Geisha School Dropout

Lysol as Douche?

Holy squeaky clean vagina, Batman!  "Yo Mama so OCD her pussy tastes like Lysol" was actually a REALITY 50 years ago!

 

Thanks, Jezebel!

I Wasn't a Poet, and Didn't Know It

 

I was cleaning out some files over the weekend and found an old journal chronicling September-October 2001.  I was living in my parents' house, recuperating from my latest clash with psychotic depression (sounds scarier than it actually was, basically depression + paranoia).  I was apparently *so* psychotic, I wrote horrible songs with lyrics that make my eyeballs bleed.  So of course I had to share!  Check it out:

Sail Away

You say you'll reach the stars when you don't even get out of bed
Watch the world spin by you as you live through the dreams inside your head
What are all those sounds outside your window?
What are all those sounds outside your window?
You'll never know, you'll never know

You sail away, hide from yourself
You sail away, you sail away
From it all

I see you, you look so cool, your skin is oh so crystal clean
Now disinfect yourself, don't touch your face, you don't know where it's been
What makes your black eyes seem so hollow?
What makes your black eyes seem so hollow?
They're like open graves, like open graves

I don't know whether to slap you or to hide you
All I know is I hope I won't be like you

----------------------------------

Untitled

As I lay on the ground
The sky looks so astounding
If I just take a step
From the cliff that I've made
Close my eyes, take a breath
Blow a kiss at the moon
I might look and see
What's up there for me

I write all these words
So one day you'll find them
And then when you read them
Throw your head back and laugh
Then reach back, hold your head
Hold your head and weep for me
And you'll be just fine
You'll be just fine

----------------------------------

Do any you guys have similar records of when you were young and thought you were deep?  *head hanging in shame*

The Worst Apartment in San Francisco

San Francisco is full of crappy places to call home, but Tim and I were lucky enough to live in the worst.  It wasn't a crack den or in the projects, but if I can do it any justice with my feeble writing skills, by the end of my tale you will see that it was much, much worse than a crack den.  It was such a dark, depressing time of our life, we didn't even take any pictures.

I was working in downtown San Francisco at the time, and Tim was about to start a job in Palo Alto.  We decided to move from Oakland to SF so Tim wouldn't have a bridge commute.  We also thought we were were financially comfortable enough to rent a house, and found a Craigslist ad for one in the Portola District, a 10 minute bus ride away from the Glen Park BART station.  The street name was Bacon, which we took to be a good sign.

It turned out that the house was the first 2 stories of a 3-level building similar to the ones pictured above, with space in the garage for 1 car and half of the backyard.  The interior was beautifully decorated and obviously remodeled with love.  It was way too much space for us (this place was 2600 s.f. and we were moving from an 1100 s.f. apartment), but we figured we could use the entire bottom floor as a play area for Isaac (who was 2 at the time) and Riley.

The owner of the house was a young and hip Chinese chick who made a ton of money as a salesperson for some huge telecom company, and she claimed although she loved the house and had a good relationship with her upstairs neighbors, she wanted to live in a hipper neighborhood and had the money to keep this one while she lived it up in some loft somewhere.  She seemed really laid-back and flexible, so we decided to rent the place right then and there.

We soon learned the real situation.  The upstairs neighbors, a strange Filipino couple named Luz and Allen, were an obvious marriage of convenience (they were of much different ages and openly despised each other).  Plus, they were absolutely nuts.  Our landlord warned them that we had a young son and a big dog and they claimed they were okay with that.  We also made sure that Riley was able to poop and pee on the wood chips in our part of the backyard, and they were okay with that, too.  But once we moved in, almost every time we walked Riley back there (on leash of course, out of respect), Luz or Allen would be there, keeping an eye on things, making sure we didn't enter their part of the yard, that we picked up after ourselves appropriately, and even would replace the 2 pieces of wood chip that got picked up along with some poop (keep in mind that even though they were adamant that we not touch anything of theirs, they had no problem doing things like this on our stuff).  Allen was retired, so he had nothing but time to stalk us like this.  Every time we would open the door to go down the shared stairwell, he would open his door to make sure we turned off the hallway light.  We forgot once and Luz taped an extremely angry letter to our door saying "You AGREED to turn of the lights EVERY TIME.  You are WASTING MONEY!!!!!!!"  We responded by re-attaching the letter to their door with a $20 bill taped to it.  They responded back by re-attaching the letter to our door, but kept the money.

Luz and Allen were also anal about the garage.  They would hang a futon pad on the outside of their car doors to keep away any dings we may give them.  They would hire this poor contractor every couple weeks to repaint their cabinet doors white, standing right behind him while he worked to make sure he didn't cut any corners.  Then they would inevitably find something wrong and refuse to pay him, telling him to fix his "mistakes" in a couple weeks.

When we asked a few friends over to have dinner to celebrate our new home, the get-together would be punctuated by occasional bangs on the floor.  We were seriously just having dinner, no music was playing, just conversation amongst 8 people, including children.  But the banging would keep coming, and our puzzled guests left with uncomfortable looks of sympathy on their faces at around 9 pm.  Meanwhile, there was a huge party going on across the street, complete with drunken fistfights and house music blaring like a nightclub.  So when the police knocked on our door around midnight with a noise complaint, we figured it was because of that party. 

"Ma'am, we got a disturbance of the peace call."

I was in my pajamas.  "Oh, you must be talking about the party across the street?  It wasn't that bad actually."

"Um, actually, the caller gave us this address specifically, unit #1."

"Really???  We just had a few friends over for dinner, and they've been gone for a while.  Our upstairs neighbors probably called, they didn't like the noise and were banging on our ceiling until our guests left."

The SF policewoman looked really, really annoyed and asked if she could enter so she can tell off Luz and Allen herself.  Allen excitedly opened his door when the policewoman knocked, and started railing about how loud we were.  But the cop sternly told him that he was completely in the wrong, he just wasted everyone's time, and she had her eye on him, and if she received any more frivolous calls she would take action against him.  Oh, it was awesome.

Another day, we had a friend stay over from Vancouver with her 2-year-old daughter.  The sound of 2 kids running around laughing during the middle of the day on a Saturday was enough for Luz and Allen to slam what sounded like 50-pound weights down on their floor, over and over again until our friend's little girl started crying, then they pounded on the floor to express their displeasure at the crying.  Needless to say, our friends looked for other lodging.

Over the course of a few weeks, Riley started acting strangely.  He no longer wanted to go out back to pee and would instead have accidents for the first time in his life downstairs.  Things got so bad that we eventually laid down several layers of industrial-strength vinyl under some newspaper so he could go potty that way because he would just cower at the door frame and shake.  We wondered what was going on while we were at work, but couldn't do much about it.  Then one day I had to call in sick and saw Allen climb down the emergency ladder into our patio.  He started screaming at Riley and shaking this noisemaker device.  Riley cowered in the corner furthest away from the patio door.  As I approached him, Allen turned pale and scurried back up the ladder yelling "Keep that damn dog away from me!"

Things deteriorated quickly after that.  They called our landlord repeatedly complaining about the dog smell and the mess we were making in the backyard.  She would then come over and look around and see that none of their claims were true, apologizing each time, saying that Luz and Allen were annoying but ultimately harmless.

Then came the harm.  I was dragging Riley into the backyard before leaving for work when suddenly I heard from the upstairs deck, "Goddamn motherfucker!!!"  I looked up to see Allen, and then he sprayed me with his garden hose.  Riley cowered and immediately ran back into the house, and I knew this wasn't the first time Allen terrorized him with the hose.  I ran back inside as well, dripping wet, and told Tim what happened.  Tim was enraged, and opened the front door to see Allen sheepishly scurrying down the stairwell to escape.  Then a shouting match occurred, where Allen claimed he did nothing, that I was a liar, he didn't know what I was talking about, and that actually he was aiming for the dog.  Idiot.

We called our landlord and told her we were moving out and she let us go without any argument.  We were out of there within a week to some ghetto house in south Hayward.  A few days after we moved, we got a letter of apology and our original deposit check back.  A few days after that, we got an email from her that she found another renter: a good friend of hers, in fact.  And with a smirky emoticon, she oh-so-casually mentioned that he was a single dad...with a very large German Shepherd...and was black.  And Luz and Allen haven't made a peep.  Apparently he scared them into silence.  What a punchline!

Actually, the even funnier punchline was that we paid $2500 a month for the privilege of living with these lunatics.  Looking back, I can't believe we survived it.

The unlikely circumstances in which I am introduced to Andrew Bird

Tim and I are going to see Andrew Bird tonight at the Orpheum! I am very, very excited because he is a classically-trained-former-musician-Midwestern-American-loving Asian girl web dream!!!

Exhibit A:

I was introduced to him last May, and here is my journal entry marking the momentous occasion:

So yesterday morning I was watching TV with Isaac and Emily, some silly show called "Jack's Big Music Show" where crappy puppets sing about singing and do kooky things like assembling watermelons into drum kits. Anyway, one of the characters had a hammered dulcimer that she was excited to try for the first time, when Jack dropped and broke it. However, have no fear -- because there were instructions to call for Dr. Stringz if a calamity such as this would strike.

So with a few utterences of "String a ling ding ding," in comes this gangly wild-eyed dude who obviously doesn't do children's music for a living, the aforementioned Dr. Stringz. He sings a little ditty about himself, and I was impressed by how beautiful his voice was, and was dumbstruck by his whistling ability. I needed to know who this dude was; he was obviously someone who the hipster parents would recognize immediately and squeal to themselves over.

It only took two seconds on Wikipedia to find out it was Andrew Bird. (Side note: if you ever want to know anything about any episode of any children's show, like let's say the "Wonder Pets," it's all catalogued by some losers on Wikipedia. Check out the index for "Arthur" episodes, it is fucking nuts.)

I have heard Andrew Bird's name mentioned in hushed, reverent tones all around me in the hipster circles I seem to always find myself sitting next to. But I immediately dismissed him because of his followers: the type who collapse onto fainting couches after a glance from their puppy love crushes, their egos so easily bruised like overripe peaches. I like my indie rock with some bite to it, thankyouverymuch, harrumph.

But I had to investigate, and Andrew Bird is fantastic. He's equal parts folk, bluegrass, vaudeville, and gypsy...simultaneously reminiscent of old Gramaphone records and refreshingly new. Quite lovely.

So anyway, this is the first musician crush I've developed from a children's show. I can feel my street cred shrink as I speak.

When Isaac Turned Two

I just found this desperate love letter I wrote to Isaac when he turned two.  I'm trying to channel the "me" back then, to see why my tone was so urgent, the circumstances I described so bleak.  Maybe she will come to me tonight in my dreams; they have been very vivid as of late and I haven't been resting well.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

"Isaac, Now You Are Two"
(Written 11/28/2005-12/20-2005)

I meant to write this for a long time, but I kept putting it off.  Sorry.

Isaac, now you are two.  I am so amazed that we have all made it to this point, and even more astounded to see that you are such a great little boy.  I mean, consider your roots.  Your Mama and Papa are two extremely flawed people, and there have been many times in the past when both of them looked around and said "Why me?  I wanted none of it."  Many a parallel life was imagined while shards of pottery were swept up, while tears poured into pillows, while cars crept along morning commutes.  Even down to the last few days before your birth, Mama thought of emergency evacuation plans involving a bassinet strapped to a bunk in the back of a rickety Winnebago headed straight for Sedona, a mobile attached to Riley's tail your only entertainment while the desert flew past our windows.

Why were we like this?  Because we were selfish, ungrateful, immature, and damaged.  Our universe was so small.  We didn't know how to differentiate between things that were urgent and things that were important.  We were so hurt.  We were always moping, "Why me?  Why you?  Why us?"  We were like ostriches with our heads in the sand, ignorant of the beach above us:

"Gawd, it's fucking dark in here.  Tim!  I'm bored and hungry and sick of the view.  Let's go out for sushi."
"Be quiet, I'm trying to read."
"You can't read in the fucking DARK.  Why are you ignoring me?  All I asked for was some sushi and all I get --"
"Nine out of ten dentists say that all the sushi in the world can't solve your problems."
"Nine out of ten dentists say that you can kiss my ASS."
etc.

But on Thanksgiving Day 2003, you came into our broken little world, demanding change.  You had your own identity and personality right out of the womb, reminiscent of but inherently different from either of ours.  That was fascinating.  You were and are: independent, fearless, vivacious, forgiving, thick-skinned, social, flexible, loving, sensitive, and absolutely beautiful.  You are the unflawed, uncensored, cartoon version of what your parents wished they could be.  Now, there are many many days when all we do is look at you and talk about what you are doing, what you might be thinking, what we are learning from you, and how lucky we are to witness all of this wonderfulness together.  Why us?

So, little bu, thank you for showing us what is truly miraculous and sacred in this life: the heart and will of a child.  I just want to set the record straight that you are not wonderful because of us; you are wonderful in spite of us.  We did nothing, and my only wish is that we don't mess it up.

Spotlight on Isaac

I still have a few stories to tell from Montreal, but I've been a bit busy.  Here's are two oldies-but-a-goodies to satisfy you until I get my act together again.  They both feature my first-born.
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August 21, 2008 - Thursday

Isaac is slowly inching his way towards 5, and although he's not growing physically, his sass level is going through a bit of a growth spurt. 

Some examples:

1. Lately we've been on a campaign to not turn on the TV until the living room and Isaac's room are clean.  That basically means no toys on the floor.  Isaac wanted to watch some show or another, and does a half-assed pass through the living room.  He says "How about now?" and I point to the 2 dozen legos still strewn all over the floor.

Mama: [points at mess of toys]  How about you pick that up?
Isaac: [points at Mama's belly] How about you pick that up?

The incorrigible lad, I swear!  Where is my beating stick?

2. Emily and Isaac were sitting at the breakfast table munching on toast triangles.  Isaac finished his slice, walked over to me and snuggled on my lap on the couch.  Emily got jealous and started squawking in protest.   Isaac sighed wearily, rolled his eyes and said "Ohhh okaayyy," and reluctantly lumbered over to her high chair.  He asked her, "What's the matter now, Emily?"  She squawked "Dere!!!!" and jabbed her finger where he had been sitting at the kitchen table.  He again sighed, "Ohhh alright, whatever you want" and sat back down at the table. 

Where in the world did he learn such phrases?  Harrumph!

3. We were at a Dodger game on Sunday and some fans next to us were eating some peanuts and naturally threw the shells on the floor.  When they left to score some better seats, Isaac starts climbing toward their chairs and stops dead in his tracks.  He points to the shells and cries, "What in the?  What?  What?  What in the hhhhhhheck?"  Actually, those shells bothered Emily too.  Every time she saw them she'd put her hands on top of her head in indignation and say "Oooooh!!!"

4. Tim reminded me of another one.  Yesterday after dinner, we were in the car and Isaac kept asking if we were going to get ice cream.  Each time he asked, we said yes, in fact we were.  He asked again, so I snapped "Look, we already said we're going to get it, and we will go get ice cream once you stop asking."

Isaac then completes my sentence: "...if we're going to get ice cream?"
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July 30, 2008 - Wednesday

Last night, Isaac was running around naked before his bath.  I caught him in the hallway poking at his penis.

"Hey Bu, is your penis okay?  Does it hurt or itch or something?"

"Nope. I'm just seeing how long my pipe is."

"Your pipe?"

"Yup.  Look.  This is how long it is."

"Wow, that's a very long pipe."  It actually was a lot longer than normal because, well, you know why.

"And it gets smaller when I squeeze it." And he savagely pinches his pipe, and whaddaya know, down it goes.

Tim managed to keep a straight face, but I couldn't hold it in.  I masked it as a coughing fit then dunked him in the tub.

All pain, all gain

"Don't worry!  It only hurts a little bit the first time, but after that, it's nothing!"  My mom assured me last week when she told me she made me an appointment for some sort of Korean weight loss body massage.  Mind you, this was after she told me she had it done to her face and it hurt so bad afterwards she couldn't handle the pain of a rubbing a powder puff on her skin.

I nervously checked in for my 1:30 appointment today at "Jennifer Skin Care."  They knew who I was before I said a word.  "Oh, you must be Mrs. Kang's daughter.  Wow!  You're bigger than I thought!"  Jennifer eyed me up and down, with a glint in her eye which can only be described as "hungry."

I stripped down and climbed onto a massage table...covered in 2 layers of thick vinyl.  I felt like I was the hired "entertainment" at a sex party.  Jennifer called over her "unni" (big sister) and the two of them got to business.

How would I describe their method?  They basically grab a handful of fat (or what they think is fat, but is actually nerve endings) and forcefully run their thumbs/elbows/rolling pin (no I am not joking) up and down about 20 times in the same place until you call uncle.  The goal was to rub the fat against your bone, generating heat, dissolving the softened fat, and hopefully pushing it to be processed as waste.  Yeah, the science really blew my mind too.  They also used some kind of vacuum device that would grab a small piece of skin at a time and they ran that over my entire body, so it was like a gigantic Indian Burn.

What killed me was that they made no allowance for pressure points, so sometimes my leg would start twitching and cramping up while they press the pressure point behind my knee again and again and again.  The most painful areas were my kidneys, which were kneaded, knotted, and switched places multiple times, and the rolling pin across my spine.  This whole process took two and a half HOURS.  Needless to say, I was crying by the end of it.

They played good cop/bad cop to try to make me laugh all throughout.  Jennifer was good cop and her territory was my upper half, and she'd coo to me to let her know if it hurts too much and she'll back off.  Well, she never did, but at least she was apologetic about it.  Unni was bad cop, and she was the one pushing all the pressure points in my legs. When I begged her to ease off, she'd say it's the fat that's hurting so it's good for me.  However, Unni had one interesting method that didn't hurt me physically and never failed to make me laugh.  She'd fist my upper thighs at a good steady pace, hurling insults at them, and asking me how in the world did I ever get this fat?  My mom is skinny, why didn't I listen to my mom?  Just the thought of getting fisted for real by someone this grouchy made me lose my shit, but then again I was probably certifiably insane by that point.

I tried to meditate and get to my happy place.  There was some ocean sounds CD playing in the background, and by then the combination of sweat/massage oil/vinyl had me sliding all over the place, so I imagined I was swimming in the ocean.  Swimming la la la, hear the waves, but then HOLY JESUS a shark has taken a large bite to my ribcage and I am going down down down okay think of something else...Guantanamo!  I imagined I was held captive and these women were trying to pump information out of me but I was valiant and remained silent.  Then I thought about waterboarding, and how that supposedly only took 15 minutes.  I imagined being waterboarded, because then I would have been done by then.  It sounds fucked up, but that was the only happy place that helped me at all.

Anyway, 2.5 hours later, I was given respite and they did a cool-down massage which immediately kicked in the Stockholm Syndrome complex and I felt so, so grateful for these two benefactors who gave pain but have now taken it away.  I cried extra tears of gratitude.  I got to change back into my clothes and my ordeal was done.

Actually, no I wasn't done.  Once I got to my feet, I immediately wanted to hurl and faint at the same time.  I was seeing stars and I dropped to my knees in their lobby.  They let me back on the massage table and sleep it off, but after an hour I was still fucked up, alternating between shivering and blacking out.  Jennifer and Unni attributed it to the fact that I had too much fat, and they activated a bunch of it, and my body was getting used to the extra blood flow.  I thought (and still think) that I was going into shock, but hey, I'm not an MD nor a Korean massage therapist.  There was no way I could have driven home, so I called my mom.  She gave me a few sips of Coke and I felt okay enough to crawl to her car.  She drove me to her house, yelling at me for being a big embarrassing pussy, and helped me into her living room couch while I tried to remain conscious. 

As we drove off, I remember Jennifer and Unni waving cheerfully at us.  "See you next Tuesday?" they cried.  "Yes!  She will be there, same time!" my mom yelled out the window.  I just rolled my head to the side and dry-heaved.

I'm feeling better now, after some fluids and dinner.  And I have to admit, my belly has gone down considerably.  It's most likely from sweating so much, and I'd much rather get wrapped in seaweed and relax under a heated blanket to get that effect, but I'm definitely intrigued despite of the aching pains and blossoming bruises I am feeling right now.  Maybe I'll even try it again next week.  After all, it only hurts the first time, right?

A cute MIL story

I totally forgot this happened, thank you MySpace for being my surrogate brain.  This story is an almost-perfect allegory of the differences between me and my mother-in-law.  I don't have any serious problems with my MIL, it's just that she is so quintessentially Japanese in all the ways I am not, and I am usually too entertained to feel unworthy and shameful.  You'll see what I mean after you read.

February 10, 2007 - Saturday

My MIL is in town, and among other things, her mission is to teach Isaac how to read his letters.  Apparently Tim (or "Timmy-chan" as she calls him, HAR HAR HAR HAR sorry babe couldn't help it) was already reading at 3, so Isaac has some major catching up to do.

In typical over-the-top Japanese fashion, she commenced making homemade flash cards by tearing down an industrial-grade cardboard box with a pair of tiny craft scissors, lovingly rounding each card's corners, then hand-drawing a machine-precise letter (font=Helvetica) on each one.  She spent hours on this.

Then, she called Isaac over and held up the letter A, and said "Isaac, what letter is this?"

"That's the ABCs!  Wow, so many ABCs!"

"This is the letter A.  Can you say A?"

"A!"

"Good!  What letter is this?" (Holding up the exact same card)

"K!  M!  Double-Yoo!"

She moves on to the next card.

"What is this?"

"B!"

"Wow!!!  Good job!  You know the letter B!"

"K!" (at the exact same card)

etc.

I was bowling over in silent laughter.  So she doesn't feel like her grandson is an absolute imbecile, I walked him over to our penguin calendar and asked him to count the penguins with me.  Isaac is much better with numbers than with letters.

He then commenced, "A, B, C, D..." instead of counting NUMBERS.  How hilarious is that? 

Obaa-chan stacked up the flashcards in defeat.  Isaac grabbed them and she let him play with them in his own way, which was tossing them around like a pirate tossing gold bullion.

However, about 15 minutes later, while we were discussing how he wasn't quite ready for this level of learning yet, Isaac walked into the room holding a plastic letter H magnet and the H flashcard, saying "Look!  One H! Another H!  They're both H!"

He didn't seem to notice our jaws on the floor.

Suburban Serendipity

This is one of my favorite stories.  I just re-read it and shocked myself by my choice of words, but for the sake of journalistic integrity (cough cough) I didn't change anything.

February 14, 2006 - Tuesday
Current mood: silly

Isaac just started his obsession with Thomas the Tank Engine, so I craiglisted for some Thomas trains.  I found one lady selling all the trains and tracks and a train table for $200.  Best thing of all was that she lived in San Ramon, where I work.

San Ramon is Stepford of the West, apparently.  I took Bollinger Canyon deeper into the foothills and when you go over one hill, there are newly-manufactured master-planned communities as far as the eye can see.  Her neighborhood was the last one, about 3 MILES down the road.  These communities are so large, they have their own SCHOOLS.  The actual houses were a lot bigger and nicer-looking than the planned community homes I've seen elsewhere, but they were still close together enough to make things uncomfortable.

This woman had to have been 35, but she looked older than my mom!  Her face was heavily wrinkled, scars from what seemed like a lifelong struggle with eating disorders.  I'm not saying this lightly, because her bones were jutting out, and her eye cavities were sunken, and the clincher, she had fake teeth (nicely done, but fake nonetheless).  Her preschool-aged daughter was chubby, and was VERY concerned when her mom was helping me lift the train table into my car.

I pissed her off a bit when I backed into her driveway and ended up in her side lawn a bit.  "It's okay, it's only temporary."  But when you're surrounded by well-manicured lawns, I'm sure some lying-down grass really sticks out!  

It turns out that the table doesn't fit into my Accord, so I have to go back.  I'm not looking forward to it, and I'm definitely not subjecting Tim to the weirdness there.  Luckily, my coworkers are stepping up and Isaac will be in train heaven soon.

I couldn't wait to get out of there, man.  My heart was racing and I couldn't breathe.  The quiet, the stucco, the WHITENESS in that kind of abundance really freaked me the hell out.

Why do white people make life so difficult for themselves?  These people live in a total fishbowl ON PURPOSE.  They pay well into the millions for the privilege to live like this, to stress out about which direction their grass lies.  Can you imagine living in a neighborhood that is MILES across?  In Windemere, no one can hear you scream!  Or barf into your toilet after every meal.

On the way back, however, I experienced some cool suburban magic: Live 105 was playing "Tainted Love," and I was singing and dancing along whilst cruising down Bollinger Canyon.  At a stop light, I saw people leaving Bishop Ranch for their lunch breaks, and wouldn't you know it, ALL of them were singing along with me.  Ten of us in ten cars, from the stiff white-collar CFO in his BMW to the lady with the 3-inch nails clutching a Virginia Slim out her window, grooving to the Gayest Song on the Planet.

Two Union City memories

I miss the Bay Area, even the boring parts of it.  The last city we lived in, Union City, was no great shakes in terms of culture or hipness, but it had a unique mix of cultures that resulted in hella-specialized Chinese restaurants, all of them delicious and dirty in their own way, and a Jollibee (I explain later in case you've never heard of it).

Here is the story of our family's first encounter with Jollibee, as well as an interesting story located by the Texas Roadhouse, a couple parking lots away.

April 29, 2006 - Saturday

Yesterday, we went to eat dinner at Jollibee, a Pilipino fast food chain that basically sells hamburgers, spaghetti, and fried chicken and that's it.  I highly recommend it, as a spaghetti dinner will set you back literally $3 and it is CRACK SPAGHETTI.  Tim and I finished sucking the stuff down in a minute flat.  It is sweeter than I expected, with chunks of spicy smoked sausage, but holy moly it was dee-licious.  At first I was careful to avoid the meat, but by the end of it I was eating the styrofoam container too, just to get more of the sauce.  I never thought I would be "chasing the dragon" spaghetti-style.  This is a new low for me.  Now I will crave for it nightly and shun the Organic Muir Glen $6/bottle tomato sauce I normally get cuz it just ain't the same, yo.  The Jollibee is my PIMP!!!

The Jollibee ensnares another young
victim into the harsh world of Crack
Spaghetti and Opium-Fried Chicken
addiction.

-------------------------------------------------------

May 7, 2006 - Sunday

Okie dokie, today was the first day Isaac ever threw up.  We went to Texas Roadhouse for lunch, and he was a little irritable all throughout and wouldn't eat much.  As we started walking back toward the car in the parking lot, Isaac (for once) wanted me to carry him.  He hardly ever wants to do that, especially with me, so I was feeling so maternal and warm as he hugged my neck and nestled his huge head on my shoulder.  He hiccuped this little baby hiccup, I thought it was so cute, then before I knew it BLAAAAAAAAAAH throw-up down my back.

Luckily, most of it landed on the asphalt.  He starts crying, and I put him down and BLAAAAAAAAAAAAAH again.  It totally looked like the way people throw up on South Park.  There is no warning at all, suddenly a parabolic arc of HELLA STUFF comes out.  Pretty cool.  He totally missed his shoes, like a pro!  Frat-ready, this one is.  Right afterwards he smiled as he stared at the neat-o puddle he just made.  I gave him a high-five, saying "Don't you feel so much better now?"

After a nap and downing 3 glasses of water, he was totally back to normal.  I'm guessing it's because he ate too much for breakfast.  So at least that feedback loop actually WORKS, as this guy can really pack it in.

What's funny is that after dinner I was carrying Isaac into the house and he burped.  Tim, who was right next to me, zipped away soooooo quickly, literally the fastest I have ever seen anyone move.  Like in one blink of an eye he went from the driveway to halfway down the entryway.  Luckily, it was a false alarm.  I would have been soooooo pissed if it happened "on my watch" again.  Tim deserves to be puked on at least once.