Sublime Sentiments

The year is winding down, and I am pooped.  So, in the disconnected spirit of finals week, here are some highlights of the unquenched desires of my youth:

I used to walk around Kindergarten, church, and my dad's lab, securing votes for my future career as president of the United States.  Then, I realized that presidents are often assassinated, and having the acute sense of self-preservation that I still harbor today, I decided to go for something a bit less exclusive.  I aspired to be a supreme court justice until I realized recently that I don't like history all that much, and I'm a bit too un-opinionated to handle the complex legal issues of today's world.  I still want to get one of those wigs, though.

When I was a child, my only pets were aquatic.  I acquired my first fish on a field trip to the pet store.  My mom, advised by the internet of the early 2000s, fed the new family member lettuce and boiled egg yolks.  The next day, I was informed that my buddy took a pilgrimage down the toilet.  We had what equated to a guppy farm for most of my elementary school years, with some ghost shrimp, albino frogs, hermit crabs, and betta fish in between.  What I really wanted was a seahorse -- I spent long hours searching for shipping and tropical care methods online, but it was a no-go.  Considering the untimely deaths of my lower-maintenance creatures, I guess that was probably for the best.

I first saw my love sketching pedestrians on the streets of Seoul, gazing wistfully in the distance as the sun creamed over his gentle features.  I began to learn more about him with each passing day -- his gaming habits, his parents' occupations, his reputation as a trickster...  Unfortunately, I learned all of these from the research of thousands of girls across the world similarly starstruck by this charismatic superstar.  Kyuhyun (of the Korean boy band Super Junior) has been my one true love for around two years now, and I can only hope that my life with him will someday become a reality.

My most recent unfulfilled wish is manifested in the swiftest scout I know.  In honor of his beauty, I drew him in citrus form and sculpted him out of clay for an art project.  Teemo is the cutest character from a certain real time strategy game, and his cherubic image was commercially immortalized in a furry green hat that is currently being sold online.  Given my history with frivolous novelty purchases, however, I have not been permitted to order this treasure for myself.  A friend of mine offered to buy one for me if I could guess his convoluted password.  Whatever destitute avenue I must traverse in order to reach absolution with a Teemo hat will be absolutely worth it, but they all seem pretty impossible at the time being.

I have a tendency to fixate on unattainable, grandiose ideas, all the while sitting at my computer knitting and watching Korean dramas.  I guess life wouldn't be all that fun if every self-centered wish was granted.  If there's one dream of mine that is nearing fulfillment, it is to create fifty limes on this blog.  This post, my last for the class, marks forty-six.  Maybe I'll be back to provide those last few limes.  For now, thanks for sticking around in the lime-o-sphere, and have a great Winter break!

Knitwit

I learned to knit at a young age, from the mom of my mom.  I learned to cast on from a young age as well, from a friend, with bright yarn and sticks you use to write.  I do not think I can do this short word thing for much more time.  It was nice while it...lasted.

I've always considered myself reasonably crafty, but two years of learning about producerism in history have made me realize that I am nowhere near artisan level.  Apart from my thus-derived shame, the greater influences on my latest artistic endeavor were the holiday jingles bringing life and hot chocolate to Walmart's otherwise droll atmosphere (I was there getting ingredients for my brother's rooster costume).  I once again had my ultimate fantasy of retiring, knitting, and binging on Korean dramas as I bathed in the glow of red ornaments and Mariah Carey's "All I Want For Christmas Is You."  In this daze, I ended up spending over forty dollars on yarn skeins, needles, and rooster supplies.  

I refused to let this high-cost project join my past knitting attempts (forever incomplete).  I found a pattern for a hat that was basically a stout scarf seamed together, and began knitting a hat for the most important person in my life.  Several thousand stitches and three days later, I triumphantly donned my first hat and mentally prepared myself to start knitting for lesser humans.

Over Thanksgiving break, I changed scenes a little, and flew to Germany.  I knitted for six hours straight on the plane, trying to ignore the fact that the lady next to me had two carry-on dogs, one of which had its own seat, and the other of which was attempting to crawl into my bag.  I watched two romance movies, one Indian and one Chinese, but the visual strain of knitting and watching was too great, and I settled for listening to Justin Bieber and Maroon 5, and knitting with my eyes closed.

As we traversed the bars of Germany night after night, I rejoiced whenever the adults finally decided to settle on a bar.  There I would perch, extract my knitting, and repeat my ribbing mantra: knit, knit, purl, purl, knit, knit, purl purl.  With each subsequent hat (I finished three hats in Germany), I noticed things about the pattern that helped me to stop making mistakes, and I truly felt like my knitting was going places.  One of the adults on the trip noted during one such bar hop, "Gloria seems to live on a higher plane than us.  It's probably the knitting.  She has reached knitting nirvana, and now she's just looking down at us humans."  I laughed a bit, but then nodded wisely in order to perpetuate my holy aura.

Honestly, I'm starting to tire of hats.  Or at least, hats the way I've been making them.  40 hours spent with the same pattern was in its own way adrenaline-filled and rewarding, but I want to branch out.  It doesn't help that 10 of those hours were lost when I misplaced my blue-and-green hat in the bustling food court of O'Hare airport while devouring a huge burrito bowl.  I still have a passion for yarn, and the addictive nature of knitting, and I have more than enough hat requests lined up for the year, but perhaps I'll branch out into something like mittens or hats with videogame characters on them in good time.

Here's a compilation of my lovely models in various poses of approval.

The Transfiguration Toddler

My youngest brother is many things. For Halloween, he was a dragon one day, with a stuffed pantyhose tail and aluminum foil spikes, and a lizard the next, wearing a sparkly green acrobatics costume from dance recitals past. On normal days, he’s a sweet-faced demon determined to make me miserable. And now, they tell me, he’s going to be a rooster (insert obligatory “They told me I could be anything so I became a rooster” meme here). 

At the tender age of three and three-quarters, my brother has already morphed through a more diverse range of species than most birders witness in their lifetimes (and 97% of statistics are made up). You may wonder why this is.  And I would regale you with an intense tale of gender roles and the arts, of belonging and passions. Why keep that lovely scenario in the hypothetical? That’s what I’m asking!

My family dances.  I started pretty late with hip hop when I was eight, but my first brother began his short-lived acrobatics career at the age of five.  Both of us were born with the rhythm of a dancer in our veins -- I danced along to the whirrs of a printer as a child, and we now battle along to hip hop beats and Kpop together.  Then came the third child, and tried as he did to find his inner rhythm, all it resulted in was pain for the family watching.

Despite his natural limitations, my youngest brother came to dance one summer day and I let him try out a pair of tap shoes in the lost and found.  He delighted in the unwieldy clicks and slams that came from the metal plates, and we figured that it was time for the youngest lime to have a chance in the dancing scene.  We enrolled him in the only class available for three-year-olds: Fairytale Ballet and Tap.  As the name might imply, the class was filled with wispy, blonde-haired, pink-clad girls with lovely big eyes and the most charming smiles.  And then there was my brother, in all of his manly, dark-haired, small-eyed glory.  

Now, he's going to be a rooster, and I have been enlisted to create his headpiece.  He doesn't seem to realize that he's the only one not wearing a leotard during class, but he just might notice that he's not wearing a frilly chicken costume once showtime comes around.  I have faith in his versatility to crow among the squawks.

In case you were wondering what my little master actually looks like, here he is, in more or less the order of the limes above (other than the rooster, for obvious reasons).  And here are some extras I found while flipping through my paparazzi collection.  Honestly, I think my brother is the cutest and I hope he never changes.  But apparently that's not going to happen anytime soon.

My Comrades, the Taste Buds

The other day in chemistry, we talked about seawater, which is just 1% salt, yet still enough to kill you due to its relatively high concentration of isoelectrons.  A sense of betrayal twitched in my esophagus -- salt, my reliable friend, has always had the potential to make me into a shriveled-up cadaver.  Lovely.

Nevertheless, I really like salt.  Saltiness is probably the most glorious taste, followed closely by the refreshing chill of watermelon cubes and the bursting sweetness of plump Korean clementines.  Without salt, Hot Cheetos would be all pain and no pleasure.  Kimchi would just be peppery, fermented cabbages and radishes.  Mapo tofu and other soft tofu dishes would become spicy mush.  Eggs would be tasteless flabs of potential chickens.  And Gloria would be sad.

So there's salt, and eggs, and I'm pretty sure I could live a considerable amount of time simply relying on a skillet and those two ingredients.  But I assure you that I do have a wide range of taste.  I like sticking anchovies into tangerines.  I used to have an obsession with raw brussel sprouts from my neighbor's garden.  My friend recently asked the social media world for "the most delicious meal in the world," and I came up with an eclectic blend of raw oysters, watermelon...and three different egg dishes.

Aside from salty entrees, I have my particulars for sweets. I love oranges and grapes, but I hate orange- and grape-flavored candy. Tylenol and cough syrup are vomit-inducingly sweet, but I delight in devouring fruity cough drops throughout the year, sick or not. And then there’s limes. Even before my infatuation with lime green began, I had a strong bias for all things lemon/lime-flavored -- Sprite, yellow and green Skittles, yellow and green Sour Patch Kids, yellow and green M&M’s, etc (the last one was a lie; my taste buds aren’t acute enough to detect the differences in candy dyes). I don’t often eat actual limes, but no bowl of pho is complete without a subliminal squirt of citrus.

I was recently disillusioned at one of those amazing soda machines of wonder (see: Noodles, Meatheads). The brilliant artificial coloring of their Lime Fanta cajoled me to fill my cup to the brim, but I was speedily broken out of my citrus reverie by the actual taste. Please, if you ever have a strong desire to judge the quality of limes, do not base it upon this sorry excuse for a soda, unless it is heavily diluted by the more appetizing flavors of Strawberry and Raspberry Fanta.

Moral of the story: Even the holiest of foods can disappoint.  But at the core of it all, salt and limes rule the earth.

Chaos and Crashes (of the best sort)

I spend my Saturday afternoons washing beds with intoxicatingly wonderful sanitizing wipes and folding sheets that have the occasional brown mark or two. 

I also spend them longing to be part of the many conversations going on around the emergency room.  I've only once been bold enough to ask for a piece of chocolate on someone's desk, and I otherwise spend my downtime chugging down water and crunching artfully-shaped hospital ice.  Occasionally I "go to the bathroom" to record the latest out-of-context quotes from random voices in the vicinity.  

"I wanted to have a beer," I heard from the nurse's station.  In glee, I made sure to store that one safely away, just another speck of phlegm on the growing spitball I was developing against my worst enemy.  After being rudely dismissed by her two weeks in a row, I lost all hope for maintaining a good relationship, and instead resorted to staring insolently at the back of her head, and recording her every misstep in my mental book of hatred.  When I heard her talk about her dad slapping her in the face, I grew jealous of that father, and when she mentioned alcohol, I imagined her in all of her hoity-toity extravagance.  I hold terrible grudges.

"Where is the man in the little red hat?" demanded a patient.  I stifled my laughter as security calmly informed him that there was, in fact, no man with a little red hat.  The patient insisted that there was, and I hoped for him that the man was running around somewhere.  He continued his winning streak by asking for a sex change operation, and was finally granted exit from the hospital.  I think I saw him on the drive back home.

"I feel like a gecko," cried out one woman.  The man in the adjacent room screamed at her to shut up every other minute.  I felt quite forlorn when the dynamic duo didn't return the next week, because together they always had something interesting to say to spice things up.  Plus, I've always wanted a gecko (or a lizard, or a seahorse, or any other exotic pet wish that was never fulfilled).

"So say hello to falsetto in 3, 2, swag," I rapped down the tiled floors.  There was an hour and a half left in my three-hour time slot, and I was incredibly bored.  Having recently made a CD of my current favorite Korean hits mingled with masterpieces such as "Boyfriend" and "What Makes You Beautiful," I proceeded to sing through the 15 song playlist one by one.  I stretched out each song for at least five minutes in order to make the time pass quicker, and upped the volume when I was in a room by myself.  I smiled apologetically at anyone who caught me in my world of Bollywood and Bieber, and the clock seemed to fly at the evidence of my muttered musical prowess.  Swaggie.

"You should check the hospital for a fatigue disease," said my mom once I awoke from my 14-hour slumber this morning.  The combined effect of a sugar overload on Friday and inhaling sanitizing wipe goodness on Saturday did me in, and I had a relaxing "nap" from 7PM to 9AM.  I had an intensely vivid dream about being back in Korea, in a huge stationary store, and shoveling in the pencils, pens, and stuffed animals like there was no tomorrow.

Three day weekends are glorious.

Bathroom Woes, Salty Toes

The bottom of this post is lined with toilet water for your utmost convenience.  

There's nothing quite like a malfunctioning bathroom.  But once you've had one, you'll be hard-pressed to see a toilet in the same light again.  Why is it that only home toilets seem to flood?  You never see people surfing on toilet water waves at Wal-Mart, and the industrial flush in those places always works flawlessly.  Perhaps it's punishment for being sedentary couch potatoes.  We should be out and about buying more couches and using bathrooms that work.  First world problems for the win.

(I should add that I recently went to a restaurant in which their second floor women's bathroom stall was locked from the inside, and emanating the stinkiest odors from someone's sassy excrement.  But I think that was more a fault of a customer and maintenance than an evil toilet.)

So I was in a meeting the other day, and the warm-up question was thus: "What's something funny that happened to you this week?"  "Well, my toilet flooded," I replied, half-laughing.  As I'd learned to expect over the week, everyone gasped, thinking of the worst possible situation.  But, dear reader, please note that my bladder was graciously empty in the advent of this fiasco.  Let's not get into past experiences, because nothing puts a damper on poop jokes like a toilet flooding with feces.

Now that I've disgusted you enough, let us delve into my reactions to this 6:20 AM bathroom chaos.  I'd like to say that I was studious enough to keep a troubleshooting manual taped to the side of my toilet, but alas, Bathroom Readers are my sole source of bathroom entertainment.  I grappled with the confounded twisty thing on the pipe while holding up the little black cap thing in the back so it couldn't release even more water into the system.  I'm really into this technical language thing, obviously.

I could almost hear the snores of my entire family downstairs, oblivious to my struggle.  Then to top it off, my 6:30 AM alarm went off with Big Bang's autotuned "Tonight" and I wailed in grief.  Only my wicked toilet was there to grin cutely at my pain, spraying water from every crack.  I had several brilliant ideas, and several stupid ones.  It turns out that the toothbrush-esque toilet cleaner doesn't work quite like a plunger.  I didn't want to test out my hypothesis that toe-washing water would provide the salt necessary for egg soup (not my idea, I got it from a Korean drama).

Through brute force (and realizing the twisty thing to close off the pipe was supposed to be turned the other way), the flood ceased, and I was able to return to my daily life.  Other than the fact, you know, that the water had somehow leaked through the tiled floor of my bathroom to the ceiling of the first floor, right where I had parked my school stuff for the night.  My physics notebook took the biggest hit, and for the rest of the day, I pulled out each subject notebook and wiped it on my backpack before returning to my studious, unafflicted-by-bathroom-woes self.

Trends in the Lime-o-sphere

I'm really tempted to begin with embedded music, but I imagine that would be overkill.  Especially for those who may think my color scheme is excruciating in the first place.  I'm sorry.  I understand that these shades are not meant for everybody.  At least, I can conceive it.  I do not actually understand.   

So instead, I'll begin with an introduction.  I hope this can clear up any confusion about the purpose of this lime green niche.  Much like a historian, I can predict the recurring themes in this blog, which are highlighted in the first five shades below.  I urge you to skim:

1. I have strange and fixated relationships with food, especially eggs.  One of my longest friendships hinges on the fact that I love what she abhors -- eggs.  I've been manning the subbie retreat egg race for three years, this time bringing back 40 leftover eggs to scramble and spice.  I'm not sure if it's my Asian taste buds, the natural addictive qualities of eggs, or something.  But let me clarify -- this is not a food blog, nor is it an egg blog.  I just might reference it a few times.

2. My taste in music is questionable.  I'll always be the first to defend my many lovers against plastic surgery accusations and "he looks like a girl" comments, but I'll also be the first to admit that Korean pop isn't exactly the most objectively excellent music genre.  I think that Justin Bieber has a gorgeous voice and that "What Makes You Beautiful" is a great song (that may or may not have been played 241 times in the past week).  I watch Asian soap operas with incredible dedication.  Please don't judge me.

3. Athletics are the bane of my life.  Uni fitness is about as far as I'll go in terms of sports.  I am the lessthan30%?  But, as indicated by my third shade, I've been a tapper for quite a few years, and before that, a ballet/jazz/tap/strength junkie.  Dance is an art, not a sport.

4. Math has the ability to excite me.  I'm not a great mathematician by any means.  But perfecting a proof by induction or figuring out a difficult integral is the best feeling in the world.  Getting stuck on a quiz or test question is the worst stomach-knotter.

5. Your argument is invalid because I'm an artist.  I dearly hope that at some point in my life, I'll be able to concentrate on art.  I haven't even had the chance to dabble in many different styles yet, or stretch outside of my comfort zone.  These days, I can only allow myself to focus on art if it's for school (often ending up in me seeing every project as an artistic opportunity, even if it's a simple blog post).  And yes, that is an anthropomorphic lime scribbling with a drawing tablet.