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To celebrate my fiftieth, we’ve been having an eating vacation down here in Pasadena. Friday night we had dinner at a frou-frou restaurant in Pasadena called Maison Akira. Karen and I both had a miso-flavored sea bass dish which was fairly good, although neither of us cared for the bed of quinoa on which it was served. To me, quinoa has a musty, “off” flavor that detracts from whatever it accompanies. Maison Akira is a French-Japanese fusion restaurant, which means I was able to eat escargot and sashimi in the same dinner. And I did. The escargot were sufficiently garlicky and buttery, and were a good deal more fleshy than I’m used to, although I’m pretty sure they were not African giant snails. But perhaps a dwarf cousin of the giant snail. Definitely bigger than what I’m used to.
I don’t know . . . a place like that, everything ought to be die and go to heaven. It really wasn’t. The soft shell crab was plainly of the frozen-and-thawed variety, and it showed. Karen and Jake had decent desserts — Karen, a Baked Alaska with green tea ice cream at its core, and Jake, this odd confection crowned with a caramelized sugar globe. I took pictures, but I have to figure out how to upload them to the blog. Perhaps I can upload them to Facebook and then link it? Hmm. Let’s try that. Nope, nothing yet.
Anyway, I had a figs-sauteed-in-Port-wine thing that was just okay. Would have been better were it not for the shredded mint littering the dish. Hey, not everyone likes mint. If I wanted a mojito I would have ordered a mojito.
Yesterday, we went to Duck House in Monterey Park for lunch, which is one of the few places left, I’m guessing, where you can get Peking Duck without ordering it a day in advance. For their signature dish, I’d have to say they deserve only a B-. The skin was crispy and perfect, and yes that’s the most important thing, but the meat was tasteless. But what’s a boy to do — Quan Jude has disappeared from the San Gabriel Valley, and that had always been our place for Peking Duck. To paraphrase Lloyd Bentsen, “You, sir, are no Quan Jude.” We also had a stir-fried lamb dish, tasty but not lamby. I like my lamb a little lamby, otherwise I worry that they’re feeding me beef. We had some excellent crab there, some greasy noodles, and a hot red bean paste dessert that was probably the best thing we had.
But the true star of this eating vacation was Azeen’s Afghanistan restaurant in Pasadena. What a find! We had the sambosa appetizer (like an Indian samosa, but lighter . . . and indeed, much of Afghani food, if this restaurant is representative, is a lighter, more delicate version than its equivalent in Indian cuisine). For main courses we had the mixed kebabs, the eggplant with onions and tomatoes, the spinach-onion-and-garlic stew, and an amazing butternut squash dish. Mark of a superb restaurant: I think we each had a different favorite dish. This is a restaurant that gets everything right, and I’m sure we’ll be coming back.
Not sure what’s on the menu for today. Breakfast, for starters. All this rich food has been doing a dance on my innards, so once I’m back in Bako, I’ll probably subsist on smoothies for the rest of the week. Smoothies, the perfect diet food (you just have to make them yourself to control the ingredients).
D.
So here’s the death toll thus far. I’ve had five fillings and one root canal/crown. I still need another crown but we’re leaving that to 2012 because I’ve exceeded my benefits for the year. And no telling what he wants to do to my left lower quadrant; perhaps that’s a project for 2013.
 After I finish doing my teeth, the cool tatt is absolutely next. Of all the various discomforts of dental work, the least of it is the needle. Yeah, I know some people hate the local injection, but I’m a surgeon. The local injection is our friend. And I need plenty of him, heaven knows; I’m one of these people who gets numb only after the third injection.
Next in line of things I hate the most would be the pain of the drilling. Honestly, it’s more the anticipation of pain than the pain itself that bugs me. If I could be certain that the low level pain I experience is the limit of it, I would gladly forgo that third injection. But I’m not a trusting sort, and I keep expecting the nerve to wrap itself around the drill and send my brain into the stratosphere.
Worse than the injection and the pain of the drilling is that awful itchy feeling I experience when the lidocaine starts to wear off. I have to show enormous restraint to avoid tearing the flesh off my face.
And worst of all is the TMJ because, unlike everything else, it lingers for days.
All that’s left for 2011 is the placement of the permanent crown. And he’s not even charging me for it. Because he already has.
Do you suppose he has to numb me to remove the temporary crown and place the permanent? I hope not.
D.
otherwise, I’d be dying right now.
D.
This afternoon, I heard a piece on NPR about the giant African snail, which is an invasive species in South Florida. Look at these monsters:
They’ll eat any and all vegetation. They’ll even eat the stucco off a house. They are incredibly difficult to eradicate, and they carry an organism that can cause meningitis in humans (which is why the dude in the photo is wearing gloves, I’m guessing). On the other hand, they might prove to be part of the solution for protein malnutrition in Africa. Which I am totally okay with. I would eat that snail pie. I’ll take a pass on the locusts, though.
***
We’ve been having trouble with our Miata’s AC. Dean, I’m talking to you here, since you’re a Miata owner and a car guy (i.e., you can change your oil without getting a panic attack like some of us). Here’s the deal: the AC cut out while Karen was idling the car, waiting for Jake to get out of school. Took it into the shop and the mechanic said the compressor was shot. He replaced the compressor (and showed us the old one — there was some kind of thoroughly rotten gasket thingie in there). Next time we drove it in hot weather, it was evident that the AC was underpowered. I took it back, and he flushed the system or some damn thing. After that it worked great in cool weather and hot weather, and stayed good for almost a week. Then, last Thursday, it cut out again while Karen was idling for all of about 15 minutes.
I took it in today and asked the mechanic to let it idle for 15 minutes. He let it idle for 45 minutes, he says*, and everything was fine. And I drove it away from his place and it stayed fine. I asked him what would make it cut out like that and he didn’t know.
Maybe this is one for the Car Talk guys.
***
Still writing here and there. It was a busy week so I didn’t get a chance to work until today. Gonna get back to it momentarily. I keep feeling torn between “trite” and “great.” “Great” because I enjoy rereading it, “trite” because, well, it’s a commercially sound story, i.e. the kind of thing that would likely sell. I’m almost feeling guilty that it’s not weird enough.
***
Finished Sara Gran’s Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead. And, wow. This author’s writing is up there with Jonathan Lethem, Michael Chabon, Martin Cruz Smith . . . I was very impressed with this novel, and I’ve liked her other novels, too (Dope and Come Closer were great; I haven’t read Saturn’s Return to New York).
I’ve also been dipping into Jeff Huber’s Bathtub Admirals which is quite good (and reading a not-yet-published book by a certain author who frequents this blog!) The blurbs on Huber’s book compare it to Catch-22, but so far I am liking it a whole lot better than Catch-22, which I have never been able to finish, despite trying multiple times.
***
Okay, stop procrastinating.
D.
*I dunno — shouldn’t the gas gauge drop at least an eighth of a tank if he really let it idle for that long? Maybe I need to run this test myself.
5822, spread out over three incomplete chapters.
Bits of scenes come to me and I write them down or email them to myself, to save them from memory death.
Just letting it happen however it will. Not fighting it.
Having fun.
D.
This was an unusually busy week, what with the AC pooping out in Karen’s car, scrambling around with a rental, getting the AC repaired, returning the rental, all within the confines of my 8 to 5 job. And I wasn’t even on call. On Thursday after work, I had to submit to another hour and forty-five minutes of Special Torture at the dentist, wherein he finished the root canal and got my #12 ready for a permanent crown. Why this is such a big production, I do not know. You would think I might understand these things since I look at teeth all day, but I’m not really looking at teeth. I’m looking around teeth. And if I happen to look at the teeth themselves, it’s usually because they’ve attracted my attention in an “oh, yuck” kind of way.
I had surgery on Tuesday*, administrative duties on Wednesday, and clinic pretty much every day of the week, and what with the car and the dentist and everything else, I only managed to make dinner on Friday night. Otherwise it was all takeout. On Friday I made doro wat (this recipe), which went over well, except no one liked the couscous. Would have been better had I had some pita, I guess, or even basmati rice, but I was already so pressed for time that I made the fastest starch I could think of, hence the couscous. Of course, traditional is the fermented Ethiopian pancakes known as injera, but I’ve never been able to reproduce these pungent little crepes at home. Wrong ingredients and likely the wrong technique.
Needless to say, I didn’t get any writing done this week. Thinking, yes, writing, no. Not even blogging.
And on Thursday, I succumbed to my usual eat-under-stress drive and consumed WAY too much salt (in the mode of pork rinds) and my weight shot up three pounds. I’ve been piling the water in to try to pee off that weight, but it’s a slow process. I hate my body, the way it craves salt and yet punishes me with instant poundage if I give into the craving even a little bit. (And on Thursday, I gave in more than a little bit.) I wish I could live in a boot camp where I can only eat what they feed me. Such is my lack of self control.
Making lasagna tonight, but I’ll have to avoid eating it myself, other than for the little taste to make sure it came out okay. Since I don’t have a working pasta thingie at the moment, I am going to try using those no-boil pasta sheets. Hell, Cooks Illustrated swears by them.
And now I’m biding time . . . Jake has service hours this afternoon (the Greek Food Festival, where they will hopefully feed their slave labor pool of eager student volunteers) so I will get a chance to go sweat in the gym and hopefully excrete some of this salt water weight.
D.
*Occurred to me in rereading this that most folks would interpret this to mean that I went under the knife. No, gentle readers, I was most definitely over the knife, not under it.
Brian Blessed: I love this guy. 74, and I hope he’s here to bellow at us on his 100th birthday.
D.
But I have been writing. New stuff, not just editing old stuff. Don’t know how long it’ll last but for the time being, the muse is feeding me ideas, and if I’ve learned one thing, it’s that you don’t fuck with the muse.
D.
Similar to his “bad doctor” sketch, and just as hilarious.
D.
One of my favorite essayists is former Harper’s editor Lewis Lapham (who, in his life since Harper’s, now edits Lapham’s Quarterly). Lapham’s essays often have a unique form of argument, stabbing at the thesis from multiple directions, convincing you of the thesis’s validity before the thesis has ever been articulated. By the time the reader finishes, he not only agrees with the thesis (usually) but has a deeper understanding of the topic; and if he does not agree, he still comes away with that same depth of knowledge.
I have always felt that this was the pinnacle of essay writing, the ideal to which the young author should aspire. When I home-schooled my son, knowing that he didn’t have the depth of knowledge that decades of scholarship brings, I simplified the format into one which would still stand him in good stead in college. Begin with your thesis paragraph, I told him, develop and prove it in the paragraphs which follow, and restate at the end; but, and here’s the kicker, your goal should be to augment the thesis with your arguments, and when you conclude, restate a thesis which is deeper than the one with which you began. Call it value-added essay writing.
Jake’s Theology teacher (a Jesuit, and therefore in my opinion NOT an intellectual lightweight) disagrees. Theology this year is a writing class more than anything else. All to the good. I asked Jake how he was doing, and he told me that the only thing the teacher red-lined was precisely the thing I had been teaching him all these years. I know what his teacher has in mind because he discussed this with us at Open House. He wants a very simple format: state your thesis, support it, restate it at the end. In other words:
Okra is a disgusting vegetable.
It’s slimy no matter how you cook it.
The taste in no way compensates for its inherent sliminess.
Hence, okra is a disgusting vegetable.
Whereas my ideal essay would run more like this:
Okra is a disgusting vegetable.
It’s slimy no matter how you cook it, and the taste in no way compensates for its inherent sliminess.
In many areas of the country, a child could easily get through the first twenty years of life without seeing, let alone tasting, an okra dish, while in other areas of the country, okra is as much a part of a weekly schedule as potatoes, onions, or carrots. Those people often develop a fondness for okra.
In other parts of the world, staple foods may include things that others find unacceptable and “disgusting” — blood, intestines, insects. Foods we find acceptable (poached egg, anyone?) might be similarly revolting to people living in those regions. The emotion of disgust in response to particular foods may have more to do with what the eater is used to than anything else. Never eat anything slimy? Then slimy is not a characteristic you associate with acceptable food.
Okra’s unacceptability to many Americans is thus not only an example of the diversity of dietary practices in the world, but also tells us a little something about human nature.
(Forgive the topic, you okra-lovers; I pulled that one out of the air. And I’m afraid I did not put much time into creating something that would stand in the same galaxy as Lapham’s essays, let alone the same room.)
The Theology teacher’s version is geared toward getting high marks on AP History or English essay exams. The SAT written exam almost certainly has similar grading practices. Considering how poorly most college students write at the undergraduate level, I suspect most college profs would be delighted to read a well executed version of the A, B, C, D, and therefore A essay. So there’s nothing at all wrong with this goal. It’s good writing. But it’s not great writing.
Okay, so maybe I was wrong in my attempt to get Jake to shoot for the stars. But I don’t think so. Because if you can write even a little bit like Lapham, you can easily modify your writing to suit the circumstances. I explained this to Jake this morning . . . hopefully he can excuse me for making him write with too much finesse.
D.
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