label me

Labels are annoying. They have a way of defining you that is trite and limiting. For example, when people ask me where I am from, the answer they're looking for is not New Jersey. They want to know if I am Korean or Japanese. When I reply that I am Chinese, they give a knowing nod and say, "Oh really?!" But what does it mean to be Chinese? Obviously, I am not the Chinese from China in their imaginations, but that's not important because a Chinese is a Chinese above all else, whatever that means.

Sometimes, labels can be useful. For example, recently I discovered that I am a flexitarian. All of my life when people ask me about my food preferences I feel compelled to explain that while I love vegetables and eat and cook mostly vegetables I am an omnivore. But that is a mouthful. Finally, I have my own label. Like vegetarians, pescatarians, lacto-ovo vegetarians, I-eat-chicken vegetarians, I-eat-chicken-fish-eggs-dairy vegetarians, the-only-animals-I-eat-have-two-feet-or-less vegetarians, and vegans, I have a word to describe me (at least my food preferences anyway).

Having a label this time feels good. It feels like there may be a colony of like-minded flexitarians in the universe. That I am not alone. I may not be unique, but now I am legitimate.

girly man

Riding in a bus today, my attention alighted on the back of a young man's left earlobe. He wore an earring. If he and his stud had been facing me, his face and jewel would have seemed patches of color, wallpaper on a bus. But because he had been facing away, I saw it. The earring back was silver and dainty, its two ends curling c0yly. I thought the whole business girly.

Pirates don't look girly, from the front or back. Maybe it is because the earrings they sport are hoop-shaped. Just as they don't use pretty ribbons to tie their wooden legs on, they don't need backs to keep their earrings in.

The young man was also wearing a ring. It was a brass band with carvings on it. Visualize this ring as if it had a big fat diamond or emerald or ruby protruding from it and you will understand my feeling toward the earring back.

To speak a Romance language compels one to make decisions about, or be reminded of, what is masculine and what is feminine. In a Romance language, there are no queer nouns, no sliding scales, no spectrum of beings.

Though now it is normal, even hip and sometimes uber manly, for a heterosexual man to wear earrings, to me, in my Spanish-speaking frame of mind, I was looking at a transvestite.

my favorite weed

ten thousand honey
suckles suggest sweet summer's
secret solitude

torta, salt and sweet

My sometimes fantasy is to open a cafe. I would serve torta and gazpacho, in summer. I would serve celery and potato soup and garnish it with watercress and lump crab, on request. Maybe I shall serve sandwiches; I would need to find a fine bakery. Definitely chocolate chip cookies. And hot chocolate with cinnamon and cloves.

tempest in a teapot

I ran out of things to say. I tired of my own voice, in my head, my own words, on my screen. I found my days ordinary, my thoughts ordinary, my words ordinary. Me ordinary.

The end of December, all of January, and the beginning of February have not been ordinary: I applied to two post-graduate programs, past time with friends from New York, visited Cusco and Machu Picchu, slept with a kitten, fell sick twice, left Perú, gazed at Betelgeuse at 4,400 meters (2.7 miles) above sea level, hitchhiked to the beach with a middle-class Chilean family, and cooked gazpacho.

Yet, I am all a tempest in teapot. The source of my solitary steaming storm is secret. To me too.

One symptom is that I have lost my appetite, but not my hunger. I no longer delight in food: tonight I hunted at two supermarkets and four restaurants and caught two pieces of plain crusty bread for dinner. I experience intense cravings for specific foods: scalding spicy tofu in a black stone bowl garnished with raw egg and scallions, salted raw crab with bright orange roe with leftover rice that is reheated with boiling water, creamy saag paneer with glutinous naan brushed with nutty canary ghee, sour and spicy tom yum with straw rice noodles and julienne bamboo, stir fried peanuts and seaweed with salt and sugar and beer, silver noodles with prawn and star anise in a clay pot, and everything my mom and my dad cook.

I love cooking. I miss someone cooking for me.

I love Peruvian cuisine. I hate Peruvian-Chinese food. I yearn for wantons in soup, their thin slippery skin sliding around my tongue, and the burst of flavor from the dainty ball of perfectly seasoned, perfectly textured filling in the center. Peruvian wantons, whose skin is as thick as lasagna layers and filled with SPAM-textured mystery meat, are spirit crushers. Or fried wantons. Here, they are deep fried sheets of dough; it is as if you were served two slices of bread for a sandwich. Ja gao is a steamed dumpling made with rice flour filled with chunks of jumbo shrimp. In New York, they glisten like pink opals; in Peru, they resemble burst pimples.

I love writing. I hate writing.

I will try, though.
For you.
For me.
Not to appease appetite, but to sate hunger.