Week of February 19: Mortified

Teenage drama… we’ve all gone through it. Most of us survived those embarrassing moments of our yesteryears to become well functioning and valuable members of society. Those years were very awkward and clumsy for most of us and yet we hold these memories with warm fondness whenever a REO Speedwagon song triggers a flashback (how many remember The Jets?). The world used to suck so much back then. So many things could easily throw our world into chaos; everything from an unanswered crush to a grapefruit sized zit on your nose. Even I, yes the high school stud who lettered in two varsity sports, had good grades, was popular and was an all around nice guy (I just picked up my high school year books from my parents so I can prove all of the aforementioned claims… sure I was the 3rd string water captain for football but that counts!!!), had my fair share of angst. I think I dealt with my torments pretty much like how I deal with them now… alcohol. But a lot of my friends and people in general, found therapy by documenting their feelings. Journals, poems, songs, diaries, letters, etc. Countless tragedies and drama unfolded in the diaries of many “why me?” youths, each candidly recording their pure emotions, confident that their journal would never be read by anyone else.

Mortified is a show that started a couple of years ago in New York and Los Angeles. Mortified invites every day people to expose their innermost emotional horror stories on stage. Not sure if it’s considered therapy when people actually laugh AT you. Andrea and I first heard about this show a few months ago on NPR. So when Mortified came to San Francisco, we gathered a few of our friends and checked out the show. So on Saturday, we met up with our friends, Monica, Patty and Walter in the Mission. We met at Andalu for an early dinner and drinks before heading off to the Make-Out Room to catch Mortified.

At Andalu we also celebrated Monica's (in black) birthday. Monica is a leap year baby (2/29) so she's only about 9 years old!!! Since Monica's birthday fell close to Mardi Gras, Andrea thought it was a good idea to pick up a King Cake (picture on right) from Bread Garden Bakery in Berkeley. After stuffing ourselves with lots of tapas, we still managed to split the whole King Cake into 5 equal pieces and washed it down with a couple of pitchers of white sangria. Delicious!!!

The show was excellent and lived up to it's billing. I highly recommend it if you have a chance to see it. There were 8 performers who shared their hilarious secrets. I must say however, that some of the performers were definately putting on a show. I expected all of the performers to be every day Joes getting up on the stage and just letting their stories do the performing. But unfortunately, some found the need to reherse, refine and script their act, which took away from conveying the authentisity of the angst they originally felt. To me the best performers were the ones that just casually read their mortifying stories and simply reacted to the crowd's reactions. None the less, we all had a really good time. Andrea has been inspired and has promised to go digging into her stash of boxed-up past for some of her own mortifying tales. I will let you know what dark forgotten mystries we uncover.

Week of February 12: Keeping it real with Reggie Jackson

Living in Oakland, Andrea and I have come to appreciate the local history, culture and heroes. One of the greatest living Oakland hero is Mr. October, Reggie Jackson, who played with the Oakland A's from 1968 to 1975 and then rejoined the team in 1987 to finish his baseball career. As far as heroes are concerned, Mr. October is tops in Oakland. It's hard not to see Reggie's influence in the city. His signed Oakland A's jerseys are commonly displayed at sports bars, he is prominently seen in commercials and on billboards and he still packs a crowd at charity and other community events.

This week, my brother Brian, Andrea and I discovered the greatest tribute to Mr. October at a very local, family run diner called Lois the Pie Queen... the Reggie Jackson Special! What better way to celebrate the triumphs of this slugger than a breakfast consisting of 2 large fried pork chops, 2 eggs cooked to order, a choice of grits or hashbrowns or rice, and 2 slices of toast (biscuits and english muffins here are awesome). Much like Mr. October himself, this breakfast special is not for mere mortals. Andrea elected to go for something more healthy and light... she ordered the fried chicken breakfast, which consisted of 2 large pieces of southern fried chicken, scrambled eggs, rice with butter and a couple of delicious biscuits. Brian, who earlier announced that he wasn't really hungry, followed suit with his order of the fried chicken breakfast. He however, had his eggs over easy with hashbrowns instead. That left it up to me to represent the Kim's family name in giving props to Reggie. And with great pride, I proudly ordered the Special.

Map of Lois the Pie Queen
851 60th St
Oakland, CA 94608-1409

Let me tell you, Lois (she actually passed away decades ago but her cooking lives on) knows soul cooking. The pork chop was fried just right... tender and flavorful. The chicken was crispy on the outside and juicy on the inside. Lois did something very clever with the chicken. She stripped the skin off most of the meat but left it attached to one end of the chicken. The result was that when the chicken pieces were breaded and fried, the skin was breaded and cooked on both sides as well as the meat. Thus, if you didn't like eating the skin, you simply pulled it off (as it was only attached by one end of the chicken) and still had the meat which was fully crispy breaded. Or if you liked eating the skin, you had a double sided crispy treat.

We did our best to clean off our plates but fell a little short. I think it was the first time I have ever seen Andrea leave behind rice uneaten. I don't think she's quite ready for the Reggie Jackson Special. We left Lois' smelling like fried soul food, barely able to move. And this was at 11 AM. You can just imagine how productive the rest of the day went. Next time (it will have to be at least a few weeks away for health reasons), we'll have to order less to save room for Lois' pies. Anyone up for chicken and waffles?

Week of February 5: Super Bowl XL

A few weeks ago, I posted a blog (Week of January 1) about my tragic Fantasy Football season. The Fantasy Football gods cursed my team and I ended up coming in last. The consequence of my unjust demise resulted in me hosting the Super Bowl party. Despite the shame of my last place finish and despite being forced to host the Super Bowl party, I turned my frown up-side-down and was determined to host one heck of a party.

For the feast, I cooked my famous fried chicken, mac & cheese (Leslie's favorite), corn and biscuits. In addition, Andrea cooked candied crispy bacon (soo bad yet soo good), Velveeta Jimmy Dean sausage dip (Brian has a love/hate relationship with this dish) and some oatmeal chocolate chip cookies. As if there wasn't quite enough food, everyone who came over brought their culinary contributions. What started as a Fantasy Football loser penalty ended up as a delicious heart-stopping calorie-filled banquet. As for the game... I think the Pittsburg Pirates won. Right?

Todd and Leslie brought this cake. By the time it took to get my camera, someone had made off with the other field goal post and taken a slice from the other side. Johnny!!!

Kodi was a lot of help preparing for the party. Kodi was in charge of seating arrangements. Unfortunately, we forgot to tell him that the chairs were for people and not for his favorite bags of goodies.


Eagerly waiting for the food! Nicole (aka Shaguars) seen in black coming up the stairs (pic on left) was the winner of our Fantasy Football league... she handedly kicked all of our butts including her husband Scott's (pic on left, both hands in pockets). Even the ground hogs Steve and Kamini (pic on right), made it out of their den to attend the Super Bowl party. They managed not to be scared away by their shadows for once.

After the Hines Ward touch down, Ed celebrated by tossing his first born, Shaun in the air. Fortunately, Leslie was near by to stop Ed from spiking Shaun.


Dinner is served!

I was really surprised to see Mariella eat so much. I would dare to say that she ate enough for two ;) Last week, I heard the news that Kevin (the sharp shooter) and Mariella are expecting their first baby! CONGRATULATIONS!!!

Week of January 29: TV Dramas- U.S. vs. Korea

For the most part I don’t watch too much TV. Mostly I stick with the morning news & traffic (before work), sports and occasional DVD movies via Netflix. Andrea watches a little more than I do but all in all, our TV consumption levels are pretty similar. Instead of my sports games, Andrea prefers Oprah and some reality shows. Recently however, we have both become very hooked on a couple of TV shows. Both Andrea and I are hooked on ABC’s LOST and Andrea recently completed watching a Korean drama (aka K-drama to those in the know) called First Love of a Royal Prince.

LOST
It started pretty innocently for us. Curious as to what all the hype was about, we ordered LOST Season 1 from Netflix. And honestly, it sat on top of our entertainment center collecting dust for a while. I think we watched Dukes of Hazard (one of the worst movies ever) and The Longest Yard (another bad movie, except for the cameo appearance of Rob Schneider… “You can do it!”- always cracks me up) before we decided to take LOST for a test drive. Within the first 10 minutes of Episode 1 of Season 1, we were hooked. I don’t think either of us quite expected it and since then, we have been watching a few episodes daily to get finally caught up to LOST’s current schedule. We burned through Season 1 pretty quickly (24 hour-long episodes), thanks to Netflix. However, when we reached the end of Season 1, we realized that the rest of the TV world was currently in the midst of Season 2 and none of the Season 2 episodes we missed thus far were available in a DVD format (unless you bought homemade copies through eBay sellers, mostly from the UK). The only legal source was found through Apple’s iTunes at $1.99 per episode. Being the good law abiding citizens, homemade eBay copies were not even considered. That left us with iTunes as the only solution to our LOST fix. Downloading LOST videos from iTunes posed several questions and problems for us. We could download each episode from iTunes and watch it on our computer screen or we could try hooking up our laptop to our plasma TV and try watching it “normally”. After a little bit of googling, we decided that we would try to connect our computer to the TV. The biggest concern I had was how the quality of the downloaded shows would scale up to fit a big screen plasma TV as these iTunes videos were made originally to only fit a small screen (it’s all pixels these days). I bought a S-Video cable from Radio Shack and connected my laptop to our TV and after a few minor adjustments (I had to connect the laptop to the TV via S-Cable first and then power up the computer) we watched LOST Episode1 of Season 2. The video quality was surprisingly good (I had low expectations). It was nowhere close to HD but decent enough to make it worth the effort. And frankly, since Andrea and I were so hooked on the show, we didn’t even realize the degradation in the picture quality after a while. Needless to say, we are now caught up to the current schedule of LOST. We can’t wait for next Wednesday to arrive.

So what is it about the show you ask? The story is well written with a lot of twists and turns (much better than X-Files). Watching the show, you feel like you’re part of the whole situation. I sometimes catch myself getting pissed off at the characters on the show…

• “That Michael is such a hot head. Screw him… let him go off into the jungle.”
• “Charlie is such a damn whiner and a drama queen. Stupid crack head!”
• “They’re all idiots for entering the numbers on the computer. I wouldn’t.”

And the last reason for watching the show? Small island full of good looking people!

First Love of a Royal Prince
Andrea is about as non-Korean as you can get. Tall, blond, blue-eyed from Grand Forks, North Dakota. But everyday she is becoming more and more Korean. She has embraced my family, taken Korean language classes, developed fondness (even more than me) for Korean cuisine and has even taken up Korean cooking (you can check our her blog). I am very grateful that she finds my cultural heritage to her liking. And for the most part, I fully support her interests in Korean customs. However, I am somewhat skeptical of one particular source of information that Andrea has been using for her Korean assimilation… K-drama. It all started with Andrea watching a K-drama show as a way of augmenting her Korean conversational skills. And I must admit, the first K-drama show that we watched, All In, (I only watched it to help Andrea correctly absorb as much Korean as possible) was pretty enjoyable. The storyline was that of a tragic love triangle… two friends of opposite backgrounds, the son of a millionaire hotel owner, Jung-won and the street tough, In-ha, going after the same girl, the innocent and delicate, Su-yon. Andrea purchased the DVD box set of All In online and we promptly watched it together. Unlike the American dramas, K-dramas only last 1 season, usually not more than 24 episodes. Then Andrea discovered a TV station called AZN which is dedicated to a wide range of Asian TV shows and movies. That’s where Andrea found the K-drama, First Love of a Royal Prince. The storyline was that of a tragic love triangle… two separated-at-birth brothers of opposite backgrounds, the son of a millionaire hotel owner, Gun-hee and the workaholic self-made Mr. Perfect older brother, Seung-hyun, going after the same girl, the innocent and delicate, Yoo-bin. Sounds familiar? No it’s not a typo or some sort of blogging error; all K-dramas have the same freakin story line. The shows, All In and First Love of a Royal Prince, are the exact same shows with different actors and different location settings. However, unlike All In, I found the First Love of a Royal Prince to be unwatchable. It was full of over emotional acting with no sense of reality. Don’t believe me? Ask yourself this question… if you were a normal dude (and I don’t care what country you’re from) and the girl you liked, repeatedly told you that she didn’t like you, repeatedly told you never to contact her, repeatedly ran away from you (even to other countries), and got engaged to your older brother, would you still go after this girl when you have other hot women throwing themselves at you? Not convinced yet? Here was the deal breaker for me… this innocent and delicate girl, Yoo-bin is about to get married to Mr. Perfect, Seung-hyun. She is having doubts so she breaks down in tears and asks her fiancé, Seung-hyun (and I’m paraphrasing here) “Do you love me? I need you to tell me that you love me!” Very touching moment. And how does Mr. Perfect respond? “I will call you later”, checks his cell phone and walks away to another meeting. Bravo! Brilliant acting!! So real!!!

Despite all this, Andrea faithfully Tivo’d and watched all the episodes. Andrea’s mother, Karen (when she was in town with Rick) and even my brother, Brian, managed to catch a few episodes of the show and actually enjoyed it. Now Andrea is waiting for another “good” K-drama to come onto the AZN network. And I have a good idea what the storyline will be.

One side effect of Andrea watching K-dramas… Andrea is becoming aware of some of the mannerisms of a Korean wife and has threatened to use these virtues of my people against me. Some of these traits are:

• Korean pinching (ggoh-jjip): when a Korean wife is pissed off at her husband she uses her thumb and index finger to pinch the husband, usually in the arm. When the wife is really pissed, she adds an additional move… she pinches and then twists.
• Korean kiss (bbo-bbo): when kissing on the lips, this technique requires the wife to close her lips air-tight and pull back the mouth into an anti-pucker. When the husband leans over to kiss, the wife holds tight this position, never moves her head, keeps her eyes open and stares blankly straight past the husband.
• Korean nagging (bahgga-ji): according to K-drama, there are 2 types of Korean wives. One is an emotionless stoic pillar of self control and the second kind is an over sensitive nagging hot head.

Does anyone know how to use the Parental Lockout Control?

Week of January 22: Winter Backpacking @ Sam MacDonald Hut

Sierra Club has a system of huts that they maintain throughout California. Usually, these huts are within a few miles from the trailhead and are open to the public all year. I've been to a few of these huts (Ludlow Hut and Benson Hut) in the Sierra Nevada mountains but I only recently learned about the Sam MacDonald Hut in La Honda, which is only about an hour south west of Oakland.

Winter is the perfect time to visit the Sierra Club Huts. Chances are much higher in reserving the whole hut for your group of friends which is exactly what I did. Andrea and I packed our backpacks and hit the road early Saturday morning for Sam MacDonald Park. We met our friends at the parking lot near the trailhead. The Hut was located 1.5 miles from the trailhead and had running water, standard toilets, electricity, fireplace with wood, a full kitchen and slept 14. Since the Hut came with many of the conveniences usually not associated with backpacking, we were able to leave a lot of the camping gear behind and instead pack our backpacks with good food and beverages. Perhaps it was the convenience of the Hut or perhaps it was the caliber of friends Andrea and I keep, but I managed to gain weight over the weekend by eating and drinking all day.

We reached the Hut around noon. After lunching on delicious sandwiches, we quickly settled in and began a long day of enjoying adult beverages and playing multiple games. I must say, I haven't laughed like that in quite a while. Overall, the trip was an excellent way of being in the outdoors and spending time with good friends.

As you can see, Brian (black jacket) has already eaten his lunch and is buying time for his second round. Charles, Jenny and Andrea still have half of their sandwiches left!!!

Playing a civilized game of Blow Pong, where each team tries to blow the ping pong ball off the opponent's table side. Blow Todd blow!!!

After Blow Pong, we decided to get outside for some fresh air and some good old fun. Beers had nothing to do with what happened I'm sure. As you will see, I had a hard time holding the camera steady.

Todd vs. Charles

Lucie vs. Jason

Jenny vs. Lauren

Andrea vs. Victor vs. Leslie

Quite the view from our Hut. Andrea (top) enjoying the sunrise on Sunday. Todd and Leslie (bottom) trying to get away for some quality time alone.