The Fire from Within

So word on the street is that my blog-in-progress just isn't as interesting, offensive or abrasive as myself in person, so I am having a bit of a digital identity crisis.

I certainly don't want to be airing my dirty laundry online (my shadiness is none of your business) nor incriminating any of my new partners in crime (aka troublemaking drinkers in shanghai), so what the hell am I going to write about, that will provide me some outlet for ranting, and for my loved ones to know I am still alive and terrorizing people. My lil bro's girlfriend Jenny told me that upon seeing my previous entries, I might have to change the blog to: onesizeup.com. I really hope her sassy genes marry into the family.

The truth is, I just can't stop talking about eating or spending money. I guess I can try t0 broaden my content, so please bear with me for the next few months or so as I vacillate with random regurgitations of everything under the pollution-obscured china sun.

So anyway back to eating.... I just came home from having Dumbo Octopus Sashimi
for the first time. (see image). It is an extremely rare delicacy and is actually heralded as a rare, endangered creature (especially for its likeness to Easter Peeps Candy), so that is why only the Chinese are ruthless enough to slay it for food. It had a buttery, slimy, mango-redolent, idiotic, plain dumb taste. Ok, I am totally fucking lying, I just found this cute knob of an organism deep in my right ear. Ok again, lying, this little guy lives in the bottom of the Monterey Bay! He would make a hot ass keychain, that's for sure. Or maybe one of those toothpick dispensing contraptions. Which reminds me of a quote I read in my TimeOut Shanghai guide today: (something to the effect of..) "Teenagers here don't think anything of spending an entire day dedicated to shopping for one single tchotchsky for their cell phone."

But I digress.... back to eating...Last night I had a sort of pricey curry hot pot, which was pretty good. It was a ripoff though, for being around $20US a person for dinner. But I learned from Burbs during dinner this chinese concept of "inner heat." Apparently, when you eat a lot of foods that naturally incur heat, ie. Fried foods, hot essence foods like oil-- you raise the temperature of your chi internally. If you don't counter that out by eating foods that conjure coldness, ie. deep sea creatures like dumbo octopus and crabs, watermelon, cucumbers, etc. that is what may cause you to erupt with cankersores, acne, etc., as a physical manifestation of the heat imbalance internally. To testify, I have had 3 cankersores within 2 weeks since I have been here! I am going to start rocking watermelon wedges as retainers in my mouth. I certainly don't want to get caught by the housekeeper with a cucumber in my mouth.

Here's a shot of hairy crab I had the other night when the hot Hong Kongers (Davena, Anton & crew came to town.) The guy who owned the restaurant apparently sources his hairy crabs (stop laughing) from Holland, where they farm them all year long, vs. here in China when they only peak during the fall season. Chef told me yesterday that hairy crabs actually abound all through the world, and most scientists regard them as a biological nuisance, but maybe its just that there are too many hungry people in China to give a shit that the chubbiest crusteaceans you can eat have massive tufts of pubes on their shells. The waitresses actually dissected the crabs for everyone, and made a flower out of their limbs. In every restaurant, there is basically a 1:1 ratio of servers to customers. Luckily I did not feel so bad for them that night since some Taiwanese pop star names Vanness Wu rolled through to make their night by signing their timecards and diaries. Do yourself a favor and get a glimpse of this GAYSIAN.