no, i didn't say any of those things out loud.

Makin' Mandoo: An Informal Photo Essay
By Jesse Hall

So, somewhere between being unemployed and Lunar* New Year landing on Valentine's day this year, I felt the need to make a huge amount of Korean food. The back story is that I spent the night before chopping vegetables and mixing tofu and marinating meats and whatnot. Then, I spent the day in front of the TV, Olympics on, ready to start folding some dumplings.

So, like those clever Blair Witch kids, I decided to photo-document the process. I figured, if nothing else, I would have something to show for it other than having eaten 1000 dumplings all by myself (which I contend is a respectable feat).


Our story begins at about 3 o'clock. You'll notice some hopeful things there. A single cookie tray, a moist paper towel to keep the wrappers from drying out, a spoon. Oh, how naïve you were, Jesse at 3 PM. Things were about to get exciting.

1 hour mark. The observant viewer will notice the tray full of dumplings but also notice that the level of dumpling filling is unchanged from the first picture. No, this is not a continuity error. This is simply because YHWH, performing a miracle, made a bowl of turkey and tofu last not one day but eight! Praise the LORD!

2 hour mark. We were rounding the horn on tray #2 and there seemed to be no end in sight of dumpling filling. You might also notice a bowl of what was once water used to seal the wrappers shut and now more closely resembles the runoff of a factory from an episode of Captain Planet.


I can see light!


So the wrappers ran out long before the filling did. You'll also notice the philosophy of squeezing three trays worth of dumplings onto two (motivated mostly by the fact that we only have two cookie sheets in the apartment). No dumpling left behind! Time: 6 PM.


Then, the fun part! Deep frying! Mmmmmmmmmmm... You'll notice the varying shades of golden brown based on my method of frying them at whatever temperature the oil happens to be until they look done-ish.


Oh, I also made Korean BBQ beef and rice and bought some kimchee. Happy Valentine's Day, self!


*Some of you may say to yourself, wait a minute. Don't you mean Chinese New Year? What is this Lunar business? Well, you may or may not know that more than one culture celebrates the New Year when Chinese people typically do. Among them are Koreans. And, as much as they love the Chinese, Koreans are not apt to call their New Year "Chinese New Year." In fact, I had a discussion with a colleague at the Hall about this very issue. And by discussion, I mean, I kept repeating the same point, and she kept not understanding it.

It went something like this:

Woman: Maybe we can do a Chinese New Year celebration to attract the Asian population.
Jesse: Well, if we wanted to be more inclusive, we should call it "Lunar New Year."
Woman: Why?
Jesse: Because blahblahblah
Woman: Oh, I didn't know that!

LATER

Woman: Oh, I took your idea to the CEO / President!
Jesse (suspicious): What idea?
Woman: About Chinese New Year.
Jesse: You mean Lunar New Year.
Woman: Yes! Exactly!
Jesse: So why would you call it Chinese New Year?
Woman: Well, we decided that it might not be clear what we meant. So we decided to compromise and call it Chinese Lunar New Year. I told her it was all your idea!
Jesse: ...


WHAT!!!
A) A compromise? What are we compromising?! Are we at war?
B) Why would we call it something that makes no sense! There is no such thing as Chinese Lunar New Year! So instead of being exclusive or inclusive, we've decided to be nonsensical.
and
C) Be clear for Chinese people? Do you know what Chinese people call Chinese New Year? NEW YEAR! GAH! Who is going to be confused about the New Year celebration scheduled for February?! White people without calendars?

I'm glad that is the one idea of mine that made its way to the CEO. A lasting legacy, I left there.

Also, it is legal to drink on planes.

I love airports. I do. I don’t love it like I love other things—like, say, pizza. But I still give them the thumbs up. I think my ability to say that I love airports stems from the deep hatred other people have for them. To say I love airports could also be translated as I don’t hate airports with a burning passion of the Christ. I really think some people are at their most miserable in an airport. And, to that, I say a few things. A) You are the one who had all of those kids. And b) just calm the f down! Like seriously. Yes, things cost more in an airport. Yes, you have to take your shoes off. Yes, the lines can get long. But if you aren’t a crazy person, it all goes by quite quickly and painlessly.

On my latest flight, I ran into the usual suspects. The “I have no idea what to do at airport security” people. The “a cup of coffee costs what?!” people. The “what do you mean I can’t carry on 165 bags” people. You know, the sort of (white) people who use phrases like “this is ridiculous” with the sense of entitlement that makes you want to kill yourself. Honestly, if you ever hear those words leave your mouth, it is time to rethink your entire outlook on life.

I imagine these people have never had to work in any industry in which you interact with another human being. Like, yes, it was the guy whose job it is to initial your boarding pass who made up the rule to check your ID. That’s him, the head of TSA. This is where he works. SFO United gates 70 – 89. Calm down, woman.

The key to enjoying airports is getting there early. I always get to airports early. Sometimes, I get there super early. But typically, just regular early. That way, if security takes a long time, that’s cool. Oh, a long line to get my coffee? Awesome. I have three hours to kill anyway.

I think part of loving airports also has to do with living in New York. You won’t have to fight anyone for a seat on the plane. You are already used to paying over five bucks for a cup of coffee and a muffin. You are simply amazed to find bathrooms that have interacted with a mop. All in all, you could do a lot worse (like, say, the R train).

Still, with any flight there is an added bonus. Every flight has something. The added bonus on my flight was that there was a mystery bag that had snuck on board. So after some taxiing (words with two i’s in a row always look funny. Like skiing. Or radii.) we headed back to the gate. People on the plane freaked out. “This is ridiculous!” God forbid airline employees follow national law. The bigger freakouts came from business and first class. Yeah, I bet it is hard sitting in your huge chair that reclines. Your life really is just so hard.

I did get to make my best Jim Halpert face when the head airline stewardess (do they have an official name? Flight queen?) reminded us more than once that “in case of an emergency, you must leave all of your belongings behind” as if it were more applicable to this flight. Great. But I don’t mind. I have had to make announcements before. Sometimes they just don’t go as planned. I suggest writing them down first.

The old guy next to me was one of those old guys who learned to start conversations using the chum method. Dump a bucket of open-ended statements in the water and wait for the sharks around you to bite. I don’t play that game. “I guess it’s all in the name of safety!” he’d say to no one. I usually pretend I don’t speak English (you know, by reading a book). Rude? Maybe. But you have to be careful. Grandpas have these bear trap stories that they unleash on strangers. A polite nibble and suddenly you are desperately trying to gnaw your leg off as he tells you about the time he flew out of St. Louis in 1974. By the way, you should be visualizing someone setting a shark trap for bears or a bear trap for sharks. In any case, this bear-shark ain’t falling for it. Better luck next flight, corrective shoes.

Behind me, just for comic relief, sat the funniest little old Asian lady that you ever did meet. She was the last one on the plane, dragging her carry-on (and by carry-on, I of course mean garbage bag). After the return to the gate to remove the mystery bag, she gleefully announced “we’re here in New York!” I giggled. The French couple next to her didn’t get the joke. I think it was a joke. Either that, or I meanly laughed at a confused old lady. But I prefer to think that I laughed at the expense of the French couple.

The old Asian lady apparently hated San Francisco, told the French couple they were gorgeous and interrogated them about when they were having kids, and proudly announced she was taking a cab to Connecticut. And as it turns out, the old gal could book it. The second the armed door open, the lady was, garbage bag in hand, out of the plane.

She blew past the James Spader look-alike who had earlier thrown a huge fit over the return to the gate. He of course threw a fit again. He started with the “Excuse me” (yes, it is said with a capital E) and shouted (to no one. Seriously. She was gone.) “why are you in such a hurry?”

Now if I were an airport crazy, I might have punched him in the face. You are the one! You! Sitting there freaking out about nothing! You! But I was still in range of the grandpa tractor beam, so I wasn’t about to reveal my fluency in English. And, I love airports.

sometimes, i just draw pictures

My academic success was hampered by several things—laziness, apathy, a poor retention of facts and figures. And, my later years in school were always hampered by the fact that I was generally satisfied with the B+. Sure, I could go for the A but I already know enough for the B+. It seemed like a lot of extra work just to top off an already quite full tank. This isn’t to say I am dispassionate about life or success, but that I am rather dispassionate when it comes to early British Literature. As an English major.

Sidebar defense: In my defense, I became an English major not because of a love of English Literature, but because I was pretty good at it. I mean, how hard is it? You read something and you tell someone what it means. This means this because it says so. Don’t believe me? Well, let me show you exactly where. Here, here, and here. The best part was poetry. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. Except for the occasional Whitman or T.S. Eliot monstrosity, poems are like 20 lines long and have a title. “This poem is about sadness.” “I feel so sad, so very sad / I feel so very sad.” Then you write something about how this poem is about sadness because it says so. It does. Right there in it. See? After you have established that, you make a reach. First, apply the adverb perhaps and the verb suggest. “Perhaps the theme even suggests that his sadness is the sadness of God / man / God toward man / man toward God / man toward man.” I mean, perhaps. Who the fuck knows?

Anyway, other than personal flaws, I think that a large gap in my academic abilities lies in my inability to take good notes. Part of it is that I give myself too much credit. “Oh, you’ll remember that,” my lazy hand tells me brain, “I won’t write that down because you can just remember the year that Freud was born. We’re good.” But it also has to do with just the things my ear chooses to latch onto and the things it chooses not to. For example, it chooses to notice a grammatical error in someone’s lecture but not, say, the actual sentence he was saying. What did he just say? Well, I know there was a “who” that should have been a “whom” somewhere in there. Oh, the actual content? Yeah, I let that pitch sail by.

Still, my notes tend to be vaguely helpful to me—like a list of keywords from a conversation (once, in a class I wrote down “the heart of the matter” after my professor said “we’re going to get right into the heart of the matter of this chapter of Ulysses today.” I did not write what the heart of the matter actually was). They will spark some “oh yeah I remember talking about that” sort of thoughts in my brain. The real problem lies in when I write them for the benefit of someone else. You have two roads that we could travel down: the nonsense road (“the heart of the matter”) or, like the notes I took for a recent conference session I led, the useless road. At one point, I wrote something like “Museum arrow Schools and Groups arrow Teens.” I bet that was really helpful for our participants.

This also comes into play in taking a phone message. Well, I didn’t write down the woman’s last name, but I did write down the word community group about six times. I also wrote down her phone number and the number of teachers in her school, but not the name of her school. So, good luck! It’s a wonder I wasn’t laid off earlier.

Merry Christmas Eve, everybody!

the only things keeping me from getting my own are money, allergies, and my fear of securing my spinsterdom for good

There are definitely moments in which the bitterness of being laid off takes over. They are, for now, fleeting and inconsequential. But I think it all stems from the feeling that I just faded away unnoticed and unannounced, without ceremony. They insisted my termination was budgetary and not performance-based, but you would then think that there could be some fanfare to my departure. I didn’t need a goodbye parade, but there is certainly space between that and being swept under the rug. A card, maybe.

In any case, in my throes of moping, my room has become the set of a future episode of Hoarders. So last night, as I waded through the knee-deep swamp of pizza boxes and Duane Reade bags and dirty sweatshirts, I felt like perhaps it was time to do something. I felt I should at least take out the trash (I think there was a bag of moldy bread in there). At 11:45 PM, I collected a large bag of trash to take out to the cans that sat in the vestibule in the front of our building. As I threw it away, a little friend came up to greet me. Hello, kitty cat!

Now, as any true Hall family member knows, cats have a way of finding us. It is as if we give off a scent of feline compassion with a touch of gullibility. So this little cat, collarless and adorable, pawed around looking lost and confused. There are only four apartments in our building and he was indoors, so he had to belong to a neighbor. He was much too comfortable being held and petted to be a stray. But instead of knocking on doors in the middle of the night, my roommate and I felt the best move was to take him in our apartment and leave some notes.

If you are a careful reader of my blog, you may already know that I have recently been diagnosed as allergic to cats. What the allergist didn’t catch was my big suckerdom for cuddly creatures. So I set up a little bed, a bowl of water, and some of Viva’s dog food with a splash of water (to soften the big pieces too big for little kitty’s mouth). I put him in the bathroom because I felt that when he did eventually poop in my room, it would at least be the easiest place to clean. So I bid him goodnight, turned out the light and went to bed. But this cat was in no mood to sleep. He wanted to play! And he felt that if I were not going to play, then he would find his own game. His favorite game is apparently knock down objects in a bathroom. Several times in the night, I had to get up and rescue something that I figured should not be battered around by a cat.

And of course, after he finally fell asleep, I realized I now had to use the bathroom. Let me tell you what is always a fun time: sitting on a toilet as a newly-awakened and attention-seeking cat rubbed its allergen-y body all over your cold and swelling legs—all the while you are praying that smell is you and not some yet undiscovered mystery in the corner. Worse yet, I found myself talking to him. “Give me a minute!”

I made him a toy out of toilet paper that he enjoyed about as much as a bad gift from your crazy great-aunt. “Oh, wow a toilet paper ball! Let me politely bat it around a couple of times before I go back to knocking shampoo bottles into the tub. Oh you want to see me play with it again? Ok, here are a few more polite swipes with my paw. Happy now? Great.”

I got back in bed, but he was definitely awake. After scratching at the door for a while, he went back to fighting the evil safety razor cover in the bathtub. “Go to sleep,” I would shout, “It’s late!” In the morning, I went in to brush my teeth before heading out to a doctor appointment. Rare are the times that you say things like “thank god you pooped in the tub,” but it was certainly the easiest way to clean it up. And let me tell you, he is shaped like a little kitty but he can certainly poop like a man.

When I got home, I let him explore my room (as I put the various bottles and hair straighteners back into their proper places). His favorite place, he decided, was my pillows on my bed—which should be fun to sleep on tonight. This was after testing out the inside of my coat, my lap, my lunch, and the inside of my other coat.

But as he closed his little eyes and fell asleep (in a Sphinx position, no less. I swear he is related to the fat cat back home), I felt a genuine bond to the little guy. I mean, you don’t clean up someone else’s poop and not have a bit of a bond. It is why freshman year college roommate has a special place in my heart, for sure. But it was at that moment that the neighbor who owned the cat came by. So I had to give up my new friend (not before playing the keep the cat away from the dog keep the dog away from the door don’t lock yourself out of the apartment game). I’m going to miss my twelve-hour companion. But don’t you worry, I still have some hives to remember him by.

Also, when did RADAR become radar?

Being laid off sucks. There isn’t much more insight into the situation. I feel a little like how I imagine the first contestant voted off of a reality show feels. You knew a cut was happening. You knew someone was going home. And you knew that no matter what there was a chance it was going to be you. But you are still not prepared to have your torch extinguished or your knives wrapped up or whatever. It just sucks.

On an unrelated note, I often find myself to be blatantly hypocritical. Not in, I hope, any sort of major way, but in the little things in life. As a driver, I get angry with pedestrians who expect me to stop despite their crossing against the light or in the middle of the street. And as a pedestrian, I walk assuming the driver has to stop and will (even if I cross against the light or in the middle of the street). I get the same way with e-vites. As a person who is e-vited to an e-vent, I wait and wait and wait to e-spond until the last possible e-pportunity. Yes? No? Well, let’s see who’s going first, but in the meantime I am going to e-tend that I have not yet checked my e-mail.

Also, when did e-mail crossover to be email. When did we give up the hyphen?

But, when I am the e-host I find myself refreshing and refreshing the page. Why don’t people e-spond, I say. Why are people so e-rude? RSVP! Come on! Three-quarters of that abbreviation is a very snooty French please. You could at least be polite enough to say no.

Also, in case you were ever wondering, an abbreviation that is said as a word, like say RADAR, is called an acronym. An abbreviation that is said as a set of letters, like say PTA, is called an initialism. Yes, there is a word for every type of word.

In any case, I’m the player who hates the game. I suppose one could see it as karma with a very quick turnaround. I like to see that sort of immediate balance in life. It helps me to believe that I won’t end up as a mosquito splattered across a windshield someday.

on the plus side, I can eat all the cockroaches I want

I was laid off yesterday. More on this later.

In the past couple of weeks, I had convinced myself I was allergic to shrimp. So, it was off to the allergist.

I have gone to a doctor plenty of times convinced I had some ailment which I did not. I imagine it comes a lot from my parents who dealt with a lot of sick progeny who were typically not me. So when it was me—say, the time I got a weird, puffy bug bite or the time I stabbed my hand with a pencil—it was a trip to the emergency room, just like any of the other kids. It didn't matter how minor it actually was. So now, any time I suspect something may be wrong, I visit the doctor.

The visit typically begins a long story. I don’t know if that is how most people start off a doctor appointment, but it is how I start one. “Well,” I begin, usually with a sort of a high-pitched intonation. “Well…” and then we take a nice little journey through an anecdote without a lot of the salient information but with a dash of unnecessary specifics.

“Well,” I began (after some runaround with the receptionist and the insurance card and the referral I was told I didn’t need but I did need but it was okay because they were going to fax it over). “Well, I was eating shrimp at this event we had at work where they were giving us some free food and felt funny afterwards. And later I was eating Chinese food that I had ordered in and I felt funny again. I don’t know how to describe funny. Like. Unusual.” The doctor asked, “How long ago was this?” I had no idea. A week or so. Maybe a month. No, that doesn’t sound right.

The doctor asked a few more questions about what “funny” meant (you know, funny. Not like I usually feel. Not like I felt before). Then, I took a breathing test with a little Asian nurse. There was definitely miscommunication. “What you’re going to do is…” And then the test wouldn’t read right. “No, you’re not doing it right!” “I don’t know what you’re asking me to do!” I felt like she was trying to teach me to drive for the first time. “Breathe, breathe, breathe!” “I have no more breath!” “That’s because you’re doing it wrong!” I am pretty sure she jumped up and down at one point.

Sidebar anecdote: it brought up the memory of a visit to the eye doctor in which the technician pleaded with me to open my eye wider to take a picture of it with some expensive machine and I crossly protested that I could not. “Please try!” “This is as far as they open!” Anyway. I’m pretty good at math, so it balances.

Somewhere in there, I got something usable for the doctor to see (whose door was open the whole time and I am sure could hear the whole conversation). And then came the pinpricks of allergens. One of them was “cockroach” which is disgusting one on level already. But then I found myself playing out this story in which it wasn’t the shrimp but a cockroach in my Chinese food that had caused the reaction and that garlic sauce was really cockroach bath sauce.

It wasn’t.

And I’m not allergic to shrimp. At least not by the first round of testing. I am allergic to cats and grass and tree pollen and a bunch of other things he mentioned that I hope I wasn’t supposed to memorize (what’s a tree plantain?).

So, in addition to joining the growing ten whatever percent of unemployed Americans in this economy, I am also joining the ranks of (judging by the patients I witnessed flitting in and out of the office, greeting the receptionist by name) nebbish (white) men with medically diagnosed allergies. Great.