07. 05. DINNER

mapo tofu, rice and stuffball

Szechuan food has a clean heat that I really like. And mapo tofu is one of the nearest and dearest things to my heart in the whole history of food ever. This was picked up from the deli section of the grocery store, since we are just that lazy and refuse to cook anything for dinner as well as lunch. I guess it was okay, but despite my love of that clean heat, I’d have preferred it to be saltier and less, I don’t know, blindingly spicy. It’s a conundrum because if you try to avoid the heat, it’s too bland, and if you put enough of the mapo tofu on the rice to make it salty enough, then you die of the heat. The stuffballs come in handy here, since it helps with the heat somewhat. I guess being tasteless has its uses. Anyway, that was dinner, and we watched The Infinite Challenge. Shamefully enough, I have approximately a month and a half’s worth of backlog that I need to catch up on somehow. It’s just one of those things the virtues of which I could extol in a full-fledged essay. And I’ve finally finished translating, huzzah — now to read over and tweak, for the first time of thousands. Somewhere in the middle of the story I got the idea into my head that it kind of read like “artist-colony noir”, and though that’s hard to explain or justify, the latter half of the translated result contains a dramatic increase in choppy sentences and SVO constructions. Well, maybe that’s just the way the original is — if not, I blame Raymond Chandler.

07. 05. LUNCH

군만두: fried dumplings

We are lazy in this household, and so under the pretense of going grocery shopping, we had lunch at the food court across the street. We did actually, you know, grocery shop, but we were ill-prepared enough to not have brought any shopping bags, and so we killed the Earth a little more today. Being green is so in, I’m not much for displaying causes on clothing but I’d wear some of those environment-related designs because they’re very good-looking and also it’s a good cause I’d be paying for. But unfortunately being green is in to the degree that whenever someone wears an environmental t-shirt, it just comes across as them following a fad. I’m not sure if that’s worse than buying them just because they’re pretty, but hey. That’s not the point. The point is that fried dumplings are greasy heaven. I tried an Oldboy reference (“A red and blue dragon. What does it mean.”) but it was mealtime and really noisy, so basically it went unheard. I wept. But then I came home and while I was translating, Wikipedia took me from “pulmonary medicine” to “Danny Messer” so the world is well. That Carmine Giovinazzo. Sometimes he makes me regret that I don’t watch CSI: NY. Oh, and Gary Sinise, but you know. Carmine Giovinazzo.

07. 05. BREAKFAST

corn flakes with dried fruit

These are actually awesome. They’re not too sweet, and as much as I would like a GI infusion of sugar before I head on out for the day, the lack of sweetness makes it taste very healthy. It probably is very healthy. The dried fruit is a nice touch, and all in all I’m enjoying it. You know what isn’t awesome, though, I’ve got to be honest. Those stuffballs. I’ve kind of been in denial for the past couple of days, because I haven’t had them in so long and I do love them, but I have to admit that these are not very good. They should be smaller, tighter, and other adjectives that apparently sound like I’m describing something from a cheap porno. No, but seriously, those stuffballs are not up to par. You need to bite into one and taste this explosion of juicy flavor, somewhat like a dimsum, but instead these just fall apart between your teeth. I’m not sure what the problem is, but really, they’re not so bad that I’d rather go without them or anything that drastic. Only, I decided that gushing is good but I need to have standards. And according to those standards, this cereal is good and those stuffballs, not so much.