Ever since I moved into a house off campus three weeks ago, I’ve been learning how to cook. Honestly, I didn’t even know basics like how to heat oil or what a cookie sheet was. Learning from my roommate and working together to create meals has been a blast, and I’m surprised to say that I’ve  survived the past few weeks on variants of my home cooked pasta sauce based meals. Mmm both my stomach and my wallet are thanking me!

I’m not sure if this recipe has been invented yet, but I came up with it on accident and it turned out pretty good! So I’m going to share it here:

• place tortilla wrap on frying pan, and add all ingredients to only one half, like a quesadilla
• Add pasta sauce (not too much, or it will be too gooey)
• Add any vegetables/meat/cheese you like
• Fold tortilla half over
• Turn on medium heat and cook, flipping as needed, until insides get hot
• Turn on high heat so that tortilla cooks and is nice and crispy

Voila! Your very own Pizza Tortilla!

Recently I found myself mooching off the charity of my friends until I found a place of my own to stay. I stayed with one friend one night, another the next three, and another the last three. This hot potato of playing guest, followed by hosting a guest for one week, led me to thinking about the nuances of hosting a guest and being a guest.

We’ve all experienced how stressful it is to host a guest. Well-meaning extensions of friendship quickly turn sour when boundaries are crossed, or when a guest overstays his or her welcome. I’ve heard complaints about everything from financial incursions to physical space taken up, but the most stressful part of hosting, for me, is the emotional burden of needing to keep my guest entertained. One time my freshman year of college, I had three friends visit me two weeks apart. I ended up taking a friend to the same attractions in San Francisco three times. And no matter how much they insist that I should finish my homework and not worry about them, I still feel bad doing work. Don’t get me wrong, I love my friends dearly; in fact, probably there in lies the root of my problem: I’m not ok with just acting as a guesthouse for my friends.

I’m generally on the other side of the relationship, whether it is bumming on my friends’ dorm room floors, visiting relatives, or staying with the friend of a friend. And for all you who generally host your friends more than is reciprocated, let me tell you that, being a guest is stressful too! As a guest, I constantly feel like I am overburdening my hosts, on top the emotional instability from not having a place of my own. Even if I help with the chores, keep my clothes in a neat little suitcase,  make friends with my host’s housemates, and offer to help pay for gas, I am still aware of the undue stress I add to my host.

Hosts tend to complain about guests, but you gotta give ‘em a break, because guests get stressed too! It seems like if both parties are experiencing stress, there must be some way to resolve the issue. Until a solution is found, I’ve come up with a solution of my own. Lots of books and websites will tell you rules about being a good guest/host, but it all boils down to one simple maxim: avoid hosting and being a guest as much as possible.

This is the 4th chapter in the series about The Migrant Worker.

What kind of 30+ man makes friends with 20 year old girls? I felt pretty dejected after I realized the cute policeman was already married. So dejected, in fact, that I decided to take revenge by asking to dinner the Migrant Worker whose calls I had been avoiding all week. Needless to say, he accepted immediately.

He picked me up on his yellow Annie’s delivery bicycle after work. At 11pm, I would’ve thought most places had closed, but he took me to a part of Beijing that I had never encountered. The people who frequented this night market were those who got off work after most people had gone to bed, mostly young men like him who had come to Beijing in search of work. They only had a chance to eat dinner at midnight and play a few games of pool afterwards. The smell immediately caught my attention; it was a mixture of the glistening sweat on their bare backs after a long day’s work, and vegetables fried in peanut sauce. Although that sounds gross, it was the most down to earth scent I can remember.

During dinner, I asked him how much money he made, not considered a rude question in China. About 200$ a month was the answer.While he stepped outside for a moment, I quickly paid for the meal: only about 3$. Coming back inside, he finished eating and called out for the check. When I explained that I already covered it, he was enraged that I didn’t let him pay for the meal. He worked for his money, whereas he didn’t want me to use money that my parents gave me on him. This was the portrait of the honest worker that I had been searching for.

He sent me home on his bike at 2am; he pedaled while I stood on the bars behind him, holding his shoulders to keep from falling backwards. The quiet of the sleeping city accompanied by the bleakness of the dark gave me an eerie feeling; I thought Beijing never slept. Crossing the highway, we passed by three other guys on their bikes, and he gave out a loud whistle. I heard three whistles back.

Laying down on my couch, I thought back about all that had happened that night. Even though I had lived and visited China countless times, I had never known this side of China before. I couldn’t sleep, and spent all night texting him until 7am when I told him to come over and we fell asleep on my couch.

My computer after I sleepily stepped on it

Recently, I wrecked my mac by stepping on it, creating this inconvenient, however awesome looking, effect on my LCD screen.  Rather than pay 600$ for Apple to fix it in their store (at that rate, I would rather just buy a new computer), I decided to order a screen from www.Screentek.com and install it myself. Thinking that I would receive an entire screen, frame and all, and all I had to do was pop the original off and the new one on, I thought it should be a piece of cake.

That’s why I was surprised when I received a thin, black screen in the mail. When I realized that I was actually expected to disassemble the computer, my immediate reaction was to call my computer friend and ask him to help me. Well, my computer friend was busy with his girlfriend, so he lent me his tools and wished me luck.

First, remove the plastic frame

Computer without the frame

Next, unscrew the hinge

See? I can do it all by myself!

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you: the inside of a mac

Tada!

The whole process took about two hours, and my computer is a bit more beat up than before, but I finally finished. I feel proud of myself, and apparently not a few guys are impressed as well. So hopefully my computer will stay unbroken.

Cat attack!

Unless the house cat gets to it first…

Meow!

This is the next chapter in my project of archiving all of my memories about you so that I can finally be free of the past. Continued from previous post.

When I was younger, I said “I love you” all the time. I threw those three words around like birdseed, usually following the words, “Thank you so much!”. Once, my dad suddenly kicked me off the computer while I was about to send off an email to a classmate thanking him for his help, and he saw that I had finished with the forbidden three words.  Needless to say, he sternly lectured me about how eighth graders cannot possibly know what love means.

In my junior year of high school, I still hadn’t changed that much. I was at my house doing some last minute prepping with my debate partner for a tournament the next day, when my printer broke down. Not knowing what to do, I got online (back when people still used AIM and before the days of gchat). Using my classically middle school screen name with all its XX’s, azn, and baby’s, I scanned my buddy list to see who could help. Even though I had just met you the day before at Chinese school, I double clicked your screen name – you seemed like a computer-savvy guy despite all your ghetto pretenses. As my buddy icon flashed in the lower right corner, proudly declaring  “Italians are Hot”, you patiently walked me through various fixes, probably thinking to yourself that I was the biggest ditz ever. Even though we couldn’t get it working again, I was so grateful that you would take an hour out of your time to help me, that I told you,

me: Thank you, I love you so much!

short pause

you: lol

me: what, is my love unrequited?

long pause

you: we’ll see

Perhaps you weren’t the greatest person at recognizing hyperbole followed by sarcasm, but you took me seriously. Three days later, I saw in my chat screen:

you: so.. do you want to talk about what you said a few days ago?

I had no idea what you were talking about, so you said to forget it. But we didn’t forget it, did we? Because all of a sudden we started hanging out and talking (and flirting) all of the time. It’s like, with that conversation, a little birdie popped the idea that perhaps something romantic could happen between us. Later, well into our relationship, we both confessed that if I hadn’t said I love you, and if you hadn’t misunderstood me, we would probably never get to know how great we are together.

You didn’t really tell me that you loved me much, because you claimed that I should just know. Even though I might have overdone it with my flippancy, sometimes I think that saying I love you too much is better than too little.

mood: 5 can’t. fall. asleep…

physical tired: 5 why am I such an insomniac?

spiritual tired: 3 GRE coming up

Starting a business is hard. I started a local business my senior year in high school, which began as a one room operation with me, one other teacher,  and eight students. After four years, I have extended an offer to join the operation to many others, including a partnership offer to my younger brother. I thought everything was for the best; I could distribute the responsibility while mentoring my brother in this unique work experience.  Since I was going away to college, I needed people who were still in the area to continue the work.

However, things did not turn out as expected. My brother decided that I no longer had any right to make decisions since I was never around. He neglected my repeated advice and request for updates about the organization. He took everything in his own hands and refused to allow me any responsibility.

As a result, the organization regressed. Enrollment fell to less than half the previous year, and profits dropped from on the order of 5,000 to negative; that’s right, we didn’t even break even.

I suggested some changes, but after a furious email debate, it was evident that my brother and I had different visions of what the mission of the organization should be, and where the organization should go. Any normal professional disagreement would normally be settled through a bureaucratic process or civil discussion, but my brother and I just resorted to how we handle disagreements at home: name-calling and shouting. It got personal when he started crying about how he had always looked up to me and how I had abused him.

The result of the disagreement? I stepped down from the organization, handed over full responsibility to my brother, and, for the meantime anyway, have blocked all emails and chats from him.

You can fire those who work for you, you can break partnerships up, but you can’t sever your family.