Filed under: Personal
Every year around the weekend close to 12/22, the Chinese usually gather their family around and have dinner to celebrate the coming of winter. This year, my family invited a couple of our relatives for a casual Chinese dinner. Conversations on the dinner table are typical of what happened when a bunch of loud Chinese people came together:
1. Abalones
When Chinese come together, the most likely topic they talk about is FOOD. My uncle started telling a joke about how my aunt (his wife) accidently ordered a VERY EXPANSIVE beef dish when they had their first dinner with the boyfriend of their daughter (my cousin). The beef was imported from Japan, where the cows were fed BEER and MASSAGED, consequently their flesh has built up much fat and according to people who have tasted them, those beef DISSOLVED in your mouth (I tried it once — the beef was not bigger than a 4 by 4 by 4 cm cube and costs $100 USD per piece — it tasted like a piece of fatty meat which I could not chew). When the boyfriend and possibly future son-in-law paid the bill, they were surprised that it costs almost $4000 HK dollar (about $500 USD).
I had always expressed derision toward those beef because the production process of those cows made me think about the horrible inequality of the world. When cows are fed beer and massaged, people are dying of hunger. All because there are willing consumers of these special cows. Yet these special cows are only one example of how much some Chinese people are willing to spend on food. There are also Shark Fins (which my father would happily buy for like $10,000 HKD, about $1200 USD for a meal), “flower plastic”, Swallow’s spit, abalones and other similarly exotic food with dubious nutrition benefits that people would shower a lot of money on. So I said to my family and relatives: I think HK people’s value system toward food is seriously problematic.
After being jumped on for my view, the table turned to the topic of how to spot good abalones. Well, while I detest those special beef, I love eating abalones (call me hypocrite…but at least the abalones are cheaper than the cows and do not require special production). My family grew up my the sea, my grandmother is a fisherwoman, my father is an expert on seafood, I grew up on seafood — yet I know nothing about picking good seafood. I said this to the family — that someday when my father is gone his knowledge of seafood would be lost.
So a lecture by my father about abalones ensued. He brought examples of good and bad abalones. It turned out that the absolute best abalones came from Mexico! (Yet the Mexicans themselves don’t know anything about abalones!) The Mexican abalones have been famous for several decades already. The next best abalone next to Mexican abalones are Australians abalones. Several jokes about abalones ensured. It happened that one of the dish served is an abalone dish, in it mixed with fake abalones in the shape of a strange mushrooms that are named “drumstick” mushrooms which looks just like that. Then followed a funny conversation about my relatives and family’s attitude toward these expansive food when they were young and poor.
2. Night Piss
One of the dish on the table is chestnuts and chicken. As my uncle grabbed the piece of chestnut and enthusiastically said, “Chestnuts are great! They stop night piss.”
Then my Dad enthusiastically said, “Abalones also stop night piss!”
My cousin said, “Chestnuts are a certainly much cheaper solution to stop night piss. But fortunately I don’t have this problem.”
I said, “I also don’t have this problem.” All the young unmarried people on the table similarly said the same thing.
It turned out that night piss is a thing that bother 50+ married men. Why?
Filed under: Music
Jay you are so cool!
Good bye Chicago! Hello Hong Kong! Hello Mommy! Hello Daddy! Hello Yoyo (with all your little bumps on you body)! Hello Penny! Hello Raymond! In 10 hours! (But not goodbye work and hello vacation yet)
A couple days into December, I have received several surprise Christmas presents, which are surprising, which I extremely appreciate and makes me happy because of the thought (similar feeling as receiving replies from my former “chicago ham” emails). I piled them up into a little mountain on my dining table to appreciate them everywhere I walk in my apartment:
1. A ginger bread house and a big box of chocolates! (coincidentally I saw a program on food network about building ginger bread houses and fantasized of trying….and viola, it came. Thanks Hunnie.)
2. A fly-shooter gun. Yes, it means what it is — a tiny gun that shoots flies (kind of like Will Smith’s gun in Man in Black). Who gave it to me? Here is the surprise — Prof S. from my Intro to Macro class. It is clear now that the professor sees his TA still as kids by giving them play guns. It is hilarious, and I absolutely get a kick out of it! Thanks Prof S!
3. A handbag made of a hardbook cover of “Short Stories of Mark Twain” — I love it and especially love the thought! It is so original but mostly it’s the thought. Thanks A,P,B,C!
And I look forward to the surprise christmas cards in my mailbox!
In this kind of freezing weather, it behooves one NOT to do the following.
1. wear contacts outside
2. cry on the street
Otherwise, the result would be the case of “glassy eyes”.
Yes, today we redefine glassy eyes as describing the situation when you eyeballs froze, as the following mini-me demonstrated.
Snowing resumed yesterday night, and continued throughout the day. The road is snowy and icy. At these times, I felt it is EXTREMELY unwise for me (specifically, me) to be on the road. Here is why:
1. If I drive, my car skids. Yes, I know I know…my car is supposed to be “SUV”, meaning it should skid less than normal cars. But it does not. Comparing my car’s skid rate at the same driving speed as other sedans on the road, I felt my car skids much easier. By now I know enough about my car such that when I drive, I know it is extremely unsafe. The feeling of the car losing control is very scary, trust me. So at this time, I should not drive, unless the road is empty at least 200 yards within the vicinity of my car.
2. Even if I were a pedestrian, cars that skid will crash toward me. Even in snowy places like Chicago, cars don’t put on snow chains. And the scene on the road is not like Lake Tahoe, where all the cars are SUV and have snow chains. CARS DON’T PUT ON SNOW CHAINS HERE and they drive like 30mph on a snowy road. Which means that they do skid, and when they do and if I happen to be within the vicinity of those cars, I’ll die. So I also make sure that I won’t be such an unsuspecting victim by staying at least 200 yards away from any cars I see on the road. And on a street with normal traffic flow, this is impossible. So I should not be on the road.
Conclusion: better stay home to work.
P.S. the reason why I wrote this post is because I am on the road right now, and contemplating the wisdom of it.
That sounds very scary, doesn’t it? It does. Especially if that face belongs to you! This is the punishment for my materialism for buying the PROACTIV facial treatment package after seeing a TV commercial. My right arm developed some skin irritation last month, and now it left a huge dark mark on it. When the irritation began, it showed symptoms of what my face is today. Extremely fearful that my face would turn into that dark spot on my right arm, and especially after reading all the symptoms after doing a brief online research of allergy to PROACTIV and feeling that I want to tear off my skin, I called the school health care center.
Today is my lucky day. I called the student care center at 4:00pm, and got a last minute appointment at 4:25pm as somebody cancelled. (Normally it takes a week to get an appointment! Not to mention that you don’t get to see a real DOCTOR…you only get to see a nurse practitioner). Furthermore, I got to see a REAL DOCTOR! (on the car it reads that he is an assistant professor in medicine!).
I seized the chance to ask my doctor 2 other symptoms that is unrelated to my beehive face. One is this black bump that developed between my eyes, and the second one is a long lasting skin irritation on my right arm.
Today is my lucky day, because according to the doctor:
1. “You don’t have cancer!” He said to me with regard to the dark bump in between my eyes. (yes…I had wondered if I had cancer….seriously…after 2 years of extreme stress. And I didn’t even mention cancer to the doctor, he mention the word by himself ) According to him, it is a “cyst”, which will go away in “about a year or more.” When I heard the latter phrase, I nearly dropped to the floor.
2. “You need to make an appointment to see the student counsellor.” This because I told him about my sleeping problems and I wondered whether it has to do with the series of problems I had lately.
The doctor became my primary care doctor (I never had one, now I have a good one, I think!).
You know, I always believe that good things happened out of bad situations. In bad times, you realize how bad things are and you snap out of it and correct the wrongs. It’s kind of like the economy — it is in bad times that all the stuff that made the subsequent good times fall into place as the bad get erased. The worse it gets, the brighter tomorrow will be.
Of course it is easier to say this. One would never wish to be in that bad situation in any case.
Filed under: Random
From Warren Buffet’s letter to shareholder (on his website) for 2007 (I bolded the part of the phrase that is especially relevant to where I am):
‘A line from Bobby Bare’s country song explains what too often happens with acquisitions: “I’ve never gone to bed with an ugly woman, but I’ve sure woke up with a few.”’
Our direct currency positions have yielded $2.3 billion of pre-tax profits over the past five years, and in addition we have profited by holding bonds of U.S. companies that are denominated in other currencies. For example, in 2001 and 2002 we purchased €310 million Amazon.com, Inc. 6 7/8 of 2010 at 57% of par. At the time, Amazon bonds were priced as “junk” credits, though they were anything but. (Yes, Virginia, you can occasionally find markets that are ridiculously inefficient – or at least you can find them anywhere except at the finance departments of some leading business schools.)
Filed under: Musings
The first real snow of 2008. It happened a little past midnight on December 1st. The lights were already off, the curtains down. And I heard it before I saw it. I was already snuggled up in bed, half drifting off with Dostoevsky’s “Brothers Karamozov” in my hands. Then I heard some tinkling at the windows in the bedroom, as if Tinklebel herself was tapping at the window pane. I jumped out of bed and lifted the curtains, then saw the miniature house in the garden of my neighbor house covered in white. The little playground around it paved with white. Misty white as far as one could look to downtown. The many pieces of snowflakes carelessly undulating in the December winds of Chicago.
The next morning, there was no more wind, only left is the quietness of the aftermath of a snow storm. I quietly treaded on the soft carpets of silky powders, on the quiet streets.
