So, I went to the butcher’s yesterday and asked them for a whole chunk of pork belly for thịt heo quay–just the meat, no need to prepare it in any special way or anything. I should have known something was up when the butcher looked at me oddly, but I didn’t twig until they asked me “so, what are you going to do with it exactly?”. Then I remembered that the French tend to buy pork belly in little chunks to use as lardons or bacon, and that people wanting a huge uncut chunk of pork belly with the skin on were not exactly common… [1]

Darn. Last time we moved, it took more than 3 visits to the butcher’s before I got flagged as “that girl who makes the weird recipes with our meat…” [2]

Current mood: amused

[1] Bit surprised though, because the neighbourhood is fairly cosmopolitan, and I can’t believe I’m the only one in need of that kind of ingredients on a regular basis…
[2] It took about a year and a half for my butcher to work out something was up–after repeated requests for minced unsalted pork meat. (again, not so much a French ingredient. At least I assume not, given the reaction)

I have a memory–I can’t place it exactly, but I’m at the school fair flipping through used books. You have to picture the scene: my school was in an upper class neighbourhood of Paris. I hadn’t been there long, and I had no liking for the place: the combination of being the only Asian/non-white person at school plus something of a geek pretty much guaranteed me a miserable time, making me the target of a number of unpleasant quips and jokes and other nice forms of exclusion (I did have a few very good friends, and the overall situation got better as the years went by–and I’m not complaining at all! Just setting the scene for what happens next).
The books on display were mostly of the boring “educational for children” variety, or non fiction books, which mostly didn’t really interest me at the time. So I was bored; and thinking of moving to another stall–until I found this book. It was a small tattered volume of short stories, and I flipped it open, and read the first one in a single sitting. It was… quite unlike anything I had read before–there was no happy ending, no triumph of technology, just the thoughtless cruelty children will cheerfully mete out between them. It spoke to me in a language I could appreciate and relate to–which fascinated and repelled me all at once. I bought the book and took it home.

The story was “All Summer in a Day”, and the book was an anthology of Bradbury’s stories–to this day I remember that first story, and the one that came just afterwards, “The Long Rain”. It was decades ago, so far ago that the past feels almost like another country; and I have forgotten the titles (which were in French anyway); but I have not forgotten the stories. They were threatening and witty and cruel all at once, and though there was little science to them, they nevertheless encompassed profound truths about the human condition and the savage irony of our lives.

Rest in peace, Ray Bradbury. Your words are in my heart.

OK, so I’ve given it a try, but it’s not working out. Clearly the novel thing needs a little more of my focused attention, and I can’t do this while managing a blog and a twitter and a facebook. Accordingly, I’m having a mini-darkness notice: I’ll still post about the important stuff, and do a few things, but I’m cutting back on my internet consumption.

Didn’t post much this week because I’ve been fairly busy with RL stuff. Not least of which was that my writing laptop had the good taste to crash with the only copy of my Paris UF fantasy on its hard disk (I do have Dropbox; however, since the computer wouldn’t boot, it wouldn’t actually upload the file where I could recover). A tense night was spent poking at it to see if it would stop being grumpy; fortunately, my husband worked miracles yesterday night, while I was interviewing with Ben Love and Guillermo Velez for the First Million Words (really fun interview, btw, look for it in July–it’ll coincide with the release of the Obsidian and Blood omnibus). So now the laptop is… sort of working, I guess, and my fingers are crossed it doesn’t fail me again. And I have found my synopsis and my first chapter, so I’m ready to roll!

I obsessively proofread the upcoming “Immersion” in Clarkesworld; I think I’ve got everything, but probably I haven’t 🙂 Kind of worried how it’ll come across: I seem to have moved in a new phase where I attempt very ambitious and very personal things, and end up always worried I’ll get something wrong or get howled at by everyone (OK. Not that very different from the Impostor Syndrome. Just turned up to max, for no reason I can see).

Cooking wise, this was very much a week for not trying out anything new–bought some coconut milk to make a bánh chuối nướng in order to consume leftover bread; of course ended up with leftover coconut milk, so made cà ri tôm (sort of a merge of this recipe and this recipe with half the ingredients substituted for something else). Next week, however, I have some crab to use up, and I’m going to be more adventurous (might even open the VN cookbook and check out promising stuff, ever-so-slowly and with the help of my trusty dictionary 🙂 ).

Now I’m off to buy some running shoes and celebrate a birthday–and eat the last of the chả lụa Grandma brought back from Saigon (which is going to make me regret Vietnam all over again…).

Just a heads-up that I’ll be in Sussex for four days for the Villa Diodati workshop; there might be wifi there, but I’m not really going to be inclined to keep blogging much…

See you on Wednesday 😀

And now for a minor rant on politics… Yesterday we got the leaflets for the presidential campaign of all our candidates (a solid dozen or so). The H went through them, making sarcastic comments as he waded deeper into them (a lot of them were about financial regulations and what we should do about the banks, which is unfortunate for them because the H works in an investment bank). He handed the lot to me, and said something to the effect of “you should read them, but it’s seriously pathetic”.

And, I have to admit, he’s right. There are many many things that I find outright creepy in them–the insistence on overtaxing companies (er, can I point out that companies you overtax will just move to another country where taxes are lower?), on curbing immigration and promoting French values at the expense of Europe (yeah, sure, let’s step back a few decades).

But that’s not the pathetic thing. The thing is–all of those leaflets, save one [1], fail on a very simple basic criterion: they don’t make sense. They present a presidential program that does a combination of: incoherent measures, promising something we already have in place (like separating investment activities from credit activities. We already have that), and/or promising something intenable (you can’t actually hand out gift measures to everyone, and promise we’ll balance our budget by 2017). And I stare at them, and think, oh my God. That’s leaflets for voters. They think we’re going to swallow this hook, line and sinker. They think we know so little about our own country, that we have so little logical and critical sense that we’ll believe all of this.

It’s… scary. Probably not in the way that they intended, but it doesn’t make me very optimistic about the coming years.

[1] You’ll wonder about the one that made sense, aka the only leaflet the husband didn’t poke holes into as he was reading it. It’s the one from our incumbent, Sarkozy. I hate many of his measures, but I have to grant him this: he presents a coherent program, doesn’t make promises I don’t believe in for a second, and I actually trust him to do something during his presidency that doesn’t include major fuck-ups. It’s a shame, as said above, that I don’t agree with many of his measures, especially his stance on Europe and immigration.

… is that, even while getting home relatively late, there’s still a good half hour of wonderful sun to enjoy while walking in a park.

*happy writer*

And the much-delayed pictures (the H still holds the pictures hostage on his computer. I filched a few that looked pretty).

The first two are of the Ngũ Hành Sơn (mountains of the Five Elements), better known in English as Marble Mountain: it’s a major Buddhist temple complex near Đà Nẵng (centre of Vietnam), which has a slew of pagodas and shrines on moutaintops, as well as temples carved within caves that are truly impressive. Easily my favourite place (though not very favoured by Western tourists; the crowd was mostly local) of the trip: serene and unearthly, and with fabulous views over the surrounding countryside. Easy to see why they built the temples here.

And this is the tomb of Khải Định, the second-to-last emperor of the Nguyễn dynasty: Huế is surrounded by the mausoleums of all the emperors–they’re all in very different styles, and this one is a striking fusion of Eastern and Western (see the octogonal pavillion vs the crosses that line the terraces). Inside, it looks a lot like a Vietnamese Versailles, with lots of ornate ceramics on the walls, and it has a golden likeness of the Emperor (the actual body is somewhere under the palace) and a shrine to honour his memory.

That’s all from me–tommorrow it’s back to novel brainstorming and cooking 🙂

< sarcasm >
I don’t usually post anything about politics on this blog, but I did want to point this out: if you’re one of the French presidential candidates, aka the ones who have been repeatedly bashing on immigration and foreigners and generally centering the debate on pretty hateful xenophobic stuff, you shouldn’t be surprised that some madman with a gun decides to start shooting minorities they don’t approve of.
< /sarcasm >

(on a not-sarcastic note, my heart goes out to the families of the dead, whether it’s the three soldiers or the schoolchildren and the teacher. It’s a truly devastating thing to go through a death of a loved one, especially without rhyme or reason. And I hope they catch whoever is behind all three shootings before they can make more victims. But I have absolutely no pity for the politicians who think fanning a climate of xenophobia is the way to win a presidential campaign)

Best moment of the day: the H and I finish filling the washing machine. We’ve been using a lot of rice bowls lately, and we have trouble fitting them all in: like most washing machines in France, ours has a space at the bottom that’s specifically for plates, with little grooves holding them in place (which also prevent you from slipping in anything that’s not round and flat-ish); and a smaller space on top that’s used for glasses. Rice bowls don’t fit in at the bottom, and sort of fit in at the top (while taking the space of 1.5 glass, which is problematic). The H pulls back, looks at the washing machine, and says, “You know, I bet Asian washing machines are set up differently, because this was clearly not meant for rice bowls at all.” LOOOL

And today, we went and celebrated the Nebula nomination (yes, I know, fashionably late), and I used the opportunity to drag him to Chinatown Olympiades for the first time, one of the biggest Chinese restaurants in the XIIIe (which turned out to be kind of busy a Saturday at noon, lol). I introduced him to their dim sum menu (which is extensive compared to what you get in a lot of Paris Chinese restaurants), and we had a very pleasant meal altogether.

Afterwards, we joined the queue of people in the Asian food stores, and bought a 5kg bag of the 2012 crop of jasmine rice. *happy cook*