T-Day and total exhaustion

Food and drink consumed:
Peanuts
Avocado-crab cucumber canapes
Scotch on the rocks

14-pound turkey barbecued over peach tree twigs
Mashed potatoes with giblet gravy
Dried-fruit-and-nut couscous
Herb-roasted squash
Stir-fried bitter collard greens
Candied yams
Sauteed mushrooms
Corn and bell peppers
Baby vegetable salad
Merlot

Fruits (papaya, kiwi, honeydew, pineapple, oranges)
Organic pumpkin pie
Green tea

Games played by the young people:
Halo 2
Star Wars
Five in a row (checkers)
Scrabble

Miscellaneous highlights:
Went for a trail run for the first time ever this morning. 50 minutes of pure am-I-going-to-survive-this.

Finished making most of the side dishes and dozed in my brother's room for 20 minutes while waiting for Dad to finish barbecuing the turkey.

Melody, on her way to the fruit platter after dinner, was sidetracked by some leftover cranberry jelly. She took a slice and added a small mound of mashed potatoes on top, for good measure. My kind of girl.

Went to surf the Web for a bit after dinner, and returned to find everything cleaned up and leftovers put away in plastic containers. After chaos, cleanliness.

Made turkey stock, blogged, and am heading off to bed now. A good day.

Changes at the Griffith Observatory

The Griffith Observatory was always one of my favorite spots in LA, growing up. It was kind of a rag-tag landmark, with a cheesy planetarium show and spectacular views (on a clear day) of all around the city, from downtown to the Hollywood sign to the giant-mound-by-the-ocean that is Palos Verdes. My father used to drive the family there, on a whim, to see the city lights. I remember being driven up a dark, winding road through Griffith park, walking along the covered walkway that wraps around the exterior of the Observatory, brushing past strangers and searching for a good spot to lean over and admire.

The Observatory closed about 4 years ago for major renovations, and reopened this month. Jen and Jason got us some reservations to go visit, so this morning we parked at the bottom of the hill beneath the Observatory and hiked a short way up to it. For now, they're only allowing people up on a reservation basis, because they're expecting a crush of visitors in the first few months and want to do crowd control. My review of the renovated building:

What's bad - The place has lost some of its old charm. The exhibits are more sophisticated and polished than before, with a Smithsonian feel, but I couldn't find this one exhibit I used to like where you had to push little buttons and try to match groupings of stars to the right constellations. That was fun as a kid. Other small changes that make me long for the old days: the coin-operated telescopes on the outside of the building are gone. Gone also is the raggedy little gift shop that used to sell silly things like glow-in-the-dark sticker kits of the planets and stars for your bedroom ceiling.

What's good - The changes don't hit you at once, because most of them occurred underground or are simply replacements of old things. Everything's clean and spiffy. The museum is twice the size it used to be, thanks to the underground expansion. I hear the seats in the planetarium are super cushy and much better than the old ones with wooden head rests. There's a big cafe with Wolfgang Puck food and outdoor seating with nice views. The giant pendulum that greets you at the entrance is still there, ready to puzzle a new crop of kids with how it proves the earth is spinning.

Another addition I really liked: They have added a long, curved hallway with a glass display all along one side that contained thousands of pieces of inexpensive jewelry fashioned into stars, suns, and moons, arranged in a milky-way type of pattern. It strikes you as kind of kitschy, all these metal and plastic trinkets that you might find in a dusty case at an antique shop. Until you step back and realize how touching it is, really, that humans are so fascinated by the heavenly bodies that we so often incorporate these symbols into our daily lives, without even being conscious of it nowadays. Think of the gold stars that your teacher gave you.

Overall, the Observatory's suffered a little from the changes, which makes me sad. But it's still a grand old landmark. It still inspires. Which is what Griffith J. Griffith always wanted for the citizens of LA. Even if he did shoot his wife in the face.

61 percent of a marathon

Today I ran 16 miles, a personal record. I was fine for most of the run, getting used to my gigantic new running shoes. The only part that nearly killed me was the very last 10th of a mile, which includes an uphill stretch that connects the Santa Monica pier back to the rest of the city.

The day was nice, or at least I think it was. I've kind of stopped admiring the scenery because it is about the same every week. And there's too much at stake to be looking around googly-eyed at the pretty sunrise and flocks of seagulls. Look away for a second and you could smack into a fire hydrant or fall into a sand pit or lose your footing on a wet sidewalk and wipe out.

A funny thing about organized marathon training is that your running group behaves almost like a single living organism, with all the parts taking care of one another. When someone comes upon an obstacle, like a fire hydrant, he or she will usually yell out "hydrant" and point to it as a warning to the runners behind. The warning gets passed down the line, so what you hear is "hydrant!" "hydrant!" "hydrant!" At first it seemed kind of silly to me, but lately I've come to appreciate how people look out for their fellow runners. It's easy to zone out when you're mainly concerned about putting one foot in front of the other.

Fragmented self

I haven't been able to settle down since school started in October. Part of it is because I'm single again, and there's nothing quite like that for making you feel like a boat adrift. Another reason is that I'm involved in too many school activities that keep pulling at me in about 10 different directions. I field e-mails and attend meetings for a business conference I'm helping to plan, do inanely time-consuming things like design a T-shirt and police a Yahoo Group for a very active school club of which I'm an officer, and generally juggle too many little tasks related to all these activities. Plus I'm trying to start a business (www.mrfob.com) with some classmates, find a few hours a week to devote to my part-time job, and do just enough freelance writing assignments to keep that door open. And I have about 3 friends I've promised to have dinner with and a handful of others to whom I owe an e-mail or phone call big time.

But there's a more pernicious reason why I'm feeling like I have been splintered into a thousand little pieces: The information age. It's causing me to adapt in ways that apparently include losing some key mental faculties. While my typing speed is faster than ever (when I really get going, my fingers practically all hit the keys at the same time), my attention span is about 2 seconds because there's always an IM or text message to attend to or one of my four e-mail accounts to check or something that I just remembered I have to look up on Wikipedia.

My ability to recall information has become very weak (I suspect that my brain knows it can just Google almost anything, so it's packed up and gone on an extended vacation or something). My ability to focus is completely shot. I've become the ultimate multi-tasker, in that I do everything okay but nothing very well. Needless to say, I've been spending precious little time engaged in quiet study and my grades are suffering. But you'll find me in a bar on a Wednesday night, with my cell phone on "vibrate" in my back pocket!

It's a really unsettling frame of mind to be in. It reminds me of how I feel when I have coffee that's a little strong, and my brain kind of starts to itch. But unlike with a cup of coffee, which I have no problem throwing away once I've had enough, somehow I don't learn my lesson with the things that help me achieve this indispensable feeling of connectivity. I almost never leave my cell phone behind, and the first thing I do when I get home is plug in my laptop. If I don't do it right away, I'm really conscious of the fact the entire time until I do plug in.

I have in mind some advice that my father often gives me. There's no good translation for it in English, but it's literally something like "Don't get flustered," and what it really means is "Chill out." Brent's mom has a similar take on things, in that she always told him not do do more than one thing at a time, like don't cook while talking on the phone. They would both be very disappointed in me.

Birthday eggs

Today is my mom's birthday, and I am at home in Hacienda Heights spending some Q time with the family. We have this tradition of eating eggs for breakfast on a person's birthday, so this morning my dad prepared some soft-boiled ones. Six of them. My mom got two, and so did I because I am a girl. My dad and brother each got one. If it had been my father or my brother's birthday, the boys would each have gotten two eggs and the girls just one.

I've never heard of this practice outside of my family.* I asked my dad about it (he grew up in a household where birthdays and birthday eggs were always made much of) and he said it's from back in the day in China when eggs were hard to come by, and getting two would have been considered a really big deal. Now everyone's richer, and there are more eggs to go around. But you still have to limit who gets two eggs so that it's a special treat for the birthday person.

*If anyone else has heard of eating birthday eggs, let me know. Or if your families have any interesting traditions related to food on birthdays. You know I love this kind of stuff.

Bigfoot and friendship

It turns out I am a bigfoot when it comes to running shoes. After months of not feeling quite right in my $120 Brooks running shoes, which I bought over the summer when I started the marathon training, I finally caved in after this morning's 14 mile run and admitted that "expensive" does not necessarily equal the right running shoe.

Went to my running store and learned that my blister- and toe-smooshing problems are due to the fact that my shoes are size 8.5 and that no amount of expert craftsmanship on the part of Brooks is going to make them feel any better on me. So I got upped to a 10. Which for an Asian girl of any height is pretty embarrassing. But I ran around a bit with the shoes, and decided that they felt great. So now I am properly shod. Lots of training and one half-marathon later.

On another note, my friend Erin did something the other day that really touched me. We went to the gym together, and I hadn't been to the gym for so long that I forgot to bring a towel. I didn't have cash to buy a towel and the helpful staff at 24-Hour Fitness wouldn't loan me one. So Erin went to the front desk, borrowed a pair of scissors and cut her towel in half for me. If that's not a good friend, I don't know what is.

Intoxication

At the moment, the kind that you get from drinking a couple of beers and a smidge of tequila.

But a lot of other things qualify as intoxication, at least in the sense that they give you a temporary high and make you forget your immediate surroundings, or enhance your enjoyment of them:

A good song. Sends chills up your spine, and makes you forgetful of yourself and happy to just be alive and listening to this song.

Waiting for an e-mail to pop up when you're having good back-and-forth correspondence with someone who's funny and witty. When the e-mail pops up, your brain is like, "Yay!"

A good night's sleep, after several days of sleep deprivation. The next day you're floating around, thinking, "How come I feel this good?"

The prospect of a fun outing. Creates a little knot of anticipation in your belly when you think about it. Who knows if it will live up to your expectations, but in the meantime, who cares?

Drool

- Weird quote of the day -

My dentist, to me: "You have more saliva than anyone I've ever met."