It's pretty clear to anyone who reads this, and there's no one who does, that I'm not actually a Xangan, if we assume actually updating Xanga to be a qualifying characteristic of a Xangan.

Still, for old times sake, a Xanga post.

What's changed in my life since...February of 2011.

I've changed jobs and no longer work for a bank. That's a plus. My new job includes lots of challenging work and smart people, also a plus. It requires hard work but also grants flexible hours. Mostly a plus. It also stuffs me with free food every single day. A definite plus. I'm getting fat. Not a plus.

I live in Manhattan now instead of Jersey City. No more waiting around drunk at the PATH station at 5 am. A plus. I'm blowing even more cash than before on partying. Not really a plus in the narrow financial sense.

I own a sword now. See, there's a picture of me holding it. It's a miao dao, specifically, in case you were wondering, and yes, I can use it to some extent. Not well, but enough that I feel comfortable saying that I am not, in fact, a LARPer. Generally a plus, but there are way too many incidents of my friends and I getting really wasted and playing with it, which is generally neither a plus nor minus until somebody accidentally gets stabbed.

Overall, looks like the plus's outnumber the not plus's.

Going back to the food, I kind of miss my own cooking. When you constantly get free catering and an effectively unlimited tab on SeamlessWeb during the week, it's hard to find time after 11+ hours at work to justify grocery shopping and cooking. Still, I need to find an excuse to make my own food more often so that I don't get too far out of practice. I also genuinely enjoy it...I suppose this calls for hosting potlucks.

Alternatively, I could get a girlfriend exclusively for the purpose of feeding her.

Writing an entry for no real reason other than that I ran into two Xangas from the summer meet up on Saturday and was reminded of the community's existence.

If you don't have an interest in martial arts, skip this part and go to the completely unrelated picture below for the second half of the entry.

There's no real meaning behind the title of the entry other than a lame joke I made during kung fu training today. It was my first time back in 3 weeks, so everything I was doing was a little off.

Well, I mean, I'm always a little off, but more than usual.

Still, I had an interesting moment when trying to practice the "Superman punch" from the fourth basic technique of Tanglangquan and wasn't having much luck at all. I wish I wasn't too lazy to draw a picture, but, I am too lazy to draw a picture. Basically, my right leg was off the ground and I was supposed to snap it backwards to pitch my weight forward into a heavy punch with my right fist. Timing was off, angles were messed up, and it was getting annoying. Cary gave me some good pointers that tapped into my knowledge of Taekwondo and wushu to make a point, but I also spaced out for a second and...

...started thinking of a Cowboy Bebop episode I rewatched recently where Spike more or less directly quotes one of Bruce Lee's most famous speeches, the one about being like water.

And you know what? It helped. I was able to relax my body a little more right before snapping everything out. It was still far from perfect, but it was a little better. I was thinking about it on the way home, and it reminded me of a conversation I've had with other martial artists about the value of traditional terms for what are actually concepts from classical Newtonian mechanics in physics. In Chinese kung fu, you'd say something like 'fa jing,' which I think translates to something like explosive energy. Which is fine if you interpret it correctly, but over decades of training, the misinterpretation of the idea of "energy" and the general inconsistency found in non-scientific conceptions of physical phenomenon just sort of lead to fools going around thinking they can tap you and send their "energy" into you and make your heart explode or something ridiculous. In short, the loose understanding of physics in traditional martial arts is just that, loose. You end up not really having a good set of terminology for understanding what's going on.

But I realized today that there's another side to this coin that made me realize that these fuzzy, loose ways of describing physics have their value. As I was doing the punch, I could look at someone else doing the same punch and break down using physics what they were doing that made them hit harder than me. But I couldn't actually do it. Anyone who does a sport of any sort knows that when you have to think through what's supposed to be a smooth motion step by step, you botch it. It wasn't until I started thinking of the whole movement more philosophically rather than scientifically that my body was able to understand what my brain wanted it to do. I'm a firm believer in the power of science, but there's definitely something about concepts that are fundamentally weak but instinctively powerful which I never thought about until today.

AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT!!!!!!!

This should probably be a separate entry, but if I don't write about it now, I'll just get lazy and forget about it. My other major hobby besides martial arts and writing is cooking, and is probably the most useful of the three.

And uh, the girls seem to like it...but that's totally not why I always look forward to posting pictures of my dishes on my facebook album. Definitely.

Anyway, I haven't had as much time to cook lately as I would like, and I've had time to clean my apartment, but I just haven't cared lately. So, kill two birds with one stone and...

Have you ever thought about how messed up that phrase is? Who fucking hunts birds with a stone? I guess if you had a slingshot, but I haven't even seen a slingshot in years. I'm just picturing myself trying to toss pebbles at a pigeon, and really, that's just not gonna be putting food on the table anytime soon.

Where was I...oh, right. I needed motivation to clean my apartment, so I invited people over for a white elephant gift exchange this past Saturday. I wanted a challenge, so I announced that I was going to cook for everyone..uh, after making sure only a manageable crowd would attend. To make things easier, I stuck to things I had cooked at least once before, since cooking food to feed 7 people including myself sounded like enough of a pain in the ass as it was. I also wanted the food to sort of all be the same type to avoid clashing flavors, so I picked Japanese yoshoku cuisine as the target. For those who don't know, Japanese yoshoku cooking basically refers to Western dishes that have been co-opted and modified by Japanese cuisine to suit Japanese tastes. I tend to do Japanese yoshoku cooking much more often than Chinese cooking because it's far easier and the ingredients are easier to find in Western supermarkets.

Here's what the menu wound up being:

http://justbento.com/handbook/recipe-collection-mains/japanese-scotch-egg
http://japanesefood.about.com/od/shrimp/r/shrimpdoriarecipe.htm
http://www.justhungry.com/spaghetti-napolitan

I ran out of steam before getting to dessert, which the girls fortunately anticipated and brought over mochi to compensate for. We drank a little sake, but most of the after dinner drinking was apple cider mixed with Yamazaki whiskey, which worked quite well. Though, no one trusted me to mix their drinks for them. Is half and half really that bad? Does me having to ask say something about me?  Anyway, it was a success, and though it was a lot of work and a bit of a mess, I'm glad I did it. I laughed at my company for making postings about offering holiday stress counseling to employees until I realized I was laughing because deep down, I kind of felt like I wanted it. The holidays don't actually make me happy half the time for various reasons, and it was nice to finally find something I could do to make myself start to like them again now that I'm too old for Santa stories.

Some interesting takeaway lessons from the night:

1) When you're making something like scotch eggs, don't make too many--people can't handle eating that much of something that's basically a giant meatball surrounding an entire hardboiled egg.
2) Check to see if a controversial ingredient is common across dishes--one girl hated onions and I had them in everything I made, though, fortunately, they were only really noticeable in the spaghetti napolitan since I was laziest about cutting them thin in that one.
3) Don't buy unpeeled shrimp, like, ever. I hate peeling and de-veining the little bastards..maybe I should just skip de-veining next time...no one will notice...right?
4) It's unavoidable if you're doing something like this, but running 2 or 3 burners constantly while having the oven at 450 degrees is a little stressful. I was worried about burning something. Not burning the food, I mean, like, accidentally burning my apartment down.