07. 01. DINNER

동그랑땡: it is way too complicated so let me tell you about it below

First things first. These are made of ground beef, tofu, apparently scallions, some sort of floury substance that I don’t know about, and presumably they are coated in egg (yolk only? I’m not certain) and then fried. The odd part is that we didn’t have ground beef, because for some reason my mother, my father, and I all had a braindead moment while shopping and bought ground pork instead. So I suspect that these are actually made with ground pork. Which, I guess, is okay, because they taste the same. I love them so. When I was super little and attending swimming lessons, they used to make us kick lying down on the edge of the pool until I thought I was seriously going to expire then and there. And I used to console myself with the thought of maybe having these for dinner. I may or may not have done the exact same thing during piano lessons, but in general piano lessons are a big blemish in the happy years of my youth. There was a lot of animosity.

a tangerine

Or is it a mandarin orange? A mikan? A clementine? I couldn’t tell you. The mother and daughter who withdrew a crapload of money and then disappeared were found dead today. I didn’t think they would be. I thought they’d taken the money and went somewhere happy, found Xanadu, you know, were bathing off the coast of some Caribbean island. You know. Taken the money and escaped. But I guess it was never that happy.

07. 01. LUNCH

sulfur smoked duck (유황오리), seasoned radish (무말랭이), microwavable rice and a cup of good old-fashioned water

And also Pride and Prejudice in the background. I got back starving as always, but to my credit, I had about twenty pages of the book left and I decided that I might as well finish it during lunch so that I could continue The Long Goodbye in the gym. So I had lunch in bed. I mean, really, it wasn’t like some super hot paramour brought it into the room, but at least I didn’t have to cook anything. I am getting so much reading done lately. So far I’ve reread Slaughterhouse-Five, read Pride and Prejudice, two-thirds of The Long Goodbye, and the endless packets that we have for the classes I’m auditing. So Darcy is supposed to be pretty much all that, yes? But with all the respect and all the love I have for Colin Firth, which is a remarkable amount, I assure you, I don’t really see how he — well, I mean, isn’t Darcy taller, darker, or am I just prejudiced because the first actor I saw playing Mr. Knightley was Jeremy Northam? Do I have an unreasonable stereotype in my mind of what Austen heroes should look like? Anyway, that is that, but with the novel finished, I am still on team Wickham. I can’t help it. I think I will like Willoughby tremendously. Of course, I liked Fred Vincy better when he was an idiot. I don’t care what Nabokov says — I will get through being an English major by hopping from one eligible male character to another. I will empathize. Unfortunately Eugene Wrayburn is still giving the Austen and Eliot men the old ultra-violence thrashing, and what is more, he is doing it with an air of careless detachment. That reminds me that I should reread Catch-22 sometime, because ex-P.F.C. Wintergreen is another of my great favorites. Yes, I read novels about the absurdity of imposed order and the futility of war in the face of human stupidity for the men.

07. 01. BREAKFAST

corn flakes with dried fruit

July. Tuesdays and Thursdays are awful. Getting up any later than seven robs me of either a breakfast or a shower, and even though I’m not known for being the cleanest person around, knowing that I didn’t shower in the morning just makes my mood foul for the rest of the day. So I opt out of breakfast and as a result I am immensely pissy, but only until lunchtime. Anyway, today was a moderate success since I got both in time. This is the new sort of cereal, which I think I might be eating for a while since we are out of vegetables for an omelette and it’s too much work anyway, I have better things to do at seven in the morning than to fix myself an actual meal. Ridiculous.