Are Small Plates Scary?

a friend of my mom's took her out to lunch today. they went to a build-your-own-burger place, one of those trendy joints that seem to be popping up everywhere, where you're hard pressed to find a burger for under $10. i actually really like burgers, but I'm all about meat, not add-ons, so this kind of place is wasted on me. the concept was apparently a big miss with my mom, as well. 

"There were six steps," my mom said. "Each step had so many choices, and whenever you added something to your burger, the price went up a couple dollars."

faced with this overwhelming arrangement, what did my mom do?

she ordered sweet potato fries and a chocolate-raspberry shake. a magnificent lunch, if i may say so myself.

when i relayed this story to my roommate, his response was: "Well, Americans don't understand dim sum."

first of all, i took issue with his use of the word "Americans". i think he meant "white people." so i'm going to take the liberty of replacing his "Americans" with "white people". 

"What's so strange about dim sum?" i asked. "It's tapas; it's small plates."

"Yeah, but the concept of making a meal out of small plates is confusing to [white people]," he said. "We don't understand how you can have a meal without a main dish."

i disagree. i think dim sum is scary to white people because they're not familiar with the dishes and there's no written description of what everything is. it has nothing to do with the size of the plates.

what do you think?

Words/Phrases I Will No Longer Say

totally
you should totally ___________________  
sumpin' sumpin'
so-and-so loves him some ____________ 
my bad
awesome
cool/that's so cool
no way (but "NOOO" in mock or real horror is still ok)
get OUT! (but "shut the front door!" is ok)
you can't be serious/you've gotta be kidding/for real? (but "for realz" is ok, though i think it's got a fairly imminent expiration date)



i encourage you all to join me in purging your daily vocabulary of words/phrases you've used since junior high. it's time to freshen up our convos. i wanna hear more "shut the front door!" when i walk the streets. exception: i can still use words from this list in my writing if i can make it sound ironic.

Are You Smarter Than A Second Grader?

i volunteer in a second grade class in a SF public school during math time. apparently the big thing in education pedagogy these days is re-inventing the wheel, which means the kids are learning how to calculate multiple-digit addition and multiplication using means completely foreign to me, which means i am of ZERO help to them, master's degree be damned. today, after two months, i finally figured out addition:

  123
+456 

step one: how many hundreds do you have? 100 + 400 = 500 
step two: how many tens? 20 + 50 = 70
step three: how many ones? 3 + 6 = 9
step four: add up your totals from steps 1-3: 500 + 70 + 9 = 579
your answer: 579


does this remind anyone else of figuring out your tax forms?


now i just have to master multi-digit multiplication.