Feeding kimchee to the night owls

This article in the New York Times highlights New York’s unofficial reigning title as the Best City for Late Night Dining. The interesting part is that the article highlights several late-night dining venues that are Korean-inspired. It is true that in K-town, late night dining has always been a staple, but I think it’s funny that the mainstream culture has finally caught on that there’s nothing to feed a night out on the town like some good bibimbop or soft tofu soup.

Even non-Korean Sam Talbot, who runs a pushcart that sells Korean-type items like kalbee rolls and kimchee dogs (I munched on a kimchee dog from his cart once after proclaiming it was a bastardization of my country’s cuisine, and it was delish) says that he associates Korean food with “being up all night, with drinking and everything.” Haha.

I grew up eating kimchee with everything, including hot dogs, and with bulgogi in hoagie buns, and in regular bologna sandwiches, with pizza, etc., etc. Note to Sam Talbot (who I discovered is also on season 2 of Top Chef), kimchee also tastes good with fried chicken and white rice. I’d like to see that added to the cart.

Yam cream probably tastes great with waffles and a mimosa

So someone brought to my attention recently a product announcement for a board game for women going through menopause. We were pretty speechless. Some folks I know were thoroughly offended; others thought it was unbelievably hysterical. But everyone pretty much took it as tasteless.

Anyway, I’m about 25-30 years outside the game’s target demographic, so I know it’s not geared toward me. But if I were going through menopause, I probably wouldn't take it as irreverent or funny. (Actually, I'd probably think it was hilarious one second and thoroughly depressing the next.) My real reason for bringing up this game, however, isn’t to rail against some ill-conceived product that missed the taste mark. It’s to ask: What the hell is yam cream?

I get pretty much why all the other game pieces fit in with the menopause theme. I guess I’m just naïve or uninformed, but yam cream didn’t ring a bell. Thinking harder, I might have an inkling, but it’s nasty so I won’t say what I think it is aloud.

If I ever did play this game though, I think I would choose to be the diaphragm every time. If some other menopausal bitch took my game piece, the Freedom Tampon would be a close second.

Cincinnati has that je nei sais quoi

Got back recently from Cincinnati for work, a place that I was curious to visit because all I know of Cincy is the WKRP jingle, and that I always spell it wrong, with two “t”s instead of two “n”s. Alas, I didn’t get to try Cincinnati chili, but I did get to taste Graeter’s ice cream (which has Oprah’s stamp of approval) and ride a Tallstacks boat. I didn’t get to stray too much outside of the business district, so I don’t think I saw enough of the city to get a feel of the real Cincy, but overall it was pleasant enough and everyone was very nice. (Come to think of it, I don’t think I’ve ever met an Ohioan who wasn’t nice and didn’t speak in broadcaster’s English.)

I was there to visit various local companies (including one particular consumer products company that runs the city, pretty much) and on this trip I met some French and German folks who were also quite nice and pleasant enough, but whom I was amused to find were very French and German, in the way that most Americans seem to think the French and the German will be.

The Germans were friendly but definitely had the more booming of voices. The French women were rail thin and smoked whenever they had a few spare moments, and were never quite satisfied with the strength and taste of American coffee. (“Is this coffee, or is this tea?” asked one French colleague when she poured some of the admittedly bad and weak coffee provided by one of the companies.) At one point we were visiting a place that wouldn’t allow smoking within 25 feet of the entrance, with a menacing sign proclaiming so. The French women stopped at the sign almost like it was invisible fencing, puffing quickly away on the cigarettes they had just lit ten feet earlier.

So I was surprised to read this NYT article when I got back into town that says France was working toward a smoking ban. I remember being culture-shocked when I went to visit Paris a few years ago to see people smoking in the airports and the subway. At that time, indoor smoking in NYC had been a thing of the past. Smoking seemed so entrenched in the Parisian culture to me that it seems near impossible to rid it of its tobacco habit. Then again, they said they’d never be able to ban smoking in New York or LA, either (or in Ireland, for that matter), and now I can’t imagine people lighting up in enclosed quarters anymore here, like back in college, when I would step in a bar or club for two seconds only to emerge reeking of cancer-stick residue.

The best thing about the French losing their right to smoke indoors, however, is their protesting.

My favorite quotes:

“I see this as a personal attack,” said André Santini, a center-right member of Parliament from a Paris suburb and compulsive cigar smoker, who posed for photographers this week in the tobacco kiosk in the National Assembly building. “What disturbs me is the ayatollahs you meet everywhere. They tell you how you have to make love, how you have to eat.”

And…

“I’ll end my life where I started it — in the men’s room,” said Jean-Pierre Balligand, a lawmaker from eastern France. “I started smoking like every other schoolboy, in the toilets of my junior high school. And that’s where I’ll end up, in the toilets of the National Assembly, while the school principal, Mr. Debré, screams at us for smoking.”

Gotta love the French and their poetic metaphoric rants. So, ah…how you say…so dramatique!

R.I.P. Leatherface

So a person who fits the description of the leather-clad man I had an odd encounter with in the West Village a few weekends ago has a name: Richard Lewis. As suspected, he was recently released from a mental institution, and died in an apparent suicide by hanging himself by his spiked dog collar from a fence. It almost sounds too strange to be true (as evidenced by the fact that most passersby thought he was an early Halloween costume), but it reminded me of a few past encounters I’ve had with strangers whom I later found out had died.

Though my initial encounter elicited the typical shake-your-head-in-amazement-at-crazy-New-Yorkers reaction, news of his death actually struck me rather sadly. I’ve been lucky to not have lost too many loved ones, save a few aging grandparents for whom death was less about sadness, and more about letting go and being relieved that their suffering was finally over. For the most part, the people I’ve lost had lived a long and eventful life. But I’ve always been strangely affected by the death of people whom I barely knew, especially when the death has been by suicide. I often wondered what their life was like and what caused them so much sorrow that they had to take their own lives.

One summer I worked at the front desk of a Comfort Inn, and I remember a man who prepaid for his room in cash. I don’t remember his name, but I do recall that when he filled out the information card we had all walk-in guests fill out, he listed his occupation as “college professor.” And I remember that when he paid, he gave me a halfhearted smile that was the typical forced smile you give someone when you’re exhausted and just want to retreat to your own bed as soon as you can.

Except this wasn’t his own bed, and he curiously had little luggage, even for a simple overnight stay. Later that night, after my shift was over, I found out that a housekeeper had found him dead on his bed. I think he had taken some medication and placed a plastic bag over his head to suffocate himself. I remember wondering whether he really was a college professor, and, for some odd reason, whether jilted or unrequited love was the reason for him wanting to kill himself. It was an odd thought, but one that didn’t seem out of the realm of possibility. What was even more odd was the possibility that I may have been the last person he ever saw face-to-face.

I never found out his name. But the other close encounter I’ve had with suicide was a girl I knew in college, two years below me. I remember her as someone who always seemed chill, really nice, really interested in what you had to say and an all-around well-adjusted person. After I graduated she went abroad to study in France, I think, and the next time I saw her, she said she had really enjoyed it, almost too much—and I sensed something emotionally significant had happened there, because her face fell a little bit when she said that.

Then one day, at 2 am, in what would have been her senior year, I got a call at home from my friend who had heard word that she had killed herself. She had jumped out of her window, and apparently there was no mistaking that it was suicide, since the high-rise dorm in which she lived had windows that you had to take apart to open big enough to jump out of. I was shocked. I never thought that she, of all people, would do it. Aside from being seemingly well-adjusted, she was religious, and I can only imagine she was going through some kind of extreme emotional and spiritual turmoil, so much so that she lost the will to live.

I don’t think I cried that night; instead, I was shocked. Just shocked. I didn’t know what to think, really, except that I had thought about calling her a few months before just to say hello, to see how she was doing. I had lost touch with her after I graduated, but she was someone whom I definitely thought about from time to time with fondness. I did cry, however, when I finally put flowers on her grave a few months later on a dreary day in a Long Island cemetery.

I don’t think one can ever speculate how or why someone loses the will to live. I think those of us who have ever thought about it were lucky that something just stopped us short from that feeling of total despair, of total separation from the rest of the world, when you think your only option for finding peace is in death. I think of my undergrad friend from time to time, and I think she’s found that peace, though the means through which she found it was not the way she was meant to. I find solace though, in the fact that if I ever see her one day, we’ll both realize that the pain she was feeling was just a blip in the eternity she was meant to experience.