Bad Movies, A Musical Interlude, and Drinkin' with Granny

I didn't leave the house the entire day yesterday, just working on a freelance editing job and watching bad American movies on TV. Actually, The Faculty (1998) wasn't that bad -- it was one of those good bad movies, along the vein of Tremors or Dirty Dancing. It featured a weirdly high number of rather well-known actors -- Robert Patrick, Bebe Neuwirth, Piper Laurie, Salma Hayek, Famke Janssen, Jon Stewart -- and now-famous Elijah Wood and Josh Harnett too. Not to mention Jordana Brewster, the daughter of a former Yale president and co-star of The Fast and the Furious. Why do I know all this? Well, partially because I have access to the internet (duh) and thus imdb.com, but also because I absorb and retain so much information about movies and actors -- even when I don't want to! It's a sickness. I attribute it to growing up in Los Angeles.

What else did I watch yesterday? Oh yes, the original Tomb Raider, which was another not-bad bad movie. Seeing Lara Croft run around the temples of Angkor was a little disconcerting -- when I went to Cambodia last year, I hadn't seen the movie yet, and in retrospect, the temples look a thousand times more majestic in real life. It was weird to recall me and Wendy climbing around Beng Melea and saying to each other, "It's a movie set. They obviously built it for tourists," because we couldn't quite believe how magnificent the ruins were, when in fact, the movie version of the temples pales in comparison.

Today, I also stayed home for all except an hour or so -- I was up until 4 am last night channel surfing (by the way, love that Discovery Channel!), so I woke up at 12 pm, spent half an hour trying to decide with my coworker whether it was worth meeting for 2 hours today, decided against it, and listened to CDs for another hour before shaking myself and becoming perversely productive by cleaning my room.

One of the CDs I listened to was Coldplay, which I haven't heard for about a year. Around this time last year, I was listening to Rush of Blood to the Head almost every day, whenever I went for a walk in Olympic Park. I would walk and listen and cry sometimes, trying to get through that awful, awful post-breakup darkness where you seriously contemplate cutting your heart out with a spoon, because it would have to hurt less.

It's still hard to listen to some songs on the album, but I can do it now (track 8 still brought tears to my eyes, though: "When the truth is, I miss you/Yeah the truth is, I miss you so/And I'm tired, I should not have let you go..."). It's strange to think that I will always associate breaking up with John with this record.

It's also strange to think that at this time last year, I was really, really grateful to KB and my Canadian doppelganger for just being in my life here, because they were like flashlights in the tunnel, reminders of the eventual light outside and concrete assistance in getting there. Track 7 always reminded me of them both, but especially KB, because of the title ("Green Eyes"): "'Cause I came here with a load/And it feels so much lighter since I met you..."

After cleaning and neatening up my room (which does wonders psychologically! I see why people do it!), I had dinner with my grandmother and great-aunt. My grandmother had bought some especially tender beef from the meat shop. "Meat on Sunday is the best, because they catch and kill the cow on Saturday," she said. "You can't get this kind of beef in barbecue restaurants, because there's not enough to sell in bulk like that."

She fried the beef on an electric pan on the table, and we ate the pieces with lettuce from the planters on the patio and young salad greens from the neighbor upstairs. A few minutes into the meal, my grandmother said, "Shall we drink some liquor? I'm going to have some liquor!"

Thrown for a loop, I asked, "You drink?"

"Oh, I drink quite well!" she replied cheerily. "Remember when I came to the States with your grandfather and we drank beer?"

Well, no. But I believe her.

She went to the cabinet and took out a two-liter water bottle about two-thirds full of a brown liquid.

"Try it," she said. "I made it."

"You made it?"

"Yeah. You take young pine needles and wash them thoroughly and salt them, and leave them for about a year --"

"A YEAR?"

" -- and a certain kind of berry in the mountains, and then you mix it with soju. Tasty, huh?"

And it was.

At the end of the meal, I asked my grandmother if she wanted to do a shot (bastardized in Korean as "one-shot"). "What's a 'one-shot'?" she asked.

"It's when you, uh, fill it to the top and--"

"-- and you drink it all at once," my great-aunt supplied.

"Why would you do that?" my grandmother wondered.

"I think it's to get drunk faster," I said.

"Okay!" So me and my 75-year-old grandmother clinked shotglasses and downed her pine-and-mountain-berry-soju.

And it was good.