Journal Entry 3

Chapters

Learning A New Recipe

Before my step-grandparents came back from China, my stepdad would make this really delicious fried pork that’s glazed in some sort of caramelized sauce. But once the grandparents came back, they started making dinner really early at like 4-5 PM (I usually eat dinner at like 8-10 PM). I don’t wanna be mean, but their cooking is so bland. Their idea of good tasting food is straight fried food with zero seasoning or sauce, and if there is a sauce, then it’s only soy sauce. I can’t stand it. Maybe I’m too spoiled or too picky, but I decided that I needed to lock in and be able to make good food for myself if I’m complaining this much. I will say, though, that their miso soup is really good.

Since dinner is usually ready before my stepdad comes home, he doesn’t have a large incentive to cook his delicacies anymore. This Monday, however, my mom finally got him to cook the glazed fried pork for me and my little brother again and I stood by him to see what ingredients were used for the sauce. That way, I could recreate it in my own free time without needing him to cook it.

I have the ingredients for the sauce as listed: minced garlic, sugar lump candy, a little leftover oil from deep frying pork, ground white pepper (a good amount), ketchup, mushroom flavored dark soy sauce, regular soy sauce, oyster sauce, fukien old wine, white vinegar, and scallions.

I might make a cooking post about this recipe this summer, but there’s no promise. It tastes so freaking good though. Before that though, I might have to watch my stepdad remake it because I need a better estimate of how much of each ingredient that I need. I’m also not sure what I’ll name it since it seems to be a traditional Fuzhou family recipe but that’s a problem for another day.

For those wondering, my cooking account will resume once I’m in college. I’m not buying my school’s meal plan so I’ll have to cook a lot more rather than freeload off whatever’s in the fridge. Right now, recipes take too much time and energy to document while following them at the same time. I’ve also been pretty wasteful of the ingredients after making them 1-3 times and that’s been bothering me a lot. When I make a recipe, I’m the only one who really eats it. That’s pretty inconvenient since I stopped eating a lot a bit ago and I don’t wanna eat a lot at once. I’ll definitely have to change my approach to how I document my cooking journey to be more conservative with ingredients and learn how to make my own recipes instead of only following them. This cooking thing is something I really want to stick with and I know I’m not living up to my word right now but give me some time.

What Do You Mean The Story Only Got 2 Likes.

Wow, my bum ahh really got humbled.

I thought my story would do numbers because it’s such a popular reference from Minecraft.

I was in bed with my little brother tucked beside me. He looked so locked in on his YouTube Shorts that I had the light bulb idea to make a Noob vs. Pro vs. Hacker vs. God meme, but for doomscrolling. There’s been this wave of Minecraft nostalgia washing over me recently, especially on my Instagram feed.

At first, I was only going to make two panels: the noob and the hacker. But after thinking about it for a bit, I decided to go all out and make all four players. I’ll do a “quick” breakdown of the thought process behind each one.

The first one I actually worked on was the hacker. Originally, I wanted the computer doomscroller to be the hacker because, well… hackers use computers. I changed my mind because after seeing how much aura the red lights gave, I just had to. So I had my little brother lie on the bed with the lights turned red for that hacker vibe. After taking a few photos, though, he suggested that he should also hold a phone, iPad, and watch TV all at the same time. I loved that idea so much that I would revisit the Hacker later after all the other players.

Before redoing the hacker photos, I moved on to the Pro. Since the computer no longer made sense as the hacker after the red-light photos had way too much aura, I decided to make the computer doomscroller the Pro instead.

Then I went back and redid the Hacker. Instead of giving him three devices, I changed it to two while keeping the red lighting. I decided to make the God player have the three devices instead because I was thinking doomscrolling on three devices would be considered as “doing too much”. For both of them, I also put my little brother on some drip, which were a pair of glasses and a cap, so he actually looked like his players.

The last one I did was the Noob. I wanted myself to be the noob because I’m nowhere close to the Gen Alpha level of doomscrolling… do I even have to explain? Just look at those kids. I also thought it would be funnier if my little brother was the higher-ranked player because of the irony. So I just sat on the couch doomscrolling while he took a picture of me because that’s basically the average doomscrolling setup. Besides, I was the one with the creative vision, so it made more sense for him to be the one posing.

In the end, my player order basically came down to how many devices each person had. According to my completely bullshit reasoning, one device was Noob, the computer was Pro, two devices were Hacker, and the three-device combo became God.

I was going to put together all of the photos in Canva but I quickly realized that I suck at editing images, so I used AI to generate images until I got something I really liked. If you hate AI image generation for ethical reasons, I sincerely apologize, but this was a must (not really but also yes, really). The individual photos took 2 hours to get right so I was already tired by then.

After getting the meme image, I had to make what I thought was going to be a banger story. I was stuck between a few audios but decided to go with The Spectre because it’s such a classic banger and meme song. I was so proud of my final product that I spent 20 minutes rewatching it. I was debating whether I should post it when I woke up or at 2 AM, but I didn’t want to think about posting it anymore so I just posted it at 2 AM.

I might’ve been too proud of myself because I couldn’t fall asleep until 5 AM and then woke up at 7:30 AM. Not to mention, I had a meeting at 1 PM that day to create my schedule for college, so I really fried myself. In fact, my sleep schedule earlier this week was so terrible. I’ve been falling asleep at 7 AM and waking up at 12 PM. Then I would take a nap at 7 PM for one and a half hours until like 9:30 PM ish and the whole cycle would repeat. Thankfully, I was able to fix my sleep schedule with the help of taking 2 melatonin gummies.

The entire next day, I was really sad because my story absolutely flopped when I thought it was gonna be a giga-banger. Very big thanks to the people who responded to the poll and my two story likers. I’m not really sure why I’m relying so much on external validation. I’m finding it a bit concerning for myself but I’m also not really sure on how to fix the issue.

By the way, don’t worry about my little brother. I paid him with “game time”, so his labor was not for nothing :).

I will be talking about my silly schedule in the next chapter so have fun reading about that!

Me And My Bomboclatt Schedule

I made my schedule earlier on Thursday. I attended a 3 hour meeting from 1:30-4:30. For the first 10-20 minutes they gave an introduction to how the schedule works and some graduation requirements but I didn’t really pay attention because I was doing something else at the same time (I forgot what it was).

After the quick introduction, we were split into breakout rooms with a senior buddy in groups of 2-3. I asked the senior and he said that it’s usually 4-5 people per group so I got lucky that I picked a less busy time. It was just the senior, me, and one other person. You had to join on a computer because the UI on the phone is terrible and won’t actually let you add courses to your schedule and the other person thought it was a good idea to join on his phone while at work (absolute genius). He had to leave and reschedule his meeting so then it was just me and the senior left. I asked so many questions and kind of kept him until the last minute so I feel kind of bad. I’m really glad I did though because I learned so many things about college and all the nitty gritty details. He also put me on so many websites and gave me so much advice. It reminded me of those reels that talk about being a sophomore watching your senior friend graduate.

Now about my schedule. One of the weird things about my schedule is that I have all the “stacked” classes on Tuesday/Thursday so I might be a little fried when it comes to exam season but at most there’s three exams on the same day. Apparently all of the professors that teach proofs suck and I’m going to have to thug it out. I’ve also heard that proofs is kind of difficult in the sense that it’s a lot different than typical math. The other classes aren’t that bad to be honest and I should do fine in them. I’m really excited for my Intro to Sociology class because I think I’ll learn a lot of cool ideas that should interest me.

My American Government class is Asynchronous which means I can do it online during any time of the week. I’m not sure if that’s the best idea because I’ve realized that I don’t learn very well asynchronously, so I might switch that out potentially for an in person class. The creative writing class shouldn’t be too bad since I’ve kind of trained my writing endurance with my blog. Though, since it’s for a class, I might struggle having fun writing compared to writing for my blog. The communications class shouldn’t be that bad and I heard it’s a good class to take so I’m looking forward to that as well. The only thing is that this class is also online which might be bad for me. I find it really hard locking in while learning online and always find myself getting distracted.

There were other classes that I wanted to take but Gen. Ed is so silly and my advisor wanted me to take a lot of my Gen. Eds classes during the fall semester. I’ll probably just take them later on though. I’m really excited for college to start so I can meet new people and see what kind of people are waiting for me out there.

What’s The Difference Between The 帅哥 4 Years Ago And The 帅哥 Now?

I’ve been getting the compliment, “帅哥”, a lot more often recently after seeing relatives for the first time in a while. “帅哥” (shuàigē) basically just means a “handsome brother” in Chinese. If you’ve never heard it before, I’d recommend going to google translate and listening to how it’s ennunciated.

But the thing is, relatives used to call me 帅哥 back when I was a chubby little guy too. So I’ve been wondering: what exactly is the difference between then and now and why do relatives use it so much?

I don’t really believe it when my relatives call me a 帅哥 because they use it so often. Back then when I was called a 帅哥, I used to believe them and would be pretty happy. Clearly, I wasn’t a 帅哥 back then. It’s most likely because I was considered “cuter” back then because I was younger.

I know it’s a common slang term in China that’s equivalent to “bro” or “brother” here in America but in the context that I hear it in, it doesn’t really rub off on me as slang.

It seems to be a more cultural thing to just call people a 帅哥 and 美女 (girl equivalent) as a way to warm up to each other and maybe I shouldn’t think too much about it. Yet, I still find myself wondering why someone would call me a 帅哥 in the first place if they maybe never fully believed in it, especially when I was young. When I heard 帅哥 more recently, I started to believe it a little more for a few reasons. One was that I myself already believe that I’ve changed a lot since back then and improved a lot. Second was that a lot of the relatives pointed out how I lost so much weight and look so much better now. I still find it hard to believe whether or not they actually think that I am a 帅哥. I mean, I guess that’s why I’m writing about it right now.

I think it affects me more now because my identity is more formed and also because I’m aware of what my identity is. I’ve seen this idea floating around somewhere before but the more a compliment aligns with your identity, the more you resonate with it. This sounds pretty similar to what I’m experiencing now.

Maybe that’s why hearing 帅哥 now feels a lot different than it did four years ago.

The Larping Is Too Good…/ “Do You Want To Go Somewhere Before School Starts?”

My mom just became a soccer fan over the past week.

With the World Cup that’s about to come to an end this week (it just ended a few hours ago at the time of writing this), comes many larpers. My mom was one of those larpers. That caught me off guard but at the same time, my uncle loves watching soccer and was spreading his propaganda to her. It was only a matter of time before she started being a soccer fan.

But get this. She asked me to open a betting account so she could bet on the games. I don’t know what surprised me more: the fact that she wanted to gamble or the fact that she was larping being a soccer fan.

I was really hesitant and didn’t want her to gamble at all because the one major reason we are living our current lives was because she didn’t gamble. She told me that she wanted to have an incentive to watch the game and by betting, that incentive would be created. She told me this on Monday.

I think it was on Thursday or Friday that my mom asked me, “Do you want to go somewhere before school starts?” I replied, “Japan.” She instantly shut down the idea and said it was too expensive. After that, she kept on suggesting the idea of London but I was like, “There’s nothing to do in London. Why do you want to go so bad?” She started talking about how it has a cool history and how the buildings look really good but then I said how I hate history and that it doesn’t interest me that much. The only thing to do there was take pictures. I then said, “How about we go to Japan to buy clothes so we look good in the photos first AND THEN go to London to take the photos. I had a pretty compelling argument because she started considering it after that point for her own reasons that I won’t mention. She told me to go apply for a visa for my stepdad first and then we could go to Japan after.

Fast forward to yesterday (Saturday) and I asked her if she still wanted to gamble and she said yes. She then somehow made the account by herself and placed a big niche bet that gave a 5x cashout by accident. The bet conditions were the following: one was for if Mbappe scored at least one goal at any time during the game, while the second one was for if England won the game. Before the game started, I said that if she won the entire bet, it would all go towards my Japan flight ticket and she agreed as casual banter. I can’t lie, this was the most fun I’ve had talking with my mom in a long time. I’ve never seen her so passionate about soccer and gambling while using all the buzzwords both in Mandarin and English.

We didn’t even realize how unlikely the bet was, but somehow she cashed out big. I was pretty happy for her and I said in sarcasm, “Hooray I got a free Japan ticket!” as a joke. Then, she started encouraging me to get started on my stepdad’s visa.

Today, she bet on Argentina winning and lost a good amount of the winnings, so I guess there goes a part of my free Japan ticket.

I guess the lesson here is that once you win big, just go home or else you’ll lose it all.

Photo(s) Of The Week

Here’s the much clearer version of the Noob vs. Pro vs. Hacker vs. God Doomscroller meme. The explosion on my story might’ve been a little too big…

Stepdad tossing the fried pork inside the caramelized sauce in a wok

Here’s a photo of me with my unc hat on that I brought to the gym. My mom told me to bring it out because it was really hot that day. Thank god she told me to because it protected me from the big ahh rain storm after I got out of Chipotle.

Here’s a picture that I took during the introduction section of the meeting that I was attending to create my schedule.

Here’s a big bag full of many 包子 (buns) with pork inside. They taste SO GOOD. I eat like 4-5 every morning for breakfast. This might also be one of the reasons why I’m not cooking as often…