Posts Tagged → Humor

I am gluten free Jen.

I am that person now.

I’m that girl you invite to dinner, but question whether she’s that interesting enough to make this endeavor worthwhile. You know, the person who you start exerting effort over the stove for and then think, fuck, fuck, fuck in the middle of roasting a giant cheese and breadcrumb stuffed leg of lamb because you remembered that they can eat neither lamb nor cheese nor bread nor giant things nor, for that matter, cooked food.

You know, the kind of person whose diet prevents them from eating anything except, perhaps, a single carrot that grew in a sterilized vacuum, free from the influence of microbes, pesticides, and controversial opinions about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Carrot lightly spritz with salt water, please.

I’m that person now. Don’t invite me to dinner, because I wouldn’t want to invite my food sensitive ass either. Besides, I won’t be listening to you. I’ll just be looping a montage of the Cheetos, fried chicken, and beer I can no longer consume – like a gastronomic In Memoriam set to the painful, yearning melody of Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata”.

You may call it dietary restrictions or “gluten sensitivity”. I just call it nihilistic dietary sadness.

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Some people forget who they are amid tragic circumstances like war or natural disaster. Such circumstances reveal the fragility of being human – that, free of societal comfort and constraint, we sway dangerously between savagery and humanity.

My experience of near-humanistic loss was not in a war zone or amid scorched earth. I wasn’t imperiled by flood rains or famine. I was in the exceptionally well-lit frozen food section at Whole Foods.

There I stood, amid dozens of other young professionals with pansy ass nutritional preferences, choosing between the infinite number of frozen pizza options. I had narrowed it down to 2 products – an organic version of the Tostino’s Pizza Roll1 and an item that purported to be a gluten-free, dairy free pizza.

As I held the glass door of the freezer ajar, I felt the physical whoosh of circulated, refrigerated air hit my face and the psychological gust of question after question:

Who am I?

Who is Jen?

Is this Jen now?

Is Jen me?

Is this me?

—

The Jen of yore is a chubby kid whose childhood diet was almost exclusively Vietnamese. By virtue of the cuisine, I defaulted on a life that was gluten-free – rice noodles, rice dishes, rice-wine vinegar, rice paper.

When you raise children with little money, the strategy is to bribe your brood with cheap, empty things. My brilliant parents withheld what they considered “American food” unless I gave them what they wanted – Arby’s for A’s, Egg McMuffins for exemplary handwriting, curly fries for a clean room. Gluten became an elusive privilege.

Like a fat Pavlovian dog, I associate the thick, greasy air surrounding a Jack-In-The-Box with nostalgia and American success. Today, nothing feels more satisfying than eating a Sourdough Jack with a side of chili cheese curly fries.2

Do you think the child in me cared about multiplication tables or knowledge or the inherent goodness that is learning for the sake of learning? NOPE. Just give me the McNuggets and don’t you dare forget the sweet and sour sauce.

In gluten, I see the hunger of youth – the luminous energy of a girl who could write a story in one-night, run to the local campus pub, and down an entire pitcher of Blue Moon. I taste the countless bagels I ate for breakfast, lunch, and dinner – a decision born of collegiate poverty and caring not of body, but of creating, writing, and imaging.

And I remember the people all around me who devoured the same glutinous, gluttonous shit with me. The companions who stared into a dark midnight sky with me, dreaming of a day we would drink better than Keystone Light. The dirty café on Wisconsin Avenue that served the best 3 AM french fries with friends. The pizza shop on Haight Street that always rectified a disappointing Friday with slices covered in whole gloves of garlic. All the people I texted reminding them that it was Two-Dollar Thigh Tuesday at Popeye’s.

That’s who I am.

—

I’m also the girl who, months ago, went to my fourth doctor in 10 years to resolve long-standing skin issues. For much of my life, I have itched, scratched, and itched, resulting in cycle so tumultuous that it would jolt me awake in my sleep. It became so entrenched in my sleeping habits that my partner learned to unconsciously scream No! No! No! and slap my hand away if she heard scratching in her sleep.

Anyone who has had an itch that never goes away knows that the sensation becomes both a physical and emotional irritation. The most infuriating part of insatiable itching was that I could never figure out why the urge existed. It became a part of me.

Through 20 years and a half-dozen doctors, I never had a diagnosis – only conjectures that blamed my dogs, Houston (the entire city, its polluted airspace and its climate), San Francisco (the entire city, its cold airspace, and its weird ass people), dryer sheets (???), and a confounding, physiologically-impossible claim that I had chlamydia3 (which ended up a false positive, thank you STD Jesus).

Dog-less, dryer sheet-less, and STD-less, I still itched. The more I itched, the less I slept, the less I felt like myself. Hazy-eyed, mildly desperate, and on the suggestion of doctor number 4, I did something that I never thought Jen would do. I went on an elimination diet. Out went the bread, then the pasta, then those delicious Red Lobster cheddar bacon biscuits, and then, worst of all, the beer.

“I can’t imagine you without a beer,” said my friend after inviting me, to all places, a brewery towards the finale of my elimination nightmare. I hate my life, I thought as I drank the only thing I could: non-alcoholic kombucha.4

There went most of the carbs – donuts, cookies, French bread – I consumed burning my candle at both ends in a dreamy, ardent desire to write. There went the dream of one day living an Asian version of the King of the Hill opening credits. And there, on the other side, went the itching.

Like a phoenix that cannot be feathered, dredged in breadcrumbs, and deep fried – I rose, a new gluten-free me.5

—

I’m that person now. I hope you’ll still invite me to dinner.6

I am a native San Franciscan?

In May of 2009, I moved to San Francisco after graduating from college.   It was a place I had only been twice in my life – once for an unremarkable pre-move trip and once as a kid traveling with my grandmother (and apparently everyone else’s tiger balm-drenched Chinese grandmother) on a Chinese bus tour of California. On both occasions, I wasn’t hit with an Allen Ginsburg-esque love for this fog-filled, hilly metropolis. All I remember was how cold summer could feel and how sequined my grandmother’s clothing was despite our daily hours-long activity of sitting in a charter bus full of unimpressed Chinese ladies.

Give or take the months I’ve spent away for graduate school, I have somehow hit my 7-year mark living in San Francisco. If the insufferable television series “Sex and the City” should be believed, it takes 7 years for someone to become a “native New Yorker”. Should this logic be applied to San Francisco – New York’s equally expensive, equally pretentious, and equally homosexual west coast counterpart – I will have reached my “native” status as of this writing.

If time is not an adequate indicator of being a “native” San Franciscan, I have another convincing measure of nativity. According to psychologist Robert Plutchik’s seminal theory of emotion, there are eight standard human emotions, which include fear, joy, and surprise. I would argue that San Franciscans have two additional standard emotions – “Exasperation over expensive rent” and “Terror induced by clueless Lyft Driver who is from Sacramento”. I acquired the former emotion the moment I moved to this city and developed the latter emotion this past Saturday night.

Thus, to mark my self-proclaimed transition from invasive species to native species of a city I have grown to love, I’m going to partake in a San Francisco tradition – complaining about insignificant minutia.

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Rant #1: Why is this line so damn long? [Ice Cream Edition]

This rant has many iterations which include, but are not limited to “Lines! Coffee edition,” “Lines! Brunch edition,” and “Lines! Artisanal chocolate (?) edition”.

I chose to write about waiting in line for ice cream because ice cream is among my top five favorite things in the world. Anything that stands in the way of my ravenously consuming ice cream feels like a travesty of injustice.*

I grew up eating entire tubs of Country Vanilla, Neapolitan, and Moo-llenium Crunch Blue Bell ice cream, which is a practice that has recently fallen out of favor because of the possibility of death by Listeria. Now, instead of risking death via infectious bacteria, I now risk dying in the frigid cold as I stand in line at one of the many San Francisco handcrafted ice cream shops – Bi-Rite Creamery, Humphry Slocombe, Mitchell’s, Smitten and, most recently, Salt & Straw.

I’ve had to stand in line so often at these shops that it feels like waiting for ice cream is inevitable. However, I find that the bottleneck is preventable if people stop the practice of trying every single flavor available. I dislike the practice for two reasons – first, the longer I have to wait in line, the more likely I am to come to the realization that purchasing a 5-dollar scoop of ice cream when it is already cold outside is a fucking stupid idea. Second, the people scooping your 17 samples of ice cream are probably twenty-something English majors with rock star dreams who are a few scoops away from early onset carpal tunnel syndrome.

In an effort to save the wrist nerves and tendons scooping ice cream in this great city, I wanted to share my approach to ordering ice cream:

  1. Determine the number of scoops you would like. Anything more than 3 scoops is obscene, you greedy bastard.
  2. To determine the number of samples to try, double the number of scoops you intend to order. For example, if you want 1 scoop, try 2 flavors. 2 distinct scoops equates to 4 tries. Under no circumstance should you try all 32 flavors of ice cream available unless you intend to order 16 distinct scoops. If you are thinking of ordering 16 distinct scoops, please refer to my off-color remark muttered in step number 1, you greedy bastard.
  3. To maximize satisfaction in the flavor combinations you choose, make sure that roughly half of what you choose to sample is new, interesting flavors. The other half should be traditional and reliable. For instance, “I want 2 scoops of ice cream, so I’m going to try 4 flavors. My 4 choices are vanilla, chocolate, balsamic and raspberry-infused fermented trout intestines, and candied walnut with malted soy milk of Pikachu.”

As you can tell, the above 3 steps are a general outline of the philosophy in which I live my life. Feel free to use – it works!

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Rant #2: For the last time, “Hella” is not a unit of measurement.

This section is directed to my partner – a true native San Franciscan – who has insisted since the inception of our relationship that “hella” is unit of time, quantity, size, and dimension. Examples include “hella expensive,” “hella dumb,” and, most infuriatingly, “hella whack”. Who has perpetuated this non-sense and tainted our beloved partners with these lies?

People, it is unacceptable to tell me that “hella people are coming to the party”. Does that mean 4 people (“hella people” to me) or does that mean 37 people (“hella people” to my partner)? What does it mean that it is going to take “hella long to get here”? Is this 6 minutes (which feels “hella long” because I am hungry) or does this mean 2 hours (because your Lyft Driver from Fresno has collided on the Bay Bridge with a Lyft Driver from Modesto)? If the situation is “hella whack,” do you mean as whack as waiting in a long line to get ice cream in the cold or as whack as the 2016 presidential election?

Clarity in language is important. How important? Hella. Don’t know how important that is? PRECISELY.

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*Editor’s Note: Probably not a travesty of injustice.

 

I am creating a budget.

One of the greatest tools that I have learned from seeing a therapist over the last year (exceptionally helpful – I would highly recommend it!) is assessing, daily, the circumstances that I can and cannot control.  It’s a helpful practice that allows me to direct my energy towards actions that can actually affect some change and to expend little on the inconsequential and incontrollable.  So, I’ve been focusing on firming up my finances – more specifically reforming my budget using practices like the snowball method, the 50/20/30 model, and multiple banking accounts for my discretionary spending and specific savings objectives.

The results can be found below, as depicted in these 100% accurate and mathematically correct visual representations of my budget as a 20-something and my budget as a 30-something.  The graphics are color-colored, of course, according to “needs,” “debts and savings,” and “wants”.

 

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Jen’s 20-Something Budget:

  • Rent that probably (definitely) contributes to gentrification
  • Eating Out
  • Groceries that will inevitably go bad from eating out
  • Books
  • Fucking Student Loans
  • “Savings” (to be raided at the end of the month)
  • Alcohol – Fun
  • Alcohol – Existential Crisis
  • Alcohol – Ladies Night in the Gayborhood on Tuesday (??!!) nights filled with awkward, semi-passive aggressive dancing

Definitely Outside Budget, but YOLO:

  • Travel – Budget level accommodations that play techno versions of Adele songs
  • Alcohol – Potlucks and 20s Themed Parties
  • Brunch

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Jen’s 30-Something Budget:

  • Rent for an apartment that should have gone to a nice Latino family, but instead went to you, you God damn yuppie
  • Eating out
  • Groceries that will inevitably go bad from eating out because, you know, change is slow and hard
  • Books
  • Therapist (actual person, not alcohol)
  • Fucking student loans
  • Savings (for future wedding, children, parents and potential collapse of the USA)
  • Alcohol – single 8 PM drink on a Friday night with long-term lesbian partner
  • Not-So-Sketch Travel
  • MALM dresser from Ikea