In my ventures to avoid dairy at all costs, I have found myself at an odd spot. How do I know when a food has dairy in it? In something like iced coffee, the presence of milk is pretty evident. I first thought that it was only milk in cold, liquid form that cause me to be ill, but it isn't quite so. The Don-Katsu I had from a certain restaurant in K-town has also caused me much grief, and no liquid white milk was visible! It must have been in the sauce, although I can't think of how milk would go into don-katsu sauce. It's a bit like spaghetti sauce. Getting back to the point, cheese and ice cream (thank goodness) don't make me sick at all. Sometimes I have a bowl of cereal with (gasp) milk, and I don't feel too sick. So what exactly is making me ill? I have done quite a bit of research to find that lactose intolerant people almost always get ill after having dairy. I seem to have very irregular patterns of ill effects after dairy. My mom makes wonderful ºÎÄ£°³ of kimchi and potatoes and etc.. This is a lot like a Korean version of a pancake. The batter is made from milk and flour! I have yet to have gotten sick from it. So I checked the labels on the milk at home. In the listed ingredients, there was nothing remotely related to lactose. I think there was something called milk-proteins, but that really can't be similar to lactose. Lactose is a sugar that is found in dairy. It is because my intestines have stopped producting lactase that digests lactose, that I get sick. Since lactose is a sugar form, it is not in a milk-protein, provided that milk-protein is regular proteins found in milk. Proteins are composed of amino acids. Amino Acids, if my memory serves correctly, is quite different from the basic sugars, although essentially, they are composed from same elements, like carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen. Hm. The reason I have thought of this is because for lunch I came across a dish called omelette (sp?) rice. Basically, rice and vegetables surrounded by a big tortilla-shaped-like eggs. While I ate this half-way, a sudden freaky thought struck in my head: what if this has milk/dairy in it!? As I finished it, I started to get a queasy feeling in my stomach (mostly from the fear of becoming ill, I think) and I kept telling myself that rice doesn't have milk in it, vegetables don't have milk in them, eggs don't have milk, etc. I analyzed all the food particles, but the sauce remains a mystery. I think the anxiety caused a greater effect -- my stomach felt queasy, and I thought more than a couple of times to attempt to vomit what I ate, but I decided against looking like a crazy, especially at work. I popped some pain relievers just in case. I am just thankful that there's only two hours left for work, and thankfully it's been a quiet, customer-less day here so far. I love eating. It feels like a trial for me to restrict it and think twice before I eat something new. (sigh)

Thanksgiving. It seems odd that lately people have been calling it "Turkey day" instead of Thanksgiving. I don't know if it's because people of other ethnicities who don't celebrate Thanksgiving find it offensive (!) but I think it's because people are just too darn lazy to form the three syllables: Thanks-Gi-ving.

Is it odd that I baby-talk to my cat? Much too often to be healthy, according to some. Sometimes I do talk to my cat in a normal tone and volume, but talking to one's cat in any language is kind of odd, isn't it? I mean, would my cat understand me? If she possesses the art of understanding spoken words, would English, or Korean, or perhaps even Spanish, be the language of choice?

I went over to my uncle's for "turkey" day. It involves arriving around approx. 6PM, eating almost immediately, minor chit-chat, and leave by 8 or 9PM. Nothing too big. Uncle lives on the other side of town, about a mile or so away, and we see each other fairly often. Turkey felt dryer this year... perhaps it was because the cranberry sauce, which I love, was missing. There was kimchi on the table like always, to help swallow the tough turkey breast.

I woke up about 9AM to find the sun slapping me in the face, so I positioned myself to face the opposite end of the bed. My legs got a nice tan, by the time I finally got up around 11 AM. I installed my mom's new keyboard and mouse -- I bought it from amazon.com -- a microsoft wireless duo -- wireless multimedia keyboard and an intellipoint or something wireless optical mouse. Very fancy and cool-looking (I'm not feeling very descriptive today -- the tryptophan in the turkey has cause my brain to go into deep slumber), if I say so myself. I watched some stuff on a DVD disk, of course, on my brand new DVD player, had ramen for breakfast/lunch, and then went to take a nap (YES, a NAP!) around 3 PM or so. I woke up about 5:30 ish and prepared to consume lage quantities of turkey and potatoes.

That was my day. Now I have taken a shower (first in two days! I am just a big slug!) and will prepare for another day of sheer HELL of work tomorrow.

I called my co-worker minutes ago, about his day at work. Of course, I wasn't there, since it is my day off from work for school. It was another disasterous day, which only makes me sick to the stomach about returning to work tomorrow. WLNP has taken a toll on cell-phoners! Will life ever return to normal??

On a happier note, I have finally received a Samsung DVD player. It was through a mail-in-rebate sort of deal, for a purchase of a new Samsung cell phone. I finally have a DVD player!!! I know where I'll be tomorrow night! At Blockbusters, renting DVD's!

My mom makes the most fantastic food, be it Korean, American, Hamburger Helper... Recently I had the pleasure of eating mandoo, which is what you gringos call "dumplings." Mandoo, (or as my best friend's boyfriend calls'em, Man-dude -- he was a white farm boy) is a wonderful potpourri of food meshed and mixed together and stuffed in a flour wrap. The wraps, called pi-pronounced "pee" -- are usually round.

Not many people make these mandoos at home, because they take a lot of work. First all of the ingredients (there's a whole lot of them and vary greatly between different regions and families in Korea, or by which kind of mandoo you are making) must be prepared just right. Then they must be mixed, and somewhere along the line, you have to squeeze all the ingredients, which include radish, dang-myun(a type of greyish transparent noodles), various vegetables, ground meat, sometimes even kimchi. All the ingredients have excess water in them, especially kimchi and the vegetables. The excess water will make the fillings soppy and will not form a good mandoo. This is the hard part -- in my family, we do it by hand. Try to slice and dice various vegetables and squeeze excess water out of them! Takes immense hand strength, I tell you. That's where all the strenuous practicing on the piano pays off.

After the mandoo is prepared, there's many options that you must face. All equally delicious, those options pose tough decisions. Would you fry them? Boil them? Dunk them in soups? Would you steam them? Mmmm... makes my mouth water just thinking! Of course I already had a batch for dinner tonight, while watching the American Idol Christmas.

Here's a view of mandoos completely loaded and ready to go. The white flour wrapping is of course, the pi.

Here's a pic of them, fried in a frying pan:

They're golden treats! Yummmm yum!

There is something about listening to Christmas songs that makes my eyes well up with tears. I guess it is what one calls nostalgia, but nostalgia about what?

I watched the American Idol Christmas. Kelly Clarkson and Clay Aiken and the rest of them. They are all brilliant performers, and as they do every year, my eyes were filled with tears again. I get so emotional sometimes -- I'd like to blame it on PMS, but that's not always true. When "Rachel" gave birth to "Emma" on "Friends" I cried! And one long distance phone company broke me down into tears with their awfully emotional commercial. I admit it -- I am a big cry baby.

I bought some hair trinkets today, and a pair of jeans that I desperately needed. Hair trinkets were really cheap, a buck or so a piece, but the jeans were a different story. I haven't shopped for clothing for many reasons: one, because my mother works in wholesale and gets many items at really ultra low prices; two, because the mall parking lot drives me senselessly crazy; and three, I am fed up with the long lines, the endless trying on of clothes, and so on and so forth. So basically, I am a huge lazy-ass and I refused to get myself over to the local mall.

I finally got myself there, and found that since the last time I went clothes shopping (which was last millenium), prices has skyrocketed. I remember waiting for a pair of jeans to go on sale and buying them for $20. Their regular prices were $30. I went to Macy's today, and the jeans on sale were $30. The cheapests ones to be found at Macy's were $30. I finally found one that wasn't so low-ridery, and it was $50!! I thankfully had a gift card I received from work (one of the few perks), but it still felt like a fortune! Many others were $70 or even $128!! I felt that Macy's might be at the high end when it comes to prices, so I shopped other stores in the vicinity.

I was extremely disappointed, because nothing pleased my frugal shopping sense. Sweaters (nothing diamond encrusted, I assure you) were in the 70's, dress shirts were in 50's, slacks were between 50 and 100, and jeans were from 50 to 128 (not on sale). I don't know about everyone else, but those are mighty high prices for me.

I would like to defend myself and say that I only went to Macy's because I had a gift card and for months my mother and I tried to buy something for her, but with little success. We bought her two pairs of shoes and two handbags, but nothing more, and we still had over $100 left. So in actuality, the $50 Polo jeans I purchased didn't cost me a dime. Actually, I guess I did sort of work for it, since I received it as a reward for hard work. But anyhoot.

See? $49! I wasn't lying!

My biggest foes in literature -- Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude has gained a partner. Mr GM has written another book with similar magic realism, titled Living to Tell the Tale. I really do wish that I had emerged triumphant over OHYOS -- I would have definitely gone on to tackle Love in the Time of Cholera. I am a big fan of a lot of Spanish writers -- Pablo Neruda, and of course Garcia Lorca. And who can forget that Senor Don Quixote? I was first acquatined with Don Quixote in a cartoon series, titled "Don Coyote." Don Quixote was a coyote, with a screw or two loose, and his sidekick was a panda. But I did read parts of Don Quixote in Spanish -- it is a loooooooooong book though. I read quite a bit of Garcia Lorca in high school, all in Spanish! He was an interesting character to learn, and was one of the most important force in ... well... forcing me to learn the language.

I have found several words that I picked up in the "two weeks ago" edition of TIME magazine. One is "aplomb." The other is "epiphany." I had found two more, but I can't remember them now. I have come to enjoy TIME magazine much more than in previous years of my subscription (they cost a lot of money, but my mother always insists on paying for them!). Before, they came in the mail just to be recycled, or better yet, to be trashed with Ramen soup splashed on them (as we used them to shield our table from hot pots). Now I read almost from cover to cover every other week or so. I think my brother actually used to read them after finding them on the table, but now that they're always in my room, he has forgotten about them.

Well, let's get down to business.

Aplomb means self confidence. Plumbus is the Latin name for lead. I guess that should somehow indicate a relationship between lead and self-confidence. But anyhoot. Epiphany is a sudden manifestation in the essence of something. That's what dictionary.com is telling me, but I don't understand it. But the word is derived from various roots from Middle English (like Chaucer's time?), Old French, Late Latin, and even Greek, meaning manifestation.

It's only 10:30 PM, but I am pooped. Sometimes I feel like an old granny. I can't stay past 11PM! I get so drowsy! I wonder how I used to work at a bar until 2-3AM! Then again, I feel like a child, because I can't get out of bed before 8AM either. I am amazed that I suffered through a 7AM English class last semester. NEVER EVER doing that again!

As you may know, WLNP -- Wireless Landline Number Portability which is also known simply as number portability has gone into effect today. Since I work in the cell phone biz, you can just imagine what kind of day I may have had. Well, it was 45,687,935,867,654 times worse! It was nearly 6 PM when the madness quieted down. It felt like I was without warning, hit by a tornado.

Everyone hates their wireless carrier and wanted to go with someone new. Half of Koreatown's been callin' and askin' if the rumors were true, that we could take a phone number from one carrier and take it to another, if it is November 24, if it's gonna happen, how it's gonna happen, and everything else possible under the sun. So there was hints of craziness waiting to explode... I dreaded showing up for work this morning.

I hereby declare this day November 24 -- Number Portability Satanic Madness Day. As a veteran of such a hectic situation, I believe it should be declared a national holiday -- or better yet, a holiday just for those in the cell phone industry. Let the customers cry over their own boohoo's for once!

If the Korean is still broken, try clicking "View" at the top of the browser, and then select "Encoding" and then select "Korean." Maybe it can fix something.