The Great Tempura Incident

天ぷら事件

最近日本料理を作ってみようと思っていましたけど、和食はちょっと怖いです。色々な分からない食材が作られてやっぱり日本人の料理のし方は不思議だと思って自身が全然持っていません。でも、あの日、「天ぷらは．．．天ぷらなら簡単ですね」と思って、アルバートソンで天ぷらのバッタと蝦と色んな野菜を買いました。楽しみをして友達のアパートに早く行って、すぐに私たちは私の夢のように一緒に天ぷらを作るの準備をしていました。喜んで野菜を切ったり、バッタをミクスしたり、蝦を剥いたりしました。「今まで全部大丈夫ね。和食は難しくないかもしれない！」と思いました。でも、その後、怖いパートがありました。それはフライと呼ばれます。何か緊張して、油下を入るポットの蓋を擡げると急に大波のような煙の雲はアパートをひらがて始めました。それから、すぐに火災刑法を鳴ってしまいました。煙が多かったのでアパートの建物の火災刑法も鳴って、私は「えっ！どうしよう？！」と言ってキャンパスの警察の警吏が来てアラームを消してくれました。警吏のレポートで火災刑法の「理由」ところで「料理」を書きました。警吏と友達に笑われました。友達に、「日本にいたら、そんなことをしないで！もっともっと恥ずかしいね」と言われて、私は日本にいなくても恥ずかしかったです。とにかく、油下を使わないで天ぷらを作りましたけど、この天ぷらは天ぷらじゃなかったです。今からプローに和食を残した方がいいと思いました。

translation:

The Great Tempura Incident

Recently I had been thinking I’d like to try making Japanese food. However, this is a little frightening. The Japanese use so many kinds of ingredients unknown to me, and their way of cooking it all seems a bit mysterious, so I had absolutely no self-confidence in the matter. But a few days ago the thought occurred to me: “Tempura now…tempura’s pretty simple, isn’t it?” so I went to Albertsons nearby and bought the batter, shrimp, and various veggies. Excited, I hurried over to my friend’s apartment, and soon we were happily preparing tempura together just as I’d imagined, cutting up the vegetables, mixing the batter, and peeling the little shimpies. “So far so good,” I thought, “Maybe I can do this!” But after this came the scary part: the cooking. Somewhat nervously I lifted the lid of the pot we had dumped all the oil into. Suddenly, a cloud of smoke billowed out like a tsunami, engulfing the entire apartment. In a matter of seconds the fire alarm went off! There was so much smoke, the general alarm for the entire apartment complex began screeching too! “Oh no! What should we do??” I said, but a campus safety officer came and turned off the alarm for us. In his report, the officer listed the reason for the fire alarms as “cooking,” and I was heartily laughed at by him and my friend, who said, “You’d better not do this when you’re in Japan; that would be really embarrassing!” Even though I wasn’t in Japan I was quite embarrassed. Anyway, we wanted to finish making the tempura, but since we couldn’t use oil the end result barely resembled “tempura.” From now on I think I’ll leave Japanese cooking to the pros.

15 Books

These are a strange list of books. Many of them have little in common except that they impressed me in some way. Some are favorites from childhood, some deepened my faith, some frigthened me, some disgusted me--all took me to new heights and depths of thought. I'll not forget any of them.

I don't like to include the Bible with other reading, hence its absence. In the order they came to mind:


1. The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien

I generally read this book every year. The characters are dear friends and their quest pulls at something deep inside even though the greatness of it is totally outside of my experience.

2. The Idiot by F.M. Dostoevsky

There is something feverish about the philosophy of this book, something terribly, terribly beautiful but flawed in a way that just makes me love it more. The main character is someone I want to be, and yet I am glad I am not.

3. The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury

The writing style of this book took hold of my mind and wouldn't let go, to the degree that I had suicidal thoughts for a few days after reading it.

4. Grimms’ Fairy Tales by the Brothers Grimm

Read when I was about age 6 or 7. In one story a girl turns into a frog-like creature at night. One night she tearfully attempted to rid herself of the curse by cutting apart her webbed fingers. Somehow I was never the same after reading that.

5. 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne

I love to escape to this underwater world, where science and a systematic way of looking at the world serve more to emphasize the mystery of things than to explain them. Nemo is such a magnetic character. I still get a bit of a crush on him every time I reread.

6. The Picture of Dorian Grey by Oscar Wilde

Beauty and ugliness, evil and goodness mix in this haunting book. The reader sees his own sins in Dorian so it's not a comfortable read. One of the few books I read for pleasure that roused me enough to write essays refuting some of its ideas.

7. The Gentle Infidel by Lawrence Schoonover

A scene from this fun, epic sword-and-sandal book often comes to mind in moments of trouble. In his moment of need, the main character, a young Muslim warrior, cries out "Father in heaven, Father in heaven!"--all that he remembers of The Lord's Prayer from his distant, Christian childhood...

8. Catherine, Called Birdy by Karen Cushman

Many things about this book still linger in my memory though I haven't read it since I was about 12 or 13. It somehow taught me how to be a teenager, in that it woke up a sense that someday I would become a person, and oh yes...the birds and the bees were rather less mysterious after this book!

9. Black Beauty by Anna Sewell

Read this over and over as a kid. The horses were such living characters, their lives so sad but full of a kind of charm for me.

10. The Lord of the Flies by William Golding

Another book that lodges in the mind through its shocking imagery and disturbing conclusions. Not a favorite, but there is a lot of truth in it.

11. Les Miserables by Victor Hugo

A beautiful book, of many interwoven stories all together of many people and times. Is its own world...and God is somehow on every page: the themes of forgiveness, grace, and love are not to be missed. I'm so glad there are books like this, whole worlds to visit and be changed by.

12. Richard III by Shakespeare

The short passage of evil from quiet plotting, to gaining power, to final destruction by the good guys makes this a great story. Many passages in this book are just too much fun to speak aloud in your best iambic pentameter and a snarly Richard voice.

13. Silence by Shusaku Endo

The first word that comes to mind in describing this book is "miserable"--the trials of Job set in medieval Japan, complete with plenty of poverty and persecutions, make for a depressing read. Offers a different (very Japanese) view of Jesus that I hadn't thought of before.

14. Wives and Daughters by Elizabeth Gaskell

What a delightful book! And it isn't all fluff. The author has very wise insights into people's natures, as human beings, as individuals, and especially as women. I never quite warmed up to Jane Austen, Elizabeth Gaskell is more to my liking.

15. The Temple of the Golden Pavilion by Yukio Mishima

The worst thing about reading this book was it's about a very disturbed person, and I sympathized with one too many of his ways of thinking for my comfort. Uh oh. I think it was simply because the author was familiar with human nature, in all its beauty and ugliness.

What books have touched you most? Which books will you never forget?

A Fairly Odd (First) Couple

According to Mrs. Miyuki Hatoyama, wife of Japan's newly-elected prime minister Yukio Hatoyama, Tom Cruise used to be Japanese. In this article, Mrs. Hatoyama is described as a "tarento"--a sort of TV personality who does just about everything, and is rather expected to be exciting and different from us normal folks. Mrs. Hatoyama claims, among other things, to have visited Venus and to have met Tom Cruise in a past life, when he was Japanese (he must have been a bad Japanese to be punished with being reborn as an American!). Apparently, her husband doesn't frown on her eccentricities, but encourages her. He also submits to Mrs. Hatoyama's extensive knowledge of "life composing"--she selects his wardrobe and styles his hair. Mrs. Hatoyama met the Mr. in the 70s in a San Fransisco restaurant. They married after Mrs. Hatoyama had divorced her first husband. Rather scandalous for an up-and-coming politician like Mr. Hatoyama, but he says, "I chose her from all womankind." It's not in this article, but in another the Prime Minister says his wife is "like an energy refueling base" and that he looks forward to returning to her after a long day of work.

Many commentors on this and similar articles point out how unfit Mrs. Hatoyama's flamboyant personality is for being Japan's First Lady, but I think as a couple they are SO CUTE, and a great example for many societies in which divorce rates continue to climb and politicians too are subject to scandals and rocky marriages. Mrs. Hatoyama supports her husband as the nation's PM, and, far from dampening her personality, she is able to utilize it in helping him. She "brings him good, not harm, all the days of her life" (Prov. 31:12); in return he is supportive of her, warm, and quite devoted. The Hatoyamas may not be the most normal couple out there, but their marriage is seems awfully sweet, and the simple kindness they show each other isn't met with enough in marriages these days.

I hope if I ever marry I can be an "energy refueling base" for my husband, though I don't suppose I'll find it necessary to test his patience with claims of extraterrestrial jaunts.

It's My Lumberjack Reading Keats!!

Actually it's Abe Lincoln on the new commemorative "formative years" pennies. But when I first saw it I giggled, remembering a previous post about manly men...^^

Why I Dislike American Masculinity

A friend and I were talking recently about, well, men, and how very scarce a truly attractive man is. Now that we're in our 20s and all mature and old, we don't mean physically attractive: we're looking for someone who thinks. That is, man who is sensitive enough to recognize and value beauty. A man who has original thoughts of his own. A man who reads books--and yet is somehow not a milquetoast.

When I began to notice boys as something more than fit company for my annoying kid brother, Asian ones especially possessed a charm that drew my attention. I think it was the eyelids and the shape of the mouth. I am still attracted to Asian men--but now I realize it's not just for looks. Generally, Asian men do not have that insecure need American men do to be so darned masculine! What I mean is, they don't seem to labor under the kind of code of masculinity that says you have to 1)love football 2)be banal and coarse 3)devalue intellectual, introspective, and emotional activity, and 4) grow a disgusting neck-beard.

Maybe we're looking for the wrong thing. Maybe we just want "girlfriends in guys' bodies." But really, what is a manly man? Why are lumberjacks seen as so masculine, and poets are not? A lecture in Shakespeare class once piqued my interest (that sounds like the rest of Shakespeare class was boring; it wasn't). Elizabethan ideas of masculinity and femininity were quite different compared to today's: men were the fountains of intellectual beauty. They came up with the best ideas, wrote the best poetry, painted the best pictures, felt the best feelings and emotions. Women, as the bearers of life and equated philosophically with the earth, were carnally-minded and unable to produce or experience such nice things. Oh, they had emotions, but it was just hysteria--because they had wombs (think hysterectomy). Somehow that all got stood on its head--nature and the physical world became man's domain, and the "finer feelings" belonged to woman. Alas and alack for the lumberjack who puts down his chainsaw to compose a few verses about interlacing boughs! He'll be thought a sissy or worse forever by his manlier fellows.

How this came to be is a fascinating question that likely has already been answered by countless researchers, sociologists, and Shakespeare professors. Rather more interesting to my friend and me was commiserating over the fact that a good balance between "brains and brawn" is so hard to come by! If you are every inch a man who is yet proud to be a sensitive thinker, pat yourself on the back. If you're not, well, if you happen to see any lumberjacks reading Keats let me know..

Howl's Moving Castle

Since I saw Hayao Miyazaki's animated movie before I read this book by Diana Wynne Jones, it is somewhat difficult to review--the images and occurrences of the two stories are quite intertwined in my brain, but I will do my best to sort them out for the purposes of this review.

At first this book was very engaging. It is simply splendid in its uniqueness as a work of children's fantasy. The author's writing style is top-notch and enjoyable. But there were so many plot holes and loose ends! This is my only complaint with the book. Perhaps Jones had so much of the story in her head, she forgot we readers need to be given more. That is the trouble with this book. It does not give to the reader, and this is why the movie gets so mixed up with it in my head. There is very little description (an epic wizard's fight is a ball of dark fog??), characters changed too abruptly without development, and the plot twists were confusing.

And yet somehow I couldn't help falling love (Howl's doing, I'll warrant). The three principle characters: Howl, a dashing young wizard with mysterious charm; Sophie, a stubborn oldest sister under a terrible curse; and Calcifer, an incorrigible fire demon, were all so endearing! Despite the fact that they could have been fleshed out more, they are characters that will linger in fond memories long after the details of this unfortunately flawed book are forgotten.

Harmony

Psalm 133
A song of ascents. Of David.

1 How good and pleasant it is
when brothers live together in unity!
2 It is like precious oil poured on the head,
running down on the beard,
running down on Aaron's beard,
down upon the collar of his robes.

3 It is as if the dew of Hermon
were falling on Mount Zion.
For there the LORD bestows his blessing,
even life forevermore.