Beginning French

Some intense dreams last night, including a torrid clandestine affair with a renowned gay scholar. One minute we were making out in his car during the pouring rain, the next we were sitting with his friends calmly chatting at a sidewalk café. I remarked upon a French textbook sitting in front of one and she reminded me that she was attempting to learn the language. "T'as un chameau?" I asked her by way of practice conversation. When she didn't know what to say to that, I suggested, "Non, c'est trop grand. Il y a pas de place pour ça dans mon appartement."

Abendpost, 1922.11.11

Die beiden angeklagten Frauen zeigen übrigens nicht das geringste Verständnis für die Schwere der gegen sie vorgebrachten Anklagen sondern sehen der Zukunft mit volliger Gleichgültigkeit und Interesselosigkeit entgegen.

("Both of the accused women show incidentally not the slightest understanding of the severity of the charges brought against them but rather await the future with complete indifference and disinterest.")

Abendpost, 1922.11.15

Während dieser Mann krank war, so sollen die beiden Frauen erzählt haben, habe Frau Klimek oft davon gesprochen, daß er nicht lange mehr leben werde, und schon mehrere Tage vor seinem Tode habe sie einen Sarg in ihre Wohnung bringen lassen, den sie bei einem Gelegenheitskauf billig erhalten habe.

Während sie an seinem Krankenbett saß, soll sie an ihrem Trauerkleid genäht und sich nicht enblödet haben, dem Manne ohne Umschweife zu sagen, daß er sterben müsse. Nach seinem Tode spielte sie angeblich Tanzmusik in dem Zimmer, in dem die Leiche lag.

("While this man was sick, so both are to have said, Mrs Klimek remarked often that he would not live much longer and several days before his death she had a coffin, which she had picked up cheaply, brought into the dwelling.

While she sat on his sick bed, she reportedly sewed her mourning dress and did not shy away from saying to her husband plainly that he must die. After his death, she allegedly played dance music in the room where the corpse lay."

Weder Eltern noch Geschwister glauben an ihre Schuld. Burck ist ein gutmütig aussehender, grauhaariger Herr, der schon 80 Jahre alt ist, und seine bejahrte Ehehälfte eine typische Bäuerin.

("Neither her parents nor her siblings believe she is guilty. Burck seems a good-natured, grey-haired gentleman of 80 and his aged spouse is a typical farmer's wife.")

Family style

Friday night, I kicked off my birthday weekend with a late dinner at Sanchae Dolsot Restaurant (산채 한정식). K. and J. wanted to introduce me to their favourite place in Koreatown, a family-style restaurant they stumbled across during an evening of misadventure that included aborted visits to both Smoke and Chicago Kalbi (시카고 갈비). Apparently, they're regulars, and despite some chatter about trying something different (I pointed out the presence of summertime cold noodle specialities on the menu), they went with their regular order: pork belly with kimchee (김치삼겹살볶음), deep-fried mackerel, and bulgogi dolsot (불고기 돌솥).

Obviously, we had to get a dolsot ("stone bowl") dish, as it was apparently a speciality of the house. (Although "dolsot" is absent form the Korean name, which can be translated as "Mountain Herb Korean Table d'Hôte".) As a bonus, of course, it allowed me to discourse on the lack of a proper term for "rice crust" in English. The mackerel was awesome, the projecting tines fried so hard that they became a kind of crispy snack rather than a choking hazard. I had to be sparing with pork belly because of all the gochujang it was swimming in, but it was hard.

The next morning, Turtle and her wife picked us up and drove us to the Korean Street Festival on Bryn Mawr. It was hot away that far from the Lake, but at least you couldn't hear the damn jet planes. Events hadn't really started yet, so there was nothing to do but eat. monshu kicked us off with a dish of crispy mandoo and I tried to sell the girls on bindaetteok (빈대떡), albeit with limited success. Then the eating got serious.

As my neighbour said later, "Everything with Asian food is family size." So my little box of blood sausage (순대) was easily enough for four people. (Or rather, four people who like blood sausage; as it was, half your party was vegetarian and it was all mine.) The spicy rice cakes (떡볶이) were so fat that you were stuffed after three or four and there was a truly ludicrous amount of vegetable tempura piled atop the Old Man's plate. Yet somehow we managed to leave enough room for a bit of green tea kintoki (그린티 氷水) at the Art Zone Café (which we were chuffed to see is still a going concern) afterwards.

Finally! A post in pure Amurrican!

By some minor miracle, monshu and I both managed to get through last night's condo meeting without killing anyone. (It may have had something to do with the fact that we were hosting and couldn't stand the thought of blood on our walls.) Really, everyone sounded almost perfectly reasonable. So much so that you'd actually think it was their nature if, you know, you hadn't witnessed their behaviour over the past months. Perhaps something we happen on the crumbling chimney, perhaps not; we're so past caring at this point. What matters is that they approved monshu's scheme for reforming rental arrangements.

Afterwards, though, we did have a bit of garden rage. At the meeting, I'd politely asked everyone to have a look at their plots and rein in the exuberance of their plantings if need be. As you locals know, it's been a warm and wet summer, and that's led to a lot of rank growth. What actually inspired the announcement was straightening up from doing some weeding a couple weeks ago and finding my hair caught in an overarching shoot from the gayboys' climbing rose. And even though I didn't explicitly mention this, they acknowledged their fault and did something about it that very evening.

Contrast this to Crazy Neighbour Lady, who decided to pick a fight over her zinnias. (This is the woman, if you'll recall, who planted the collapsing sunflowers last year.) First she asked if the announcement was a passive-aggressive dig at her. I assured her it wasn't, but I mentioned that her stuff was rather encroaching on our herbs. She asked what I wanted her to do; I made a number of suggestions (e.g. tie back, pull up, replant, etc.) all of which she shot down, ultimately justifying her laissez-faire attitude with the claim that her flowers' invasiveness was just "nature taking its course". "Actually, if it were just a case of 'nature taking its course', then this would be all pokeweed and smartweed." That's about when she stormed off.

I also regaled everyone with the sad saga of the ninebark, which is still limping from watering to watering. I had almost given it up for gone when I turned the hose on it last night, but after a good soaking (almost a very good soaking, because I was already naked in bed before I remembered to turn the water off) it fluffed out again. Two applications of bug smothered has failed to solve our pest problem. Anyone know a good insect exorcist?