Stand Beside Her, and Guide Her

I don’t want this to be another cliché piece about where I was when I heard about the planes hitting the towers.  It doesn’t matter.  It doesn’t matter if you were in Manhattan or Minnesota.  No matter where we were, we were all in the same place.  A place of shock and fear.  A terrible place where our innate sense of security was absolutely trampled.

What matters is where we are now.  President Obama declared today a National Day of Service, and I think he expressed my own feelings when he said

"On a day when others sought to sap our confidence, let us renew our common purpose, let us remember how we came together as one nation, as one people, as Americans united. Such sense of purpose need not be a fleeting moment.”

And he’s right. In the months following, everyone was flying a flag on their front porch, sporting a patriotic bumper sticker, wearing that requisite lapel pin. Everyone was talking about patriotism, and freedom, and what it means to be an American.

I can honestly say that I have never felt so American in my life as I do now, as an AmeriCorps volunteer. This is what being an American means to me.  I truly believe at the core of this country is the underlying sense of responsibility to do right by each other.  To take care of our ourselves by taking care of each other. 

I know that means something different to everyone.  What I want it to mean is that you do something for someone today.  Take that sense of purpose you felt on September 12, 2001 and renew it.  Follow through on it, eight years later.  That might mean installing sheetrock for a single mother stuggling to give her son a safe home.  Or maybe it means donating a few bucks to the Red Cross.  It could mean helping someone pick up the change they dropped. 

No matter what you choose to do, it means that you remember, today and everyday, what it means to be an American, and to cherish it.

Ears on the Beatles

Today, the world has dedicated itself to The Beatles.  With the release of the remastered albums and The Beatles: Rock Band, today is a day to party.  To celebrate, my favorite radio station, WFUV, is playing Beatles songs and solo projects, original and covers all day. Stream it! http://www.wfuv.org/audio/stream.html

I personally have a deep love for The Beatles.  1 was the first cd I bought for myself, and also my first favorite.  And I kind of forced my RA staff to make our building Beatles themed last year.  The complex (comprised of Brewster, Boland, and Brockway, also known as BBB) had "Let it B B B" painted across the front windows, our lounge was called Strawberry Fields, and we had a giant orange (it is Syracuse, after all) submarine.  It was pretty fabulous.

I thought I'd share a few of my favorite Beatles tunes...

(À la Dominic Monaghan, I think the lyrics "Living is easy with eyes closed" make for a great tattoo.)

Mystery Meat

My dad has a few friends who are Burmese, one of whom recently had a daughter. In their tradition, you celebrate 100 days after birth with a feast. So this party of sorts was at a Chinese restaurant, which sounds awesome because who wouldn't want nine courses of General Tso's yumyums? But hold on to your taste buds, this was real Chinese food. None of the made up, American, not even remotely Chinese in nature, Chinese food. Nope, this was the real deal.

We started of with a platter, which I neglected to take a picture of because I was just so enthralled. There were beef ribs, calimari, and duck, all of which was pretty harmless. But there was also duck tongue. Tongue! And there were probably at least 30 on our platter, and multiply that times every table at the party...well, that answer begs the question my Dad so artfully asked. How many ducks are we eating?!

(Two duck tongues!  Actually they tasted fine, but there isn't a lot of meat on there.)

But the fun doesn't stop there!  Also on this platter were these mystery orange things.  Perhaps octupus.  No one was really all that sure.

(Aakash bravely approached the orange stuff.)

Okay course two.  Much tamer, and much more delicious!  Little balls of fried dough with condensed milk inside, candied pecans, broccoli, and shrimp.  It was all quite good, except for the fact that the shrimp was drenched in this mayo-based sauce.  Like, you could tell you were eating a whole lot of mayo.  That made me squick out a little.  Okay, a lot.  So, needless to say, tht shrimp did not get eaten by me.

Course three- soup!  It was quite good, although I don't actually know what it was.  I do know that someone at the table put a little bit of red wine vinegar and Johnny Walker Black in the cup to bring out the flavor of the seafood.  

(Good to the last drop!)

Course four was perhaps my favorite of the night.  Why?  Because no one knew what it was.  No one!  Even the wait staff just shurgged and said "Seafood?"

(In the end we decided that it may or may not have been conch and abalone.)

The fifth course, lobster, was very artfully displayed.  With both the lobster head and tail on the plate, it represented good luck from head to toe for the baby.

This was followed by a sixth course of chicken and a seventh course of fish, also featuring the heads and tails.  I have the pictures, but they're kind of creepy, so I'll refrain from posting them.

Then came the tame stuff.  Courses eight and nine were lo mein and fried rice with nuts and raisins, followed by a fruit platter and a sweet soup of black bean and tapioca, making it a grand total of eleven!

But the fun didn't stop there!  Someone at the table put in an order for the chef's specialty.  And I was very glad they did.  Out came chicken wings stuffed with sticky rice with a side of Sriracha mixed with something sweet.  So good!

(YUM!)

All in all, it was a very interesting night.  I tried a whole lot of new things and had a lot of fun doing it.  Certainly a culinary adventure worth having.

I leave you with the quote of the evening:

Me: I work for Habitat for Humanity

Random Guy: Oh cool, you work with ducks!

Song of the Moment

"The Littlest Birds" by The Be Good Tanyas

Well I feel like an old hobo,
I'm sad lonesome and blue
I was fair as a summer's day
Now the summer days are through
You pass through places
And places pass through you
But you carry 'em with you
On the souls of your travellin' shoes

Well I love you so dearly I love you so clearly
Wake you up in the mornin' so early
Just to tell you I got the wanderin' blues
I got the wanderin' blues
And i'm gonna quit these ramblin' ways one of
these days soon
And I'll sing

The littlest birds sing the prettiest songs...

Well it's times like these
I feel so small and wild
Like the ramblin' footsteps of a wanderin' child
And I'm lonesome as a lonesome whippoorwill
Singin these blues with a warble and a trill
But I'm not too blue to fly
No I'm not too blue to fly cause

The littlest birds sing the prettiest songs...

Well I love you so dearly
I love you so fearlessly
Wake you up in the mornin' so early
Just to tell you I got the wanderin' blues
I got the wanderin' blues
And I don't wanna leave you
I love you through and through

Oh I left my baby on a pretty blue train
And I sang my songs to the cold and the rain
I had the wanderin' blues
And I sang those wanderin' blues
And I'm gonna quit these ramblin' ways
One of these days soon
And I'll sing...

The littlest birds sing the prettiest songs....

I don't care if the sun don't shine
I don't care if nothin' is mine
I don't care if I'm nervous with you
I'll do my lovin' in the wintertime