ONETWOTHREE DEATH!

Posted on July 1, 2013 by travelfoodandlife

I mentioned in an earlier post that I got lucky a few weeks ago when I was in the Bay Area and had a day with no meetings.  I got even luckier that the Monterey Bay Aquarium acquired a peacock mantis shrimp about a week earlier. I played hooky and dragged my friend, Vince, with me to see it, and it made my day the way winning the lottery would.  Vince likes visiting the Aquarium as much as the next person, but he was puzzled about why I was so excited to see the mantis shrimp.  I made him read the Oatmeal cartoon on it, but it didn’t fully explain why I derived so much joy from seeing the mantis shrimp in person and shouting, “ONETWOTHREEDEATH!” every 20 minutes on the ride there and back.

I didn’t have an explanation at the time, aside from it being cool.  The Monterey Bay Aquarium has adorable otters and an amazing jellyfish installation, though, both also cool, neither of which inspired the kind of happiness the mantis shrimp did.  I’ve been thinking and researching, trying to figure out why I’m so obsessed with the damned thing, and I finally have
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Patience

Posted on June 27, 2013 by travelfoodandlife

[I wrote this for my writing class at SMU a few years ago, so this isn’t new content.  It’s also not my usual kind of blog post:  it’s thinly veiled fiction, and it’s very long.  We’ll be back to our usual programming next week when I’ve had some time to sort through the things that I have swirling in my head and get them written.  Thanks for your patience.]

“That had better be a rock in my tire and not a nail,” said Stacy.

Veronica reached the front driver’s tire first.  “Good eye.  That’s a nail.”  Veronica saw the fury overtake Stacy’s lean frame and flung her own eyesight back at the tire to avoid eye contact.  Twenty-four hours of biting tongues and forcing sisterly cheer, and their truce was undone by a 25-cent piece of metal.  The fight clock started its countdown.

Veronica drove while Stacy searched for a Discount Tire on her phone, muttering indictments against Arkansas for strewing nails on the road, the car for being old, and the heat for making her hair stick to her neck.  Her conversation with customer service revealed that the nearest location was Nashville and that it would be foolhardy to Continue reading →

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Things I Learned When My Dad Wrecked My Car

Posted on June 25, 2013 by travelfoodandlife

My dad wrecked my car last July.  He and my mom took it to dinner so I could pick up my sister at the airport in their SUV.  They got home about five minutes before we did.  After my sister sprung herself on my dad (he didn’t know she was coming home for the weekend), he told me he’d had an accident.  At first I thought he was joking, but then my mom chimed in with, “I think it’s bad.  The car made strange noises all the way home.”  My mom has a sense of humor, but this isn’t the kind of thing that triggers it.  You haven’t lived until your dad, who only reluctantly let your teenaged-self drive, sheepishly admits that he’s wrecked your car.  Neither of them was hurt, and Dad seemed to think it was just the bumper.  He’d made a left too soon and run the car up onto a curb.  Beetles are pretty low to the ground, so it made sense that the bumper would be damaged by the curb, but he’d pulled far enough forward in the garage that we couldn’t see from our angle.  I shrugged and said, “Accidents happen,” but after about Continue reading →

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Bartender Trouble

Posted on June 20, 2013 by travelfoodandlife

I have a bartender problem.  I only noticed it in the past year, but I figured out it’s been going on since I was 19.

What I mean by bartender problem is that I seem to be wired to develop a temporary (or sometimes not-so-temporary) crush on the gentleman behind the bar who happens to be mixing my cocktail at any given moment.  With a few exceptions, the crushes have lasted only until the end of the evening, but by then I have asked them to marry me, usually more than once.

Part of it is that these guys have mixed a delicious cocktail for me, and my admiration for the cocktail extends to its creator and his talent.  Being an expert is attractive, and while I love cocktails, I am much too lazy to make them at home.  Carie thinks that part of it might be that there’s already a wall between us, so I feel completely safe in flirting inappropriately with them and don’t feel it necessary to construct my usual metaphorical wall.  I think she’s partially right, except that the metaphorical wall is up all the time and doesn’t require reconstruction when I meet someone new. Continue reading →

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Confessions: I Love Nespresso

Posted on June 17, 2013 by travelfoodandlife

[I wrote a version of this almost five years ago on a different blog.  I’m cribbing from that entry and adding a little extra, because, really, nobody likes a rerun.]

I played hookie one day last week to go see the peacock mantis shrimp at the Monterey Bay Aquarium.  This entry isn’t about that.

My friend Vince is funemployed right now, in between jobs, so I persuaded him to come with me to the aquarium.  We both had other commitments in the late afternoon and evening, so I picked him up at 8am to be at the aquarium by 9:30am, shortly after it opened.  An 8am pickup for a night owl like me, even a CT night owl operating on PT, requires coffee, stat.

Vince is a foodie, and he owns the snobbiness aspect of being a foodie.  This means that when I get coffee with him, it’s NEVER at Starbucks.  We went to Roy’s Station, a Japantown institution where they made my latte with whole milk and cold-brewed espresso.  It was delicious, delicious enough that I didn’t miss my Nespresso machine.

There are a lot of people out there, including Vince the foodie, who sneer at single-serve coffee machines. Continue reading →

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Karaoke

Posted on June 14, 2013 by travelfoodandlife

When you’re a child, everyone talks about how hard it is to be an adult.  Of course, children never believe this, because it seems like adults get to do whatever they want, plus they have children around to act as free labor.  It seems like adulthood is awesome, and we all rush through our childhoods trying to get there faster.  Then you get to be an adult, and you wish that the adults in your life had been more effective in communicating how hard it is so you could have appreciated being responsibility-less with the right amount of gusto.

The thing that I find hardest about being a grown-up, though, that nobody ever mentioned to me, is that it’s hard to make friends.  Once I graduated from school, where it seemed like I was surrounded by throngs of people with whom I had a ton in common, the rate at which I made new friends slowed way down.  They sped up at my last job because the culture at the company was so terrible – it’s easy to make friends in a foxhole when you’re all fighting for your lives.

I grew up in Dallas.  My family moved here when I Continue reading →

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Love Child

Posted on June 11, 2013 by travelfoodandlife

I was 34 years old when I found out that I’m illegitimate, and I found out at an airport at the end of a harried business trip.

I was powering through the airport, with my computer bag on my shoulder and my suitcase rolling behind me, and turned on my cell phone to check messages.  I pressed the button and the nice robot told me that I had one message.  It was from my dad, my first indication that something weird was going on.  My dad loves me, and we do talk on the phone and Skype, but it’s usually my mom who initiates communication, and my dad will jump on to say hello, ask how I’m doing, and then go back to watching golf or soccer on tv.

His message was not what I expected:  “Charlotte, this is Walter Cooper.   Your Dad.  I think I may have a legal problem.  I don’t know.  Maybe not.  Anyway, can you call me?  My number is 972-555-3850.  Bye.”  Yes, my dad introduced himself by name, reminded me of who he is, and then left the phone number to the house where I grew up.  My dad is an engineer with a genius-level IQ.

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Steaks, Cigars, and Soul Mates

Posted on June 7, 2013 by travelfoodandlife

When I was in law school, my friends and I went out every Thursday.  The school trained us to do this by providing a school-sponsored keg party every other Thursday on campus called “Arbitration.”  After Arbitration, we’d go looking for more trouble, and one of our usual spots was the Village Brewery.  The Brewery had half-price burgers on Thursdays, and a regular band whose lead singer was an African-American gentleman in his 50s named Elmo, who had hair like James Brown and wore a pink, satin cape.  It was dark and smoky and loud and cheap – irresistible for poor, partially drunk law students.

So it was a Thursday night, and we were at the Brewery, and we’d screamed for Elmo to sing “Mustang Sally,” like always, which he did, like almost always.  On one of my circuits around chatting with people, I noticed two guys sitting at the bar.  Both were smoking cigars, and one had a steak.  I don’t know what possessed me, but I walked up to the man with the steak, and I asked for a bite.  He looked at me for three seconds, then cut a generous piece of steak, and handed me his fork.  In Continue reading →

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Youth Circuses, Bat Mitzvahs, and Doing What You Love

Posted on June 4, 2013 by travelfoodandlife

Every year for the past few years, one of my New Year’s resolutions is to visit as many far away friends as possible.  The airlines are usually cooperative with affordable fares at least a couple of times a year to every location I need to visit, and so it’s really just a matter of finding the right weekend and/or occasion (e.g., TurkeyCakeFest).  A few weeks ago, I flew to St. Paul to visit Dan and Sara, good friends I hadn’t seen in much too long.

The event that finally made me prioritize purchasing a plane ticket was that A, their 10-year-old daughter, has been taking classes from Circus Juventas, the largest youth circus in the U.S., and participating in the end-of-season show that they perform.  A has been doing this for a few years now, and for each show, I see amazing pictures on Facebook that make me sad that I’ve missed out on such a cool event.  Not this year.  This year, we planned months in advance, I blocked the time on my calendar, and I pulled the trigger on the plane ticket.

Between the pictures and the buildup from Dan and Sara, my expectations were high.  Dan, who Continue reading →

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Eggs

Posted on May 31, 2013 by travelfoodandlife

It’s official – I’m harvesting my eggs.  I’ve been through consultations with three different doctors, had blood drawn three times (traumatic), and had a mammogram.  It’s on like Donkey Kong, as the Manning brothers might say.

I’m 40.  I’ve been told I don’t look 40, but my uterus and ovaries definitely are, and time is running out for me to have a biological child.  I know that there are other options for having children, and I’m not ruling them out.  My family is Korean, though, and widespread adoption acceptance is unique to western cultures.  If I can avoid the battle, I’d like to.

I never thought I’d be 40 and single, but I also never prioritized my personal life.  One of my mentors is taking a break from the rat race, and when we talked about it, she said, “I feel like I’ve been running since 8th grade, and I’d like to rest for a little while.”  It’s been reverberating with me ever since.

Do I wish I’d done things differently?  I’m not sure.  I look back on the men that have been in my life, and with the gimlet eye of hindsight in moments of clarity, I know that we Continue reading →

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