Living Alone, Week 5-6: Food Frenzy

I never realized how eclectic my appetite was until I started living with others. I have always loved food and flavor. One of my career thoughts was opening my own restaurant, and I'd jump on any chance to cook meals when I was at home, often using recipes neither of my parents had tried. I also have a bad habit of walking out of the grocery store with something unusual just because I've never had it.

Apparently my love for food is a little strange for my roommates, who wonder why I cook Vietnamese lemongrass chicken, Greek tzatziki salad, or Indian pakoras instead of frozen pizza. I'm not going to offer them anything too strange, but I guess they think it's interesting to have someone outside of the burgers-and-pizza zone living with them.

Since falling in love with kimchi ramen a few weeks ago, I picked up a jar of actual kimchi yesterday. I figured I'd try the real thing. I haven't had it yet, but I probably will try it tonight.

Also, I've developed a taste for eel. I've had it in sushi many times and out of curiosity I bought a tin of roasted eel to see what I could do with it:

But I draw the line at eel. I'm not offering my roommates any. I think I'd get kicked out of the apartment for that.

While trying to find eel recipes online, I found out that roasted eel is actually an item on World of Warcraft. Apparently it requires level 75 and restores 22500 points of your health as long as you eat it while seated. Interesting.

Also, if you know of any good ways to eat roasted eel, let me know. I'd be glad to try.

Do you have any unusual food habits?

Imperfection is perfect for me

I sometimes meet girls who are after the stereotypical Prince Charming--a man who will take care of their every need and is perfect in every way. Usually these girls are young and naieve. As I gained experience with guys over the years, I learned that perfection is not what I want. I think people who acknowledge their imperfections and accept those of others are the best of all.

I have a friend who sometimes talks about how he is not perfect. His past fallacies with girls, how broken he felt after his first love, his low grades in school, and how he orders pizza way too often. When I listen to him, it is clear to me that he understands people in a way that most others do not. Although he got low grades in the past, he definately has wisdom that cannot be gained in school. I feel comfortable knowing he will not judge or belittle me for my quirks and mistakes. "We are all human and we all make mistakes," he says. "Nobody is perfect. If someone thinks they are, they aren't."

On the other side of the spectrum is another guy I once knew. He graduated from a top-notch university and was very intelligent. But he thought he was perfect. I did not know about his arrogance at the time, and blindly developed a crush on him....Big mistake. He not only saw me as below his level, he also brought it to my attention in a not-so-nice way: picking at my habits, judging me, pointing out my flaws, and then blaming my hurt feelings on myself. He was "perfect" in his own mind and I apparently needed major fixing. I fear this man is controlling and abusive in relationships. Thank God I haven't spoken to him in years.

I don't want perfection in a significant other. I would feel self-conscious as a girlfriend trying to live up to that. Someone who acknowledges their own flaws and is accepting of others is much more appealing. My future S.O. should accept the fact that I make mistakes--that I sometimes push the goofiness too far, that I'm prone to sudden nostalgia benders, and that I'll make dumb choices because of my own airheadedness. At the same time, I hope to be accepting of them as well. I'm not perfect, and I don't expect them to be either. Instead of making each other feel guilty for our faults, hopefully we can laugh them off or comfort each other knowing that we are both human, we're not perfect, and we are perfectly okay with that.

Sneeze muffins

Today Ye and I went grocery shopping. Her friend had called her beforehand and asked if we could pick up some pork for her. When we got to the store, we weren't sure what type of pork to buy. We couldn't get a signal on our cell phones in the store to call her and ask. Ye just said her friend wanted a lot of pork, so we bought the largest package of pork chops available and hoped it would work out.

When her friend came over later to pick up the meat, she looked at it with disdain and said, "You didn't get boneless?" Neither the friend or the roommate have a car, so they were counting on us to get the pork for them. The friend politely asks if they could go back to the store with us to get the right kind of pork chops.

Hold up. I'm supposed to take you back to the store because you can't just take a knife and cut the bone off the chops yourself? No offense but if I asked someone to buy me pork chops for them, and they screwed up and bought me live eel instead, I'd take the eel with a smile on my face and thank them graciously.

I smiled and said sure. So Ye, her friend and her roommate and I all drove back to the grocery store. One we're there, her friends grab a shopping cart. I thought we were just there for meat. Nope--Her friends took us through the entire store and bought everything on their grocery list. Also, I noticed that when they select vegetables to purchase, they don't put them in plastic bags before putting them in the cart. Eww. I don't want to know how dirty those carts are.

When we got back after taking her friends shopping, only one of them said a single thank you. "You're welcome," I replied. They never took the original pork chops from me or offered to pay for them, so I just spent $8 on a huge bag of pork chops that I did not want. It is sitting in my freezer.

I kept a smile on my face the whole time but in my head I thought, "If I were a waitress and you were my customers, you two would definately have earned sneeze muffins."

Living Alone, Week 3: I swear I am not making this up

I had to print something the other day so I plugged in my printer for the first time since leaving home. Without even clicking print, the printer immediately began working.

I swear I am not making this up.

You know how every once in a while some crazy wacko will find the Virgin Mary on a slice of toast? Well I am officially a crazy wacko, because I swear this is what my printer gave me:

Is it just me or does that look exactly like Jesus???

Actually there is a logical explanation for this one. Before I left my mom was using the printer to print the covers for my brother's gymnastics DVDs. The picture, when turned upside down, is actually an image of a guy on the still rings. She turned off the printer before the final page was through, so when I turned it on again it resumed the print job it had previously tried to finish. But still, I was psyched that my printer suddenly made images of Jesus.

In other news, I was able to revive Mr. Planty. After watering him and giving him lots of sun, he's almost back to normal:

Recently I ran into a roommate roadblock. Both of my roommates do not like meat or spicy food. This is a problem, because I like spicy food and I especially love meat. In fact, my body is so used to a high-protein diet that when I once went vegetarian for a week just for laughs, I'd nearly pass out unless I ate spoonfuls of peanut butter throughout the day.

We usually trade off cooking meals and I try to make things my roommates will enjoy, so I stick to non-meat, non-spicy things. They like seafood but fish costs a lot, so many of our dishes are vegetarian. Other than a few shrimp I ate yesterday, aside from eggs I did not eat any meat in five days.

Oy. I've been eating eggs at every meal to keep my protein levels plateaued.

So when I came home today and found Ye making chicken, I almost did backflips. There was just a little bit of chicken in dish, but still, it was MEAT!!!!!

Tomorrow is my turn to cook. I swear, I'm making steak and baked potatoes. Extra bloody on that sirloin.

How to pwn an assface

When I was in high school there was a kid who worked on the newspaper with me, let's call him Kyle, who was--for lack of a better term--an assface. He was one of those very egotistical people who had a lot of friends simply because he was loud and outgoing; behind his back people rolled their eyes about his attitude. He was a fellow editor with me on the paper. We were very opposite personalities--He was loud and garish while I was quiet and docile. He did not like me because he thought I was boring and I did not like him because he was, well, him. We both knew this although it was never said out loud, and we stayed out of each other's way.

One day I walked past him when we were working after school. He turned to me and said out of the blue, "Nichole, I am much smarter than you."

Amused at his arrogance, I said, "Why would you think that?"

"Because I talk more than you. That means I have more ideas than you, which means I'm smarter than you."

So I smiled and replied, "Kyle, I don't know if you are smarter than me, but you are definately more arrogant." And then I walked away.

PWND. It was one of the highlights of my high school experience.

On a side note, Kyle was also the school's token Jesus Freak. He rubbed his religion in people's faces often, thus proving that zealots in one area of life are often zealots in others as well. It's odd how someone so into acting "Christly" can sometimes turn out to be the opposite.