Geisha School Dropout

Clap clap!

Ever thought a girl was so cute that you wished you could shrink her and stick her in your pocket?  Awesome.  Because now you can have your very own geisha!

She tells you the time!  You can choose the color of her kimono!  She bows and dances when you clap your hands!  Tee hee hee!

Thank you, GClue, Inc., for making all our fantasy dreams come true.  And big ups to Angry Asian Man for bringing this to my attention.  Dancing on Command was one of my favorite courses in geisha school, too bad I totally bombed the Pocket Fitting course.  Sometimes I was able to squish myself in there, but my damn wig kept getting caught.  Believe me, it is not easy to be such a paragon of Oriental charm and grace!  I would explain further, but it would be like trying to pick up a piece of bird feces with one's fingers from the petal of a cherry blossom upon first dew.  *covers face with fan*

GONG!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The Morning After

Okay, so there wasn't a Christmas goose, no tamales, no caroling kindergartners.  But there were Koreans aplenty, a few chubby cheeks to kiss, gifts of all sizes, and a Marie Callender's turkey and ham dinner supplemented by homemade chicken noodle soup (by me) and kimchi fried rice (by my dad, who swore this was his last year and he will pass the secret recipe down to Tim).

My family is not that exciting or inspirational; you won't see us on the cover of "The Saturday Evening Post" by any means.  But there is real love and comfort when we get together, usually expressed through the stuffing of food into each other's gullets.

My dad made me say a prayer at the table.  I stumbled through "Dearheavenlyfather, thankyouforbringingusheretogether" when Emily tapped my shoulder and said "MAMA?"  I ignored her and went on to say "Happy Birthday, Jesus" and my sister snickered.  "I pray for a 2009 filled with peace and love and prosperity for the world..." and then it was Isaac's turn to interject with a "What are you guys doing?"...then "INYOURNAMEIPRAYAMEN" and my ordeal was done.

Next year, I'm just going with the standard "Rub a dub dub, thanks for the grub" and calling it a day.

After dinner, Isaac wowed us with his mad Wii Golf skillz, and his unskillz with Wii Bowling.  I got all frustrated trying to teach him how to bowl, like a monkey throwing poo at the mirror.  Tim heckled me while I tried to play Wii Baseball and it made me feel a little bit better.

Then came present time and it was such a beautiful flurry of shiny paper pieces and ribbons flying, with people milling about trying to navigate through the blizzard.  Isaac's favorite gift was his EcoSphere, as predicted.  Emily fell in love with her dolly and stroller and tut-tutted her baby all around my parents' house, grunting at all of us to move furniture aside so she can squeeze the stroller into all her favorite hiding places.

We stayed at my parents' house until around 10 pm, and the kids were both wide awake and partying.  Isaac crashed pretty quickly after he got to bed, but Emily just rolled around and around, giggling to herself, and occasionally yelling "Wow!"  I never saw someone with such a strong case of The Christmas Spirit.  Sometime around midnight, she finally succumbed to sleep, leaving just enough time for the Christmas Tree to poop out presents.

The Spirit of the Season

If I really had my way, like if the gods handed over 100% of the reins to me for just a couple days, I'd be brining the Christmas goose right now, and gathering baskets to take with me to some farmer's market to gather the vegetables needed for all the side dishes.  This year, I'd probably make potatoes au gratin with lots of gooey Gruyere and nutmeg, sausage and cornbread stuffing, broiled root vegetables, curried butternut squash soup to start, maybe some kalbi jjim for some cultural "flava." 

Oh!  Nevermind, actually Tim would go to the farmer's market.  I would actually be assembling 1000 tamales...chile and cheese, sweet corn, pork...with my old Mexican girlfriends, gossiping about so-and-so and fighting over who gets to refresh everyone's mugs of chocolate.  Every once in a while we'd shout something in Spanish over to the kids, who are busy threading popcorn-and-cranberry garlands and stealing tastes of the goods, especially Emily, who shovels fistfuls of popcorn into her mouth and runs away gleefully as the older ones chide her.  But they're not getting into that much trouble, they are getting along just fine, and maybe Emily is actually taking a nap right now, I don't quite trust her around needles (or popcorn for that matter).

My mother-in-law would be in the living room, wrapping presents and occasionally popping into the kitchen to practice her Spanish with us.  We teach her how to tie down tamales.  She observes and politely shows us the way Japanese people tie things down and it is 300% better.  We reward her with with a raucous version of "Las Mañanitas."

Riley and Maggie are warming their bellies by the fireplace, underneath the Christmas tree.  My mother-in-law's 20-year-old cat, Pepper, would be nestled between the two, all three of them snoring.  Riley is wearing a Santa hat, of course.

Then, suddenly, we are treated to beautiful caroling and we finally discover the neighborhood children we have not seen since we moved here.  A bunch of them are Isaac's age, and he makes his first real friends.  They are all going to be in his kindergarten class in the fall.  We all exchange information and embraces and our souls are finally at ease about Isaac and his future school.

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Sigh.  If only, right?  But I'm sitting quiet as a mouse in my mom's house, awaiting a FedEx delivery man to come over and deliver Isaac's Christmas present: an EcoSphere.  Apparently because it involves living creatures, an adult has to sign for it, and today's my mom's Golf Day.  So here I am, an over-18 warm body trying to listen for the doorbell.  There is a good chance that it won't come at all, as I haven't gotten any kind of delivery notice. 

But waiting here, playing MacGuyver with a ghetto DSL connection, trying to get work done, hoping with all my might for the best, all for some shrimp and some algae to be under the tree for Isaac on Thursday, is almost as good as the fantasy Christmas in my head.  I can't explain why, other than Christmas is meaningless unless you're working to make some kid happy.

From 2008-12-06

Pyogenic Granuloma? I hardly know her!

Goddamn, heaven forbid any of you receiving a shot of Lidocaine in an already-swollen fingertip.  The sensation was not pleasant.  In fact, it forced a noise from deep within my diaphragm, akin to a 10-year-old PeeWee Herman who just got kicked in the balls.  It even made me do a half-sit-up, and honey, you KNOW that takes some effort.

Luckily, the pain only lasted a few seconds and once things got nice and numb down there, the doctor (who was the world's perkiest, blondest dermatologist ever) took a medical device that looked almost exactly like a proto-staple-remover and plucked out my unsightly bump.  Blood squirted everywhere, since these things are overgrown blood vessels after all, and then she took a steel stick and scraped out a bunch of dead-looking tissue from inside my finger.  I love anaesthesia, because you can look at this and totally forget that this is actually happening to you.  "Wow, that's gotta hurt!" I thought, but nope, it didn't.

Then came time for the burning!  "Igor, can you please set the cauterer to 9 volts?"  "Yeheheheheeessssss, master..."  Then BZZZT!  BZZZZT!  and the smell of barbecue filled the exam room.  Oh wait, that's my finger!  And oh man, I can really feel that!  YOOOOOOW!  Apparently, the Lidocaine was wearing off and I could start to feel the burning and melting of my skin.  Awesome.

Where an unsightly bump once was, now was a smoking black crater.  Miss Perkytits congratulated me on being a star patient and the nurse bandaged me up and told me to take some Tylenol once I got home.  Oh, and a small detail: they're going to send it over to get biopsied, so that will be an extra $10 copay.  Business is business.

I saved the crying until I got to the car and the Queen of Feeling Sorry for Herself, Beth Gibbons of Portishead, started wailing on "Mysterons" ("All for nothiiiiiiiiing, did you really waaaaaaaaaaant...") and I was like "Stupid Portishead, how can you be SOOOOO miserable when no one just burned your finger ON PURPOSE and told you to take some Tylenol???" But I started singing along anyway, and upon hearing my own frog-in-the-throat caterwauling, the tears came.

But actually, the Tylenol (washed down with orange Gatorade, THAT IS KEY) helped and now I'm pretty much fine, except I can't get my bandage wet for the rest of today (never mind that I accidentally dunked it in gravy while serving dinner yesterday...the rest of the night the dogs were ever-so-concerned with Mama's injury, harrumph).

So hooray!  Smell ya later, innocuous tumor thing!  And hello, eating chocolate pie for breakfast because nothing says "I'm healin'!" like a big ol' slice of self-indugence.

Oh, in case you need a refresher on "Mysterons":

The Proust Questionnaire

I doubt I'll ever get onto the back page of Vanity Fair, so here are my answers to their famous Proust Questionnaire:

1. What is your idea of perfect happiness?
The huge, shit-eating grin a baby gets sometimes when it falls asleep while nursing.

2. What is your greatest fear?
That our children's generation, no matter how brilliant they are, won't be able to fix the problems we created for them and will suffer greatly because of them.

3. What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?
I am very socially awkward; I constantly embarrass myself.

4. What is the trait you most deplore in others?
The lack of self-reflection.

5. Which living person do you most admire?
Ellen DeGeneres...she is so innately likeable, it's amazing.

6. What is your greatest extravagance?
Monetarily speaking, our house.  But on a regular basis, cute clothes for Emily!

7. What is your current state of mind?
Fuzzy

8. What do you consider the most overrated virtue?
Martyrdom

9. On what occasion do you lie?
I lie all the time.

10. What do you most dislike about your appearance?
My belly, it just gets in the way.

11. Which living person do you most despise?
The Man.

12. What is the quality you most like in a man?
Compassion and generosity (of time, attention, spirit).

13. What is the quality you most like in a woman?
Compassion and generosity (of time, attention, spirit).

14. Which words or phrases do you most overuse?
Like, you know, I dunno.

15. What or who is the greatest love of your life?
Fois gras poutine.

16. When and where were you happiest?
Momentary happiness, any time I'm belly-laughing.  Over an extended period of time, probably my senior year of high school...that was in Cerritos, CA.

17. Which talent would you most like to have?
I would love to be an excellent pianist.

18. If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?
I would never be bitter, always gracious.

19. What do you consider your greatest achievement?
Incubating and giving birth to 2 great (and dare I say, freaking cute-looking) kids.

20. If you were to die and come back as a person or a thing, what would it be?
A really mature, extra-stinky ginkgo tree.

21. Where would you most like to live?
Any major city where the people are genuine.

22. What is your most treasured possession?
The "My Pictures" and "My Music" folders on my laptop.

23. What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?
Having no one love you.

24. What is your favorite occupation?
Sex, drugs, and roll & roll.

25. What is your most marked characteristic?
My enormous laugh.

26. What do you most value in your friends?
Sense of humor and loyalty.

27. Who are your favorite writers?
Kurt Vonnegut, Jeffrey Eugenides, Salman Rushdie, Maya Angelou

28. Who is your hero of fiction?
The little girl in "Pan's Labyrinth."

29. Which historical figure do you most identify with?
Zelda Fitzgerald

30. Who are your heroes in real life?
Anyone who can find true satisfaction and happiness while still helping others.

31. What are your favorite names?
Dolores, Sona, Gertrude, Yumi, Jonas, Paolo

32. What is it that you most dislike?
The blissfully ignorant.

33. What is your greatest regret?
I grew up so sheltered, and I didn't even know.

34. How would you like to die?
In a way that would leave the least amount of mess.

35. What is your motto?"Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you've got about a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies - God damn it, you've got to be kind."

Middle Finger Blues

These people are repulsed!

I have to admit I haven't been fully honest on my blog.  I've been living with a shameful secret for 2 months, and like a coward I hid behind cute pictures of the kids and a trip to Hong Kong.

So here is the naked truth: I have had a nasty-looking abscess-thing on my middle finger for weeks, and I just went to the doctor yesterday for it.

At first I thought it was a wart, although I wasn't quite sure what a wart was or looked like.  And it would occasionally pop open and bleed profusely, then heal about 90% of the way, then pop again, etc.  But now my entire middle fingertip is swollen and it's become quite painful, so off to the doctor I went.

The doctor took a look at it, squeezed my finger (and actually smiled when I yawped in pain!), and diagnosed me with a "pyogenic granuloma."  It's a type of fibrohemangioma, and although technically a tumor, isn't one of those scary-type tumors.

What actually is scary, though, is that some dermatologist will have to cut it off!  Like, with a knife!  And all I will get is a huge shot of novocaine beforehand!  Have they no mercy? 

And after freaking me out with that, she asked me if what I do for my job involves my middle finger.  Apparently heavy use brings these things out.  And I told her not really, I type all day, but I have noticed that that it really impedes my ability to lift heavy objects or use chopsticks.  She had the look of "Eureka!" when I mentioned chopsticks, like THAT EXPLAINED EVERYTHING.  You know, because I'm Asiastani Asianese.  If my middle finger didn't hurt so damn much, I would have used it on her right then and there.

So please think of me on the afternoon of the 16th, as I will have this thing removed then.  Until then, if you want to lose your lunch, come on over and I'll show it to you.  I have an 8-year-old's fascination with gross body oddities; maybe you do too.

Oh, Emily

Sigh.  Last night was tough.  Emily refused to go to sleep, trying again and again to crawl off the bed to check out what her brother and daddy were doing for about an hour.  By then I figured, if she wants to hang out with Daddy so much, then feel free.  So we explored the dark house, and I was chiding her with, "See?  There's only one naughty girl in this house who's awake now."  But she still wanted her dad, so we switched positions: Tim would lie down with her and I got to sleep with Isaac.

There was blissful quiet in the house for a couple hours, then the crying started around midnight.  Scream-cries, oh how they grate upon the soul.  She did not want water, or milk, or hugs, or anything.  She cried for what seemed like hours, so in my bleary mental state I told Tim to drive towards the direction of the nearest emergency room.  Maybe her appendix burst?  Who the fuck knows.  So off they went...and she quieted down immediately, he reported.  She pointed at things outside the window, saying "Ooohhh, wooow..."  And by the time they got to the hospital parking lot, she was dozing off.  So they came back.

Another couple hours of quiet, then cries again.  Oh lordy.  I took over bed duties and the rest of the night was relatively normal.  Tim had to catch a plane up to the Bay Area early in the morning, but he made it.  So it goes, this little life we lead.

Anyway, so while I was first trying to get Emily to bed, I hummed her a 12-minute ditty by Joanna Newsom called, coincidentally, "Emily."  It's a soaring, sweeping tale, reminiscent of Renaissance court music, about the prickly, rough-hewn rope that binds family members together (with little dollops of astronomy and country life thrown in along the way).  It describes how tedious it is to have lifelong ties to such tiresome creatures, but how necessary they are for for one's world to feel happy and whole.

Emily, they'll follow your lead by the letter
And I make this claim, and I'm not ashamed to say, I know you better
What they've seen is just a beam of your sun that banishes winter
...
We could stand for a century
Starin'
With our heads cocked
In the broad daylight at this thing
Joy
Landlocked
In bodies that don't keep
Dumbstruck with the sweetness of being

Sigh.

The Ultimate Personality Test

I was cleaning the house before the cleaners came (please tell me there are other people who do this!), and I was totally struck by the oddities an observant eye can find in our bathroom.  We only have one for all 4 of us (6 if you count the dogs, since they get bathed in there too), and so the random contents therein probably would shed some light on our mental and physical states if psychologists ever cared to rummage through them.

So, here is a checklist of the weird shit I found in our bathroom.  Feel free to print out and make it a checklist for your own.  If you have more than half of the items listed, you are officially just as crazy as we are!

1. Expired condoms with the wrappers chewed by dogs (or kids, but most likely dogs (I hope)).

2. 3 unused toilet cleaning devices (I'm talking about wrappers still on the darn things).

3. A very dusty scale.

4. Bright pink plastic tubes used as pretend snorkles during bathtimes.

5. 4 separate tubes of toothpaste being actively used by different members of the family; 2 of them are identical.

6. A copy of the "Tao Te Ching," a statistics textbook, and "Highlights Magazine for Children"  stacked up as toilet reading material.

7. An empty roll of toilet paper on the roller, with a new roll stacked on top (but not actually placed on the roller!).

8. Lots of pens and coffee mugs.  Apparently someone likes to drink and/or write on the pot!  I will not point any fingers.

9. 6 bottles of bubble bath/baby shampoo/dog shampoo by the bathtub, although 4 of the bottles are empty.

10. Room for only 1 towel bar!!!

11. Children's clay art drying on the windowsill...from 4 months ago.

12. A stapler.

13. Random diapers strewn about, all of them unused, thank goodness.

14. 10 Hong Kong dollars.

I would love to hear about crazy shit in other people's bathrooms, including those of the rich and famous.