Bye-bye Mukai, hello Kimutaku

Since Tuesday I have been exchanging pictures, video links and r-rated commentary with my (married) older sister (who's probably even weirder than yours truly, except that she's a Clark Kent when it comes to concealing the true twistedness of her mind). The subject of our energetic cyber-exchange is one very hot man by the name of Kimura Takuya, who we discovered last Sunday evening on one of our dvd marathons. The name of the show we were watching? Engine. The number of episodes in that 2005 tv show? 11. Did we stay up to watch it until the last episode because we were itching to see the kiss? Yes, and we didn't finish until 4:00 in the morning.

She sent me an email a few hours ago while she was at work, just to tell me she had just finished watching a Youtube video montage of Kimutaku's kissing scenes -- thrice. I wonder if she has already managed to unpucker her lips after so many repetitions of the video. As for me, I prefer to watch the dude dance. He can move, this one, and I can actually feel my eyeballs dilate when he swings his hips like they're connected by gyros. I just saw a video tribute created by one very dedicated fangirl for Kimutaku's birthday, and omg the man just ooooooozes sexy. The best thing about discovering this perfect specimen of the Asian male? He's from the same decade. Thirty-seven years old, but he looks better than any other scrawny jap idol half his age. Pffffft. Why don't men like him exist over here?

Finally, I have succeeded in making an edible soba dish. Kanpais to the culinary angel who shared her recipe for buckwheat soba and shrimp soup online. Now I know that the absolutely indispensable ingredient, when one wants shoyu+mirin not to taste just like watered-down soy sauce, is a teaspoon of sugar. I'm proud to say that I managed to whip up something that tasted just like it came from a restaurant. Now there's absolutely no reason not to say 'itadakimasu'.

Ayumi and Sobayaki

There's a stray yellow tomcat who started hanging around my place late last year; it all began when I caught him sleeping on top of my washing machine one morning, and I meowed at him instead of shooing him away. I'm a sucker for a friendly cat, so when he meowed back, one thing led to another, and a week later, he had designated the doormat and the hood of my car as alternative sleeping quarters. I hear the neighborhood kids call him 'Patrick', but when he's in my territory, his name is Nakatsu. I feed him my leftovers whenever I have any to spare. Usually he hangs around in the morning and disappears after I give him a bit of breakfast. When I come home from work at night, he sometimes comes running from a house further down the road, and waits around for food. He meows behind my closed front door whenever he hears the sound of a spoon clinking against a plate.

Several nights ago, he brought a friend with him, a pregnant grey cat with big yellow-rimmed eyes. She looked really starved, so I gave her a bigger share of milk. I had to hold Nakatsu down and coax her over so she would eat. I named her Ayumi, and she disappeared for about a week after I first fed her. Yesterday night, she came back, and had already had her kittens somewhere. Nakatsu was nowhere to be seen, so she had a dish of milk all to herself. She gave me a high-pitched meow and a long look with her big eyes. If cats could talk I think she must have meant to say thank you.

I think Ayumi must have brought me luck, because I had a big payday today, and I didn't even expect it. I went over to a publishing firm to collect one very small check for a job I did last month, and when I got there I was given two more checks (much bigger ones too) for two projects that I didn't expect to get paid for until later in the year. Here's the icing on top of the cake too: I was told to collect a larger-than-usual royalty check by the end of February. Ka-ching! This almost beats my Christmas haul!

My two friends and I headed off to The Block, and I, having suddenly been blessed with unexpected fortune, treated them to dinner at the Banana Leaf. Two orders of roti canai with curry sauce, one black pepper steak, one dish of crunchy spring rolls, and one order of Macau chicken. I love roti bread and curry sauce! It has the same crave-for-it-when-you're-expecting-your-period effect as salt-encrusted french fries with ketchup. Effie and I could eat it all day even if we end up with toxic turmeric breath.

Nipponphilia: still kicking. I've added two more Miura plants to my windowsill garden -- a dark green aloe named Mukai, and a miniature tree named Morita. Last weekend I bought a package of buckwheat soba noodles and a bottle of Mirin; I was intending to make sukiyaki or a soba dish for lunch this afternoon, but because I didn't have the complete ingredients for either the sukiyaki recipe or the soba recipe I got off the internet, I ended up frankensteining the two recipes, with somewhat disastrous results. Soba noodles are really tasty on their own, and I shouldn't have dunked them or the shiitake mushrooms into the shoyu-mirin mixture, which just tasted like a lot of watered-down Kikkoman. I couldn't stop myself from making a face every time I bit into the mushrooms and they squirted out the soy sauce broth. My stomach did not enjoy its introduction to raw egg, and I doubt that it will grow friendlier over subsequent soba/sukiyaki experiments, so I might just drop it altogether or buck tradition and boil it in the broth until it's salmonella-free. Renny christened my mad scientist noodle dish 'sobayaki'. I think I can safely promise never to make it again.

Today's Gallimaufry: Bloodshot Eyes, Substandard Sympathy, Chronic Immaturity, and Stupidity Secondary to Obsession

I was looking for another way to say "hodgepodge collection" and discovered the word GALLIMAUFRY in the dictionary. I love words, and I enjoy learning new ones, especially the ones that sound scary and are very rarely used by anybody except uppity english professors, a grandstanding Philippine senator whose name starts with "M", and a certain blogger who believes it might help her sound more intelligent than she really is. Owing to the fact that my memory is no longer what it used to be before I sabotaged the wiring with nicotine and Zoloft, it's likely that I will have forgotten the word within the next seventy-two hours. For the sake of posterity, 'gallimaufry' means a confused jumble of things. It can also mean a dish of minced meat, and is derived from the archaic french 'galimafree', meaning 'an unappetizing dish'.

Here are the ingredients that made up my unsavory week.

My new book project is just as difficult as the last one, and as a result I've been up every night until 3AM, wrestling with the copious prose of an early 19th-century author. I thought that after surviving my bloody match with Homer (probably the worst case of verbal diarrhea in the history of man), anything else that got thrown my way would be a piece of cake. I was entirely wrong. I think I may be doomed to absorb the radiation from my computer monitor through my eyeballs for the next eight weeks. God knows I tried, but I can't go any faster than that. I can't get past two chapters of this new book without straining so much that I could probably lay an egg on my chair if I were a roosting chicken. Squawk!!

I met a friend for dinner last Wednesday night. She lost her father to cancer a few months ago, and I wanted to see how she was doing. I don't know the first thing about how to behave around the freshly bereaved, so I didn't bring up the subject. I talked about other things. The conversation went well for a while, until I mentioned something related to men (never mind what it was exactly). Well, she snapped. I could swear I saw red sparks shooting out of her eyeballs when she groused that all our group ever talks about are men and dating, and the lack of either of them. 'Can't we talk about anything other than that?' she barked, and if I didn't happen to be strangely in control of my tongue that night, I would have probably said something flippant like "Like what, quantum physics?"
I didn't apologize for bringing up a subject she was apparently sick of. I didn't bring it up to rile her in the first place. I said something along the lines of man-talk being ultimately unavoidable between aging single women friends, and then I let the matter rest. Perhaps it was after I remained quiet for a while and turned my attention to my roti canai and curry sauce, that she began to talk about how sad she was feeling lately. She said she wanted to start being happier, but she couldn't. She said she didn't know what to do about money when the schoolyear ends and she'll be out of work as an art club teacher for a while. She wants to look for other work or maybe start a small business, but she can't get herself to act on it on account of her grief. All I could do was listen, and say that it was normal to feel that way, since it has only been a few months since her father passed away. I told her she ought to let the sadness run its course first, and sometime soon she would know when she was ready to move on.
She said something that made me feel somehow that she didn't believe she would ever get over her grief. She said she knew someone who was still grieving after three years, and though she didn't say so, I'm convinced she expects herself to do the same. I know many people will disagree with me on this, but I believe that you can take control of your grief if you really wanted to, and if you recognize the necessity of doing so -- not immediately of course, but after some time has passed. A year seems quite enough time to mourn the loss of a loved one. Perhaps two, if it was someone you were really close to. But if you take any more time than that, I think it means you would rather not step back into a world that has undergone an irrevocable change. Grief takes hold of us whether we like it or not, when someone dies. But when it goes on far too long, I think it's because we don't want to let it go.
But what do I know? I have a twelve-year old's understanding of grief. My own father died when I was in sixth grade. I shook hands with the reaper twenty-five years before most everyone else. I learned to see death as something to be expected at any time, something that shouldn't come as a surprise. I came to understand it as something you had to get over as quickly as you could, because the rest of our lives were stretched ahead of us, and we didn't have a choice but to live it without him.
I went to see another friend, and I told her about my encounter with the recently-bereaved friend. She says I am the often the perpetrator of the lately-annoying discussions about men, and agrees that I am the worst person to have around people who have just lost someone special. She also says that I can be very irritating when I am too bubbly around someone who's feeling low, and that I tend to talk about "fluffy" stuff that nobody really wants to hear.
I understand perfectly, though it stings to be told such a thing. I doubt, though, that much can be done to cure me of my stingy sense of sympathy or my bubbly fluffiness. My capacity for condolence is fixed; my childish interests chronic. I guess I will just have to learn to shut up more often.

It's the seventh month of my madness for all things Japanese. I now have a vocabulary comparable to that of a Japanese six-year old, can form actual sentences for basic survival, and count up to 99,999. I know two ways to call someone a moron. The Ernie doll behind the back seat of my car wears a kimono. I often sing J-pop when I drive. I have watched at least half a dozen Japanese tv series. I own a genuine yukata and five Miura miniature plants named Daniel (from my short-lived Korean period), Nakatsu, Sano, Izumi, and Chiaki. I recently got over my admiration of Tamaki Hiroshi, and am now starry-eyed over Mukai Osamu, who plays Mayama in the live action version of "Honey and Clover" (Hachimitsu to Kuroba). (He is living proof that a good-looking face can be made even better with the right pair of glasses. Sure, the boy is ten years too young for me, and in some countries I'd probably be stoned for unlawful attraction to a minor, but it's not like I'll ever get anywhere near him anyway).

**Warning: possibility of disturbing visuals. Last Tuesday morning, as I sat on the toilet doing number two and flipping through my cellphone messages, I got the idea of changing my phone language to Japanese. It was only after the deed was done (not the toilet deed, the phone one), that I realized that I wouldn't know how to return to the English menu because I couldn't read in Hiragana. Panic! Flop sweat! I was assaulted by visions of asking for help from a half-Japanese friend from high school or a Greenhills cellphone pirate, and having to relate the details of my idiocy. Masakaaaaaaa! One hour later (but honestly, it felt like an eternity), thanks to a combination of elimination, dumb luck, and the menu listings from the manual, I restored my unit back to English. Now would be a good time to call myself a moron in one of the possible two ways. twistedspinster no ahoo!