notageek

Thanks to the benevolence and generosity of my in-laws, I am no longer wokless. This wok is of a cast-iron variety, and it has a heft similar to a cast-iron skillet. Due to travelling circumstances to be complained about later, the wok emerged from its packaginging only today, and I have since been studiously ignoring the accompanying literature which explains that it is preseasoned and needs no further such treatments.

The first time I tried cooking in a wok, my mother was out of town and so were all of the ingredients. My concoction weighed heavily on the pineapple and carrot. As I hadn’t really learned to wield a knife, the carrot pieces were large and irregular, and wouldn’t cook in the underheated oil. I dumped in a cup of water, let it boil off, and called the vegetables cooked when they were reasonably unsoupy again. This overlong and overmoist cooking technique was my standard in my teenage years, and figured large in my inability to figure out why people raved about stir-frying.

There are things which are very good when cooked in a stir-braised kind of way with both oil and water. But it helps when it is done intentionally, and I also managed to categorically avoid most of these things in my early cooking years. By the time I got married, I’d switched over to sauteed sorts of dishes where stir-fry could have been used, to reasonable success. Kind people sent me a food processor and a slow cooker when I got married, and I appreciated both when I started working full-time this summer.

I started reading Barbara Fisher’s Tigers and Strawberries food weblog this summer, after a feisty post of hers about squeamish nonvegetarians started getting pingponged around some farm weblogs I read because I am a big ole hippie. I am a former veg-head, and holy crap, I love that post, so I started reading Barbara regularly. That gal can write, and hell, that gal can cook. She is unapologetic about loving to cook and doing it all really damn well.

This set my halfbreed mind a-turning. I have Chinese restaurant phobia, a phenomenon common to second- or higher-generation Asian Americans who either don’t speak their ancestral Asian languages, or who speak insufficiently citified dialects. I have it because I speak about 30 words of Cantonese. My mom has it because she sounds like a freakin’ hick. My dad does not have it, because nobody expects a beard-faced white guy to speak Chinese. He has no trouble meeting the expectations.

The most common effect is eating a lot of Thai food, because while I am unlikely to be mistaken for Vietnamese, Vietnamese restaurants are not so ubiquitous within walking distance of my house. The restaurant-phobia actually extends way beyond restaurants, in a cycle wherein being insufficiently Chinese increases the reluctance to lay claim to any aspects of Chinese culture.

But if a hillbilly gal can cook Chinese food well and unapologetically, there is no need for me to be a shrinking violet either. There is also, I discovered, no earthly reason why I cannot heat the oil hotter and make a successful stir-fry in my cast-iron frying pan–which is peeping over the back of the wok. I over-fried a few meals, but they were still so much better than my teenage flumpety-wumpety wok concoctions that I figured this was something I could seriously get behind.

Visiting my parents over most of the winter break kind of clinched it. I made almost a week’s worth of dinner, starting with the turkey jook my mom and I co-concocted, through several days of different vegetables with black bean/beef toppings, ending with a pumpkin flan and a giant pot of chai. I used my mom’s flat-bottom carbon-steel wok on her electric stove for all the stir-frying, and while it worked it cooled down too much when I dumped, say, a couple pounds of asparagus into it. That’s when I realised I cared about things like how quickly the wok cools down when you dump stuff into it.

“When did you become such a good cook?” my family kept asking, and I credited my husband for being my willing guinea pig, but that’s only part of it. I became a better cook after reading Barbara’s weblog, because I became unafraid, both to experiment and to cook Chinese. And to heat the gorram oil.

This is the sort of New Year’s purgatory for a lot of North Americans of East Asian descent, stuck between the Western calendar rollover and the Lunar New Year. A lot of us call our moms twice, just in case. But it’s the New Year now, and it is always the new year, just it is always sunrise somewhere. The wok is a symbol and all that, feeding your family and center of the hearth and fusion of elemental fire and human workmanship blah blah. But my wok is about being bold and unafraid, and becoming the better for it.

Happy Gnu Ear.

My brothers and I used to make stories up to entertain each other on car rides when we were much younger. We weren’t real picky; the ride to the grocery store would do. Sometimes we illustrated them with hand-puppets.

On a vacation that involved more National Parks than anyone but my dad really felt necessary, we started trying to make up the most boring story possible, not knowing that we could have gotten Paul Thomas Anderson to make it into a movie in a few years.

Once, there was a cow. It ate some grass. It said moo. The End.

“Boring”, for us, had a high correlation with “short”. We tried to improve on it.

Once there was a cow. It ate some grass. The End.

My other brother had a better idea.

Once there was a cow. It exploded. The End.

We protested that cows exploding was far too exciting a premise for the conditions set, but he was undeterred. Every story of his from then on exploded, blew up, or went into outer space.

This, incidentally, is the same brother who has Asperger’s. We have discovered that we get along pretty well when we live in different states. About a decade after our story-telling (and excruciatingly long-vacation) days, our developmental-pediatrician father ruminated on how the exploding stories were a metaphor for my brother’s inabilities to cope with non-stereotyped situations.

In the intervening years, my brother (who has chosen Fox as a pseudonym, making him Fox Brother) has acquired a nearly normal set of social skills that allow nearly normal interactions with other people. He has a job at RadioShack, volunteers at a computer-recycling/resale facility, and is lumbering along an electronics degree track.

I asked him if he ever read my blog.

“What? Why would I do that? I don’t see the point of blogs. You tell the whole world your deepest, darkest secrets?”

My mom had, in fact, recognised my username as a link from my boyf^Whusband’s website and read most of my archives. So yes, the entire world. But not my deepest, darkest secrets. Retrospectively, it makes sense that Fox Brother has no interests in blogs other than the engadget sort; pure information exchange and not social information exchange is the point for him. But he went on, after I pointed out that I share only the shallowest and slightly-dingiest of my secrets on my weblog.

“What do you write, then?”

Last night my husband was snoring so loud that I went and slept on the couch? The End. It exploded!

I don’t think I can argue with that.

Somewhat like vegetarians who explain they hate plants, I’ve grown into a form of feminism where I hate both women and men. As gravity acts equally on all masses, so does my loathing apply equally to each fault. Sure, I’ll toe the feminist majority line about equal opportunity and even a bit about sisterhood, supportiveness in male-dominated environments and ungenerated hypotheses in scientific theory–but there is this thing I loathe about women that I have never seen in men, and so I hate the women who have it just a little bit more.

It is not counterbalanced by the horror that is ball sweat.

I was once a physics major, and I took a few entry-level programming and higher math classes, and I worked pretty closely with an old-skool biologist as an undergrad. I’ve seen both the overt and inadvertent sexism that can emerge in a environment of predominantly men, even if they are highly educated men who consider themselves above such things. I know how frustrating it is to get herded into the Female Lab Group, and that not all women can deal by gritting their teeth and just doing better than everyone. I know that some female-dominated professions can/have developed homologous anti-male biases, and I’m entering a profession which is rapidly becoming female-dominated (and god help me, because I’m going to have to learn how to put anti-drama in the HEPA filter).

Some male-, and a few female-dominated professions are full of traditionals or neotraditionals espousing gender-based theories about members of one sex having some inherent superiority in the field; it’s based on mental images of non-overlapping normal curves of male and female ability and such (neo-)traditionals not making the leap to realising that aggregate statistics tell you pretty much nothing about the ability of the individual in front of you. That much is crap and needs to go. I also think it’s true that same-sex support groups can be helpful for persons of the non-dominant sex in a profession.

Women who wish to be treated as equals in male-dominated environments need to act as equals. We must succeed or fail on our merits as professionals, and not our merits as women in the profession. In addition to removing irrelevant institutional barriers to our success, we must remove the notion of female exceptionality–that being “good, for a women” is good enough. Lowering the bar for female success relative to male devalues each true female success, and reinforces the expectation that women, both in person and in aggregate, are incapable of performing as well as males.

I say women in male-dominated environments throughout the last paragraph because I have never seen a man achieve the shoulder disarticulation of a few women who have attained some minor benchmark in a technical field and laud themselves and each other without end.

I have, as I type, a washcloth draped over half my face. On top of the washcloth is a cotton sack full of white rice, which in turn is in a plastic grocery sack. This sack weighs roughly two pounds, and as my head is of extraordinary hardness but only average size and density, it is balancing somewhat precariously. As with anything in my life, I have an unique confluence of events to thank for this situation. This one, however, is sillier.

Bench science goes through these cycles, where some lab or group thinks up a new way to irradiate or visualise or disambiguate something, and then it gets more popular, and then it gets manufactured by a start-up corporation for only ten times the money you could have spent building it yourself, except that now it’s got a warranty. Field biology is stuck at the first stage, because of the variability of conditions and lack of foreknowledge about what, exactly, one might be counting or measuring.

My family is also stuck at the first stage, unless the manufactured version is on a really good sale, in which case we will buy it and then call each other to brag. My grandfather,–who is the sort of good-hearted fellow who probably would never have gotten married if it weren’t for the matchmaking system in China–has a yard full of gardening implements he made himself, out of rebar.

And forks, which he soldered to the rebar, which is the handle part. He also has a few trowels made of mitre-cut PVC pipe. Because, for several years running, my oldest uncle and his wife decided that all the sibling-spouse pairs were getting Ma and Baba a big-screen TV for Christmas, there is a television with a remote in their dining room. My grandfather, unable to flip channels with a bowl in one hand and chopsticks in the other, rigged a remote stand with a spent kitchen sponge and a few rubber bands, so that he can poke buttons with as little effort as they deserve.

My mother had a frozen shoulder a few years back–a not uncommon condition for menopausal women, in which the rotator cuff muscles become inflamed and range of motion is compromised. In between PT appointments, she spent a lot of time massaging knots out of her back and shoulder muscles. Children and husband lacked the necessary stamina, so she turned to things like convex corners of walls, bannisters, and those wooden torture devices intended for foot massage. Eventually none of these proved satisfactory, and she taped two golf balls to a kitchen chair at height where she could get good leverage on her supraspinatus. We no longer flop down to dinner at our parents’ house, lest we get golfed near the kidneys.

The propensity for jerry-rigging also manifests in an extreme reluctance to throw away anything non-compostable because it “looks like it might be useful”. To wit: Twisty-ties. Reclosable plastic food tubs. Ostensibly-disposable eating utensils in plastic, bamboo and starch*. Rubber bands. Cardboard produce cups. Bacon grease. Paper-towel cores. Wasabi powder. An incomplete, unlabelled set of hex keys.

I woke up a few days ago and my left lower eyelid was swelling, red and tender. The triage nurse prodded it, had me look in a few extreme directions, and declared it to most likely be a hordeolum, or stye. Antibiotics are of little utility for styes, which are infections of either eyelash follicles or one of the ocular glands, depending on who you ask, but the standard of care is hot compresses as much as the patient can tolerate.

A hot compress, prepared by the medically accepted fashion of irrigating with hot tap water and wringing, cools very quickly. But I, as a patient, can tolerate a lot of silliness better than a little bit of pain, including a very tender eye.

And that is why I have a hot rice pack on my face.

_{*We are from Eugene.}