Gratitude List: 10 Foods

Obviously, I will not be recording my gratitude lists in the sequence previously introduced.  Whatever it may say about me, the truth remains that the compilation of my food list in its simplest form would require less than a minute.  Clearly then, I am starting this listing exercise with "easy."  However, I shall acquiesce to the creation of a more informative final product than merely a simple enumeration and do hereby agree to embellish my list with correlating background and/or miscellany.  Also, by the way, there will be no ranking implicit in the numbering here either because that would push this "easy" task to so beyond "difficult"!

  1.  MANGOS.  I didn't taste my first mango until after I was way grown up.  Sadly, decades of my life passed without knowledge of its delectable perfection.

  2.  BERRIES.  I refuse to be more specific because I really, really like lots of different berries!

  3.  POMEGRANATES.  Beautiful color, beautiful flavor.

  4.  WATERMELON.  Although I'm not a big fan of most other kinds of melon, I could breakfast, lunch, and sup on watermelon.

  5.  SALMON--grilled and served with fresh lemon.

  6.  FRESH GREEN SALAD.  (Italy has the best ones in the world.)

  7.  PIZZA.  It must have a traditional tomato sauce, not a white sauce or any other variation.  I especially like a good vegetarian pizza.  (Italy may also have the best ones of these, too!)

  8.  HOT OATMEAL--steel cut (pinhead)...and don't forget to add vanilla.  Best if served with walnuts and fresh fruit.

  9.  BROCCOLI.  Steamed, please.

10.  DARK CHOCOLATE, 70-85% cacao.  Currently I'm particularly partial to Godiva's dark chocolate truffles and dark chocolate cherries.

I elected not to include drinks in the food list but will add a drink addendum: 

1.  WATER.  Nothing can ever quite measure up to water as a comprehensive go-to drink.

2.  DIET COKE.  Alas and alack!  Although I have reached the point in my life where I kind of wish it did not have to appear on my list, anyone who knows me knows that Diet Coke would still be on the list.  For years I have preferred a fountain-generated Diet Coke, but lately I've discovered myself leaning more toward my nephew Justin's opinion:  Diet Coke from a bottle--the only way to guarantee a correct calibration of fizz and flavor.

3.  MANGO SMOOTHIE...the way they make them in the Philippines!

Gloom and Gratitude

January cold in Seoul is bitter, I have called a running hiatus, final grades for the quarter and semester are due, my grade level team colleagues—consummate talkers all—tend to rhapsodize through a team meeting way beyond both my attention span and sitting capabilities, and I grow weary of teaching sixth grade.*  So my spirits tipped, and I have been a tad glum this last week or so . . . until yesterday, that is.

I awakened with the alarm that I never change, but on weekends I’m permitted to press the snooze button and I usually select the maximum amount of snoozing offered:  SIXTY minutes!  I opted for the snooze but ultimately eschewed additional lounging once the radio played for me again.  Instead, I perfunctorily completed mandatory ablutions and then shuffled into the kitchen to prepare a bowl of Kashi “whole wheat biscuits” (Island Vanilla flavor) topped with the remaining blueberries and immersed in skim milk.  Feeling more dispirited than exhilarated, I booted up the laptop for a morning perusal of email and news online as I breakfasted.  Quite early on in this enterprise, my brother Phil found me on Yahoo, and we engaged in an instant messaging conversation, something we haven’t had in a few weeks, and something I realized I had been missing.  Maybe five minutes into our conversation, I heard a ping signaling another instant message from somewhere else in cyber world.  Well, I hadn’t opened Facebook, so I knew it couldn’t have come from that site.  I clicked on my other open email accounts and discovered my nephew Zack instant messaging me on Gmail; the last time we had talked in this mode, I still lived in Japan!  A minute later my nephew Max joined the chat.  I suddenly had three family members communicating with me simultaneously and a winter dark Saturday morning began to brighten.

An hour later I found myself heading to school to complete the grading and the grades necessary for a Monday morning deadline.  At the gate to enter post, the gate guard checked my ID and car code.  Because a different company was recently awarded the security contract, the gate guards are all relatively new, and most of them have limited English.  As he raised the gate to allow me to drive through, the guard said, "Have a good time!"

Well okay, then—this new day had somehow become aligned with stars I hadn’t seen recently . . . mostly because I had forgotten to look up!

So February has almost arrived, and perhaps spring lurks just beyond it.  And just as soon as those single digit early morning temperature decamp, I may rediscover my runnner’s jubilee.  Grades are fully input for the Semester 1, and I do recognize what good people my colleagues truly are, how devoted and how focused they are to making a positive difference for kids.  And I applied for a transfer—unlikely to transpire since I reside in the bottom category of applicants.  But who knows?  If I don’t transfer, maybe an opening will become available at a higher grade level for next year.  I’ve always been fairly consistent “hoper of all things.”

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*For me, the magic of teaching lies in the realm where teacher, students, and content intersect.  I am a more effective teacher when I am passionate about the content.  I am a happier and more motivated teacher when the ideas, reasoning, and experience of my students stimulate and enhance my own.   Ever since I began teaching middle school, sixth grade has been my least favorite grade to teach because I never really like most of the designated English Language Arts curriculum for grade six, and so many sixth graders are still such rigidly concrete thinkers only.  And that’s not wrong or even necessarily a bad thing; it’s just where they are in their development.  I, though, find myself craving the ideas and discussion that unfold with the addition of greater ability and experience with abstraction.

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Over the years I have realized that during the melancholy interludes of living, reviewing and commemorating the blessings and grace that have shaped and enhanced my life always augment perspective and renew hope.  Gratitude can change many things in our world but maybe mostly because it changes us inside ourselves.

From a church periodical, I clipped out a “gratitude challenge,” an activity suggested to be used with youth.  I have decided it is an activity to be used with me:

1.       Write 10 physical abilities you are grateful for.

2.       Write 10 material possessions you are grateful for.

3.       Write 10 living people you are grateful for.

4.       Write 10 deceased people you are grateful for.

5.       Write 10 things about nature you are grateful for.

6.       Write 10 things about today you are grateful for.

7.       Write 10 things on earth you are grateful for.

8.       Write 10 modern inventions you are grateful for.

9.       Write 10 foods you are grateful for.

10.   Write 10 things you are grateful you know.

Stay tuned . . .

January Lately

In support of Netflix despite its blunder-filled ventures of 2011, I have continued my DVD subscription.  (The streaming option is not available in Korea.)  In four days this last week I watched three disks—my current Netflix allotment.  Two disks featured a four-part series titled In Search of Shakespeare that kept me quite enthralled, and several hypotheses developed from this group’s research particularly resonated with me:  The “fair youth” addressed by Shakespeare in a series of his sonnets is his son Hamnet, who died at the age of eleven, and those sonnets express both Shakespeare’s love and sorrow for a son whose life he mostly missed.  And, the “second-best bed” Shakespeare left to his wife in his will could well have been the matrimonial bed and therefore rich in significance. 

 

After depositing those two disks into a UPS box on post, two nights later I giggled and sniffled my way through The Belle of Amherst. 

My living in Korea greatly inhibits Netflix’s efforts to provide quick turn-around service; it often requires at least ten days from the time I put a disk into the mail until I receive the next one from my Neflix queue.  So, with my entire Netflix allotment roving the obfuscated channels of the US Postal system, I returned to my book in progress—Bill Bryson’s The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid—and finished it.  In this book Bill Bryson, who was born in 1951, recounts his childhood in Iowa in the 1950s.  Although he is several years older than I am, many of his memories of childhood awakened some of my own.  Like penny candy!  Oh, what a kid could buy back in the day with even a nickel or dime, a time when a quarter heralded a seriously sweet, if at times also weird, haul.  Here is how Bill Bryson remembers the riches on offer for mere pennies:

Perhaps nothing says more about the modest range of pleasures of the age than that the most popular candies of my childhood were made of wax. You could choose among wax teeth, wax pop bottles, wax barrels, and wax skulls, each filled with a small amount of colored liquid that tasted very like a small dose of cough syrup.  You swallowed this with interest if not exactly gratification, then chewed the wax for the next ten or eleven hours.  Now you might think there is something wrong with your concept of pleasure when you find yourself paying real money to chew colorless wax, and you would be right of course.  But we did it and enjoyed it because we knew no better.  And there was, it must be said, something good, something healthily restrained about eating a product that had neither flavor nor nutritive value.

You could also get small artificial ice-cream cones made of some crumbly chalklike material, straws containing a gritty sugar so ferociously sour that your whole face would actually be sucked into your mouth like sand collapsing into a hole, root-beer barrels, red-hot cinnamon balls, licorice wheels and whips, greasy candy worms, rubbery dense gelatinlike candies that tasted of unfamiliar (and indeed unlikable) fruits but were a good value as it took more than three hours to eat each one (and three hours more to pick the gluey remnants out of your molars, sometimes with fillings attached), and jawbreakers the size and density of billiard balls, which were the best value of all as they would last for up to three months and had multiple strata that turned your tongue interesting new shades as you doggedly dissolved away one squamous layer after another. (pp. 95, 96)*

                I do remember that a lot of what Bryson describes was available for purchase during my childhood, but I—quite finicky of palate where candy was concerned—could rarely be convinced to spend my precious pennies on such fare.  I preferred Necco Wafers, Smarties, lemon drops, licorice (only black), bubble gum, or else a Sugar Daddy.  I never was a candy bar kind of girl either.  When my siblings and I would accompany my mom grocery shopping, sometimes she offered to buy us a candy bar, and I usually chose Life Savers instead.  As a teenager I finally learned the pleasures of a Snickers or a Mounds, occasionally a Three Musketeers, but I failed to ever acquire a taste for Butter Fingers and Babe Ruths.  Of course, in this current era of my life, I would much rather spend up my calories on dark chocolate—70-80% cacao, preferably—than any aforementioned candy bars.  Godiva dark chocolate truffles, too, rank as worthy calorie expenditures!

                Here is another Bryson memory of a 1950s childhood that reminded me of some of my own ponderings regarding the disappearance of certain undergarments so prevalent in my girlhood:

Among the many thousands of things moms never quite understand—the manliness implicit in grass stains, the satisfaction of a really good burp or other gaseous eructation, the need from time to time to blow into straws as well as suck out of them—winter dressing has always been perhaps the most tragically conspicuous.  All moms in the fifties lived in dread of cold fronts slipping in from Canada, and therefore insisted that their children wear enormous quantities of insulating clothes for at least seven months of the year.  This came mostly in the form of underwear—cotton underwear, flannel underwear, long underwear, thermal underwear, quilted underwear, ribbed underwear, underwear with padded shoulders, and possibly more; there was a lot of underwear in America in the 1950s—so that you couldn’t possibly perish during any of the ten minutes you spent outdoors each day.

                What they failed to take into account was that you were so mummified by extra clothing that you had no limb flexion whatever, and if you fell over you would never get up again unless someone helped you, which was not a thing you could count on.  Layered underwear also made going to the bathroom an unnerving challenge. . . .

                Mothers also failed to realize that certain clothes at certain periods of your life would get you beaten up.  If, for instance you wore snow pants beyond the age of six, you got beaten up for it.  If you wore a hat with earflaps or, worse, a chin strap, it was a certain beating, or at the very least a couple of scoops of snow down your back.  The wimpiest, most foolish thing of all was to wear galoshes.  Galoshes were unstylish and ineffective and even the name just sounded stupid and inescapably humiliating.  If your mom made you wear galoshes at any point in the year, it was a death sentence.  I knew kids who couldn’t get prom dates in high school because every girl they asked remembered that they had worn galoshes in third grade.  (pp. 140, 141)*

                And my question is, what ever happened to the concept that undershirts accompanied panties as required undergarments for little girls, at least through the chillier months of the year?!  That day in late spring when my mom finally allowed her daughters to dress for the day sans undershirt always ushered in a certain jubilation . . . quite possibly because it also signaled the imminent arrival of summer.  I wore an undershirt for at least seven or eight months of every year of my life until I got my first bra!  When I first began changing clothes for gym at school, I worried about that undershirt directing unwanted attention my way; I was not on the forefront of blossoming womanhood in my age group.  How grateful I was to observe a handful of other girls still appareled in undershirts, too!  Ironically, when I finally achieved bra-worthy status in my mother’s mind and became the owner of several of said undergarments, I found the bras itchy and for a while returned to wearing an undershirt beneath the bra!  In fact, it was my mom who presented me with the ultimatum:  bra or undershirt?  Yes, I chose the bra.

*Bill Bryson, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, Broadway Books, NY, 2006

The Philippines: Transportation Tales

For any kind of traveling, transportation options tend to play key roles in shaping the adventure.  For the Philippines, though, options for transport not only helped shape the adventure but they fascinated me daily throughout our visit, sustaining key positions in both my consciousness and imagination.

Geographically speaking, the Philippines is an archipelago comprised of over 7,000 islands, and “small” would describe the majority of them.  Largely volcanic in origin, many of these islands are hilly, even mountainous (to include several active volcanos), and swathed in the dense luxuriance of tropical rainforest.  Hence, a developed highway system is impractical—and virtually nonexistent on many of the islands—beyond Manila and environs and a handful of other urban centers.  [In truth, Manila most certainly holds a superior ranking for cities of the planet with optimal traffic gridlock, but we were only there to make our entrance and our exit—probably not even 48 hours in total—so everything remained somewhat novel,  another amazing facet of the overall adventure . . . even the traffic!  Besides, in Manila, I witnessed the infamous “jeepneys” in action, though, sadly, I never had the chance to ride in one!]

Planes and boats are modes of transportation required for island hopping.  A boat will suffice for the entire process, but often a plane will not. Except for flying in or out of Manila (located on Luzon, the largest island), any change of island for us necessitated the use of both modes in combination with some vehicle shuttling between “staging grounds”—usually a van.  We learned early that airlines transporting passengers and supplies between islands in the Philippines employed fleets of smaller planes, usually props, for important reasons:  Small islands plus little to nil natural flat land equals short runways!  Then, of course, other than Manila, we never actually spent our days and nights on islands large enough to accommodate any sort of runway, so we always had at least one boat in the transportation mix as well.

Island Hop:  Manila to Busuanga (and later, to Sangat Island Dive Resort)--descent into Busuanga

As soon as we touched down in this plane at Busuanga, the pilot began braking hard.  Both landing and take-off required the full length of the runway; there was no place--or even space--for an "oopsie."  Located rather far from the town (relatively speaking, of course, because Busuanga is not a big island) the airport, Tammy and I decided, had to be built in a place flat enough and long enough for a runway, a kind of space in short supply on this island!

Island Hop:  Boracay to Manila - boat from Boracay to the port near Caticlan (island of Panay, where there is an airport, two in fact--Caticlan and Kalibo) and the tidal depth would not allow the boat to anchor closer to the beach, so the passengers--including Tammy and me--were transported from boat to beach as pictured here.  (This lady was a fellow passenger!)

Tricycle--the "Philippine taxi"

Tricycle queue near Puka Beach on Boracay

Once ensconced on an island, we transported ourselves by foot for the most part.  Flip-flops ranked second only to "bare" for footwear, and some afternoons even now the toes on my left foot still rebel against their current shod condition.  Here is Tammy heading along Puka Beach in search of our place to situate for a few hours.

Boats—okay, and motorcycles—are my favorite modes of transportation.  Yes, I realize that for many situations and circumstances they might be impractical, even impossible, but they appeal to my nature and converse with my imagination.  One thing I especially loved about the Philippines is that it is rife with boats . . . all kinds of boats. 

Our last full day on the island of Boracay, Tammy and I hired a sailboat, the Nino, to take us from White Beach, the location of our hotel, to Puka Beach, a beach at the northern tip of the island.  What an incredible ride!  Our "boat boys" directed us to sit on a mesh netting stretched tightly between the hull and the bamboo outriggers.  For most of the trip we sat on the right side, spaced to balance with the wind and sea conditions.  Before changing direction to head into Puka Beach, the boys had us crawl across the mesh to the opposite side.

Our boat boys head back to White Beach after dropping us off on Puka Beach.

I photographed boats everyday we spent in Boracay, and I would dream of sailing a one-man outrigger in a tropical sea.  Here are some boats to dream on . . .

Tropical Temptations: the Philippines

Should the quintessence of me not be Irish, it is probably tropical. 

What pleases most people about places tropical, pleases me, too, and what rankles many, still pleases me.  In my estimation, sea and coastline have always trumped mountains—when a preference is required—and in tropical climes that sea seems ever near and ever resplendent in such a stunning array of blues.  And then, there are boats, all kinds of boats—personal and passenger, pleasure and business!   My skin and sinuses rejoice in the Tropics and my flimsy hair awakens:  it has body and bend.  The sense of parting the atmosphere as I pass through heavy air delights me, and I like its rich and heady weight in my lungs.  Rain claims a full repertoire, from mist to deluge, and the sun maintains a fairly regular rise and set schedule all year round.  Trees and vines and bushes and grass monopolize the adjectives lush and verdant.   People know how to cook fish in ways that carry me to gastronomic ecstasy.  And there are mangos . . . on trees even!

Ten days in the Philippines, with its natural beauty and lovely people, quickly converted me again to island life.

Boats!

Tammy and I went out on the Nino!