I slept late and I needed it. Another long week done, another full weekend starting.

I had a new friend, “J”, come over last night who I met through a project at school. She’s Chinese, studied media production for undergrad, and started grad school this year. She’s tall and pretty and artsy. For a couple weeks we joked and talked about making this one Chinese dish that we both love and that has a reputation for being extremely hard to make. The dish,  shui zhu yu (水煮鱼) is a kind of chili-cooked fish with lots of broth, but broth you don’t eat because it’s too spicy and mouth numbing. The broth does something to the fish flesh that makes it tasty and stimulating. Popular in special restaurants in China, less popular as a homemade dish because of its complexity.

With my longtime friend and business partner flying in from the Motherland last night, I thought it might be a good time to try cooking something, so I invited J over and she was into it.

After following all the instructions she found, things seemed to be going quite well. As the various sauces came together, most of which needed to be prepared separately for various chemical reasons, we all got pretty excited. But then we began one of the final phases where you super heat oil and add chili shells and those mouth numbing little round pepper things. The fumes from what ensued were unbelievably toxic. I was sneezing and coughing uncontrollably, and as the cloud reached my traveler friend who was out in the living room, the same happened to him. Spasms of sneezes and coughs almost to the point things seemed like they could get dangerous. I had to open the sliding glass door to the balcony, cover my nose and mouth and get the kitchen fan on, and I turned on both bathroom’s fans and opened my door. It took about 15 minutes for peace to return.

Anyway, despite that part in which we almost accidentally killed ourselves, the final dish came out incredibly well. We sat around my dinning room table (which is now oriented in a way that’s conducive to eating, finally) and lit candles and the three of feasted and talked alot about how if we could make something like this, we might just be able to make anything at all.
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Training in 90 minutes and then I’ll work with my visitor on preparing an upcoming trip we’re taking to an unbelievably dangerous place. Then we’ll probably eat and I need to work on some writing I’m doing in preparation for a meeting with the lead author tomorrow afternoon. After that I meet with my advisor to talk about my lack of dissertation progress, and after that I’ll come home. Both girls I’m dating are angry that I haven’t had any time to see them recently. I probably won’t tell them that J came over to cook unless it comes up or they ask. I’d rather not even see them right now. I’d rather come home and not need to talk to anyone. I’d rather just take a shower, jerk off and sleep.

I wonder how much disappointment it will cause when I tell both of them I don’t want to be physical any more. Probably not much because they’re probably already seeing other people because of how absent I am. One of them said she doesn’t want anything more than physical sometimes, but I know she’s lying. She texts too much and I can tell. I try to tell people to stay away from me but with chicks that backfires. It seems many like you even more when you push them away. How fucked up is that. Maybe the way for me to keep people distant from me is to show them lots of affection.