A Visit From Big Sister

Sushi with Misun

Misun, aka my big sis­ter, vis­it­ed from France yes­ter­day. We gorged our­selves on all-you-can-eat sushi, and I let her sur­prise me by choos­ing not to know what she ordered for us. Now I wish I had kept note so I could order the same things again.

Sushi with me

It was hard to argue with her about the bill. She kept insist­ing that she pay because she’s old­er (from her Korean cul­ture), and I kept insist­ing that I pay because I’m the host (from my Chinese cul­ture). I even used the argu­ment that if it’s the elder who pays, then she would always be pay­ing. Unfortunately, the host­ess took her side and refused my mon­ey.

She was only able to stay in Ottawa for the night, but before turn­ing in well beyond our bed­times, we caught up as peo­ple can only do in per­son. We’d been keep­ing in touch the whole time we’ve been apart, and now had the chance to fill in the details.

The time I most felt like I knew what it was to have a sis­ter was when we brushed our teeth togeth­er in the bath­room. Afterward, we com­pared grey hair, me laugh­ing at her three strands, as I have a steady diet of salt added to my pep­per.

Misun's note

When I woke up, I found this cute note, with our faces (includ­ing Dolly’s) drawn on it.

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Follow-Up

(I love these entries.)

First: lis­ten to this. Some days I feel exact­ly like this song. Those days are pret­ty good.

I remem­ber read­ing the blog once of the guy who said that his aunt was Nancy. She was a Canadian woman who suf­fered from men­tal insta­bil­i­ty and killed her­self (“It seems so long ago/Nancy was alone/a forty five beside her head/an open tele­phone”), and Cohen read about the sto­ry in the news­pa­per, and penned this song about her.

Anyway.

I like him. He’s very unbi­ased. He does­n’t try to cod­dle me or side with or against me or force me into think­ing any­thing. He offers per­spec­tives that no one else can give me.

I was­n’t sure where to start, so I just tried to bring him up to speed on my life in the time that passed between us. It began briefly with how well I was main­tain­ing the progress we had made but quick­ly drift­ed to the rela­tion­ship, and that pret­ty much took the rest of the ses­sion.

(From here on out, I’m going to refer to it as the rela­tion­ship. Just cause I’m tired of writ­ing “half-rela­tion­ship” or “rela­tion­ship” in quotes like that. I’d say that two peo­ple as involved as we were would cer­tain­ly be con­sid­ered to be in a rela­tion­ship.)

Continue read­ing “Follow-Up”…

Tatiana

Chest bone

Thumbnail: Three quarter body
Thumbnail: Bust
Thumbnail: Legs
Thumbnail: Hand
Thumbnail: Torso

Lying down

Some por­traits of Tatiana. As a per­son into voyeurism (more specif­i­cal­ly, on the end being observed), she’s more com­fort­able with her clothes off than on. I love work­ing with peo­ple who are com­fort­able with their bod­ies. You get total cre­ative free­dom, instead of the frus­tra­tion of hav­ing to walk on eggshells, lest you offend a mod­el’s sen­si­bil­i­ties.

I’ve dis­cov­ered that when doing nude pho­tog­ra­phy, you need to open up the aper­ture so that a greater por­tion of the per­son is in focus than in con­ven­tion­al por­traits. If you focus on only the eyes, you lose the nudi­ty and it becomes a dis­trac­tion. If you focus on naked­ness, you lose the eyes and it becomes vul­gar.

Ottawa Foodies Pot Luck

Digging in

Thumbnail: Roof-patio view
Thumbnail: Cheese on baguette
Thumbnail: Cookies
Thumbnail: Pie
Thumbnail: Pizza
Thumbnail: Pulled pork
Thumbnail: Rhubarb pie
Thumbnail: Salad
Thumbnail: Spread and toast
Thumbnail: Tofu stew

Cherry tomato pizza

Tiana brought me as her guest to the Ottawa Foodies pot luck, run by Pam1, and held on a rooftop patio right on Bank Street. It was a true potluck, where no one knew what any­one else was bring­ing.

The Ottawa Foodies usu­al­ly gath­er in the Ottawa Foodie forums, where they dis­cuss recipes and restau­rants in Ottawa, so this was the first in-per­son meet­ing for many. Many did­n’t know each oth­ers real names, so there were intro­duc­tions like, “Hi, I’m MissMuffins862”, or ‚“Hi, I’m Thomas, aka BagelRapist”.

I don’t think Tiana was quite ready for the food dorks, the type of which I was already some­what accus­tomed to dur­ing my time at the com­put­er sci­ence pro­gram at Ottawa U. I’ve deter­mined that food dorks are just as bad as wine snobs and com­put­er geeks. For exam­ple:

There were two guys who got into a heat­ed argu­ment about the kind of fat used in Mcdonald’s french fries. One of these guys also preached to me about the ben­e­fits of good rice, (and me — being Chinese — knew absolute­ly noth­ing about rice). There was one guy who said, “I’m doing a doc­u­men­tary on the youngest head chef in the ———- region”. I asked “Wow, how did he get that posi­tion?”, and his reply was “His par­ents own the restau­rant”. Then real­iz­ing the fact that nepo­tism ruins the cred­i­bil­i­ty of his ini­tial state­ment, he fol­lowed this with “He also made a flow­er­less brown­ie at 11.” Tiana asked, “Did he invent it?”. “No, he fol­lowed a recipe”. At that point, Tiana and got silent and we just looked at each oth­er.

But what some of these peo­ple lack in social skills, they make up for in culi­nary abil­i­ties, and the food was amaz­ing.

So I basi­cal­ly hung out with Tiana the whole time, and pigged out on every­thing I could. By the end of the night, my truf­fles, usu­al­ly rolled in coco pow­der to pre­vent them from stick­ing to each oth­er, had turned into a truf­fle.

  1. Who also hap­pens to know Tim. Ottawa is real­ly small. [↩]