I couldn't forgive him or like him, but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified. It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.

-The Great Gatsby

About 2 months ago, I was sitting on gchat when the LilBro and his roommate Ruth are iming me telling me to set up a profile just for fun on OKCupid and that they had done theirs too. I figure I'd do it just for laughs- I forgot I actually had an account ever since I made the profile. I figured I'd log back on and see it again. I think it's not too shabby. Hyuk hyuk hyuk.

Last night I thought I picked up a virus with that stupid meebo bar at the bottom of the xanga page. Turns out it's just part of xanga rolling out the xanga chat feature and it's hosted by meebo. If you're wondering what happened, read the xanga team blog and you can uninstall it under the options settings.

I saw this. And I really like it. A lot. You can still have an amazing life if that's how you really see it.

Melissa has been looking at houses lately and this was one of the ones she was considering. She went to check it out around 11 AM on a Saturday morning and informed me that she would wait for me before she would even go upstairs. When I got to the house, I could see why- it's an older-style house near the Memorial/Town&Country area that just gives you a little bit of a creepy vibe when you step in.

The cedar closet upstairs with chains for the rack- almost like some torture chamber. Don't even get me started on the hole in the closet that leads to the "attic" in one of the guest bedrooms.

Ceramic animals adorn the back yard. On trees.

This is the garage. MY GOD. The prior owner was probably building a place for his tools and instead built it to look like a MORGUE.

In one of the lonely drawers, a solitary razor blade neatly centered.

The morgue.

I like how he had blue accents on the interior of each shelf.

It's actually not very deep, but you could put a person in each level if you put them in sideways.

Innocent looking monkey.

The interior of a gazebo in the backyard. I imagine during thunderstorms, you can see shadowy figures sitting in this.

These signs can be potentially scary.

A chandelier that is about chest height in the dining room.

Tiffany lamps in the kitchen.

Have you seen Paranormal Activity? Yeah, this is kind of the same layout.

There are also intercoms in most rooms, with the main one in the bar area/living room downstairs. Except when you turn it on, all you hear is loud static. I've asked her to borrow the key from the realtor and we could come back at night with flashlights and go with all the lights off, but she has denied all my requests. Large old empty houses are the scariest.

Hm. After that computer debacle last week, I thought I could get things back on track. I fixed my computer by last Thursday, and Friday would be a product photoshoot at Herman Park. Easy, right? It turns out Herman Park is teeming with ants. And I'm allergic to ant bites. After getting bitten twice that morning- no overreaction to those, thankfully- towards the end of the shoot I felt an itch just above the back of my knee. I thought it was a mosquito (we were shooting near the lake) and thought nothing of it. I wrapped up the shoot and by late afternoon, my leg started swelling.

The first time I learned I was allergic to ant bites, I was at UT and I had been trying to overcome my fear of heights during a cliff jumping expedition. Jumped off the cliff, but on the way back up, was bit by an ant on my foot. My foot swelled up to the point where my foot wouldn't fit in a shoe and I had to use a crutch around campus.

The bite on Friday morning happened at a particularly inconvenient spot, as it's a fairly mobile part of the body (not one of the extremities) and that meant it would spread quickly in part from gravity. By evening, I succumbed to hobbling around.

24 hours after the bite, I was at Tramanh's aunt's house shooting her bridal shower on Saturday morning. I couldn't bend my knee and each step sent a jolt of pain up my leg. I was drugged up on benadryl and pain and not in the best of spirits, and I felt bad for being so out of it in the middle of a shoot. It's probably one of the only times I haven't been my chipper self while working.

By Saturday evening, an enormous bruised area had angrily formed on the back of my leg, spanning an area of two hand lengths and slightly raised running up across the back of my thigh and calf, and I ended up staying in while everyone went out to celebrate. I could barely sleep from the pain.

But you know what? Screw that. Screw all of that and that quarter-life crisis and everything that comes with it. When I'm in a rut, I always try to put everything in perspective. There are people who are worse off out there, and there are people who are better off, too. My friend around the same age as I am, in a similar situation, lost his wife not too long ago, so really, what do I have to complain about? And there are people in substantially better situations who will find something to complain about regardless. Everyone is fighting their own battles and just because things have been coming down on your side doesn't make it any worse than someone else's.

So here are some nice things my friends have gotten me as of late. Some will be my new totems to replace the ones I lost this year.

Lin Lin made me a ginger cupcake with green tea frosting. The bee is unrelated to the flavor.

Seo made me a slider/burger hybrid from the stop motion shoot that was pretty delicious.

Tramanh got me this, which I first thought said was a Nikon lens cap. I pondered what I would even do with a lens cap.

It even comes with a nifty pouch for it.

A Nikon 24-70mm f/2.8 normally goes for around $1,750. Thankfully, this was nowhere near that amount.

The lens cap comes off to reveal the hidden functionality-

It's a condensation-free cup! It has replaced all the other cups I use now.

I was hanging out at the zoo with Josephine one day in scorching hot weather (I made her take the zoo choo with me) and she got me this coke. I like it even if it cost $3 for 8.5(!) ounces. I may save the bottle for like a cheesy couples photo shoot prop or something.

I was dancing at an all-black club last thursday near the bar and a man came up to me and gave me this cd. Yes, street cred confirmed.

 

Jenn went to the Inception premiere a while back and they gave these away to the goers. It actually spins for what seems like forever.

I leave it on my computer desk and occasionally give it a spin while waiting for applications to load.

She also gave me this banh bao pig. Not too shabby.

Here's my first stop motion video I've made with some sort of storyline behind it rather than the usual quick 10 second visual gag. Seo wanted to be in a stop motion video and I warned her it was a painstakingly slow process, but she was still up for it, so while I was running at Memorial Park one evening, I came up with a storyline loosely tailored to her interests. Tuesday of last week, I picked her up at noon and we headed off to the grocery store to buy ingredients and we came back and we storyboarded the whole thing.

Stop motion, or more accurately, pixillation, is difficult because I have to ask people to move very incrementally (most of my friends don't have the patience for that), but Seo was a good sport about it all. We wrapped up shooting at 7:30 PM, seven and a half hours after I had first picked her up.

One thing most people say when they hear about me doing stop motion is, "Man, that's a lot of work." They say it like it's a bad thing. But nothing great was ever created without patience. You've gotta be obsessed about something before you can get good at it. And while the final product isn't perfect- there's still a lot of improvement to be made- at least I've got a final product of some sort and that beats out all the others who just thought about doing something like that and never did.

What is the price of sentimental value? My friend posed this topic one day as we were going around Memorial Park. When does it lose to the market value of a particular product? When a particular object has no added cost (unlike, say, an aging car, which will require additional increasing maintenance costs), at what point does something with sentimental value lose its worth? He didn't place much sentimental value in his things, while I tend to place a lot of sentimental value in mine.

The topic was watches. Or at one point, girlfriends (marriage, we both agreed, equaled finality). He was arguing, always keep your options open- something better might come along. I argued that if you're always looking for something better, you enjoy what you own even less (these are both extremes in viewpoint- obviously the answer falls somewhere in the middle). There are even studies out there regarding the burden of choice, and how it makes people even unhappier.

I always come back to my Kenneth Cole watch my parents bought me when I was in high school as an example. It is gunmetal grey in color, very understated with a clean simple design. You probably wouldn't even notice it if I wore it. I actually don't like most luxury watches because they're too flashy, too noticeable. Movado, with its simple design, still calls for attention. I remember we were out looking at luxury watches one time and one of my friends asked, "When are you going to get a watch for the corporate world?" I was secretly slightly offended, because that was implying that my parents' gift to me- something that I really wanted and was the very first expensive nice thing I've ever received- was just juvenile. And granted, people in the corporate world typically do not go around sporting Kenneth Cole watches- public accounting firms display their Tags, Rolexes, and the like the higher you go up the management chain. Does my sentimental attachment to my watch warrant its value above the "market price"- as in, am I missing out on something better because I'm so attached to my watch? It's really all up to personal taste though, and in the end, the watches that partners at public accounting firms do the exact same thing mine does- tell time.

I am not big on buying expensive luxury goods for myself, but if I do, it's something that I'm like, man, this is a pretty big deal. If I buy or receive something particularly nice, it happens so infrequently there is an instant sentimental value attached to it. And then when you see people who buy and sell things like that so easily, I sometimes wonder if they ever really even liked it. Does something that expensive turn into something as ordinary as buying a t-shirt at Target? Does it already lose its value in the process of becoming so readily obtainable? Is there even any story behind it? People become attached to the first car they buy, the first purse they buy with their first paycheck. Things that you think about a lot before purchasing and therefore have a vested interest in it even before you lay your hands on it. And if someone asks, you can say, "This is what I got with my first job right out of college" and it instantly makes it more memorable to the listener- that this was something special. If you're an oil magnate who can eat foie gras and a fine steak every night, would that diminish your enjoyment of it because all of a sudden, it's not something you associate with a special occasion?

Of course, it's all relative to your spending habits, your needs, your income. And certainly, one cannot only live in the past. I recently went to my friend's sister's apartment warming party. Being a college student, she had a variety of alcohols available, with two brands of vodka. One, a gift, was a bottle of Grey Goose, which she proclaimed no one could drink because it was special. That's the "expensive stuff." Not to say that she has any sentimental value attached to it, but as a higher end alcohol is less common at that age, there's a certain intangible value associated with it that probably sets it above its market value. I'm sure when she gets out of college, Grey Goose will probably be much more commonplace in her social groups than well vodka, but don't you kind of remember that feeling when the finer things in life were actually just that?

They say no man is an island, but I'm starting to dig around and cut off those ties to land.

I'm a firm believer that everyone should be well rounded. Sure, you can have those things you obsess over and because an expert on, but for the most part, guys should learn a little bit of everything. And it helps if what you want to learn next can ultimately benefit the people around you as well. Besides reading and learning a lot of new things, now instead of just conversation, I've decided to make an honest effort to bring a little something more tangible to the table. I'm a little older now and figured I should quit cooking just to sustain myself and actually try and experiment with new things rather than depend on others if I am in the mood to eat something new.

Unfortunately, I can't seem to shake off the original bachelor cooking stigma- all my friends ever remember me for with regards to cooking was the time I tried to make a peanut butter marinade for a steak. Just one time and you're framed with that image for life. No one even tried it but me, but they automatically assumed it was horrible (it wasn't). No one remembers when I injected a cajun marinade with a syringe into chicken, or any of my other past bachelor cooking endeavors.

But now I'm back and revamping bachelor cooking with something a little more upscale than tossing a random assortment of ingredients from whatever's in the fridge. Unfortunately, a lot of my good friends are foodies, so I try to avoid cooking for them because I feel like in the back of their minds, they are totally judging my fledgling dishes. While I enjoy fine dining, my palate is much more accepting and encompasses a much wider realm of foods. And, I suppose, like farts, sometimes the only person who will like the dish is the person who made it.

As Anthony Bourdain says, "Well, good food is a willingness to step out of your comfort zone a little, take a shot at the unfamiliar, try something that, OK, might give you diarrhea."

The first meal I'd attempt, I prepped the board for a colorful roasted corn salad.

Miso chicken and corn salad. Not a bad first attempt. The cool salad was a pretty refreshing accompaniment to the chicken and perfect for a hot summer day.

The second attempt, I decided to invite Yen, Donny and Roz over. Donny invited Roz's sis Mari and Patrick came home and all of a sudden, I had to make dinner for eight people. Anyone remember Sideways Stories from Wayside School? There was a chapter which said something like Miss Mush the cafeteria lady could cook well, but the more people she cooked for, the worse the food tasted. This is how I feel like my cooking turns out- if I were just cookin' for me and another person, it'd probably taste a lot better. Anyway, the only thing I could think of that I had available that could serve a lot of people is pot roast, which is fairly simple to make. I also made some handmade garlic and bacon mashed potatoes, which was alright but delicious when reheated. Oh yeah, and the corn salad from the prior meal I decided to make again. Overall, not bad, though I felt bad I didn't have more pot roast to go around.

I've been running around sites like epicurious and allrecipes and the like to look for new recipes and I found this one for chicken stuffed with spinach and ricotta. It wasn't bad, and I added a side of bacon-crumbled sauteed asparagus.

Jeannie had put up a recipe for garlic noodles or somesuch, so I went off to the asian store to add something to the noodles- I went with beef and bok choy for this distinctly asian dish. It turned out pretty well (though perhaps a little too buttery) and my friends proclaimed it smelled good- like a dish from Tan Tan's, which I couldn't tell if that was a good or bad thing.

I used to love reading magazines like Esquire and they'd have great recipes every now and again. This one was for a 5 hour roast duck. I went and bought a whole cleaned duck from Ranch 99 in the morning (that sucker took forever to thaw) and had to lop off the head and feet with a cleaver. It's fairly simple to make, but required prepping every hour in the oven.

The result is a supercrispy skin that had crunch- it was pretty delicious. I drained the fat every hour on the hour, so it was fairly lean meat- if you like fatty duck, you might not like this as much, but I like that it didn't leave that oily taste in your throat after eating it. I was able to save about half a cup of duck fat which I may use in the future with vegetable oil to fry french fries in.

The aforementioned egg in a nest with bacon, gruyere and pear slices. I know it better enough now that I've made it to make it better next time.

Well-done eggs- couldn't gauge cooking times for a double-decker egg sammich. Next time, though!

Bacon-wrapped chicken sauteed with rosemary, thyme, and garlic. When you add things like rosemary and thyme to a dish, it takes it to a whole 'nother level. The fancy level.

Prep ingredients for a bachelor's morning omelet with leftover Jack-in-the-Box ultimate cheeseburger. I ate the burger earlier and took out a patty for future use (note: don't get the ultimate cheeseburger. not worth the four bucks).

Ultimate cheeseburger patty deconstructed back to ground beef. Trying to take the place of the sawsij.

Couldn't flip this dang thing over properly. Oh well.

The flipping issue kind of resulted in a well-done omelet. I seem to have to worst luck with dishes with egg in them. Tastes pretty much like it sounds, though the ground beef (as to be expected) was a little bland.

Prepping for deep-fried dill and mozzarella-stuffed chicken breast.

Result? Don't use ingredients like dill just because you need to use them. Chicken, however, was perfectly crispy and super juicy.

Overall, pretty delicious. Needs more cheese though- these stuffed recipes recommend using a rolling pin to flatten out the chicken, which I obviously need to do because you can't fill these things with much of anything otherwise.

Deep fried handmade calamari. I remember one time I had some pretty good fried calamari and the bartender was like, it's because they soak it for a while in buttermilk. I was at Ranch 99 and of course the asian supermarket doesn't have buttermilk. I tried to use whole milk in its place, but it didn't seem to have much effect. The first batch, the calamari was added to the boiling oil too quickly, rapidly lowering the cooking temp and it came out a little soggy. I couldn't get the crust to adhere properly- next time will fry at higher temp. Overall, it was just okay.

If you're Vietnamese, you probably love thit kho or canh chua, but I don't care much for either (I'll eat them and it will taste fine, but I don't crave them- thit kho tends to be a little too strong/flavorful for me and I'm not that big fan of soups that are added to rice). But this- this is one of my comfort foods. Next to a simple fried rice in it with nothing but egg, maggi, and a dash of sriracha (while I like complex flavors, sometimes I just like tasting minimal basic ingredients, which is why I have a bad habit of not adding salt or pepper to most anything), this is one of my fave Vietnamese foods my mom makes. And she doesn't even make it that often, and until I tried to make it on Saturday, there's a reason why. It takes forever to make.

To make this, you buy cleaned headless smelt, butterfly each one, and proceed to cut out the embedded small spinal cord. I asked Tu to help me out and he did a handful and was like, just deep fry the whole thing. Funny thing is, I looked up recipes online and most recipes people just deep fried the whole thing. But not my mom. And not me either. If she had the patience to butterfly those smelt and then proceed to debone them, I would sit my butt down and take as long as it takes to debone those suckers too.

I did about half a bag before I started cooking because I felt bad for making Tu and Tramanh wait (it was already 9 PM) and though it wasn't as seasoned as my mom makes it (she seasons it before she adds the flour, I just added the seasoning directly into the flour) I was pretty happy with how it turned out. Tasted like childhood.

I've learned how to make a decent marble cake just like my mom and now I'm slowly learning vietnamese dishes. My parents' kitchen hasn't finished being remodeled yet so I haven't had a chance to learn my mom's cooking yet, but at least I've got some of the things down I remember her making. I may not be able to pass on much of the Vietnamese culture if I ever have a family, but I hope to at least try through cooking.

A book with ideas on how to train yourself to start seeing the mundane as something much more than that. It's not all that practical, but if you feel like you're in a rut, it'll give you some ideas.