So, I’ve just moved house this weekend. The new place is in a more posh neighborhood but has nothing like the atmosphere of the old place. And what’s more, there’s no cheap food courts!

At the old place, we had a bit of a problem with bugs. Well, actually, not really a problem, because they were never annoying or plentiful enough to attract our attention for long. It was these little things about an inch in size, I don’t exactly know what they’re called, but lets just call them cockroaches for the purposes of this post:

Solitary creatures, they usually appear late at night from out of nowhere crawling along the floor or the walls. They’ve never appeared more than one at a time, so at first I thought there was only this one bug in the whole house. Being taught from a young age not to squish bugs for pleasure, I just let it roam around as it pleases and somehow developed an affinity to it.

The funny thing was that the first thought that came into my mind after I kept seeing the little cockroach roaming about a couple of times was that, it could very well be a reincarnation of a dead relative or something. It’s absurd, but that’s exactly what I thought, in all seriousness. I was actually considering that as an actual possibility. This is odd, because I’m usually quite dismissive of supernatural beliefs, and have gotten in many a debate with people from all walks ardently defending science from the nefarious ideas of mysticism.

I think it reveals something about my religiosity. When people ask me what my religion is, I have a hard time answering. Because, yes, I was born a Theravada Buddhist and I still am, in many ways. I practice the rituals, I have a deep respect for its philosophical and ethical teachings, but I’ve always had a problem believing in mystical cosmic concepts like karma and reincarnation. Also, I think the everyday conception of these concepts by the average practitioner of Buddhism is just dead wrong, in the sense that they have deviated from what was actually said in the Buddhist scriptures. For example, the popular conception of karma is analogous to Christian conceptions of sin, where you get punished for doing bad and rewarded for doing good. But that’s not how it was originally meant. Karma just means “action”, or more specifically, “intentioned actions”. It says that every intentioned act is like planting a seed, which will eventually grow into a plant as a consequence of you planting it. There is no cosmic enforcer of “karmic law”, it is just the natural consequences of your actions.

Unlike in Christianity or Islam, Buddhists do not have ready access to their holy book in their native language. Instead, the Tipitaka, or the compilation of all of Buddha’s teachings, is a series of humongous books that fill out several bookshelves. What’s more, the Theravada version, at least, is only available in Pali, and not in Burmese. This means that Buddhism is much more of a monastic tradition, where we rely on the monastic order as a liaison between the scriptures and the practitioners. As a result, it’s rather easy for the “popular view” of certain teachings to be way off the mark from their actual meanings. The situation is analogous to something like Physics, where there is a elite class of physicists who have been trained for many years in the discipline, and then there’s the laypeople, who only learn about physics from popular writings. Nevertheless, even though the average person doesn’t understand it, they would still claim to “believe” in Relativity or Quantum Mechanics. But, the question then becomes: when someone says they believe in Karma or Quantum Mechanics, are they saying:

1. That they do not know what it actually means, but nevertheless they still believe it because they have faith in the monastic or scholarly community, and as a result, they believe whatever it is that monks define as karma or physicists define as Quantum Mechanics? OR
2. That they do have in their mind a popular understanding of karma or Quantum Mechanics, and when they say they believe in the concept, that they are saying that they believe in that “popular conception” and not what “it actually means”? OR
3. They believe in both the popular and the technically rigorous definitions? This last point is logically inconsistent, because obviously, if the popular conception is different from the technical definition, obviously both cannot be true. So, it makes no sense to believe in both.

Well, yeah, that’s some food for thought. As for me, if you ask me “Do I believe in Buddhism?” I would have to say, “well, not really, but, yeah, kinda”. This is because I know that the popular conception I have of Buddhist concepts are “wrong”, and it would be weird for me to believe in something that I know is wrong. But at the same time, I don’t have a conception of what the technical definitions of the Buddhist concepts are, and so I am not prepared to say I believe in them, because it will be weird for me to believe in something and yet at the same time not know what it is that I believe in.

Ma Moe came by the other day to Peninsula and asked me to come down to eat dinner with her and her friend. I was like, “er… ok”. Turns out her friend’s a pro blogger. Kevin from theory.isthereason.com. He’s an expert on social media and is currently finishing his doctorate from SUNY Buffalo in Communications or something. So yeah, cool guy.

Anyways, we went to Inlay restaurant at the basement of Peninsula to introduce Kevin to Burmese food! And he actually took a video of it and put it on Youtube! So, here’s a little introduction to Burmese food for all you foreigners who read this and a rub in the face for all you homesick Burmese folks abroad:

And yesterday, we went to see Kevin give a talk on Social media at this cool joint called the Zsofi’s Tapas Bar somewhere in Little India. The place was near my house (again! Proof that I live in a cool neighborhood!), and had this open air roof on top an old shop house, it felt just like downtown back home in Yangon, except of course I don’t know of any shop houses converted into bars with open roofs back home.

Anyways, the talk was really cool, you can see all the slides from the presentation here. It was something of an information overload though, but I guess the take home message (at least for me) was simply this: Get on Twitter! Ma Moe was also there, and she was also bullying me into getting on Twitter. So I decided to start. As you can probably see, I changed the theme for my blog, and that’s because I’ve got a new Twitter widget on the right column (go take a look!), and the old theme’s Twitter widget was a piece of crap.

I’m at twitter.com/yanoak

How do you like the new theme anyways? I hate the tiny font but I can’t change it unless I get a paid account on WordPress. For now, just Ctrl++ if you can’t see.

And on a not entirely unrelated note, I was hungry that night and was craving specifically for KFC. It was really late though, so all the shops were closed. So I settled for the fried chicken from a Singaporean food court. Man, it was AMAZING! I hadn’t tasted such perfect french fries in a loooong time!

My Google Reader fills up quickly with unread RSS feeds because I’m lazy and don’t bother to read them. But all too often it’ll be posts about someone’s opinion of some other person’s opinion of this one guy’s rant about somebody else’s blog post about a touchy issue.

While I don’t have such a convoluted example to share with you right now, I thought the following cases were typical:

Android Central vs. The iPhone Blog:

So, Verizon started airing the ad below last week or something:

Immediately, the iPhone Blog (and probably countless other blogs) writes a post saying it’s all utter hogwash, and it’s just some lame attempt to defame their beloved iPhone.

And of course, the cheerleaders on the other side all do their little posts about how the ads are awesome, witty and smart and everything else. It was all like, in the little Apple font, and had some indie song in the background (just like real Apple ads!).

And then, of course, a war starts, where one party attempts to prove to be the superior through showy displays of their intimate knowledge of pop culture. Apparently, the folks from the iPhone Blog have found that contrary to what one might think, Verizon’s “iDoesn’t” ads aren’t all that original:

20 years before there was Verizon’s iPhone iDoesn’t… and Droid does campaign, there was Sega Does and Nintendon’t.

Yeah, take that! Android people! You think you’re all hip and cool, but you just ripped off some ad campaign from the 80’s. And of course, that means you lose all credibility and respectability. And, after all, I mean, what kind of ethically depraved person bashes their competitors with cheeky ads like that?

Paul Krugman vs. Steven Levitt

Now, this is fun, because they both write for the same newspaper.

So, everyone’s favorite Economics popularizer, Steven Levitt, of “Freakonomics” fame, is coming out with a new book, called “Superfreakonomics“. Here’s the cover:

Of course, armed with the conscience of a liberal, Krugman writes:

Uh oh. I trust Joe Romm on climate — and his verdict on Superfreakonomics is pretty damning. I’ll get to work on the book myself, but it doesn’t look good.

Levitt goes all, “oh crap, why can’t they wait until they’ve actually read what I wrote”:

SuperFreakonomics isn’t even on sale yet, and the attacks on our chapter about global warming are already underway.

Krugman reads it! Gets all trigger happy and replies with a post after just reading five pages:

OK, I’m working my way through the climate chapter — and the first five pages, by themselves, are enough to discredit the whole thing.

Levitt’s coauthor resorts to questioning the nature of science and knowledge (okay, maybe not that severe):

They have given the impression that we are global-warming deniers of the worst sort, and that our analysis of the issue is ideological and unscientific.

And so the story goes. The political/economics blogs are still abuzz with the ongoing dispute.

So the moral of the story is: don’t insult people who believe (or do not believe) in Global Warming and don’t insult people who believe (or do not believe) iPhones are cool. Unless of course you want more visitors to your website (read: more Ad revenue).

Hmm… Interesting article (link)

And so it is with luck – unlucky people miss chance opportunities because they are too focused on looking for something else. They go to parties intent on finding their perfect partner and so miss opportunities to make good friends. They look through newspapers determined to find certain types of job advertisements and as a result miss other types of jobs. Lucky people are more relaxed and open, and therefore see what is there rather than just what they are looking for.

My research revealed that lucky people generate good fortune via four basic principles. They are skilled at creating and noticing chance opportunities, make lucky decisions by listening to their intuition, create self-fulfilling prophesies via positive expectations, and adopt a resilient attitude that transforms bad luck into good.

The claims he makes are intuitive enough. Since my personality fits what he describes to be the “unlucky” type, but I’ve always considered myself pretty lucky, it got me thinking a bit.

I think he’s got a point about the resilient attitude, being relaxed and open, and creating self fulfilling prophecies through positive expectations. I remember a few years ago when I was absolutely broke and did not have any money to pay for my college tuition. It was overdue for like two semesters and I couldn’t even officially register for classes because I hadn’t paid tuition. I got multiple warnings from the administration, even threatening to suspend my student visa. But through some weird arbitrary mental block, a certain inability to worry about certain (apparently random but important) aspects of my life, I was completely relaxed about it the whole time. I always knew (believed would be a better word maybe?) that the problem would sort itself out. And at the end of the day, it was solved, somehow.

That is strange, because I’m not usually like that. I always think I worry too much about certain things and not at all about others. I usually stick to some fixed algorithm when trying to figure something out, and usually not a well thought out algorithm either. Like when I’m meeting with people I’m not close to, or when I’m playing poker, or whatnot. I stick to some dumb routine, because I’m really bad at making snap decisions.

The  article goes on to say the following:

Unlucky people often fail to follow their intuition when making a choice, whereas lucky people tend to respect hunches. Lucky people are interested in how they both think and feel about the various options, rather than simply looking at the rational side of the situation. I think this helps them because gut feelings act as an alarm bell – a reason to consider a decision carefully.

This part, I would have to disagree with. I think he’s using the words “rational” and “intuitive” in a way that muddles up the issue and create artificial dualistic divides. From my own experience, like I said earlier, I am usually not someone who would do things based on intuition, but that doesn’t mean I’m rational. I am anything but rational when it comes to making personal decisions. Instead, I would usually stick to some fixed method when doing something without considering alternatives in a relaxed and open-minded manner. That IS NOT rational behavior as I understand it.

A truly rational approach would not only have a coherent method to perform a task or make a decision, but would also incorporate feedback through some Bayesian updating system (like what your spam filter does). Also, a truly rational approach would require that options are weighed according to the probabilities of the various possible outcomes, and these probabilities should be estimated using unbiased statistical data. And as you can imagine, nobody does ANOVA or multiple regressions before deciding who to talk to at a party. So, I, for one, think people should stop equating stupid, closed-minded stubbornness with rational behavior. Rationality gets such a bad rep for all these silly reasons.

But then again, I think psychologists use the word “rational” in a different sense than what I understand. The way they use it probably has something to do with which parts of the brain are active while making the decisions.

Another thing. I checked out the author online, and it seems like he’s one of those pop psychologist guys who are all too keen to popularize their “scientific research”. Also, he’s only written one paper (it was a conference paper, not a published one) on the stuff he was writing about in this article. Most of his research has to do with the psychology of paranormal beliefs, and not the psychology of luck. Well, I guess I shouldn’t scrutinize a newspaper article all too much.

Ok, this post was pretty incoherent. It’s 6AM. I should sleep.

Oh man, I have no life. I just finished all 50 levels of this puzzle game called Boxed In on my iPhone.

YOUR WHAAAT!!!?? I hear you ask.

Yes, I have a dirty little secret. I have been using an iPhone (3GS, 32GB) for more than a month now. And if you know anything about me, you’d know that there are few things I hate more in the world than Apple fanboys. I bow my head in shame. But first I have to defend myself.

I’ve always loved Macs since that one semester when I started living (yes, if you knew me at Midd, you know what I’m talking about) in the Comp Sci department’s Mac lab in college. They make very good computers. What I couldn’t stand is the thought of paying Apple Inc exorbitant sums to join their stupid cult. And yes, Apple Inc is ALSO a publicly traded corporation with a legal mandate to maximize profits (for those of you who hate such entities but nevertheless forget that your shiny Mac comes from the same factories in China that make electronics for Wal-Mart). Okay, don’t get me started…

The thing is, in Singapore at least, you don’t have to pay lots of money to get an iPhone. If you buy it with a plan, it’s only S$148 (~USD 100), and you don’t have to pay extra in monthly fees just because you’re using an iPhone. From what I know, both the up-front cost and the monthly fees are only about a half to a third of what you’d pay in the US for a 32GB 3GS.

And I didn’t even have to pay for the phone, I got that for free, I only have to pay the monthly bills (working in Telecoms has some quirks). I was offered the phone as a graduation present/equipment for work by Othercousin. I WOULD NOT have gotten it if it was up to me. All I did was complacently agree to my elder’s wishes, and that’s just what you do in my culture. No, really.

So that was me defending my dignity, for what it’s worth. I seriously feel bad for this, like I killed a kitten or something.

That said, I can definitely say with some confidence afforded by my 2 months experience working in the biz that iPhones really are the best cell phones on the market right now. That’s of course, until Nokia, Samsung, HTC, Sony and others catch up with their newest models. But it will still be a benchmark that all other mobile devices coming out in the next few years will be measured against. I think the Blackberry Storm is the only comparable one right now, but I’ve never used it, so I don’t know. I suspect it’s actually slightly better than the iPhone.

Ok, again, this is not some attempt at underhanded bragging. It was just my honest opinion. There’s no escape, is there? Arrgh…

Anyways, this post was not supposed to be about the phone at all. What I really did want to brag about was that I finished all 50 levels of Boxed In!

Lookit!

Booya!

All 50 done!

Boxed In is a game where you move a little robot around a room to push boxes into their proper places to open all the passageways blocking your exit. It’s just challenging enough that you want to keep going at it till you finish all the levels, without just giving up and abandoning the game because it’s giving you a headache.

The whole time I was playing it, I remembered similar games from the good old days of MS-DOS and Windows 3.11. There’s two that I particularly loved.

The first is Chip’s Challenge, it’s an old Windows game with the same premise as Boxed In, except it’s got a lot more features. Whereas Boxed In just involves pushing boxes, Chip’ Challenge makes you get boots to walk on fire, run away from monsters, flip switches and levers, unlock doors, in addition to pushing boxes around. It’s awesome! And has more than 140 levels. I never finished it. I guess I was dumber when I was young, and the game itself was pretty darn hard.

The second one, and IMHO the better of the two, is an old MS-DOS game called Supaplex. This one also involves controlling a little guy that pushes stuff around until you find a clear path to the exit, but unlike Chip’s Challenge and Boxed In, it’s not so much a test of logical puzzle solving skills but rather your speed and control. There’s these scissor things that eat you, and stuff that explode when it falls on you, and rocks falling on all sides which block the narrow passages to your exit. It’s gloriously fun, and incredibly hard. I was about nine or ten when I played it and could only finish a few levels (but it did let you skip levels though).

All that makes me want to start writing games. I think it would actually be quite easy to write small games like that. Most games for cell phones are on the level of second year Comp Sci class projects. And if you look at the kind of stupid shit that they sell for $1.99 at the iPhone App store, you’d think you can do a hell of a lot better.

I’ve already started reading a book on programming for Symbian, since Nokias are the most widely used phones. The thing, though, is that, Apple, being sneaky as usual, made it so that you can only get Apps from their official store (unless of course, you get clever and jailbreak the thing), so App makers for Apple don’t have to worry about piracy, but it sooo easy to copy stuff from one Nokia phone to another. iPhone Apps are definitely where the big bucks are. 40 million iPhone users in the world, all wanting a 99 cent cure for their boredom, makes for a goldmine.

But of course, there’s always a catch. Even before you start writing any program for the iPhone, you first have to buy a Mac. The SDK only runs on Macs. Which I think is stupid and unfair. Imagine Sony made sure that you could only write Playstation games on Sony laptops. In addition, even if you are a altruistic type of person who would give your wonderful Apps to the world for free, you still have to pay Apple US$99 to join the developer’s program. But hey, as we say in Burmese, “you are the police, do whatever you want”.

Buy a Mac? Maybe a mini? Even that’s like S$988 (~USD 700) for a paltry thing with a gig of ram, it’s like an amputee of a computer. I can use a hackintosh but it’s gonna be a nightmare when you need updates for the SDK.

No way sir. Not until I pay off my student loans.

*Steve Jobs laughs diabolically in the background*

She is:

• the first woman to win the Economics Prize
• a political scientist, not an economist (which goes to show that the social sciences are more interrelated than one might think)
• not a dabbler in arcane mathematics, unlike most people who win the Economics Prize (which goes to show that the popular view that contemporary economics is just abstruse mathematics is not exactly correct)
• an advocate of behavioral economics, which uses insights from economic experiments, psychology, and neuroscience to form more nuanced and empirically grounded models of human economic behavior, in contrast to the super-rational Homo Economicus of standard economic theory

And, one of the influences for my Economics thesis last year ! Her classic book, Governing the Commons, was a very good read. I even cited one of her papers in my thesis. In fact, that was one of the first papers I read for my thesis.

And another thing. The criteria for winning the Economics prize is kinda sorta subjective, unlike in the natural sciences where the prize is only awarded to advancements that are supported by solid empirical evidence. But *ahem*, unlike some other award that was given this year, at least Ostrom won her prize AFTER she wrote all her books and papers.

The problem with my blog is that I spend too much time and effort writing each post, and about an order of magnitude more time procrastinating before actually writing the post. Often, I have nice ideas about things that I want to blog about, but I don’t just want to put a 3 sentence blurb on the blog, I feel like I should do a more substantial post with well developed ideas and stuff. The internet is way too overloaded with trivial shit already, so much so that we surrender our lives over unknowingly t o Google bots.

But I do want to have a place where I can have five minute blurbs about spontaneous ideas, or to link to cool things I find online. Maybe I should start a Twitter account. I have an account already, but I’ve never posted anything there. Or maybe I can consolidate random ideas in bullet point form and have them all in one post, as seen below:

• Google bots rule our lives. I was talking to the web designer for our company website today and was surprised/disgusted at how much effort professional web designers have to put in to cater to the search engine’s bots so that your page gets ranked higer in a Google search. It’s amazing, everything from the wording you use on a page, the meta tags, the way the links on a page are structured, everything has to be designed to please the little buggers.
• I hung out with my old internet buddy Ko Htoon tonight. I met him online about five years ago and have only seen him twice in real life. He’s an engineer from Myanmar who’s been living in Singapore for about ten years now. We had a few beers and talked about a whole bunch of things, from religion to marketing practices. He’s very well read and down to earth, something quite rare among the Burmese in Singapore. After the beer, food and interesting conversation, we went to watch a punk rock show with a few local bands, and this one guy from Australia:
• The show itself was pretty crappy. I know they have better bands in Singapore, just have to wait around for their gigs.

• I really enjoy the little “hourly journal” comics from the lovely Kate Beaton’s website. She’s a webcomic artist from Canada who’s famous for her historical themed comics with a witty and dry sense of humor. The hourly journal ones are just random snapshots of her (admittedly boring) life at each hour throughout the day, but there’s a certain warmth about them. I always thought that if I actually grew up in the West, I’d be very happy just living in my own little apartment with a 9 to 5 job, doing something enjoyable in my free time like drawing comics. The American dream may be some proto-spiritual quest for self-creation and fulfillment, but believe me, the Burmese dream is just a simple life, a steady job, and a decent house. Nothing more.
• This guy has an interesting gallery of pictures he took during his trip to Singapore. Actually, I think most of the photos are taken at locales near where I live. See, I do live in a cool neighborhood (at least until the end of this month).
• Ashley was complaining the other day about how much she had to pay for income taxes in the US. I told her it was stupid that in the US, the lowest tax bracket is 10%, which means students, lower skilled and entry level workers get taxed an unfairly high amount. In every other country I know of, the lowest tax bracket is 0%. I just think it’s blatantly obvious that someone making less than USD 15K per annum in a rich country just shouldn’t be taxed. But she replied that when you pay taxes, you feel like you have some “ownership” or “stake” in the government. It’s an interesting point. It’s funny how Americans really have a sense of “government of the people”, and not just “government as an entity that should make my life easier”, which I think is the view in most of the world. If you ask me, I couldn’t care less what role I play in the governing of the country, as long as whoever’s governing is doing a good job. I think its at the root of the discussion about what actually constitutes “politics”. David Brooks had a recent column about that question by contrasting Jeremy Bentham and David Hume. And I think someone like Hannah Arendt would actually support Ashley’s point, and say that utilitarians like me are succumbing to an “untenable ‘communistic fiction’ about the unity of society”.
• Also, I never understood why conservatives in the US supported tax cuts for the wealthy even when the typical American will never live to see the day when she earns enough that she will be affected by a tax cut for the highest income bracket. Maybe its a hope thing. Americans are big on that.
• Yay! Fringe S02E04 just finished downloading! Never mind my headache, Fringe is more important than headahces. Oh, and I hate how I don’t get stuff like Hulu, Pandora and Last.fm here. I need to get VPN or go through a proxy, but I haven’t found a decent service like that you can get for free.
• And damn I’m hungry. Do late night meals cure headaches? Well, we’ll just have to find out, wouldn’t we?

First, Al Gore, and now…

Obama? WTF!!?

Now I can write a how-to book for winning the Nobel Peace prize, here’s your two options:

1) Rot in some prison for 20 years fighting for justice, risking your life, jettisoning your family, holding on to a vague figment of hope and that the “arc of the universe bends towards justice” in Dr. King’s immortal words

2) Join the US Democratic party and make all the people in the media rave about you (try not to have an affair while in the process)

To all the liberal politicians and public intellectuals in the US: I’m sure you are pleased to know that you can rest assured that you can go on merrily alienating the bulk of the population, losing elections and whatever else. The Swedes got your retirement already taken care of.

I love walking around at night in this town.

So, about a half hour ago, I was on my way to fuel my addiction to pork at the 24 hour food court down the street, navigating past the table with the old white guy courting a young SPG, and another with a chatty group of sleazy looking dolled-up transvestites with conspicuously broad shoulders, and around the stall selling ice-kachang, there it was: the pork stall, with all its glorious aromas.

Bak kut teh, ribs, liver, and my favorite… braised pig’s feet.

So I ask the lady at the stall for some pig’s feet, and she replies in Mandarin. Thinking it’s just that it’s late and she couldn’t tell (or didn’t bother to check) that I wasn’t Chinese, I replied in English, thinking she’d get the hang of it and start switching to English. She just goes on in Mandarin. Oops, PRC person…

There’s actually quite a lot people from mainland China here, but they blend in with the ethnically Chinese majority until you start talking to them and notice they don’t know any English (Singaporeans at least know rudimentary English, since it’s the language of instruction in public schools from day 1) or they have a noticeably PRC accent. So I was in one of those situations that happen often enough that you vividly remember the last time it happened but not so often that you would actually call it a “familiar situation”. I didn’t know whether I should pretend like I don’t know any Chinese and just point and nod, or actually start practicing the little Chinese I learned for a year in college. I flip a coin in my head, and start trying out my rusty Mandarin.

Immediately she asks me if I know Fujian Hua. I was like “Huh?”. I don’t even know what that was. Isn’t it odd enough that a brown guy speaks a few words of Mandarin? I didn’t know at the time that she was referring to Hokkien (I just Wikipedia-ed it). Obviously unable to convey my sense of confusion in my rudimentary Mandarin, I just reply with a simple “no”. And then she says, “well, I’ve seen a lot of people like you who can speak Fujian Hua, so I thought I’d ask”. People like me? So, I’m part of some category of people in this lady’s mind now? Which could it possibly be? She doesn’t know I’m Burmese. I’m not dark skinned enough to be South Asian (especially because most of the South Asians in Singapore are Tamils, who have darker skin tones), and definitely not fair skinned enough, and too hairy to be any variant of Southern or Northern Chinese. Maybe she thinks I’m Malay, but I don’t think Malays are particularly adept in Hokkien, nor do they eat pork (being Muslims). Plus, she seems to know I’m a foreigner, because she was asking later how long I’ve been in Singapore. So, yeah, puzzled and confused, I change the topic to small talk and wait for her to finish preparing the pork, after which I get to enjoy my meal and continue pondering about the nice Chinese lady’s possible schemes of racial profiling.

But more importantly, I started thinking that it would be a good idea to learn Chinese again. I gave it up after a year in college because the Chinese program at Middlebury was awfully intense and I had to take other awful classes for my double major requirements. And I think more than the workload, it’s the lack of incentives to learn it. If you studied really hard, you get to ace the spelling quiz the next morning, and that was pretty much the only reward. Oh, and you got to go to China for Junior year. Big deal.

Middkids learn Chinese, or whatever other language, because they want to be worldly and sophisticated, or they’re interested in comparative linguistics. I don’t care about any of that stuff. I like doing things only when they become an everyday reality in my life. And now it seems like a good time for me to learn Chinese, considering I’m in a town where several million folks speak it.

It’ll be exciting. I’m definitely stoked.

I haven’t written a recipe post in so long I thought I should start again. Part of the reason was that I haven’t really been cooking at all for months. I don’t know why, I just didn’t feel like it. I hate how I randomly abandon important and rewarding things just because I don’t feel like it. I spend too much time chasing comfort.

Well, anyways, I’m definitely going to start cooking often now. I’ve coerced othercousin into letting me cook dinner twice a week. Usually, she would get up early in the morning to see her husband off to work, and then she’d start cooking and doing all the housework. By the time I wake up, she’d already be playing Farm Town on Facebook, have long finished all the cooking. So I never get to help. But this state of affairs will no longer continue.

I actually cooked this meal last Wednesday I think, but I’ve been too lazy to blog about it. Othercousin and her husband wanted me to make “western food”, but I haven’t the faintest clue how to make western food (plus, they’d want to eat it with rice, and they’d never understand the concept of rice as a “side dish”), so I struck a compromise, and made a vaguely Asian main dish and the simplest of all possible western side dishes: deviled eggs.

So, without further ado, here is my fabulous Pork with Lao Gan Ma:

It might not look spectacular, but it tastes delicious.

And if you don’t know what Lao Gan Ma is, you’ve obviously never hung out around East Asians before. It translates literally to “Old Dry Mother”, and its a brand of Chinese chili sauces that is famous the world over. I think it gets its name from the stoic androgynous looking “Grandmother” whose portrait adorns every jar of Lao Gan Ma, staring solemnly into the faces of her billions of consumers, as the Chinese answer to McDonaldization.

Anyways, on with the recipe before I get carried away. There’s several flavors of Lao Gan Ma, and the one I used was the one with black beans and chili. It tastes so savory you can just eat it straight out of the jar. If you’re anywhere in Asia, you can find the stuff in any supermarket, and if you’re not, you can find it in any ubiquitous Asian supermarket.

So, it’s great to mix in with rice, and serves about 3 people.

Ingredients:

1. 1/2 lbs of fatty pork (or lean if you prefer tasteless food)
2. Potatoes (5 small)
3. Lao Gan Ma’s black bean + chili paste (2 tbsp)
4. Ginger (about a 1 cm piece)
5. Onion (1 medium)
6. Garlic (2 cloves)
7. Soy Sauce (1.5 tbsp)
8. Teriyaki Sauce (1 tbsp)
9. Oil (very little, the pork and Lao Gan Ma are both oily)

Directions:

1. Marinade the pork in the soy sauce and teriyaki sauce for 30 minutes.
2. Chop the potatoes into quarters (or nice sized chunks) and boil them until they start to get soft.
3. Microwave the pork for about 10 minutes together with the marinade, maybe add a little water.
4. Sautee the onions and garlic in a pot with just enough oil to make sure nothing sticks to the bottom. Keep adding tablespoons of water if they start sticking.
5. When the pork is microwaved, cut it into nice chunks and add the pork together with the marinade and the ginger, into the pot with the sautee.
6. After a few minutes, add the Lao Gan Ma and the potatoes, add a few tablespoon of water to make sure nothing sticks to the bottom.
7. Since both the potatoes and the pork have been already cooked, all you need to do is stir the mixture in the pot for a few minutes and that’s it.

So that’s the Pork with Lao Gan Ma. It can be pretty spicy depending on the amount of Lao Gan Ma you add.

And I also made deviled eggs, but I won’t bother with the recipe for that, I just used the first recipe I found on Google. I added chili powder though. But here’s the picture:

Yum, yum, yum! Will be back with more next week. And if you guys have ideas on how I can please my cousins with “western food” that is both delicious and easy to cook, please advice. Would love to hear from ya’ll.