hands

Yeah, well, I really didn’t want this entry to be something on the maudlin side. There’s enough drama surrounding me (by which I mean, wtf are my neighbors watching, is that healthy media to consume in this climate?), so maybe I should focus on somewhat better things. (Better is always a relative term; I suppose I’ve lived long enough that I hope I don’t have to specify that?)

I think the real gift that I got or gave myself this year was the option to spend these holidays completely alone. Like, I elected to not go to any family or friends gatherings, even though I did receive invitations. I said I wasn’t feeling up to it. I said I was otherwise already occupied.

And hey, I wasn’t even lying when I said I was gonna be doing something else. I spent both my 24th and 25th cooking. Is this the point where I admit that I’ve been especially keen on making food with sharp flavors all throughout this year? Of course there’s an underlying reason for that. And yes, it’s true that I’m interested in making Korean food because it’s good food! But also — the sharp flavors help me remind myself or reassure myself that I still have my sense of smell/taste intact. The fact that I need those two senses to be able to cook at all. If I can cook, if I can make these strongly-flavored dishes, then at least I know that my luck is still holding out.

Well, I call it luck. But that’s only because I can’t travel back in time, can’t I? I’ve suspected for a while that I might have caught a very mild case of SARS‑CoV‑2 way back at the beginning of 2020 — it must have gotten spread around my workplace at the time. I always was describing that office as a fucking Petri dish (yes, expletive included). Anyone who caught a cold would bring it in and then everyone would be sniffling and sneezing for a while. This was just before we started wearing masks on a daily basis.

I got my first rapid test in….June of that year? I can’t remember when I came back from my brief time WFH. I had one set of antibodies and not the other one, that’s the result I remember. Which made me think that since I really had not ventured out of the house from March to the end of May, I must have just gotten over it when I started the WFH period.

Again, I can’t turn back the hands of time; I can’t go and talk to myself and trace back the possible source of that small outbreak, if it had really been one. But maybe it’s enough. Maybe that plus the vaccines that I got and the booster that I’m going to have to start looking for will be enough.

On the one hand: holidays in the Philippines and while the people who were hurt by the typhoon wonder about tomorrow’s shelter and tomorrow’s food, the idiots who swarm public places heedlessly (and who wear their masks all wrong) just traipse around like there isn’t even really a pandemic going on.

On the other hand: I know many people who are still taking precautions just for the hope of being able to see their loved ones. (It’s been almost two years, goddamnit.)

I don’t really believe it will be possible to go back to any kind of “normal” as we’d known it, after this. That’s just me being reasoning. I cannot expect “normal” from the before-times. I can remember it, certainly, but I don’t think it makes sense to expect it now. We’ll have to make something else and understand it as “normal” now.

rewire

I finally took the plunge!

Well, okay, of course, there’s a mildly funny story because it’s me? But the plunge here is, I finally decided to see if I could actually learn the Korean language for real. The course that I’d taken for one semester way back in university is — little more than a hazy memory, truly. And I regret that I didn’t know what was coming, and I didn’t stick with it, and I really should have kept going because that was right before the Koreans started coming to this country to learn English. I could have gone somewhere else in my life trajectory if I’d stuck with Korean at that point instead of treating it like a placeholder. (I know. I bitterly regret that. Mea maxima culpa.)

I mean, I know what the alphabet looks like, and I know what the BTS members’ names and nicknames look like, but. Lack of comprehension, you know? And I thought I’d remedy that. So I downloaded Duo*lingo.

But the funny bit is: I thought it was my first time using the app. No. I actually downloaded it in 2014 — an entire lifetime ago. And what was I studying on it? French! That’s from when I was still teaching English to European adults…… Yeah. Literally I can’t remember a lot about that, either, any more. I can still do some very very very basic French but. I was never fluent, I never will be.

So. Hangul, instead. And I’ve gotten through 10 days of lessons. It was super confusing at first. I still need to remember the conventions that the app follows for the translation / transliteration / transcription of certain consonant sounds. I still need to pay attention to the forms of the vowels and how they can be used, together and especially in combination.

But it’s funny that I’m marking my progress in the lessons by recognizing names and parts of names. Not just the BTS members’ names, either, because it was funny that I almost immediately ran into parts of the names of the TXT members, too. So that’s a good thing for me. It helps me keep things in mind, helps me stay on track? Because these are already familiar phonemes and words and names? Anyway. I’m trying to learn, and 10 days’ progress means something to me because I am starting at a rather advanced age to be knowing any of this stuff.

(I may have to make a tag for that. I’m going to be musing a little bit more about the passage of time. And the passage of my time, because I’m coming up on 40 in 10 months’ time.)

I think that the whole idea of learning a language involves having to rewire those parts of the brain, and yeah that’s certainly something that I’m experiencing in the here and now. I’m learning to recognize sounds and words at this point. Haven’t started on grammar or sentences or anything of the sort yet. I’m sure more brain changes will come as I get on that — slowly. I’m taking my time with the lessons because alphabet practice is not the same to me as word/phoneme/syllable practice. (Even if in many cases syllable practice IS directly connected to alphabet practice, because this is Hangul we’re talking about, here.)

Anyway. I’m almost 40 and I’m picking up a language for more or less the second first time. That’s what I have to keep myself going.

shrimp in garlic, butter, and calamansi

Just off the heat.

The base recipe is from @BTSARMYKitchen and can be found here: garlic butter shrimp.

(I don’t get a lot of practice in writing recipes like this, so please be kind when giving feedback, okay? :D)

Ingredients:

• 6-7 garlic cloves, divided
• some chopped green onion
• 4 large tbsp butter, salted for preference
• black pepper
• salt
• 2 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
• 12 large shrimp, peeled and deveined, leave tails intact
• juice of 5-6 large calamansi OR juice of half a lemon

Procedure:

• Peel the garlic cloves. Roughly chop 3 of them. Slice the rest evenly.
• Sprinkle a little salt and a little pepper over the peeled shrimp, toss to distribute, and set aside for a moment.
• In a pan, heat the butter and the olive oil very briefly — just enough to make sure the butter is melted. Throw in the green onion and the chopped garlic. Then turn off the heat for 1-2 minutes.
• When ready to eat, turn the heat back on, add the sliced garlic, and cook over very low heat until the garlic colors very slightly. Do not burn the garlic.
• Turn the heat up a little and add the shrimp, cooking that first side until all pink and plump. Then turn all the shrimp over to cook the other side — this will go more quickly — then turn off the heat again.
• Count thirty seconds, out loud, then turn the heat back on. Swirl everything around in the pan to make sure the butter and the shrimp are evenly heated. Season to taste with salt and pepper.
• Lastly, add the calamansi or lemon juice, swirl around again to mix, and turn off the heat.
• Serve over your carbs of choice. Crusty hot bread, freshly steamed rice, long pasta, egg noodles — all will work.

I think that the secret here is to make sure your heat never gets out of your control. I turn my heat on and off in this case so that I don’t overcook any of the ingredients. I didn’t want to ruin those fabulous shrimp so I had to be super careful with my pan and with my heat here.

Since I cook with an induction stove I can’t tell you about turning the heat up and down by looking at the color of the flame. The secret of my heat control in this recipe lies in turning the stove itself on and off as needed.

Calamansi is a small green citrus fruit that’s found almost everywhere in the Philippines. The juice is tangier / sharper than that of lemons or limes. It really adds a great contrast to the butter and olive oil in this recipe.

catch me too, I’m a fish!

*cackles for the next several days*

(Look, it’s the same guy who wrote about grace and grief and imposter syndrome last year!)

(Same guy! Same mind! This is so much fun! He asked someone to choreograph this!)

superlatives

There aren’t enough superlatives in the world to describe the feeling of being at a concert — virtually, in this case — and still feeling that love and that passion and that joy.

There aren’t enough reassurances to tell seven guys that, for those of us who were already fans before the pandemic, that we are here and we aren’t leaving. But they were made to feel it by practically an entire establishment. The same establishment that used the pandemic as a weapon against the guys who just wanted to perform and to meet with their fans and to make music. They used the pandemic to tell the guys their ARMY was made of bots.

I hope the guys were convinced that we were not bots. After last night, I hope they felt our presence. Because we have felt their presence all along, in these years of quarantine.

And yes, there aren’t enough expletives in the world to help me express how angry I am and disappointed I am that I can’t go to the concerts. I am stuck in this country because it has been mismanaged all throughout this pandemic. I cannot express how unfair the situation is. I am over-full of the anger that I need to point at everyone who just stood by, filled their pockets with money, and made us poorer and dumber and UNSAFE in these past two years.

I know what my goals for the future are: and they include superlatives, because I deserve them. They include expletives and banishment for the ones who were so venal and greedy and vicious. I know what I need to do, going forward. That’s my plan for the next year.

Yeah, I did.

Take Friday off from work because I was attending an online concert on Thursday night, I mean.

And yes, my bosses know I’m attending a concert. One of them even laughed at me and said, let’s see if you sound hoarse next time we speak (on Monday the 6th)!

BRB gotta get my ARMY bomb batteried up.

sometimes I just get angry about — the lack of seeing things

I’ll forgive you if you think this is only about the concerts happening over the weekend in LA. Actually yes, those concerts sparked off this line of thinking, but this is a complaint I come back to again and again, whenever people on my side of the world wish for this or that artist to come here and perform in concert.

Look, I can perfectly understand the wanting those artists to come here. To show love to their fans, to let them see that their fans love them, et cetera. I’ve been a fan long enough. I know exactly how that feels. And for a while there the Philippines was the place where all those 70s and 80s and 90s acts would come to show their appreciation for still being listened to — although I kind of was mean in framing it as such: the Philippines is where all the boomer musicians come to say goodbye. I swear the music of old decades gone long past by will not stop getting airplay around here. I suppose that tells you something about the actual people programming the radio stations in my home cities. You’d barely hear new acts like Bad Bunny or Megan Thee Stallion or — you get my drift. It’s like everyone’s radio stopped somewhere in 2000 and only ossified from there.

I digress. What I was trying to say is, of course it makes sense that local ARMY want BTS to come back here. Was it 2016 that they last performed locally? (I just learned about the dates. I’ll talk about that some other time.) (Erratum: they were last here May 2017, and my point still stands.) And we want them back here except: and here’s the crux of my counter-argument.

I don’t want them to come here unless we have venue and security facilities that are good enough.

I’ll be blunt: is there a concert venue here in the Philippines where it’s safe enough for Jungkook to do that Euphoria flight thing?

Come talk to me when that is actually a thing.

Because I don’t want the Philippines to be the place where something wrong happened to the artists for lack of quality venue, lack of security, lack of respect.

(And if you don’t want to believe me, why, I had better point you in the direction of what the Philippines did to the Beatles. — I don’t care if you take potshots at me for this. It’s what happened. That regime disrespected the Beatles. Link here.)

water-cooler talk

Employed from the beginning of January to the end of June

Unemployed in July and half of August

Employed again by August 16

I’ve been at the new job for about three months and change. I didn’t know what I was going to wind up doing; I was, and I still am, employed as a sort of admin person-of-all-work and someone who’s supposed to be assisting various people at the company as they need help. Someone to pick up their smaller tasks for them. That was the original intention, and I understand that many of the things that I am doing are things that they need – they just happen to tend to get lost because the people at the company are always busy or are often tugged to different appointments or other things that can only be done by them, which means their more everyday tasks can get dropped further and further down the priority list.

This is also not counting the times when they have to be out of the office for some reason or another, like their business trips and that kind of thing.

So yeah, I mean, I knew I was going to be given the back-office small jobs and I’ll make it clear. I want to do those things. I like doing those things. I honestly thought it was going to be the equivalent of filing and copying, and I have to say that it’s the equivalent because I, of course, am doing all my work virtually / remotely. I’m nowhere near the actual company’s location, and that’s how it’s probably going to be for the duration. I’ve no plans of traveling anywhere or relocating.

Except. Well. I’m surprised, myself, because I have no sense of time, and I just vaguely sense how the days go past me in my time zone. I only know that time moves because I use a page of my techo every day, writing things and small thoughts that I want to try and remember. (I wind up asking too many questions. My pages are all about existential wondering, not that the wondering really means anything because it’s not like I can stop existing, can I?) (I hope not)

I’m surprised because I’ve been at the job three months, at all.

I’m surprised because some of the things that I have learned to do at this job are – well it’s all been interesting, even when it’s been weird and / or unexpected. Not like filing or copying at all. I think I can see something that I can be really good at, and I think I’d make a surprising addition to at least one of the company’s behind-the-scenes departments. I have, a couple of times, considered that I can act in a really obsessed-with-detail kind of way and this is a job where I can actually be paid a salary for that tendency of mine. It seems to be appreciated in some ways.

(I don’t know what that performance review means because it was written by one of the people I work with, and I have worked for several of them already, over the course of the last three months. So I’m not thinking about it.)

I think that in a way they also weirdly appreciate that I’m literary because in many ways they are differently literary from me? Like, the pop culture references? Some of the references that have been made in my presence are, like, understandably older than I am. What I mean is that when I bust out the occasional idiom they seem glad to hear it because that catches the thought that was in their heads, very closely. Working through a document with someone, I recently said, at this point the question is, did we want to see the forest or did we want to see the trees? And the conversation paused for a moment because we had to answer the question – and reformulate, accordingly. So that’s the clarification I can bring, from time to time. I think that’s nice to be able to contribute that.

On the other hand, I’m not sure they get it because – did someone really have to explain to me what a “bear” (as in, yes, the lgbtqia+ term, specifically) was? I guess I should be glad no one has had reason to ask me the question of, why do you know a lot of things related to that? (Putting aside the fact that I don’t really think I’ve had cause to mention that I am, myself, queer. I guess they’ll find out next year, provided I’m still working with them, because I’ll be wearing pride colors at some point on a semi-regular basis.) I’m not entirely sure that they’ve all figured out that I’m an 82-liner and also a student of pop culture from all over the world. I’m not young and I’m also not as old as the people I’m working with, is the thing.

It’s just a thing to be thinking through, I guess. Time, and the work that I do that helps it to pass, and the people I happen to be working with from afar. (I can sulk about missing out on the free pizza, right? I can sigh because they can bring in donuts and bagels and I’m never going to be able to get in for free nosh, right?) (I didn’t even get fed by my local office because – apparently they pay for trainees’ lunches, but since I was never in a training class, I never got to eat on their dime that way.)

occasionally, the kitchen

(I’ll be happy to tell you how I do it all on a single induction stove, but yeah, just — pictures for now.)

(Also, it should be noted that I didn’t even try to cook any kind of Korean-style food until I started living entirely on my own. So it’s been a year of small experiments. [thanks, BTS])

Kimchi fried rice with smashed vienna sausage, topped with crispy fried egg

Finishing off a batch of old kimchi with pork bits and green onions

less of a post and more of a long-brewed thought

After all of this pandemic thing is said and done

How do you want to be remembered? Before, and during, and after.

Let me know about your thoughts.