 1992, the UK had to withdraw from the exchange rate mechanism of the EEC, at great cost to its economy and the average British taxpayer - people were laid off left right and centre. It's only fair to say there weren't many people thinking about the best food to eat at that point.

The revival of good British food has been steady since then. I was in the midst of the 'Ciabatta Revolution' of the mid to late Nineties, when a leading grocery chain made sundried tomatoes, olive oil and ciabatta a necessity to the middle class household. Since I was working in London during this time, I had the means to witness some spectacular restaurants, as well as some terrible interpretations of different cuisines. There was a period of time when, thanks to Sir Terence Conran, nearly every new trendy restaurant served Japanese food. There were attempts to fancy up bangers and mash (use onion gravy and apple and spice sausages). Fish and chips were battered in beer and olive oil, served with tartar sauce. Pubs were serving oysters. Men decided they needed to cook and speak with a funny Essex twang. Even Delia Smith, the lady who taught people how to boil eggs in the Eighties, had to learn how to use fenugreek. It was all getting a bit ridiculous, but experiments had to be done. Of course, all this while, the Brits were still big fans of Indian curries.

I think now is a period where Brits are feeling a little bit more comfortable about eating different foods, but there is now, thanks to the BSE crisis, a desire to find their own culinary roots - Rick Stein for example, has made several successful television series about British culinary 'heritage'. And if that is best represented by a plateful of Cumberland sausage and mashed potatoes, I don't think any one will be too upset about it. The next time I visit London, it'll be fun to see how the restaurants have changed, if at all.

Premature

2005-03-07T13:22:00.000-05:00

There is a huge tower block with lots of signs on it offering luxury rental flats near where we live. Since my stuff has arrived from Hong Kong (hopefully intact, but you never know until you open the boxes) and the flat we are currently in will not accommodate all of it, M. and I decided to go flat-hunting over the weekend. We chose to drive to the huge tower block with lots of signs.

We spent a few minutes working out where the rental office was, then where the vistor's parking spaces were. As we were pushing the door of the rental office, an old man wearing a checked cap nodded at us as he passed by and said,
"Good morning!"
I thought it a bit odd as I walked up the carpeted stairs with M.. Then we saw the lobby was full of old men and women. One old gentleman was picking his nose. The white-haired receptionist looked at us curiously.
"We're looking at apartments for rent," M. said to the man. He grinned.
"I'm afraid this is a facility for the over-fifty-fives," he said. "Come back in thirty years."
We walked back down the stairs feeling sheepish. M. kept muttering to himself,
"But you can't tell it's an old people's home from the outside. It doesn't say anything on the outside."
Back outside, the man wearing the checked cap nodded at us and said, "Bye!"

Feeling Friday

2005-03-04T10:46:00.000-05:00

A part of me does understand why people wonder whether a novel was based on the author's own experiences - although literature is not supposed to be therapy, your own experiences are, afterall, the things you best know about. But I wouldn't be able to write about my family in that way. I've tried, and failed. There is something about my family that I haven't digested or made sense of yet, I suppose, which is why every time I write about them I feel there is something that slipped out in between the paragraphs. This has not stopped me from trying - for next week's class, I was trying to write a story based on my family, but after 200 words I realised I was stumped. How can you capture everything - the fights and frustration, the crazy things you do for each other, the fun you have with your siblings, the madness of growing up - without sounding like a phoney from a psychiatrist's couch? I had a madcap conversation with my parents and my little sister in the morning, and perhaps that is why I feel a little bit sad - I miss them, and I wish someone would hurry up and invent the travelling machine they use on Star Trek - and a little bit nostalgic.

Of course, I am glad to be here with M. and happy he is part of my family now. We made chicken sausage shrimp gumbo for dinner yesterday, and it was so great to have him pottering around in the background, stirring the chicken and sausage and tasting the gumbo. I always feel the recipe will turn out better when he is around.

It was my first attempt to make a gumbo, so I followed the recipe as closely as possible. I started cooking the celery, onion, green pepper and garlic first, then fried the okra in a separate pan. Okra is such a great thing to eat, and so strangely sticky when sliced. The chicken and sausage were also cooked separately then added in later, after the okra was put into the pan with the other vegetables, and after the vegetable broth, Creole seasoning, extra dried thyme - because I love the fragrance - and chopped fresh tomatoes. We stood around our tiny kitchen peeling the small but sweet, pink but barely cooked Maine shrimp to put in last. M. checked the seasoning and fiddled around with a Tabasco bottle while the air filled with the savoury scent of the spices and the meat and vegetables. We heaped the gumbo onto white fluffy rice in bowls. He was so surprised when, after having finished off the whole pot, he learned the gumbo recipe came from InStyle magazine (they have a surprisingly good food writer).

I wish my little sisters and my mum could have been here to eat the chicken sausage shrimp gumbo with us.

It's clear I became a lawyer by fluke

2005-03-02T10:47:00.000-05:00

You Are 25% Left Brained, 75% Right Brained

The left side of your brain controls verbal ability, attention to detail, and reasoning. Left brained people are good at communication and persuading others. If you're left brained, you are likely good at math and logic. Your left brain prefers dogs, reading, and quiet.

The right side of your brain is all about creativity and flexibility. Daring and intuitive, right brained people see the world in their unique way. If you're right brained, you likely have a talent for creative writing and art. Your right brain prefers day dreaming, philosophy, and sports.

Are You Right or Left Brained?

Quiz via Kinga. I don't know if I am philosophical at all.

Someone peal the bells, a couple of months from now

2005-03-01T11:12:00.000-05:00

"It's going to be a big hassle," M. said.
"No, it'll be fun," I said.
"You don't know what's involved. There's so much to think about."
"What's there to think about? We get dressed up, invite people for dinner, give them good food and wine, a little music, and it's over."
"You may think that now. But I've seen my friends go through it, and I'm telling you, there's a lot more involved."
"Like what?"
"Well, what about the music? Who's going to be the DJ? And what about flowers?"
"I'm allergic to flowers."
"You still need a bouquet."
"It can be plastic."
"Right. And what about the wedding favours?"
"What about them?"
"You really have no idea."
"Let's elope. We can go to Bali."
"OK."

This was several months ago. To date, we have got no where except for a faint hazy notion that maybe we want the celebrations in June and that it will be somewhere in Seoul because my parents want it that way. I don't have a ring, either. Once I had a fight with M., accusing him of not paying enough attention to this. The truth is, we've been both worn out by the procedure of my move to the States - yes, it took almost six months to plan this little escapade - and for a while, it seemed like a good idea to enjoy that first before embarking on another major project. But now it is getting on my nerves - my sister called me this morning to ask me whether I had made any plans at all. I foresee calls from my parents in similar vein.

I'm thinking maybe we should have a blogger wedding. Everyone has to have a blog, or read one regularly, and wear white sweatpants. The food will be Korean barbecue and vegetables. We'll hire an Irish pub for Guinness and dancing leprachauns. Party favours will include New York lottery tickets and Virgin Atlantic red socks. At the end of the night, we'll sing 'Land of Hope and Glory' and 'The Star Spangled Banner' in a medley.

Security issues

2005-02-28T10:18:00.000-05:00

Despite the forecasts of heavy rain and thunderstorms, when we set off to see the house that Henry Flagler - one of John Rockefeller's wickedly rich partners in Standard Oil Corporation - built, the coconuts had already been thrown to the carefully manicured grass along the pavement during the night and the sun was shining through the palm leaves.

We walked through neighbourhoods with names like Seaview Avenue, Seabreeze Avenue and expensive gleaming cars marshalling the pink and white red tiled houses. Several brown spotted geckos kept us on our toes by furiously darting across the square paved stones.

When we got to the Flagler Museum, there was a small queue of people patiently waiting to go through the process of buying a ticket from a woman wearing butterfly glasses. There was a little girl wearing black patent leather shoes and white lace socks which made me remember that I used to wear things like that at her age. Her mother was carrying a tiny bundle with a round, sleeping head in a baby carrier. That was when the Dame Edna lady revealed a rather mean streak.
"You can't bring in the baby carrier," she announced through the glass, on her microphone.
"Why is that?" the baby's grandmother, magnificiently dressed in a red suit and two dozen glittering bangles around her arms, asked. The rest of the queue, including a bunch of people from Ohio and Boston, wondered the same.
"You can't bring in large bags into the Museum, those are the rules," said Dame Edna.
"But we don't want a tour, we're going to have a birthday lunch for this young lady in the Pavilion. And we've already paid for the entry tickets because we had to make a reservation." The grandmother's bangles shook as she pointed towards the patent leather shoes. But Dame Edna asked her to step aside as she called the security guard and the manager.
"I'd like to see her try to put a baby back to sleep," I said to M. quietly.
"It's ridiculous," the woman with dark hennaed hair behind me said.
"It's a baby carrier, what do they think they're going to do with it?" the man in front of me asked his partner in matching jeans.
"They're going to interview us next," his partner warned, as he tucked his hands into his Levi's. He was right - the butterfly glasses didn't even gleam as the lady asked for the zip code and where we came from. She nodded towards my bag, and said, "No water bottles, right?"
We scrammed for the building, past the fountain, and didn't dare touch the bottle of water in my bag the whole time we were in the seventy-three room mansion. The Pentagon's security has nothing on Dame Edna.

Later, when we went in search of the railcar that Henry built, we found the small family inside the pavilion which housed the ancient vehicle. It was a completely separate building from the palatial residence, and as we stared across the rippling water of Lake Worth, we wondered why the security guard and manager had made such a fuss - the railcar wouldn't have fitted into the baby carrier.

When we were young

2005-02-24T07:15:00.000-05:00

When I was ten, I had been attending a Korean elementary school in Seoul for two years and was hating every minute of it. That year I decided it was best not to talk to anyone at school (they didn't speak English, they didn't know who Judy Blume was, and I couldn't understand what they were talking about) and for the most part I think I didn't. Except for one person - the boy sitting at my desk with me. Korean schools pair you up, generally according to your height, with someone of the opposite sex. This boy was quiet, so I think that's why I occasionally talked to him. I remember bringing in Twix bars to share with him a couple of times. He was also a bit of a whiz kid, and had perfect handwriting and grades, while I was one of the dunces. That was one year, and I forgot about him.

When I was twenty four, someone brought the now grown-up boy to a dinner in Hong Kong. I instantly recognised him - he had the same quietness and the glasses. He didn't remember me at first, then all of a sudden he said,
"J-A! But you were so quiet back then! Now you really talk!"
I've moved around so much, it was a shock to have someone other than my family remind me of how I was as a child. It was a surprise to him also when I told him what I remembered him to be like. We laughed about it and became friends again.

Now we are once again worlds apart: he works in Korea and I am here. But today he's in Manhattan, so I can say something I would not otherwise be able to say here, being such a recent transplant to the city.
"I'm meeting an old friend for lunch."

She stands on the soap box, Dayquil in her hand

2005-02-22T16:39:00.000-05:00

Kinga's post on feminism and the beauty myth has made me do the unusual - I am double posting, something which I am usually against because it makes me appear wordy, and for that matter I am posting something political, again something that I try hard to avoid because there are so many political writers and thinkers out there who have a much more coherent voice than mine.

Feminism is not about denouncing men. It is not about denouncing women for being with men, or being against women. There are many brands of feminism, but the core of feminist beliefs is this: that men and women should be equal, politically, economically and socially. The fundamental point being, of course, that the status quo does not give women that equality.

For those out there who somehow do not seem to believe that this brand of politics is a valid one in the year 2005 (i.e. you consider this about as outdated as the suffragettes), I would suggest you consider yourself fortunate. Perhaps you have never really experienced discrimination. Perhaps you think there are bigger matters to consider. Either way, you are fortunate to be in a part of the world that has codified the need for gender equality and formed the matching social etiquette to acknowledge the need (that is, everyone understands you shouldn't openly discriminate on the basis of gender). There are so many others in different parts of the world who do not have such a luxury. I've been (un)lucky enough to have worked in Asia and in the Westernised world and I can tell you, the difference is literally universes apart. And I'm sure you've heard about the terror of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan inflicted on the Afghan women. Without having to go into such extremes, I will give you one example:

It was reported that a Korean actress K. was filing for divorce from her husband on the grounds that he was violent and adulterous. When this was reported on the website of a newspaper, many Korean men wrote in to complain that the actress was 'humiliating' her husband and his family by making a private matter so public.

Now, if you can extend your imagination to such faraway countries, you can consider the following scene closer to home:

You are employed by a company that has hired a young man fresh from university. He is given all the client lunches to attend while you are told to stay in the office to 'work the details'. When you complain to your boss, he raises his eyebrows and says, "But what's the point of giving you client face time? Aren't you going to get married and quit work once you're pregnant?"

The above is an example of something that happened last year to an acquaintance of mine, a senior, single, female lawyer at a large Manhattan law firm. If it can happen there, it can happen anywhere - and it does. And how are we to deal with this? My belief is this: where there is a problem, the first step to finding a solution is to acknowledge the fact that there is a problem. Discrimination against women does exist. What should be done about it is a matter for everyone to discuss and agree on, not just be ignored. I feel upset when women are not proud to call themselves feminist - if you're not going to acknowledge the problems faced by the majority of those who are your gender, who do you think will? I am also annoyed by men who don't see the point of feminism, as I think both genders lose out from this discrimination: it denies humans the opportunity to be multi-faceted individuals and discourages meritocracy.

OK. I need another dose of Dayquil.

You can share colds. Not good.

2005-02-22T06:59:00.000-05:00

After having chased my little sister all across Manhattan in rainy weather for two days, it was not surprising that I came down with a severe cold. I have been languishing in my pyjamas, surrounded by little rolled up balls of snotty tissue and Dayquil for the second time this winter. Luckily for me, it was the weekend and Presidents' Day. M. was faced with the task of making sure I didn't die of boredom or a Nyquil overdose.

He gallantly cooked for me a mushroom omelette, a mushroom and chicken pasta and then ordered takeaway. He recorded the NBA All Star Game for me to finish watching when I felt better - I was shouting with a sore throat in my excitement, which brought on a fever. He played 'Place that State' with me: he came up with a state name, I marked it on the New York Times weather map. He taught me how to pronounce city names ('Shy-Ann' for 'Cheyenne'). He read Cosmo and discovered there were different makeup techniques for different face shapes.

After all that gallantry, the man himself has become ill. I knew he wasn't feeling very well because he started looking around for Tylenol. This morning I heard a "Gah!" from the kitchen and walked in to find him looking bewildered while standing over a heap of cornflakes.
"I split the bag when I tried to open it," he said.

Poor M. I guess I should get better soon-ish.

Appraisals

2005-02-17T10:13:00.000-05:00

I dreamt of smashing dozens of big, white, china plates with a brown pattern. In the morning, the class started the critiquing session with my short story. Thirteen people around the table - isn't that meant to be unlucky? I felt like standing up and saying, "Let's be reasonable, people, it's only a writing exercise," before anyone else could say anything. But instead I resorted to a poker face and carefully avoided meeting other people's eyes while I scribbled down the remarks I could hear coming from all sides.

"I really enjoyed reading the story. We get a clear picture of the group, but I just don't care about the hero."
"I enjoyed reading it but I don't understand why we need all these characters."
"I enjoyed reading it but the girlfriend's history is irrelevant."

Why is it that everyone prefaced their remarks with 'I really enjoyed the story' when they didn't sound like they had? I decided that when it was my turn to critique someone else's story, I would not use that phony phrase. Later, when I was commenting on a fellow amateur's story, I found myself saying, "I enjoyed reading the story," without even thinking.

"There are too many characters and it gets confusing."
"I don't think so - you need those characters to act as a buffer so that we don't get to see what is really going on. That's how we get the surprise ending."

It's frustrating when you can't talk back - this is the way the critiquing sessions are structured.

"You managed to make the guys believeable except for when the guy comments on the food. Guys don't care about whether it's mozarrella and proscuitto - it's just ham and cheese!"
"I don't agree. But I do think guys can be less romantic."
"I want to know why the story was written. We need more motivation to understand what she's trying to tell us with this story."

It was just a writing exercise. Really. I don't have any age-old wisdom to hand out.

The teacher finally waved her hand.
"OK, J-A, do you have any questions or comments as to what we said?"
I smiled. There really wasn't much to say when thirteen people had dissected your work down to the last detail, so I thanked them for their comments. The teacher looked at her watch.
"We really need to get moving onto the other stories," she said.

I'm going to write about robots next time.

The holiday Nazi cometh

2005-02-15T08:09:00.000-05:00

The last time we went sightseeing together was in Barcelona a couple of years ago. We walked so much during the day that at night I could hardly sleep for my trembling and aching thighs.
"No, you were the one that came up with a list of places to go," my sister said when I reminded her of this. But her true colours came out soon enough.

In the early morning we planned out a route which started from the tip of Manhattan - Battery Park. We got out of the subway to peer at the Statue of Liberty from the edge of the water. It started to rain, so I suggested taking the subway up to Canal Street. But the holiday Nazi was slowly reclaiming her territory already - we ended up posing in front of the bull on Wall Street then walking past the New York Stock Exchange to Chinatown. My toes started squelching in my trainers but we carried on. The umbrella, a flimsy but expensive thing she'd bought in London, broke in the windy rain, but we bought a new one, then carried on. We stopped for bagels and then for some tarts while going through the streets filled with delicatessens and restaurants. Finally, she agreed to take the subway up to Bloomingdale's.

We walked from there to a restaurant that turned out to have been replaced by another one, then back to Bloomingdale's. We walked to Barneys. We walked to Saks Fifth Avenue. We walked to the Rockefeller Center. Then all of a sudden, we realised we were so tired, that our soaked feet would not go any further. We waited for a taxi in the wet darkness, before realising that it was all in vain and went into the subway.

At the bar, we silently waited for M. and my friends to turn up. I refused to remove my drenched socks on the grounds that they would dry faster that way.

Happy 2nd birthday, blog

2005-02-11T07:28:00.000-05:00

This blog is now two years old. I can't believe I've managed to stick to something for so long outside of my work and family.

It's been fun to interact with other people all over the world as well as communicate with my family and friends through this blog. I've been really lucky, I think - so far 99.9% of my interactions have been with some really cool people. (The remaining 0.1% have been banned from commenting, m hahaha, so don't even think about it). The regular readers have been the main impetus for me to carry on writing it - let's face it, no one wants to ask themselves the question: if a writer misspells in a forest, is he worth his spellcheck?

To my fellow bloggers: Cheers for making the time to comment, send me postcards, presents (M. is so jealous of my receiving bloggy gifts), email me and meet up with me in person, despite so much evidence of my questionable mental condition. But my gratitude is felt so much more for your letting me share a glimpse into your world. It has been fascinating, educating and amusing, and I feel much the richer for reading your blog. I only hope to do the same.

The excuse of a bad cook: it's all about love, honey

2005-02-09T13:39:00.000-05:00

The chicken is, unfortunately, breast meat.
"Meat on the bone is more flavoursome," a friend of mine who cooks extensively had told me, and I have believed it to be so all this time. Reluctantly, I cut away the stringy yellow fat and dice the chicken. The tomatoes are not much to look at - but when they are cut, I see they are beautifully red and have the ripe savoury smell that I love. These are chopped roughly and set aside to sit with the small amount of cubed yellow onion. The carrots are carefully peeled then diced to fit in with the onion. Big white mushroom slices are cut next. The red pepper smells so sweet, I end up eating some of the chopped up pieces. But my favourite part is crushing the garlic. The pale cloves are as big as my thumb, and I relish the loud crunch they make as I first pound them from above with the side of my knife, then mince them into pieces. The green olive oil sizzles as I push in the garlic and onions - the stage is now set for a chicken dish to be born.

In the moment I am cooking, I am part of an experience shared by many - that of preparing food for one's loved ones. My mother toiled for years during her frequent bouts of illness to make enough tasty food to keep her three daughters healthy and happy. My grandfather, who is now nearing age eighty, cooked for my invalid grandmother until her death. My aunts cooked snacks and huge feasts for the gaggle of cousins whenever there was a chance. And then there are my friends who have cheerfully whipped up entire Indian banquets so that I could contentedly gorge on the sumptuous food.

When we cook at home it is about enjoying the experience of creating something, as much as it is the end result - and on occasion depending on the chef's abilities, it is more about the process than the food. It is also about the pleasure of doing something for another person - you are making an edible offering of love. The cook is God-like in some ways; she alone can decide whether this recipe will have cheese in it or not. The expression of love comes in deciding whether the person who will eat it really should have something with so much fat or salt or sugar content in it - something restaurants never care about.

I decide M. deserves some red wine, so I pour a little less than half a bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon into the mixture. The clear chicken broth is also poured in, as is a dash of balsamic vinegar. In the last minute I add in some tomato paste, then I put the entire mix to simmer away until M. is ready for dinner. Will it turn out as planned, or will it be another unmitigated disaster, I wonder, but I am not afraid. If he doesn't like it, he can have my rice and prawns.

Unmitigated disasters are something I am familiar with - through my own cooking and also my mother's. There are at least three dishes she made for us when we were children that I remember clearly - the first, a grilled fishhead with curry powder on it, which we thought was disgusting but she insisted 'there are people out there in the world who eat this', the second, rice made with milk on the grounds that we had a surplus of milk that week (we had kimchi as a side dish, which made things worse), the third, one Sunday lunch 'surprise' of tortelloni in seaweed soup. With such a wealth of experience of culinary eyebrow-raisers I am not easily scared away from cooking and perhaps creating my own.

I poke a chicken piece with a wooden spoon and it splits willingly into two. There is a rosemary sprig I have dried for occasions such as this and I put it into the stew. The dark sauce is quietly bubbling away under the glass lid. Later, M. comes home and says the wine is overwhelming the taste of everything else (something which is quite likely given how much I put in, but I don't own up to it, naturally) and I wonder if I am turning into my mother as I watch M. stoically eating the chicken with some pasta. He knows it is a labour of love, albeit a taste-challenged one.

Post-Super Bowl blues

2005-02-07T09:01:00.000-05:00

It seems you can't go to a Super Bowl party these days in Washington D.C. without getting burgled at gunpoint. Thank goodness I only live near Manhattan where people commit murder/suicide in broad daylight.

I have 24 hours until I must distribute my first short story to my fellow classmates at the writing class. It has been great to read other student's stories so far. My current favourite is redolent of so many Harlequin/Mills & Boon novels, featuring product placements (Gucci loafers, Armani suits, Laura Ashley curtains) as well as sentences that feature 'champagne cup-shaped breasts' and mispelled dessert (the heroine buys chocolate 'mouse'). After having laughed my socks off at others' efforts, I was somewhat sobered by the idea that they would be doing the same with my own story. So I made M. read it first.

He was only at the first page when he looked up to say, "I think baklava is a dessert."
"What?" I read the suspicious sentence; the protagonist is wearing 'a brown baklava'.
"Oh no. It's meant to be a balaclava! It's spellcheck, I was so paranoid about getting the wrong spelling!"
That was, unfortunately, just the beginning. M. then proceeded to correct my British use of words (flat/apartment etc.) and finally rolled over the bed. I had to ask, of course - "What do you think?"
"I hope it's not going to be some stupid young adult book," he said. "Can't you write something like CSI?"
I rolled my eyes.
"Or you could write a story about robots," he said.
"I don't write sci-fi," I said.
"What's wrong with sci-fi?"
"It's just not what I would write."
"I would be interested."

Somehow I don't think I can edit my short story into a piece of science fiction.

Jack be nimble, Jack be quick

2005-02-04T11:40:00.000-05:00

My extensive research - conducted exclusively on this morning while munching over two blueberry waffles and nursing a slight hangover - has shown that 'Jack' is the most popular name for any action character in film or television, being the quickest name you can call out in moments of crisis.

You would waste valuable time, which could otherwise be spent on saving your own skin or the planet, if you were named Jeremiah, Bartholomew or Archibald. Picture the scene - a bomb will detonate in thirty seconds. If your name was Theodore, someone would have to shout to you, "The-o-dore! Bomb!" instead of, "Jack! Bomb!" which could have saved you (and others) two more vital seconds.

I don't have anything against long names, I'm just suggesting that if you want to save lives, you could think about changing your name to Jack.

- The lives of Jack, as seen on television -
'Law & Order' is run partly by Executive Assistant D.A. Jack McCoy.
'Without A Trace' shows FBI agent Jack Malone as big boss.
'24' has CTU agent Jack Bauer running around in circles.
'Alias' has CIA agent Jack Bristow as the overbearing father.

- The lives of Jack, as seen in films -
'Speed' had Keanu Reeves cast as detective Jack Traven.
'The Day After Tomorrow' shows Dennis Quaid portraying a meteorologist called Jack Hall.
'Titanic' shows Leonardo Di Caprio as a young artist called Jack Dawson.
'Pirates of the Caribbean: the legend of the Black Pearl' features Johnny Depp as a pirate named Jack Sparrow.

- The lives of Jack, as read in books -
All of the CIA agent Jack Ryan books written by Tom Clancy.

Happy Birthday, M. - let's stay in Miami

2005-02-01T01:06:00.000-05:00

We spent the evening lounging around oversized black and white chess pieces, cushioned loungers with furry blankets, bright candelabras on whitewashed tables standing in the middle of a blue lit pool, while sipping our drinks and munching on guacamole on blue corn chips. The evening before had been M.'s unbirthday birthday dinner, so we had spent our energies devouring a whole bottle of Rjoja and a Cuban fish dish under a tree glittering with fairy lights coiled around its huge skinny branches. Lunch earlier that day had been savoured while reading the newspapers at a sun-lit wooden table on the white sand, surrounded by trees with heart-shaped foliage and cabanas with thin muslin curtains draped around them. And our first evening here we spent it under the dark sky, whispering to each other through the sea breeze on a broad sofa in a courtyard lit with starry candle lamps, drunkenly giggling at others who were lying down on a four poster iron bed in the middle of the flowery stone floor. We could make out Orion's belt in the navy blue heavens then, just as we could tonight.

During the day, we showed off our handstands in the pool and attempted cartwheels on the crushed shell sand, stepping away from broken pink coral and dried brown seaweed. And all this time, the sun shone through high clouds as the blue green sea tugged and pulled at the winding stretch of beach.

Nine letter word, as in 'Desperate -----------'

2005-01-27T17:36:00.000-05:00

One glass, drunk while sitting on the coffee coloured leather lounger of Whiskey Blue, was enough to get me going, but I didn't know it. M. did, and decided against ordering the second glass of merlot.
"It's not a good wine," he said, and we stepped outside to walk to the restaurant. We were meeting friends of mine for a Mexican dinner, and it was such a good feeling to be out on a Friday night.

At the restaurant, we discovered we were the first ones to arrive so we sat ourselves down on the cushioned wicker sofa to order a glass of wine. I was excited and nervous to be meeting my friends, and I could not help fidgeting with my new skirt. The impulse to childishly ask M. how I looked in it was terribly strong, but I shooed it away with the aroma of Rjoja. It felt like aeons had passed since I had been out for dinner with my friends. My friend A., upon her arrival, immediately noticed the skirt and said, "You're definitely not dressed for warmth."

It took a long while for everyone to order, and even longer for the food to arrive. In the mean time, I helped myself to pounds of spicy guacamole and tortilla chips, while we talked about each others high school days. Feeling slightly merry yet not drunk, I ordered another glass of wine, despite M.'s blazing glare. Taking a sip from the new glass, I decided I could not be drunk just yet - the others looked fine, we were eating - so M. was being overly protective. We demolished dessert and the rest of the group decided to move on to a bar. M. said to me, somewhat stiffly, "I'm going home."
"Oh? All right then, we'll go home," I said. It was eleven o'clock. The other jeered as we said our goodbyes, pointing out that it was incredibly early. But it was bitterly cold, and I felt relieved to be heading back to our warm little flat.

On the way home, I felt queasy. In bed, I realised I felt sickeningly drunk. Three glasses of wine over the course of a meal and I was out for the count. This was novel to me - the combination of getting drunk on so little and going home so early. 'What's happening to me?' I silently moaned to myself as I drank a large glass, this time, of water. 'Where is the party girl, the drinker of shots? Am I pregnant? What have I become?'

My friend A. seemed to have some ideas about what I had become. Her next email to me started off with 'Hello, housewife'.

The unbearable pomposity of a book, or, how the cookie was had first

2005-01-25T18:35:00.000-05:00

The Queen of Crab (Q.C.) is sitting on the floor with her eyes closed, face down on the coffee table. In front of her is a book, John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, and a plate with a chocolate chip cookie. It is evening.

Cookie: Psst.
Q.C.: (yawns) Ah hm.
Grapes of Wrath: I don't think she's going to get up just yet.
Cookie: It's so odd. She was dying to have me when I came out of the oven.
Grapes of Wrath: No offence, but she's generally like that with most cookies.
Cookie: What, leave them out till they get cold?
Grapes of Wrath: No, I meant dying to have them.
Cookie: Then what's wrong with me?
Grapes of Wrath: No, no. It's not you. It's her. Or should I say, it's really me. Generally she has cookies when she watches television. But she was reading me, you see.
Cookie: You're that boring, huh?
Grapes of Wrath: I beg your pardon - I am most certainly not boring. I'm a Nobel and Pulitzer prize winner.
Cookie: Yeah. Bor-ing.
Grapes of Wrath: I should tell you that she was so engrossed in reading me, she didn't sleep last night. That's why she's dozing off now.
Cookie: Well then it really is your fault I'm cold on the plate, isn't it? What's she reading you for anyway? You look pretty dull. I mean, you're thick and everything.
Grapes of Wrath: Size isn't everything. She was reading me for my structure.
Cookie: Your what?
Grapes of Wrath: Structure. You know, how I'm written. Apparently I'm a fine example of a contrapuntal structure - alternating short lyrical chapters of exposition and background with long narrative chapters -
Cookie: Right -
Grapes of Wrath: - and the intercalary chapters are designed to be pace changers, with the rhythms and symbols of poetry intended to open up the reader.
Cookie: OK, I think I see what you're saying. Basically, you're bor-ing.
Grapes of Wrath: There's no need to be rude just because you don't understand what I'm saying.

Q. C. turns her face sidewards and rubs her eyes. She remains slumped forward with her eyes closed.

Cookie: Do you think she'll have me after she wakes up?
Grapes of Wrath: I suppose she might. But then, she is meant to cut down on sugar during her You-Know-What. So you never know.
Cookie: Oh. What'll happen to me then?
Grapes of Wrath: Relax. She'll probably give you to M. and they will share you.
Cookie: Do you get shared?
Grapes of Wrath: Oh no. Never. Some things are just not meant to be shared, you know?
Cookie: That's probably because you're too boring to share.
Grapes of Wrath: It's a pity I have to waste my time talking to a philistine like you. As a matter of fact, she does not like sharing me with other people because I am a book. And a book is a personal matter. Just as you would never share underwear, so you would not share a book. It has too much personal time embedded in it- to let someone else read one's book would be like letting a stranger see your intimate hairs inside an undergarment. Do you see what I mean?

Q. C. moves her head from the side to facing front. She rubs her eyes with both hands then yawns. Her eyes are open.

Q.C.: Bh- uer? Er? Where am I? Oh. Damn book. So friggin' long.

She takes the cookie from the plate and crams most of it into her mouth.

Q.C.: Oh my God. These cookies are just so good. Mm. I'm going to make M. do a summary of this damn book. So friggin' long. Hopefully he's read this thing.

She pushes the book off the coffee table onto the floor.

Creaking brain cells

2005-01-21T10:19:00.000-05:00

It was great while it lasted. I went to yoga classes mid-afternoon, met up with friends on a snowy day for hot tea and peach tart, walked along Central Park's south side watching the horse-drawn carriages, shopped around Bloomingdale's and the Rockefeller Center, and had cozy evenings indoors with M. But now it is all over. I have homework to do.

As I ponder on what my short story's plot will be, I can hear from the television in the living room the choir singing from the prayer service President Bush is attending. I am sitting on the bedroom carpet with the laptop in front of me, and I see a piece of lint on the carpet. Maybe I should vaccuum the flat first, before I start on writing. I just had a bowl of cereal - maybe I should have a waffle before I get hungry. I sniff at my arm. Perhaps I should take a shower first.

But time is short - I have until mid-afternoon then I am meant to go out for dinner, which leaves me seven hours. Seven hours to write an outline for a short story! It cannot be completed on time, I know, but if I don't even start on it there is not a chance I can finish something by next Tuesday.

Even with the deadline looming in my mind, I am thinking whether I should wear a skirt today in 15 degrees Fahrenheit (that's around - 9 degrees Celsius). If I wore my woolly stockings under my new boots, it wouldn't be so cold, would it? Oh dear. I am fighting a losing battle. I must concentrate. Perhaps I should write a story on a woman who cannot do her creative writing homework so she decides to run away to Mexico where she ends up running the world's best taqueria!

Isn't it strange, I always thought I would have so much to write about once I had the time, but now that I have more time on my hands than I have ever had before, I am stumped? This must surely show that I am not meant to be a writer. Maybe I should go to Williams-Sonoma to buy baking tools instead.

Downward dog

2005-01-19T01:16:00.000-05:00

Today I was scolded by my yoga teacher while doing a headstand for being so impatient as to kick up my legs first, before positioning my shoulders to support the weight.
"Why is it that people feel they need to get their legs up there so quickly?" she said, as I finally stood upside down without risking a broken neck as I am prone to doing.
"Er, because they're Type A personalities?" I ventured from the floor. She laughed.

The trick to doing yogic poses is to concentrate on what you are doing and why. It is just like everything else in this world - just as you would work smarter rather than harder, you strategically push your energies into a select part of your body instead of blindly trying to muscle into the pose. With time, and the right amount of breathing, comes flexibility.
"Make your body fluid, instead of strictly aligned into the position," the teacher said as she went about the room, adjusting the occasional stiffly held neck or shoulder.

I try to remember what the teacher says when I am teaching M. how to do basic yoga. He is tall so I think he finds balancing a bit more difficult - but then, I found it incredibly difficult to do anything when I was starting out. He is wobbling badly on the purple yoga mat we have spread across the carpeted living room floor as he positions himself into Warrior I.
"Are you using your back leg? You have to balance yourself on your back leg - it should be straight," I say, feeling the leg to check.
"Yes, I am," he says, still wobbling. I watch him trying to find his balance, bemused. M. can lift loads that I can't but he can't move his body into different positions - this is not about power or strength. He looks perplexed when I show him the Wheel pose.
"I think I could do that when I was a kid but I don't think I can do that now," he says. Yoga is an incredibly patience-demanding exercise as well as requiring you to use muscles you normally do not recall as existent.

"It's like Jedi training," M. says as we move into the balancing poses. Yes dear, it is like Jedi training - the Force is with you, you just need to work out how to use it. If only we could harness that patience and wisdom with which we practice these movements on our bodies to use in dealing with others.