07. 15. LUNCH

장어덮밥: eel over rice

Just as I posted the last entry, I realized that the antidote was at hand whether I wanted it or not. “The Good, the Bad, the Weird” opens the day after tomorrow, and it’s going to be a point-blank, no-show, all-bets-off, one-shot-one-kill sort of fiasco. I’m going to go watch it at half past seven in the evening, and I’m going to lie awake in bed all night long because it’s only opening day, there won’t be any stuff for it anywhere yet, but sure as hell it’s not going to leave me alone. Now I’m just a bit sad. Maybe when the blow subsides I can drift back to the Three Kingdoms mess, but right now there’s not much more I can do but wait for the day after tomorrow. I need to go back to keeping an actual blog, one that I won’t feel oddly guilty about spamming with longwinded incoherency. No, what I actually want to do is work anonymously for an incredibly famous pop culture critic magazine. Whichever one that might be. I want to tell the world (because what I think is the undeniable truth) but I don’t want them to talk back at me. Just listen to what I have to say, because I could go on for days, about exactly why it is so appealing that a character drifts in and out of history, performing miracles in one city and destroying an army in another, a rumor like the moon through clouds — that and endless amounts more, but I feel that this isn’t the right blog for the purpose. So. We met up for lunch at a restaurant that I thought I might have been inside, but which looked completely unfamiliar from the outside. Eel over rice is another one of those foods that I get most everywhere if possible, because I believe that it’s an accurate measure of the overall quality of the establishment. Correction: that’s a lie. I just like eel. (And the sublime ineffability of the moment, when a great man realizes with a start that this young stranger from the west is eventually going to kill him — with the wind from the southeast like a death sentence, a twist to the gut — and he rages, he would rather bleed this man than have him serve another lord)

07. 14. DINNER

soft tofu (연두부) with rice and soy sauce

Didn’t I say something about being enervated before dinner, in the post before this one? What a deceptive word, that “enervate”. Kind of like “flammable” and “inflammable” — or like “peruse” — well, I believe that when a word changes meaning in the popular mind, then the word changes meaning. Where things are going is a bit more interesting than where they’ve come from. At any rate, this is the result of that enervation, I had all the willpower it took me to open up a pack of tofu, upend it over a bowl of rice, and then drizzle some soy sauce over the entire soggy mess. Not much more than that, and I used what was left to actually ingest the food. The trouble with me lately is that I am not quite on top of my game in terms of physical condition, but there’s so much I want to do. School, school work, that’s nothing, I’m not even getting graded for it. But I want to make this translation job something really worth reading — want to tutor kids the way they were meant to be tutored (but is that worth sixty bucks an hour?) — I want to drink in this city because half of summer break is gone. I want to live at the mall, sleep in the movie theater, eat my meals out of a paper bag in the bookstore. But I have a sinking feeling that the worst is a far bigger problem than these ambitions; John Woo is dragging me down. It’s happening, Jesus God it’s exactly like every time it’s happened before — you find something, you like something, and the next thing you know, you have an entire bookcase full of sources you’ll never look at again, a dozen stammered half-attempts at writing, you’re ravenous and you want to know everything there is about it and everything that anyone has ever said or even thought about it and everything everything everything and you just don’t sleep because there is so much out there. Once I asked my mother’s grad school thesis advisor to check out a book for me and photocopy it from cover to cover, and then to Fedex the pile of paper to me. I haven’t looked at it since. And I know it’s going to be transient, it’s just a thing like a crush, but sometimes it just doesn’t go away that quickly and what else can you possibly do but try to appease that sort of wildfire? It’s probably not a good idea to feed it, but it’s so, so, so incredibly hard to douse it. The only solution is to move onto some other newfangled madness just as abruptly — or to realize that you’ve just gotten a 75 on your computer science midterm because you tried to take it without studying a single lick because you were too busy being obsessed over whatever the hell it was that you were obsessed about, hello genius. So now I am at a crossroads. I can either buy a ten-volume set of books I will devour in a frenzy and then stuff in a dark corner somewhere, or I can try to go to sleep. Please, God, please convince me to do the latter. Or even, please just let me think about something else at all. I don’t blame John Woo; I blame that girl in eighth grade who silently put a comic book into my hand, then replaced it with a fantasy novel when I was finished, then replaced it with an empty notebook when I was finished. You ruined my life; now instead of amounting to anything worthwhile, it’s fun. Was I talking about tofu and rice?