Tag Archives: tales of the world

Tales of the World: Just Ask

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When you are in school, teachers always tell you that there are no dumb questions, which is true to an extent. It’s not dumb to ask when the test is, how many moons Jupiter has, or what the difference between an alligator and a crocodile is. It is, however, dumb to ask what the capital of Africa is.

I am overcoming a lifelong timidity towards asking for things. Unfortunately, I feel like a lot of the questions I ask are dumb and not worthwhile. I’m getting over it, but I want Miss C to seldom feel self conscious when she raises a question or asks for something. I promise to raise a child who is well enough equipped with basic information to not have to ask how many arms an octopus has if the world also promises to listen to her when she questions it. I want her to know that even if she gets turned down for a request, she was not dumb to ask. I want her to know that I am willing to surprise her when she asks me if she can have permission to do things. B and I likely won’t let her get her ears pierced before she’s 12 or stay out past eleven when she’s 16, but we will probably say yes to things that she expects us to shoot down. You’ve gotta keep your kids on their toes and surprise them with your coolness occasionally.

When I was a teenager, I was obsessed with the Smashing Pumpkins. My entire life was built around them. Most of my money went towards buying European b-side releases and tradeshow posters of them. I LOVED them, and I still do.

This picture of my room when I was a teenager doesn’t really have anything to do with this post, but it is pretty hilarious, so I thought I would tack it in.

In 1995, Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness was released. I hate to say it was epic, but check the definition. Over two hours long, it was actually epic. I asked my parents if I could go to the concert when the Pumpkins’ tour visited Memphis. The concert was on a school night, so I expected a no. I expected correctly. My plea was vetoed. This turned out OK because Billy Corgan allegedly ended the concert early because he was angry and a rockstar and he did stuff like that, apparently.

1998 rolls around. I was then 16, highly motivated, and more in love with the Pumpkins than ever. I checked their touring schedule on this thing called the Internet that we had in our house, which, incidentally, was created for the sole purpose of uploading and printing pictures of Billy Corgan for free. This time around, the Smashing Pumpkins would not be touring in Memphis but they would be making a stop in Nashville, which was about a three hour drive away.

I fully expected to get a big fat no again when I asked my parents if they would let me go. In addition to going to the concert which, let’s face it, THEY would buy my ticket for, they’d also have to drive me there and get a hotel room for the night. My parents weren’t fuddy duddies, but there’s only so much you can expect of people who often spoke of their love of the Carpenters back in the 70s.

But I asked. I just asked.

And my mom said yes.

I was really shocked when she agreed to take me and Besfrinn Cameron, but I didn’t question it. She bought our tickets – that’s right, our tickets; she attended the show with us because she’s that surprisingly cool – drove us there, and put all three of us up in a hotel for the night. All because I had the nerve to ask. She sat next to Cameron and me as we screamed every lyric, as we laughed at every droll joke James Iha made between songs, and humored us as we gushed about the show.

Me and Cameron pre-show. We were so cool.

Aaaand post-show. Apparently, I had just received news that all the kittehs just died.

She said no to many more of my schemes over the years, but occasionally she said yes to the things that meant a lot to me. The lesson for Miss C is twofold: 1, parents are cooler than you will I’ve them credit for, and 2, asking is worth it.

I’m making it a priority to raise C with the knowledge that she can ask. Even though we won’t always say yes or give her the answer she wants, we won’t ever laugh at her questions or make light of them. Doing so is finding that balance in parenthood where, even though you’re not the child’s friend, you are her ally and her guide.

My ally. My mom. She put up with me as a teenager so she wins.

Tales of the World: Get Naked

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Awhile back, Maggie wrote a hilarious post about her experience at a Korean sauna in America. After I read her account, I realized that I’ve been holding out on y’all. I have defied one of the most basic principles of life for far too long: the law that says it’s virtually impossible to go to a 찜질방 (jimjilbang) and not share the experience with every living soul around.

The universal sign for the jimjilbang in Korea Source

But where should I start? Should I start with the gauntlet of lockers and keys? Should I start with the salt room? Should I start with how you can drink beer and get Dippin’ Dots there?

Should I start with the karaoke and computer rooms? Should I start with the pink and blue uniforms? Should I start with the tanks of little fish that nibble dead skin off your feet? Should I start with the unabashed nudity?

Yes, I will start with the nudity.

At the jimjilbang*, there are two sections: the co-ed saunas and lounging areas, and the communal bathing areas. When you use the communal baths, you are stark naked. Upon entrance, you are issued one towel (two if you’re lucky) the size of a beverage napkin, and those things can’t be expected to cover up a dinner plate, much less a regulation-sized human being. Bathing in a swimsuit is not permitted. I tend to believe that it was because the Koreans wanted to see us foreign fatties in all our glory. So you enter the bath and you see it all. There are girls and women ranging from ages two to 100 (not kidding). Once, my fellow foreign friend ran into one of her students there. Yeah, both were nakers. And there is no personal space. There is no personal space in all of Korea, but when you’re naked and everyone is looking at you because you’re foreign and fat different, you’re much more aware of it.

*I swear I’m not being pretentious by calling the bathhouse/saunas by their Korean word; it’s just that I lived in Korea and this is what we always called it. OK so I’m being pretentious.

At the jimjilbang we frequented, there were several bathing areas: the showers, the warm baths, the hot baths, the close to boiling baths, the tepid baths, and the ice baths. All are right in the open and non-chlorinated. People would submerge their heads in the water and it always left me a bit throw-uppy that they felt OK doing this in human stew. But whatever. Just eat some kimchi and that’ll knock any bugs out of you.

The nudity will lambaste you if you are not used to it. I didn’t really want to get used to it. I have body issues that will never go away, and the bathing sections only exacerbated them. For that reason, I only used the baths once, the first time I went. But what B and I DID go back for again and again were the coed saunas. These are not the  saunas that I was used to in the US and Europe. For one, you have to wear the uniforms that are issued to you upon entrance. The women’s were pink and the men’s were blue, and the kids’ uniforms were yellow. Everyone has their own place.

The big central room at a jimjilbang Source

You enter a huge open communal area where people of all ages are just lounging around. Families always spent the day there since there was a restaurant at the jimjilbang. There are TVs, bookcases, a snack bar, massage chairs, and even little hovels where you can curl up and take a nap or sleep off your hangover; people used the jimjilbang as a super cheap hotel all the time because they were open 24 hours and you were just charged one fee upon entrance. Off the big room are multiple little doors to the separate saunas, which are all different temperatures. My favorite was the salt room where you could pile salt stones and pebbles all over yourself. I tended to forget that thousands of sweaty people had done the very same thing with those very stones.

The salt room at a jimjilbang. Ours was better because there were tiny salt pebbles all over the floor too. Source

The saunas were all hot, but the mother of them all was the room that was literally shaped like a kiln:

Here’s where you bake yourself. Source

The door to the kiln was only about 3 1/2 feet tall, so you felt like a Hobbit when you go in, which is kind of fun. Baked Hobbits – doesn’t that sound like some kind of pastry? I digress.  B and I can’t remember exactly how hot it was in there, but we both guessed that it was about 140 degrees Fahrenheit. It was sweltering and humid as all get out. The floor was made of dirt because I think anything else would have gotten way too hot. In the middle of the room was a 15 minute hour glass, and I don’t think we ever saw that thing to its completion.

There was an ice room too. The room was literally walled in ice coils. It was pretty cool (har har). You were supposed to alternate between the hot and cold rooms to get your circulation amped up. Kids were always playing in the ice room. Half the time there would be an impromptu Pokemon convention going on.

Then there were the random rooms. There was something called an Oxygen Room which always perplexed us because all the rooms had oxygen in them. But there was a TV in there that always had soap operas on, so I guess “oxygen room” sounds better than “soap opera room.” There was a PC room, which just had a bunch of computers where boys played Starcraft. There was a noraebang, which translates to “singing room”, where you could sing a song on stage with all your friends.

I don’t know if Miss C will ever live overseas. I hope she does at some point, just so she can experience a culture other than her own. I hope she goes to the equivalent of a jimjilbang, whatever that may be. I hope she dives into the hottest water she can reasonably handle and savors the experience. And I may come to regret saying this, but I hope she gets naked.

I mean, as long as the only other naked company she keeps are 95-year-old Korean women. If not that, I just don’t want to know.

Questions? I know you have questions. It took me forever to write this post because I had to edit so much out of it so it wouldn’t be 15,000 words long. And some of the best stuff got cut just because they need posts of their own. So ask away. Give me the opportunity to tell all the extra stories in the comments.

Tales of the World: Get Obsessed

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Gather ’round, kiddos. It’s time for another installment of Tales of the World for Wee Cee!

When I was in elementary school, once a month the teacher would hand out a Scholastic Book Club order pamphlet. Printed on fragile bible paper in full color, these handouts detailed books, books, and more books that could be yours if your mom deigned to order them for you. Which my mom did. By the dozen. She was (and still is) awesome like that. My own take-home lesson from this post is to just get my kid the books she wants. Reading never hurts.

In third grade, Scholastic made a mistake and sent me a book I hadn’t ordered: Exploring the Titanic by Robert Ballard. Blessed Scholastic, blessed error. By the end of the day, I was wholly entrenched in the Titanic disaster and there was no chance I was going to send the book back. It was terrifying and majestic. It was at the bottom of the ocean. It was covered in rustcicles. It was called Unsinkable, and it sank on its maiden voyage. The irony blew my eight-year-old mind. Just think about it for a second and it will blow your mind too. It was called Unsinkable, and it sank on its maiden voyage. Come on. You can’t make this stuff up.

The pictures and photos in the book were eerie and frightening. Such grandeur and life were lost all because of an iceberg and foolhardiness. There was one picture of a porcelain doll head that was just laying on the ocean floor among all kinds of other debris. Its clothe body and hair had been eaten away years and years ago. It was creepy and bizarre.

We  didn’t have The Ring when I was a kid. We had this. Source

Thus I became obsessed with the RMS Titanic at eight years old. I couldn’t resist the draw of this modern-day catastrophe of biblical proportions. I drew pictures in art class of the ship going down. I read A Night to Remember and was genuinely surprised when my classmates weren’t reading it too. I knew the history of the ship and could give you a hourly account of its descent into the abyss. I knew the number of rivets holding her hull together. I was fixated.

The thing that strikes me now is how morbid my fascination with the Titanic was. The movie was still years away from coming out, so it was not through the guise of a romantic narrative that my interest was sparked. That would have made sense for an eight-year-old girl. Instead, it was through the images of a slowly disintegrating passenger ship at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean that I became obsessed with human frailty and the remnants left behind when disaster strikes. I allowed myself to be engrossed in the events that brought her demise, and in a way that (perhaps) made it less likely that I’d ever have to go through such a catastrophe myself. Studying an event from the comforts of my own home disarmed it a little and made it an abstraction rather than a reality.

Becoming fixated on a person, an idea, or an event as a kid is a function of being young and having a safe, comfortable life. You can make time for a childhood obsession when you have moments to spare and brain matter open to devote to such superfluous things. The big, huge daunting world becomes a bit smaller and easier to digest when you can look at it through the lens of one small aspect of it. You can delve deep into the depths without leaving your parents’ side.

B and I often wonder what Miss C will latch onto when she gets older, what she will become intrigued with. Whatever it turns out to be, we will feed it. Childhood curiosity is delicious and we will cater to her whims, whatever they end up being.

Related Posts:

Tales of the World: Bad Dates

Tales of the World: Just Saying No

Tales of the World: Just Saying No

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For the first installment of Tales of the World for Miss C, check out this post. 

When my friend Kendra visited Miss C and me last week, we got to reminiscing as old friends are prone to do about our days in elementary and middle school. She is probably my only real remaining friend from those days, so I rely on her to remind me that my penchant for eating a jar of peperoncinis with a large glass of milk is well-established as one of my most disgusting oddest cravings. I did that when I was a kid; now the training wheels are off and I can down an entire jar with no pain-dulling beverage whatsoever, which pretty much freaks/grosses out everyone.

Just say no to smoking and yes to cuteness.

We also got to talking about being members of the Smoke Free Class of 2000. (Yes, this was a Thing, and I even linked to a 1989 NY Times article to prove it.) Basically, being born in 1981 and 1982 meant that Nancy Reagan and the girl who played “Rudy” on The Cosby Show were going to try their dardest to keep you from smoking by way of your public school guidance counselor. Kind of a mall Santa Claus-type thing; since they couldn’t do it themselves, they sent out a representative to do their work for them.

From first grade onward, we were drilled in the protocol of Just Saying No to smoking, specifically. Pretty much anyone from our class could spew the stats on how many people die in America from smoking every year and what the lung of a lifetime smoker looks like postmortem. The lung assembly resulted in me many students being ushered from the cafetorium to put their heads between their knees so they wouldn’t barf.

I totally got on board with saying no. This is probably because no one was asking me to smoke in the first place, but we needn’t split hairs. In sixth grade, I even wrote a poem wherein a girl gets approached on the playground by some older kid (who else?) to smoke but she declines in iambic pentameter. Did I mention that I wrote this poem on my own accord? Yeah, it wasn’t assigned; just did it on a Saturday afternoon. (For further reading on why I’m a nerd click here.)

Two triple zero, everyone’s a hero.

By the time the year 2000 rolled around, I was a beacon of light for the smoke-free agenda. Bill Clinton was in office but Nancy Reagan was still in my heart. On my eighteenth birthday, in a misguided display of my staunch opposition to nicotine, I went to a gas station with Cameron and her then-boyfriend to buy a pack of cigarettes which I would then flush down the toilet in an act of defiance. Nevermind that I was giving the tobacco companies money by doing so. It was the gesture that counted.

I sidled up to the counter with my still-underage friends flanking me and immediately blanked when the attendant asked me what I needed.

I asked them, “What kind am I supposed to get?”

“Marlboro Reds,” the chorus chanted.

“Ah yes, one pack of Marlboro Reds, please.”

To this, the attendant rolled her eyes. “You do realize I’m not going to sell you cigarettes now that you’ve clearly shown that you’re buying them for your friends, right?”

Fail.

Why it was more important for us to be smoke-free than our friends from the classes of 1999 and 2001, I cannot explain. Perhaps it was our birthright for our lungs to be especially looked after by First Lady Nancy, who saw the potential in us and was adamant to protect us from the dangers of smoking.

So Kendra and I were talking about our smoke-free indoctrination when she said, “Well, I guess it worked pretty well because I never smoked.”

I guess this means I failed Mrs. Reagan.

Because I did smoke for about fifteen minutes in college.

What can I say? College brought out the rebel in me. My gateway drug was Pringles, which I had consumed maybe only a few times in my life due to the fact that my mom had the pesky habit of feeding us actual food during our formative years. Before I knew it, I was unabashedly bringing Pop Tarts into the dorm and eating them too with no abandon, not only for breakfast but for dinner in-between meals as well. Months passed in my downward spiral and before I knew it I was making midnight runs to Taco Bell for chalupas. The destruction of my body was well underway via junk food so it was only a matter of time until I undid the best efforts of my parents and the Ad Counsel and started smoking.

Ranked only slightly lower than cigarettes on the “Things That Will Make You Die” List

It began easily enough and ended in an all-night ralph session. Out of boredom and curiosity I smoked a few of my sorority sister’s cigarettes one night and subsequently coughed up a lung. However, if I am anything it is determined, so once I discovered that ultra light cigarettes existed, I was all about them.

Yes, nothing is cooler than a nineteen-year-old girl carrying out the same rebellious acts as eleven- and twelve-year-olds, and for the exact same highly sophisticated reasons. The only difference was that my defiance lacked teeth since I was, you know, legal and all. I certainly wasn’t impressing any of my peers with my pack-a-year “habit,” but I never would have known it at the time because I was too busy to notice. My time was monopolized by constantly posing with the cigarettes in front of a mirror and practicing how I would hold them at parties. I was one happening gal.

My foray into smoking ended as abruptly as it had started. One night I was up studying for finals, which had all been scheduled for the following day. I thought to myself, “This seems like a nice opportunity to try out this chain smoking I’ve heard so much about.” Great plan. Keep in mind that over the course of the prior six months I had smoked maybe three packs of cigarettes. Maybe that many. Likely far less.

So that night when I staged the Great Chain Smoking of Emily, I was probably four hours in to my binge when I got horribly sick to my stomach and ended up ralphing for hours. When I finally went to bed I felt like I had been hit by a Mack truck. Surprise, surprise. I’m not a born smoker.

Why is this a Tale of the World for Miss C? Is it to show her that smoking is bad for her and she resist the urge to try it? Is it to demonstrate that I have been there and done that so there’s little she can do to shock me? Is it to make her jealous that I had the likes of Nancy Reagan looking after me in my formative years?

Well, yes, but it’s mainly to remind her that she is a product of me. She’s got that nerd gene that will shine through whether she chooses to embrace smoking or compose poems against it.

The moral of the story is to just write poems about smoking. It’s way healthier.

Tales of the World: Bad Dates

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As I sit here with my teeny little gal, gazing at her teeny little nose, hearing her teeny little sounds, and beaming at her teeny little smiles, I am reminded that this place where she is right now is ohso temporary and therefore extremely precious. I love her smallness more and more each day, but I was reminded by my mom who was here this weekend that in a mere thirty years, this teeny little gal could very well be a mother herself. How’s that for mindblowing?

I can't get enough of you, baby.

The amount of parenting and life decisions B and I are going to have to make in order for Miss C to get to a happy, well-adjusted adult place absolutely blows my mind, although I recognize that we’ll be making those decisions in strides and we don’t have to commit to a college this very day. Today’s hurdle consists just of introducing the “miracle swaddlers” to her. I have a feeling she’s going to dislike them because they restrict the movement of her arms, but since we were gifted so many, I just want to try them out. So that’s today. A nap (or five) would be nice, too. Not to mention getting all the thank-you notes completed.

In the meantime, there are many things I want to tell her. I suppose that’s what this blog is really for: showering Miss C with the redonkulousness of my own life and attempting to demonstrate that everything always seems to turn out alright. This is a lesson for myself too, especially now when I have to recalibrate my life nearly every day, depending on what’s on her agenda and how much sleep I got the night before.

When my lessons are actually age-appropriate for her, she will probably have no interest in hearing them, but I’ll still insist that she sit and listen to my ramblings and learn about the time before I knew her dad. On How I Met Your Mother, Ted’s kids are always entranced by his stories, told to them inexplicably in Bob Sagat’s voice, but I’m not going to bank on my girl being so rapt by my own stories as she ages. So now as she slumbers, I will tell her my tales of the world.

Today I will talk about bad dates. Let’s just break the ice with something innocuous. She’ll eventually be out in the world; crazy – considering I wouldn’t even dream of taking her to Target right now – and some lunatic in disguise will invite her on an outing which she will assent to because she won’t know better. Here’s my story for her when this happens.

When I was 20, I once briefly dated a guy who worked at a health food grocery store. He was a few years older than me, and I was still at the age when dating a guy who was older than me had inherent value. This was back when I worked at the Gap. He found out I worked there and came up there one day to hang out with me on my dinner break and to ask me out. I said yes and the date was set for the following weekend.

The first date went pretty well. We went downtown and saw a really loud band in the basement of some bar. That’s all I really remember of the whole encounter so at that point everything was kosher. There were a few meet-ups at the library in the meantime before the next big date.

The second date was agreed upon. We would be going downtown for dinner and then a movie. I drove to his apartment because it would have been really out of his way to pick me up at my home which was in the opposite direction. This was his idea. Sorry, but I was raised a certain way and that way entails him picking ME up, no matter how far away I lived. But at the time I didn’t know anything so I didn’t question it.

I got to his place and he drove us downtown in his Cadillac SUV. I know, kind of incongruous with his whole health food store persona. He explained that his dad owned/ managed (I can’t remember which) a dealership so he got to lease the Caddy. But he emphasized his own pauperism adamantly, saying that he was barely scraping by on his own financially. I think I was supposed to be impressed by this fact.

I think I was also supposed to be impressed by his enthusiasm over emo music, which was just then becoming popular.

So he goes on and on and on about how poor he was and I thought it was odd that he was so fixated on this but not really important. When we finally got downtown, he mentioned that he needed to make a pit stop at Hot Topic before we went to dinner. Maybe it’s because I’m really tired right now while writing this, but I don’t even have the energy or the creativity to highlight the sheer ridiculousness of this store. This is your invitation to leave jokes in the comments section to which “Hot Topic” is the punchline.

In Hot Topic, after his explanation of how strapped for cash he was, he purchases not one but two Jimmy Eat World t-shirts for himself; one was white with black writing and one was black with white writing. Yeah. You can’t make this stuff up, Miss C.

We arrive at reasonably-priced Italian restaurant. This guy has the audacity to remind me once again how broke he was and actually put a PRICE LIMIT on what I was allowed to order off the menu. You had better be sure at that point that after the t-shirt episode I ordered whatever the heck I wanted, caution to the wind.

This did not go unnoticed. By the time we left the restaurant, his feathers had been ruffled and he said that the option of seeing a movie in the theater was out due to his limited funds. I think he expected me to offer to pay, but sorry, that’s not how I roll since he was the asker-outer. We’d have to rent something instead and watch it at home.

Which we did. A video was procured and we returned to his apartment to view it. This is the part of the story that starts to make my skin crawl, so hang on.

I situated myself on the floor to watch whatever movie we rented, mostly because he had situated himself on the sofa. But within 20 minutes of the movie starting, he was of course on the floor with me trying to be romantic or whatever. You know what happened next; he OF COURSE tried to make a pass at me and shove his tongue down my throat.

He said WHAT?

And I OF COURSE resisted. And what did he say?

“What, did I buy you dinner for nothing?”

Well, apparently you did, buddy.

And I was like Seacrest, out. That was the end of the date. I hightailed it out of there.

Hopefully if anything like this ever happens to Miss C, she will too.