Friday, March 31, 2006

Random Sleep Deprived Bits and Pieces
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---->> It drives me crazy (and hurts my feelings, too, since I'm on the subject) when I'm bending over backwards to please someone or do my job or to perform well or just generally going out of my way more than usual in an attempt to win approval, and all the effort goes unpraised while something insignificant gets highlighted and criticized. I really hate to admit this, but there occasionally are times when I get invested in wanting to please people.

---> Now I know how my family feels.... :-( I'll try to lighten up.

---> Illegal immigration. Ya know, we took a lot of this country from the Mexicans, from the little bit of history I can recall. I have an idea. Why don't we ask Mexico to join the union? A lot of them end up here anyway, and why? Because conditions there are bad. At the rate we're losing farmland, we could use more of it, and I honestly think it could be a positive thing to join forces with Mexico rather than building walls and demonizing people who are only attempting to do the same thing our own ancestors did- to improve their way of life for their family. I'm not talkign about subjugating it, either. I think we should ask Mexico if they'd like to join the U.S. and be another state (or probably several more states).

--> I'm spending 8 hours a day on my feet, running around actively, and I'm breastfeeding. But I'm still not losing much weight. Huh?! Time to grease up the bicycle....

-->And another thing: I look ugly. People keep calling me a guy. It's getting old. My eye veers occasionally to the beauty products and makeup. Only problem, is, I have about as much of a clue about this stuff as most guys would, and I am seriously afraid to use it for fear of looking like a clown. Eeeeek! Besides, I hate the way it feels (from the few times other women have held me down and plastered my face). Do guys not mind the way it feels on their lips? Ick!

--> People, wear less perfume. Seriously. Half a bottle is way too much. Take the bottle with you in your car or briefcase or purse or whatever, -hell, tie it around your neck for all I care- and apply just very small amounts at a time rather than dousing yourself in enough to last the whole day and part of the next.

--> Things I want to see offered at the store: The health foody brand of chocolate that has endangered animals printed on the wrappers. That stuff is serious chocolate. Lundberg organic rice cakes with seaweed and tamari. Sounds awful? Well, I'm not a fan of seaweed myself, but I really do like this stuff. And, leeks! I wanted to make a nice leek soup, and there weren't any. No, I refuse to go to Safeway. Hey, I can dream, right? I never thought they'd carry my favorite type of soda (Blue Sky Ginseng creme) but they do now...and I never even dared to ask for it. :-)

Wednesday, March 29, 2006

Wednesday, March 15, 2006

Loath as I am to admit it, I'm beginning to come to the following conclusion: it is damned near impossible to single parent six children and do justice to anyone. In fact, I'm actually thinking it would be really hard under the best of circumstances, which in my mind would be: parents who really love each other very deeply and are the natural and commited parents of all six kids, with ample financial resources, a big enough house, out in the country with homegrown food and all that jazz. It might be pretty doable with extended family, if they were decent caring people who could be trusted with the children (i.e., not to hit them, sit them in front of a boob tube all day, etc).

Okay, so I'm feeling burned out. Look, I'm in a one bedroom house, which no matter how often I clean it, gets messed up again. Making them help me doesn't work, because as soon as I get one or two of them to lend a hand and we're a happy group, one of the others comes careening excitedly into view ("come and see this!!!") and disrupts things. I'm really trying to find a place of our own, but the only current possibility is a place half the size of this one, with no electricity or phone and possibly no water, either (well, duh, without power for the water pump, what good is the well?).

Moreover, the baby and I have both got a cold. He isn't sleeping well because his nose is stuffed up. Since the thought of having my kid sleep in a crib away from me is anathema, I don't get much sleep either. (I honestly don't know how people can sleep at all with their baby in another room. I'd worry all night long....)

Work, strangely enough, has become the solace from my homelife. There is a structure, and a schedule that always turns out pretty much as planned. It certainly isn't quiet there (they tested the fire alarm system today, eeeeek!) but it isn't the nerve-wracking stress of one impending disaster after another while you're trying to soothe the baby to sleep. The daycare provider dotes on the baby, and I can tell it isn't just when I'm there, because he's always happy and smiling when I come to get him...so while he's always in my mind, I don't worry, either. There is a rhythmn and a continuity to the work that is lacking at home, because I don't have the energy to enforce the sort of structure that I'd like to see here.

!! Charlie is crying!! :signs off:

Wednesday, March 08, 2006

I've come to the following (admittedly opinionated and generalized) conclusion:

White Americans don't particularly like or understand rice.

It's taken me a long time to grasp this simple fact, because as far as I'm concerned, plain steamed rice is GREAT, especially if it's jasmine rice. Yes, all by itself. Cold, even. Cold steamed rice with _nothing_ on it for breakfast, mmmm! :-) Rice three times a day, fine. Give me rice like that every day of the week and I'll still be looking forward to it. The notion of getting tired of rice is incomprehensible to me. I'm thinking that this has soemthing to do with the fat that my Filipino grandma helped raise me. She made excellent rice, every time, and we frequently did eat it cold, (or hot), three times a day. Rice was a mainstay, or a side dish, or a snack to be nipped at with fingers in passing, or all three. Even when my appetite for all other food lags, rice is one of the foods that retains it's appeal. Chicken soup with ginger and garlic would be the other. In my mind, rice occupies a place of respect and could almost be a food group all by itself.

Most non-Asians in the U.S. don't seem to see it the same way. Rice? Starch!! Carbs! Cover it with sauces or meats or obliterate it with "chinese" stir fry or douse it with soy sauce or grease it up with butter or flavor it with something or use it to add bulk to a soup or smear a sauce of canned soup mix over it, or worse yet, gravy. (ew!!!) Cook it so that the grains are slippery and seperate (how can you pick it up with your fingers when it's cooked that way? It doesn't feel right!). Spice it up or drown it. They might consider eating bread all by itself, but are far more likely to eat plain boiled pasta without a sauce than a bowl of plain rice.

How can they taste it when they do that? It's not that I think eating it with soy sauce is bad (so long as it's not a brown lump of rice sitting in a darker brown puddle) or that eating it with stir fry or adobo is incorrect. It's just, well, what in the hell is the matter with people that they can't like it by itself and seem so desperate not to taste it?