oyceter. Five words meme

First: Help! I'm currently on Picasa trying to post some pictures... is there any way to get it to post all the pictures in the album with captions instead of a link to the album and/or an embedded slideshow? At least without my getting the link to each individual picture and copy-pasting?

(On Picasa because my LJ photos are nearly at the storage limit and I'm not planning on renewing my paid account and because I set up Flickr a long, long time ago and now cannot remember my username or password and am too annoyed to create a new Yahoo ID.)

Reply to this meme by yelling "Words!" and I will give you five words that remind me of you. Then post them in your LJ and explain what they mean to you. These were given to me by

rachelmanija.

Peas

PEAS!!!! I love them so! Like most people (?), all I knew of peas for the longest time were those gross, mushy frozen ones. I didn't particularly hate them, since I loved the potato salad and meat sauce my mom would put them in, but they weren't really anything to write home about either.

And then, around when I first moved to California, I had an appetizer of pea pancakes at a fancy restaurant. I don't remember the pancakes that much (they were good, I'm sure), because I was so surprised by how fresh peas tasted. They were green and crispy and slightly sweet and amazing. A year or so later, I saw the pea episode on Good Eats and realized that I could cook them myself! Eventually, I found my local farmers' market, which was selling.... PEAS (English shelling ones)! (It is so weird reading entries by me from four years back...)

I bought some, went home, realized I had no idea what to do with them, figured out how to shell them, and consulted Joy of Cooking on how to cook them. I still cook them in roughly the same way: salt, pepper, cook until they start to turn bright green, turn off the heat to let them cook just a little more from the heat of the pan, then squeeze in fresh lemon juice. They are lemon-y and salty and peppery, and I love them!

I can't count the number of people I have sicced them on. Most people decided they too liked peas (YAY), although one coworker was not convinced: "They're still too... green."

I love sugar snaps as well, but they don't have the same emotional resonance of English shelling peas, which I've shelled by myself while watching Alton Brown and So You Think You Can Dance, with visiting friends, while visiting friends, and in both California and New York.

Peas for me stand for the joys of fresh produce, how something picked just a few days ago and sold at the market can taste so very different from our usual perception of a food, what it's like to chat with the seller every week ("Uh..." he asked me once, "what do you DO with all those peas?" I looked at him. "Eat them?" I replied.), how much seasonality matters (starchy peas = GROSS), and how you only need to cook very simply if you have great ingredients.

Taiwan

I don't think I will ever be able to get down all I feel about Taiwan, even if I wrote a book. So I am copying Rachel's write up of India.

I grew up there, I hated moving there, I loved it more than most of my classmates at the time, my experience of it is completely atypical, I'm not sure I will ever be able to live there again, I want to move back some day, if I ever have kids I want to torture them and move them there, I wish I had gotten my citizenship when I had the chance, I was starving for books for the entire 8 years I lived there, it's home, it's not home anymore, I miss it being home, I'm not sure it ever was home, even when I was living there people thought I was a foreigner, my family belongs to the group that oppressed people for decades, I don't know enough of the politics, I know more of the politics than most people in the US, I feel like a lumbering overweight giant every time I visit, I envy the healthcare, I miss the public transporation, I can't believe how much it's changed and that we HAVE subways now, I'm so glad there's toilet paper and clean bathrooms now, I almost miss the bad old days of bringing your own toilet paper to school, I can't believe how large my school is now, I wish my parents had enrolled me in a Chinese-speaking school, I would have had a horrible time if my parents had enrolled me in a Chinese-speaking school, I love the city I grew up in, I find Taipei more fun now, I feel like I'm betraying my city.

And I haven't even touched on the food and how I refused to eat almost all of it until I only had two years left there and how I feel like I've been trying to make up for that ever since.

I love it so much, I'm terrified I will lose it and become more of a visitor than I already am, but I'm also not sure if I can make the jump and live there again. And every time I go back, it's changed so much from when I grew up there, and I'm half afraid it will outgrow me even as I love getting to know it again every year.

Cracktastic

I always feel vaguely guilty about using this word and keep trying to figure out how offensive it is. Am contemplating "idtastic" as a replacement.

That said, cracktasticness is one of my great joys in life! It is why I love bad HK movies and manga and paranormal romances and random YA books and gothics and the cdramas I used to watch when I was growing up. Clearly there are non-cracktastic versions of all of the above as well, along with cracktastic versions of other things, but there is nothing quite like an id I sympathize with run rampant! (As opposed to, say John Ringo's id, which I am pretty sure is cracktastic but makes me cringe more than anything else.) Best enjoyed with other people who share an id with you.

In conclusion: Yuki Kaori, bitten-off noses, angels and mermaids and zombie dinosaurs, claymation skeletons, and DOOM!

Food photography

I actually don't take many food photos outside of trip photography, which I began doing because I wanted to show people on LJ my Taiwan. Not the shiny new whatevers or historical museums, even though I love those, but street stands and traffic lights and convenience stores, sidewalk bricks and the trees and plants I grew up with, the things that are so much a part of a place that no one calls attention to them. And the food. Because you can't really show Taiwan to people if you don't show off the food.

(Even people from HK come to Taiwan to eat! I feel this Says Something.)

And not just fancy or famous food, but things I miss, like tuna and corn crepes and the onigiri in 7 Eleven and the egg cakes on the street and the flavors of Pringles and Lays chips and the trend of putting jelly in every drink ever.

My parents first thought I was so weird when I photographed everything, but I think they're used to it by now. Not only that, but when we went to Italy with some friends, about four cameras would get whipped out every time a new course came in (two of them from my family!). And my dad now takes his own food pictures when he goes places and shows them to me. Success!

I am a pretty sucky photographer: I have to use flash because my hands shake, I have little sense of composition, half my photos are fuzzy. But really, I don't care, because the photos serve more as a springboard to memories. I have a notoriously bad memory for everything, so paging through old trip write ups and pictures is like going on a new mini-trip.

Spiders

HATE THEM! I have hated them forever; the guys in my class used to make fun of me by trying to drag me to see spiders in the classroom and such. I also highly recommend not living in Taiwan if you are terrified of spiders, since the ones there have these gross long legs and are the size of your open hand. GROSS!

Sadly, even though California has smaller spiders, they still taunt me! Especially if Rachel visits or if I visit her. Then they accost us in the bedroom and the bathroom and even though she's scared of spiders, I make her kill them for me. And, of course, when we are in the company of someone who is not afraid of spiders, the damn things refuse to show!

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Posted by

thomasyan

One summer my mother grew peas in the garden. So yummy to eat small peas raw! And I also really like the tender tips, sometimes called snow pea greens in the restaurants here.

Some day I will make split pea soup for myself.

Recently, a friend said it is hard to grow peas, and I said I don't remember it being hard, and he said that my mother is probably a really good gardener. I dunno.

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