Once upon a time, when I worked at an office, I never really thought much about having the heater or the air conditioner on because the building where I was working or the office manager would take care of those details for me. Now that my “office” is permanently my living room for the forever future, I actually have to think about these things now. And when you turn on the heat or the AC in your apartment, you also have to pay for it, which means that your bill goes up.

Chris tries to hold out as long as possible before turning on the heat most years because he sees it as “caving in” to the inevitable truth that winter has arrived. Yet, between not turning the heat on and turning it on, in between, he will take out his space heater… and point it in his direction. That means it’s going in the opposite direction of where I am sitting, which means… I get no heat. That means I have to either wear more layers or throw on a blanket. Granted, I generally do wear a hoodie or cardigan around the apartment most fall days, but still… what about my heat?

“You can have the heat!” he says defensively, when I make this comment. Mmmmm hmmmm, sure I can…

What’s really annoying about this time of year this specific year is that normally, while the city would be getting much colder, we’d have a European Thanksgiving trip to look forward to, and then a few weeks after that, a summer Christmas in Australia along with a side trip somewhere else inevitably warm and fun in Asia. This year, we have absolutely nothing to look forward to. I have barely taken off any real days off from work this year outside of the first few of the year while in Indonesia, plus the holidays I’ve been given. It’s just been work, work, work in some annoying form or the other. When I’m not doing paid work, I’m working on YmF videos, filming, photographing, editing, posting, promoting. There hasn’t really been much of a “relax” period this year at all. This really sucks.

The only times I seem to be able to zone out are when I ‘escape’ onto Tiktok and waste too many minutes scrolling through people’s Christmas TikTok videos, taking me through New York and other decked out cities anticipating Christmas. New York may look merry and bright, as does London and any other city that gets bedazzled for this time of year, but the mood is definitely sadder and more depressing.

Today, we did our weekly stroll into a new neighborhood, and this week, Chris decided on Fordham Heights in The Bronx. While we went to a number of spots and ate a variety of different cuisines (Ghanian, Dominican, Puerto Rican, Italian), probably the most delicious and notable for me was visiting 188 Cuchifritos, which apparently has been around since at least the 1980s and has at least two or three locations in upper Manhattan. It has an endless variety of Puerto Rican and Dominican foods and snacks, and one of the two we chose there was the pork tamale (much fattier and juicer than the Mexican tamales I am used to!), plus the alcapurrias, which is a fried snack that has a mashed yucca/green plantain shell that is deep fried, stuffed with a curried, slightly spicy minced beef and onion filling. It was love at first bite; I just loved every single aspect of this delicious pointed, fried snack. I even suggested to Chris that we get four more of them to bring home because of how delicious they were, but he lightly reminded me that we were not even near the end of our self-guided food walking tour.

Alcapurrias – this is my new Puerto Rican obsession.

Chris enjoyed the Thai minced turkey stir-fry I made this week, so much that for our weekly delivery, he ordered from one of our local favorites, Pure Thai Cookhouse. While many restaurants have closed that we used to frequent, such as LaSalle Dumpling Room two blocks away from us (they still have a location open in Harlem), Pure Thai Cookhouse is still going strong with its usual menu and specials, and our other regular spot, Rice and Beans, has re-opened with new management and a new name — Nelore Grill. The menu is still the same thankfully, and we also found that since the chef is the same, the food is also, thank goodness, still the same and super delicious!

This pandemic has been really rough, particularly on small businesses, and so we’ve been happy to see that some are still continuing to go strong… and feed us. 🙂

Thai food is likely one of my all-time favorite cuisines in the world. For me, it really has the best of everything: sweet, salty, sour, spicy, umami, and extremely complex. All the different herbs and fresh ingredients put together with different shrimp and fish-based pastes make for one explosion of flavor in the mouth after the other. Unless you just do not like flavor, Thai food is just one of the most delicious and complex cuisines in the world.

Unfortunately, here in the U.S., where we’ve basically taken complex and high-skill cuisines such as Chinese and Thai and “sweetified” them — that is to say, loaded them with so much sugar that we just expect iterations of their dishes to be sweet and sickly, a lot of people have no idea how multi-layered and deep Thai or Chinese flavors can be. They just haven’t been exposed to it because the people want and/or expect sweet, so the Thai business owners will often cater to those tastes and make their dishes sweeter. I mean, it *is* a business, right, and they need to make money to pay their bills and survive, so why not give the people what they want?

I’ve learned so much from Pai from Hot Thai Kitchen via her YouTube channel on the complexities of Thai cooking and how to make a lot of these favorite dishes at home with authentic flavors, a few shortcuts, and her recommended techniques. One of the things I’ve recently gotten excited about were her recommended Maesri Thai curry spice pastes. They are readily available and really tasty. She offers her doctored version of these pastes just by adding a few additional ingredients to make them more well rounded and “Thai,” and suggests uses for them other than making curries and stews. One of her suggestions, which I just did today, was to use the paste as just that – a spice paste to flavor minced meat and vegetables in a stir fry. I used some ground turkey I got from Costco, threw in a bunch of greens, chilies, and kaffir lime leaves, and ended it all with a squeeze of lime, and it was likely one of the fastest, most satisfying dishes I’ve made in a while.

Quick and easy Thai cooking is possible, like many other cuisines, as long as you have certain ingredients on hand!

Two days ago, on Saturday morning, we were sitting on our couch and suddenly heard screaming, clapping, and pots clanging outside our window. Within minutes, we got news alerts on our phones saying that Biden had won Pennsylvania, ultimately securing him the 10 additional electoral votes he needed to win the presidential election. I could not believe it. I mean, I could, but I was numb on Election Day, pissed the day after that the race was so close, and increasingly getting angrier and angrier to see that even MORE people had cast ballots for Trump than in 2016… he’s at about 71 million votes now. But none of that matters since he’s not going to be in the White House come January, 20, 2021. Joe and Jill Biden are moving in, and hopefully, they will help heal this country and bring a bit more normalcy and less drama into the White House and this country.

We went out and celebrated across Columbus Circle, Times Square, Union Square, and Washington Square Park. I’d never quite seen New York City this way; the people were out with signs, instruments, making noise, singing and cheering like never before. It was like for once this entire year, we’ve finally had some good news.

Yet President Dipshit is making false claims about voter fraud constantly and refusing to concede, and his 71 million supporters will be on his side because of this continued malinformation. I’m genuinely concerned about what will happen if he really does fail to concede and his idiot Republican colleagues continue to back up his false claims, and what his tens of millions of voters will do to continue the malinformation that Trump made the “new normal” since even before he took office.

This country… truly is a mess.

Yesterday, other than a quick news briefing over my NPR Up First podcast and a few NYT news alerts on my phone, I refused to look at news at all. No constantly checking CNN or NPR or the New York Times; definitely NO looking at Fox News or any insane right-wing malformation center the way I did the day of the presidential election in 2016. Nope. I was not going to repeat all those awful, paranoid, anxious actions I did four years ago. This time, I was going to sit and wait until this was really final.

Well, I woke up this morning hoping to get an update one way or another, crossing my fingers that the election was swaying in Biden-Harris’s direction. I had a gut feeling this would be a very close election; I refused to listen to all the idiots on the left in their own bubbles, insisting that many Trump supporters would have come to their senses, particularly given the awful way he has handled the COVID-19 pandemic. And as of this morning, when I immediately went to check my NYT and BBC apps… it’s looking painfully close; so close that I can taste the anger and bitterness in my mouth.

This is not a referendum on Trump. Nope. This is a referendum on the American people. This is exactly how stupid we are that we have made every excuse in the book for Trump, from his blatant sexism, racism, xenophobia, all the way to his total disregard, lack of care, and empathy for all of those who have suffered and/or died directly and indirectly from COVID-19.

I’m pissed today. I just feel so, so fed up with this entire country.

Welp. The day we’ve all either been dreading or waiting for has finally arrived: U.S. Election Day is finally today, and if you are American and have not either submitted your absentee ballot or completed early voting, you should be headed to the polls today for various local and state level elections, as well as the presidential vote. I’d been feeling pretty anxious in the last few days leading up to today, and I can say with total honesty that I feel pretty uneasy today.

As we both had the day off since our respective companies gave Election Day off, we both didn’t have (paid) work to do, so instead, I spent most of the day working on my social media, filming a new video, and making pumpkin spice lattes and Vietnamese roasted chicken. Yet somehow, even focusing on food and inhaling all the delicious smells in our apartment wasn’t enough to qualm my anxiety. In general, since November 2016, I’ve pretty much lost faith in the American electorate. I do not trust that Americans are smart enough to vote for their own interests instead of against their own interest. I also don’t trust that those who should know better would cast votes for everyone and not just for their own selfish interests (hello, Republicans in the Senate and House — thanks for being all about “party over people” the last four years). While everyone always says that education is key to helping people make informed votes, I would actually argue that sometimes, too much information can render people paralyzed, and thus they will completely disengage and make snap decisions based on random feelings they have about very specific issues or political situations. And snap decisions… are never a good thing.

And now, we wait. And wait.

When I started highlighting my hair back in 2017, I knew I’d always have brown, caramel-color type streaks in my hair. I never thought I’d go any lighter than maybe a light brown latte color… that is, until Friday, when I came in for a cut and color with my stylist, and she said to me, “So.. for the color, not too dark, and not too light, right?” She slammed the color book closed and said, “I know which one to use! You will LOVE IT!”

I figured I’d take her word for it. She knew I wanted brown highlights, so… how crazy could it really get? She first foiled my hair, then applied the toner with her selected color. But as she blow-dried my hair, I knew immediately it was too light. Ohmigod — my hair…. looked blonde. I really look like she gave me blonde highlights. I had never pictured my hair so light in my life. I looked like one of those self-hating Asians who didn’t want dark hair and wanted to be a white person. Noooooooo

“You look SOOOO sexy!” she exclaimed as she finished blow-drying and applied some smoothing cream on my flyaways. “I LOVE IT!”

I awkwardly looked at myself in the mirror. I did not recognize the person I saw in the mirror. Is that really me?

“I think this might be too light,” I suggested to her, as I wrinkled my brow.

“WHAT?” she yelled. “No, honey, this is PERFECT! It highlights your pretty face SO well!”

I didn’t have enough time to get this fixed right away, as I had a meeting to get to, and she also had another customer waiting. I ended up getting it darkened on Sunday to a “light brown mocha” tone — thank God. Now, I actually feel like myself again. But yes, that was about two days of being a blonde, and well, I’m never going to be that light ever again.

In the ’90s, I was the biggest Mariah Carey fan. My brother was a huge fan of hers basically through her Rainbow album, and most of the time, whatever music he liked, I also liked, as well. We had all her albums as soon as they would come out, and we used to listen to her songs on repeat. When I finally got access to the Internet in 1997, I was always reading about her, finding out about her fan club, reading fan pages devoted to her. Everything about her seemed amazing to me.

After the Rainbow album, though, I think I stopped obsessively following her and every interview and performance she gave. Part of it was because her life was becoming way too dramatic, and part of it was because I just stopped following celebrities in general. But I never stopped appreciating how she came from absolutely nothing and made her dream happen. She came from a neglected, abusive household amidst constant violence and racism, and she had massive grit to get to her level of success and fame. So when I saw Trevor Noah interviewing her on The Daily Show about her new memoir, I figured it would be good to read it.

The audio version of the book has Mariah Carey narrating it herself, and with that, each chapter begins with a clip from a song that is meaningful for her, and she actually sings each part. What many are not aware of is that she’s not just a singer: she’s written or co-written pretty all her songs (minus the covers), and she’s also co-produced a majority of them, as well. So there’s a lot of personal, intimate lyrics she’s written, many of which have proven to be inspirational for millions around the world. I still remember Ed used to play “Make It Happen,” “Hero,” “Can’t Take That Away from Me,” and “I Am Free” on repeat.

Listening to her share her violent moments with her siblings and the many racist incidents she’s had to endure was really gut wrenching. It’s only made me respect her even more for what she’s managed to survive and how she’s still a force to be reckoned with.