And I’m apparently writing stuff I never thought I would.  More details once I’ve posted.  (orz)

And in other news, I was sort of  late to work today because I was trying to carmelize onions for French Onion Soup.

My priorities in life.  See my work and despair.

Someone, please.  Send help.

We went to my parents’ house this past weekend and made mandu.  (Korean dumplings.)

Usually what happens is that my mother makes a vat of filling and then everybody sits around and makes enough mandu for the next couple of months.   It’s pretty tedious and time-consuming, so you’d want to have as many people around to do this as possible.

This time, she waited around for my SIL to show up to help.  But my SIL needed to go shopping, so it fell to me, my dad, and my mom to make the mandu.   That would have taken forever.  When I say vat of filling, I mean VAT.

But wait!  There were teens and preteens in the house!

So I called them in and told them their job was to make mandu as a replacement for their mother.  There was some protest, and they kept wanting to bail, but I made them stay for the entire process.  Their mandu were terrible looking – lumpy, filling leaking out, lots of little rips and tears.  Ugly. I made them do a lot of do-overs.

Those kids wanted to go, so badly.  But I kept at them, telling them this would be the most useful they would be for the entire weekend.  If it really bothered them, maybe they’d remember the experience and use it for a college application essay  about Korean-American culture and family.  (Probably titled “Mean Auntie, or the Bitter Taste of My Tears in the Dumplings.”)

The other thing that happened was that I woke up sore after the weekend.  Probably because we spent a fair amount of time playing (and I’m not proud of this) “Just Dance 3″ on the Wii.  It’s a dance game where you copy movements of people on the screen, but the only movement that counts is the hand with the controller.

It’s silly, but my family is also incredibly competitive about the dumbest things in the world and so I was bound and determined to destroy the hopes and dreams of a bunch of under-1o’s with my dance steps copied from a video game.

Like I said, I’m not proud of this, but it is something I think those kids can also learn from.  What that lesson is, I’m uncertain.  (Mean Auntie can’t dance, maybe?)  Anyway, Henry really likes the dances where he can pretend to be a robot or a Power Ranger.  (Although how he knows anything about Power Rangers is beyond me.   He doesn’t watch the show at home, and we don’t have any of the media.  Maybe school (that disseminator of all things cultural)?

Usually, I’m all about tossing the old and the broken and the long-unplayed with.  Get out, I say!

But a few things just hit me the wrong way this past week.  On Monday, I ran over one of Henry’s good outside toys (if there can be such a thing) and felt truly terrible about it.  It was a nice Tonka digger with caterpillers that really turned.  Because the broken plastic stuck to my mittens,  I had to scrape these little yellow plastic bits off the snow with my bare hands to get rid of all the evidence before he came home.  I don’t think he’s noticed yet.  At least, he hasn’t asked.

Today, I packed up all the Lego Primos (the really big chunky blocks Lego used to make for small hands) to give them away to the kids’ daycare.  I wasn’t happy about it, because I just have this fantasy that J will use them and love them even though she hasn’t, but when W said it was time, it made perfect sense.  But man, I burst into tears when packing them up.   I’m glad the kids weren’t here to see it.

Partly because this was the first toy I really invested time in finding – doing it all ebay style  (I don’t think they’re made anymore) and finding a couple of big lots of them.  And Henry loved, loved, loved them.   (They’re great for wall-building.  And that might be about it.)  Although he hasn’t gotten near them since he discovered the duplos and then the regular Lego bricks.  And they’re perfectly good and probably will last forever.  They’ll have a good home at the daycare and be loved by other little children.   Even thinking about it is causing me to tear up, though.  (If I think about it at any length, I will go all ugly-face and bawl.)

That said, I don’t even know why.  It’s not like I felt anything like this sense of loss when W got rid of the crib, or when I stopped breast-feeding, or the day Henry started school.  Or any number of things that really might be considered more personal than a box of brightly colored plastic chunky toys.

I can’t do it just yet.  I’ve just boxed them up and put them in closet, so I can get my act together.  In my head, I’m thinking I’ll make sure every last piece in the house is gathered up before I give them away.  But I know that’s just a delaying tactic.   When I do give them away, I want to be perfectly composed.  Maybe I should ask W to do it.

W also mentioned getting rid of the push-toys that make clanking, pop-corn sounds when they’re pushed across a floor.  I also have feelings about them (there are two).   Sure they’re annoying, but I’m not yet ready to give them up.  I don’t know why.  It’s not like I want to have more children and are saving these things for them.  I don’t think it’s because I want to save them for my children’s children.  It’s like they’re my toys or something.  What’s my issue?

Internet, I think I need a hug.   Or some counseling.  Or maybe just a kick in the butt.  Something.

New Year’s is a big deal in my family.  One of the things that happen is the young bow in respect for the elders and wishes for luck, and the elders give the young some cash money.  There’s also a lot of eating of traditional foods and thinking of the year past and the year ahead and the dead and all that.  The important thing, though, especially to the young, is the money.

My fail (my first of the year, go me!) was that I forgot that.  We were on our way back from DC, on Saturday, the day before New Year’s, literally on the NJ Turnpike, and I’m suddenly thinking, “oh, crap, I forgot New Year’s money.”  W and I have been elders since we had kids.  Maybe since we got married?  (It seems dumb, but I should remember when I turned into an elder, right?)

Anyway, I worry until we get to my parents’ house.   I ask my mom if it’s okay to not give.  She says it’s okay, but W notes that it’s never okay to be those people who don’t have New Year money.   I ask her how much to give, and she says it’s up to me.  I say, “$2?” and she says that’s cheap and makes a face.  So no money is okay, but $2 is too cheap.  Go figure.

I ask my dad if he’s got any spare small bills.  (He used to have lots because he ran a store.)  No.  My brother’s not around, so he’s no help.  So W and I strategize and we go over to the local strip mall and proceed to break a number of 20 dollar bills to get enough singles and fives to give away the next day.  W called it “shaking down the immigrants and natives.”

We get back to my parents’ house.  I check with my mother about the number of kids showing up.  At least 27.  Damn.  Still not enough money.  (Although we are well fortified with single cans of soda, granola bars, battery packs, single serve chip bags and yogurt cups.  I felt like one of those people passing counterfeit bills.)  Although my mother kindly reminds me that if I don’t have enough fives, I can give tens.  Everybody loves tens.  (Sure they do.  I’m not giving away that much money – mostly because I don’t have it.)  My brother shows up, and he’s got some fives.  (He’s really sympathetic because he’s done the exact same thing, but because it was before my parents retired, they had the money.  Then I make a threat to take the money people give my kids and give that away.  My brother laughs, because he’s done that too.)  Then the next morning, my mother coughs up $20 in singles.

The lucky money thing goes well enough.  Some people didn’t show.  We’ve got some singles left over.  Oh, thank goodness.  Safe.

Then some people show up at my mother’s house after the big event.  There go the rest of the money – and still, my mother’s going on about how I should stop counting and just give it away – which is easy for her to say.  I just didn’t want to give an unequal amount of money when it’s obvious that I’m counting out singles, and I might not have enough anyway.  Which I do.  Barely.

I should just take my brother’s advice and if I’m even thinking about being in the vicinity around New Year’s get a whack of money and just leave it with my parents.  It’ll be so much easier than the night of the bumble-o’s.

I told this story to a friend recently, and she thought it was funny, until we told her how many kids.  That brought it all into perspective for her.   Because 27 is a lot of kids.   Then she told the story of how she went to buy the red envelopes for New Year’s money (she’s a long-time Yankee recently married a Canadian-American-Chinese guy) and was thrilled at how many there were in the pack.  Because she could use the envelopes for year and years until they were all used up.  Until she realized that they all had the year on them.  I laughed, because if she were really ethnic, that wouldn’t matter.

Anyway, that’s my New Year story.  Here’s to hoping your New Year goes a little more smoothly than that evening did for us!

I guess I had a policy of “posting it forevermore.”  It wasn’t a formal thought-out policy, I just posted stuff when I thought it was done.  (It’s sort of a pity that my pieces never seem truly done to me, I’m always going back and picking at little typos or things I suddenly discovered I didn’t like.)

It’s just that the story was finished, but it didn’t feel finished in the way that I wanted it to, and it being out there made me all anxious in a way that didn’t seem right.  Part of it, honestly, was that it was a kink meme fill for a sort of dark topic and I tied it to a work already in progress, which doesn’t seem exactly fair.  Also, kink meme fills are supposed to be happy and the way the prompt ran – well, nothing happy was going to come out of that.  So, it got pulled.  And I felt better about it.

But it wouldn’t leave me alone.  So I picked at it for a while.  It’s a hard fic for me to do, because it comes from a dark place, considering the origins of child warriors and things like that.

I just posted it yesterday, for two people; me and the Original Poster.  I hope the OP reads it and likes it (as much as one can like something so dark and potentially angst-inducing).

As for me, I’m posting just to be done with it.  Maybe that’s how some people do it.  With this fic, I’m really understanding the idea of how people just write for themselves, because this fic isn’t going to be very popular.  I don’t have a lot of aspirations for this fic – I’m just be glad to be done, and I can stop thinking about it.  And with this post, even deliberations about this fic will be done.

Edited: To say, it’s not that I’m not happy with the piece, because, ultimately, I am satisfied.  I just don’t want the characters (and the reader) to have suffered for nothing.  As I commented to the reader, I’m not the type to drink the tears of others.

W and I were with the kids in Washington DC for the better part of a week.  We waited until the nicest day and went to the zoo.  We ambled about, and then, I almost ran over a lady in front of the bathrooms.  I can’t remember if I apologized, because I was mesmerized by her face.  Creepily.  I knew I was staring at this person and yet I couldn’t stop.  She just reminded me of someone I knew.  (You know about me and my little staring problem.  I’m aware of this and yet this seemed even more creepy and socially unacceptable.)  She kept looking back at me.  In my head, it was her trying to remember my features so she could report them to the police about crazy stalker-zoo-lady.

Anyway, I finally managed to say something like “Excuse me, but you remind me -”

And then she yelled out my name.  Much screaming and some hugging ensued.

Turns out, this was somebody I hadn’t seen in nine years.  We’d met and spent most of our active, in-person part of the friendship in Wisconsin (where she still lives), I’d been a bridesmaid at her wedding, and somehow, we both managed to take our families to the National Zoo on the same day and meet up at the toilets.  Crazy, huh?

W had taken the kids to the restaurant, and was pretty mad when I gestured for him to return back to the bathrooms.  His admitted feeling on it was “This better be some amazing frickin’ animal if you’re having me come back all the way there.”  (Ha!)

Hopefully, that’s what’s causing my current writing blues.

What might have made the problem worse was the trip we just took to DC, which was great, except that I was so miserable for it. At least we did stuff and tried to not think about how miserable I was.  Walked the National Mall in the cold, yelled at children and tried to be upbeat.

Hey friends that I visited – I’m sorry if I made you sick. Really, really sorry.

Also, read the Stephen King writing memoir.  Most lasting thing: he aims for 2ooo words a day.  Just, wow.

Maybe I’ll go call in sick, hide in bed for a while and try to feel better, about the cold and my low verbiage.  (2k a day?  Damn.)

So that means in Naruto, no ninja can fly.  Sure, they have jutsus that can effectively do this, or some technologies (mostly in the movies), but given that the schizoid tech of that world, that’s not a problem for me.  They still have to walk to get to places, or hop trees, or whatever, and you see them do it.  Or that Harry Potter’s world, nothing can be created from nothing – which I find really interesting.  Because it shows the limits of whatever power there is – a power which might solve problems without other kinds of effort.  (For the record, I am not a Potter-head.)

My favorite, in theory if not in actual execution, is Dune.  Because the whole saga is based around acquisition of the spice, which is their way of getting around.  It is actually the oil equivalent of their universe.  (Almost literally – using the analogy of the desert people and all that.  I don’t know enough about it to comment further, but I am really impressed by this.  Although, to paraphrase themightygodking, you don’t have to read much further to get the point.)  But a civilization is based on exploitation of this spice, which is the lynchpin of their moving around the universe.  Without it, nothing goes.  Everything else, the family sagas, the technology, the religious cults, is secondary to this spice.

I am myself working on several pieces which involve these little details.  One story is basically halted because of the problem I am having in getting a reasonable fix on how this civilization would transport mail/messages.  Because if you’re crossing galaxies, you’re wanting mail/news from all the corners of your empire, right?  How can you do that in a way that doesn’t seem dated by the standards of the technology you’re already getting up there?  Couriers?  Some hyper-light mail?  Which I can’t buy because of the problems of the physics, not that I know anything about it, but it is a stopping block.  How fast would it have to be to be reasonable?  Would you just set up mini-wormholes/mail drop boxes everywhere?  That’s crazy.  That would work with crack fic, but not a serious piece.  (I know lots of works just handwave it (looking at you, George Lucas, Gene Roddenberry), and I probably could too, but it seems like something really key to the story right now.  It’s probably kind of dumb that I’m stuck on it, but this is one of my Problems.)

I can’t help but think that the things that add to/halt a civilization’s communication/travel say a lot about it, and because of my need to Say Something Important Occasionally, it’s sort of blocking-making.  No wonder people start to write fantasy, if only so they don’t have to deal with it.  It’s all MAGIC, then.   Because this theorizing can sometimes feel like BS all by itself.

There is no ‘please’ in Korean.  It was driving me crazy for a while, because I couldn’t figure out if it was my piss-poor Korean or just the language itself.

I had a long conversation with my father about it.  He thinks it’s funny – of course, there is no ‘please’ in Korean.  Duh, daughter.  Going to English and learning to say ‘please’ was a weird thing for him.  The implied ‘please’ is sort of embedded in the way the sentence is phrased.  Also, I have terrible literal translator-head, where one might be asking, very politely, for something might come out as bluntly as “Give it to me.”

The ‘please’ things makes me wonder if that’s a small semantic step in the stairs of what people might consider rudeness in Koreans.  Which I find ridiculous.   Koreans aren’t rude, especially to people they don’t know.  People are always talking about how polite my father/mother are (as opposed to me, I guess) or their Korean friends are (again, as opposed to me).    There are tons of different politeness levels in Korean, and it is one of the most polite-aware countries I’m aware of (or at least, you get called out a lot if you’re rude and parents are deeply ashamed for raising rude children).   Of course, there’s always going to the exceptions.  But I find most people are pretty polite anywhere you go, if you’re not an asshole.

Anyway, there is no ‘please’ in Korean.  There are, however, many ways to say ‘excuse me’ and ‘sorry.’

It’s just not shopping if there’s no parking hassle, or inability to figure out how much stuff costs, or waiting and being pissed, or yelling at your shopping buddy about something inane because of the stress, because then there’s the relief of being done.   I’m just sort of ‘eh’ about the whole thing really.  Because it makes it so much a bare exercise of commercial excess, stripped down to point, click, credit card, done.  It’s so easy.  It’s even shipped directly to the place where it needs to go – anything I can do in there would only get in the way.

I don’t know why I’m all nostalgic about it – I don’t really want to go back to that place of crowds and all, but it’s sort of weird.  I’ll get over it – I mean, I’m not complaining.  It’s just odd to me.  But, look, I still have to buy some clothes for various children which will take me into the vicinity of other people and I’ll get my “shopping sux” emotional thing on then.   Thank goodness none of the kids actually have to try things on.