December 3, 2005

Did you know that Chinese people have been to known to eat brunch? I know! I was surprised too! You might think to yourself, “Considering that traditional Chinese cuisine involves precious little in the way of waffles and/or colored marshmallow bits, I am skeptical that people in China ever eat brunch,” but you are clearly insane. I know this for a fact because I went to Chinese brunch this morning. They call it “dim sum” (literally “fried chicken feet”) because they are all time having the gall to speak in Chinese. I took in a good dim sum this morning with some folks from MIT (stands for “MIT Institute of Technology,” recently changed to a recursive acronym by some CSAIL professors who thought it would be “funny”), and I must say, the results were pleasantly doughy.

Dim sum was excellent, and I am especially proud that I did the entire thing without once having anything explained to me. So now I will explain everything to you, as I am clearly an expert. First off, you must go to Chinatown, where you must go to a grocery store and watch a live fish get whacked by an actual live rubber mallet and then carved into bloody chunks right before your terrified eyes. Then, you must go to a Chinese restaurant where your Chinese friend will say things in Chinese and then you go upstairs to a room that, for lack of a better word, I will call “Dim Sum Land.”

Here, you are seated at a table while 800 carts of random foods go by, every one of which has been carefully selected and prepared to make it as obvious as possible that you have no idea how to eat with chopsticks. For example, there's the fried chicken feet, which we all ate, except for the Chinese friend, because, as she said, “Those things are gross.” There was also sticky fried rice, rice pudding, rice paste, rice shrimp dumplings, rice puff pastries, and rice. Add to that little pieces of pork and tea that actually doesn't taste like people poured lawn clippings into it and you've got quite a fine little dim sum going for you. You see, all the dishes are placed in the center of the table and everybody shares. The tradition started centuries ago, when a famous Chinese nobleman ordered a plate of chicken feet for himself, took a look at it, and said “Why don't we all share these?” The result: doughy puffball goodness for everybody!

This is a sharp contrast to the “Chinese” restaurants that have the annoying habit of popping up in shopping mall food courts. I suppose there must be a book somewhere in China (probably written in Chinese) with a title like “Giving Americans Indigestion for Dummies” that explains in immaculate detail how to serve piles of something called “orange chicken” to Americans, when I've begun to doubt that actual Chinese people ever eat stuff like that. The Chinese mall stall will then be followed by a Japanese mall stall (serving “orange chicken”), which will in turn be followed by a mall stall trying somehow to thematically merge Chinese with Cajun Louisiana (“Moo Goo de Lafayette,” now serving “orange chicken”), and then, finally, “Maui Tacos,” which is just like regular tacos only the wrappers have pictures of surfboards on them (and also they serve “orange chicken”).

The reason I place “orange chicken” in quotes is because, although it is, in fact, quite tasty, there's no evidence that any actual orange went into the production of this food. I suppose it's called “orange” because it is, in fact, orange-colored, but that stills leave us with the question, “How did it get that way?” Perhaps it a side effect of having the sugar content of Brazil. Pass the chicken feet, please. At least there's no mystery with those.

Also, speaking of mallets applied to fish, I must apologize for the lack of C-Files over the past few decades. It is clear that the C-File Generator at Narf's Cavern has been suffering from irregularity and could use some fiber. By C-File Generator, of course, I mean “me,” and by irregularity, I mean “writer's block,” and by fiber, I mean “Oreos.” The lack of C-Files has been unfortunate for many* people, as these are the only way they had to find out what was going on in my increasingly fascinating life. I don't have a personal blog (“Today, I did homework. (0) Comments”), or a Facebook entry (“Interests: Doing homework, checking away messages”), or a habit of sending postcards to anyone (“Look! It's a picture of homework!”). So, in an effort to keep people better informed of my goings on, I will now post C-Files more regularly (I hope) and I have every intention of starting (ulp) a blog. It will be called “The Drawing Board” and it will be so insufferably boring that you'll long for the days that I never told you anything about my life! MWAHA! (“So today I was thinking about mold, and just kind of watching it grow, when suddenly a 72-line blank verse poem about mold sprang to mind that I thought I would share with you…”)

But what are the odds of that actually happening? If you said slim-to-none, congratulations, you won the home game!** However, it may make you feel somewhat better to know that I can control the weather. It's really very simple.

To make November in Boston unseasonably warm, order the Beach Boys Pet Sounds CD and listen to it obsessively. To make it suddenly dump 4 inches of a powdery white substance (referred to by some non-Alabamians as "snow") onto your car, order a CD of Christmas carols. I was going to be prepared for the snow when it came, but I was distracted by not writing C-Files, and was surprised that the world had been caked with icing last night. "Oh well, not to worry," I thought to myself. "The cheery Boston snowplows will have this taken care of in a jiffy!" Except that it was Sunday morning, and the snow plows were evidently sleeping in.

This resulted in a phenomenon sometimes referred to as "Chris trying to drive on snow." This is a rare phenomenon in the lush, tropical monsoon-forests of Tuscaloosa, Alabama, so Chris wasn't sure what to expect. It turns out that driving on snow makes a certain sound. It goes something like this: "thump thump thump." So that was me, a little SUV in an Alabama license plate, driving to church without once bothering to press the accelerator for fear of accidentally making it to church on time, with the heat set to "Torrid" (for that down-home Alabama feeling), going "thump thump thump" down the street everytime I pressed the brake. By the time I reached church, I believe the entire population of Medford, Massachusetts had accumulated in a long line of headlights behind me.

It was somewhat frightening when the thumping would happen, because it felt like a tiny little penguin had taken the opportunity afforded it by snow to nest under my brake and was squirming around everytime I depressed the pedal. I have nothing against tiny little penguins, but I wasn't sure I liked the thump thump it was causing, especially as the thumping usually seemed to correspond with a bizarre driving state in which the steering wheel no longer had any effect on which way the car was moving. At one point, the skidding got so bad that I just leisurely skidded right into a gas station, trying very hard to communicate via my eyes to the gas station attendant that I had meant to do that all along, not that I was going to buy gas. Fortunately, travelling at a conservative 5 meters per hour, I shouldn't have been concerned. At that speed, I couldn't have felled a lawn gnome.

But good news awaited me at church. It was explained that the penguin under my brake is named "ABS" and he's supposed to be there, and you feel a thump that's a good thing. And also everybody had been skidding around that morning. It's just part of life in Boston when you forget to play Pet Sounds for a week. And the snow plows came out after service, and the trip home was easy as pie, not that I touched the accelerator any more than I had.

Anyway, I feel much more confident about snow driving having survived it once, but to make sure, I'll be listening to "Wouldn't It Be Nice?" until further notice. Have a great week, and may life bring you as many delicious chicken feet as it has me!

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** THE C-FILE HOME EDITION! Compete in 4 hilarious categories, including “Answering Rhetorical Questions!” “Random Topic Shifts!” and “Aimless Rambling!”