2012년05월10일, 목요일 아침: *sigh* i don’t know what to do because i’m so exhausted these days because of all the things i need to do around the house, and things aren’t really getting better. this morning, i actually skipped crossfit because i was just so exhausted. i slept in. i slept in really late… i mean compared to my usual schedule. i let ewan sleep in. i slept in so much, yet i still feel exhausted. the work around the house really never ends. it’s horrible. *sigh* my whole body aches; and i feel discomfort everywhere, inside and out. as i said, i wasn’t eating enough or sleeping enough. i also wasn’t bathing enough. well, i tried to feed myself better last night… at least i tried to feed myself more. i slept more. i also made sure to take a shower last night. you see, these days, i often pass out on the floor of ewan’s room while singing him to sleep. that’s been a trend for the past few weeks because i’m just so tired at night. then, when i wake up, i go to bed; but i don’t shower because i’m scared i’ll wake the beautiful kaela hwang up, and then she’ll be really mad about that. thus, i just go to bed without a shower. then in the morning, i just haven’t had time to shower lately because i’m busy chasing ewan around, cooking, and cleaning. on monday night, i purposely went to the 24 hour fitness super sport for two things: 1) to put ewan in kids club so that he could play and 2) to shower. what am i going to do? [a little later] it’s probably not just the amount of work i do around the house but probably also the amount of stress i’m given. it’s really bad these days. i need to make it through this summer. i need to make it through this next several weeks. i need to make it to the end of the month. i need to make it to the end of the week. i need to make it to the end of the day. god, please help me.
[later] one thing specific thing, besides all the housework, that is stressing me out at least a little is the finances of sending ewan to preschool. (i mentioned this before.) it’s very expensive, but what can we do? our biggest category of spending is food, hands down. there is absolutely no competition. our grocery and dining bills consistently kill us each month. paying for our food so easily transports us from “living quite comfortably” to “barely scraping by.” i would complain about this more if i weren’t so sold on it myself nowadays. in the past, i could avoid blame; but now that i’m all sold on eating healthily. it’s also partly my fault. organic produce, organic meats, wild seafood, gluten.free versions of baked goods; they are all expensive. now that i’ve gone grain.free, i’m contributing to this financial catastrophe. eating only meats and vegetables for meals is much more expensive than padding those meals with grains and starches. sometimes this is most obvious when we dine out. let’s say i remove the rice, noodles, or bread from a dish. i end up not as full, so i sometimes order more grain.free food. for example, there’s that time at 로렌스 플라자 lawrence plaza when ewan and i met up with shelton and cailley for lunch and we ordered a lunch order of 족발 jokbal and a tuna sashimi salad. that looks like way more than enough food for a dad and a toddler son, but because it was all grain.free we were able to clean it off so easily.
anyway, yeah… spending on groceries and dining is killing us, but what can we do? should we dine out less and cook more? since i need to do pretty much all of the cooking at home, that’s a tougher solution than it used to be. my time is limited. this is why so many single engineers would prefer to dine out (at low to moderately priced, casual joints) than cook. time spent cooking doesn’t save money when you ought to be using that time to work and advance your career. lately, since pretty much all the responsibility of feeding the family has fallen on me, i’ve been more likely to say, “let’s just go out.” it’s bad, but i don’t feel i have much choice.
thus, to fix our budget so that ewan can go to preschool, we can try to curb our spending – as if i’m not already always trying to do that, or i can try to make more money. after all, if i can get a couple of paid, wedding dj gigs each month; then that would definitely help, although i need to make sure i budget properly for paying my taxes on this income.
actually, all this talk of budget is not only for ewan’s preschool, but it is obviously also important for baby number two! honestly, i know i don’t talk about baby number two enough, but it’s only because i’m so overburdened right now, as is; so it’s hard for me to look beyond the next few months.
although i insist that it’s not unbearable because god will pull me through, i must say that it’s not easy to be a full.time dad, a full.time engineer, and a more.than.part.time dj. you know, there are many families where the dad is just left to go work and not expected to do so much at home. then there are families in which the dad helps out a lot, but the mom has a good, solid job that contributes to the household income. in some cases, the mom quit her job or scaled back on her job after having kids, but she used her 20s and 30s to take on a solid career that earned a decent savings. i’m not in those kinds of situations, and honestly i don’t care that i’m not. however, what i don’t like is being compared to families and dads in that situation. that is not a fair comparison! [later] 오후: i don’t want to hear stuff like, ‘why can’t we take a europe trip too?’, ‘how come we can’t hire a full.time nanny?’, ‘how come i didn’t get expensive jewelry as a “push gift?”‘ what the heck?! would you rather have a “push gift” or an involved husband and father? ”push gifts” are for dads who hang out in the waiting room and pass out cigars once they hear the news! … and then head back to the office after holding the baby once.
there’s a lot of nice things that our friends have that we can’t afford because we live an alternative lifestyle. some people call it “crunchy,” some people call it “granola”; but neither of those terms make sense with my grain.free diet. ”hippies?” hippies aren’t necessarily healthy! they are down with nature, but they also smoke a lot… of “things.” ”bohemians,” “hipsters,” “beatniks…” none of those labels really fit. an otherwise asian.american “yuppie” family that has an unusual attachment to natural food and alternative medicine… that’s not common. those two worlds just don’t easily fit together.
go ahead and take race out of the picture; remove the “asian.american” part of that label. it’s still not the most common combination, although it’s a better fit. i think the reason is the link between “asian.america” and “materialism.” asian.american women and their prada, gucci, and louis vuitton bags. asian.american men and their lexus roadsters, m3s, and porsches. that’s quite a scene, isn’t it? it’s probably worse in socal (all this stuff is), but it’s up here in the san francisco bay area too. however, good health doesn’t fit into the materialistic dream. seriously, when i look around at the richest people as well as people who are simply richer than me; they do not eat more healthily than i do, never! some might dabble in healthy food… they’ll buy some organics maybe try some low.carb options. they definitely eat nicer and fancier foods than i do. however, with the exception of hollywood celebrities that want to make a statement with their fad diets; most rich people feel fine that their secret to building up and maintaining wealth is sacrificing the little things, and healthier food is easily one of those little things which they feel can be skimped on.
sure, every financial scam guru will ask you to tell them the dream you wish to obtain through wealth; and you can tell them your dream is to be able to feed your family “fresh, organic, gluten.free meals all the time”; and they’ll of course respond with, “oh, that’s a nice dream. that’s something different. i like that.” however, of course they’ll always aim to flatter you into buying into their ridiculous seminars on the laws of attraction or whatnot. all the while, they don’t care about your health! they didn’t get rich off of caring about your health; they got rich off of scamming people. to them, it’s all about money; and they’ll always tell you that the secret is to tell yourself that it’s all about money. …but is it? i though it was about health.
every person with more money than i do knows that it’s a “simple fact” that building up wealth has everything to do with delayed gratification. delayed gratification has little to do with paying more to eat healthier now to be healthier now and later. however, delayed gratification and eating healthier intersect in the sense that if you hold off on eating certain “treat” foods, you’ll enjoy better health now and later. those are two different things. unfortunately, we simply have a broken system. you can try to blame the american government or you can blame american corporations. however it came to be, it simply isn’t cheap to eat healthier. when you take healthy eating to the extreme, it simply gets worse. recently on the “norcal crossfit fuel” nutrition blog, there was a post about eating paleo on a budget: “paleo on a budget,” posted on 2012년05월01일. that’s one crowd i’m exposed to on a regular basis that does try to eat more healthily.
contrary to all the hype though, not all the people at my crossfit box (norcal crossfit) are “paleo” (on the paleolithic diet). most are low carb people that restrict their intake of grains, starches, and sugar though. they laugh at counting calories and using artificial sweeteners and with good reason, of course. they are more about high protein than low fat. although the general sentiment is to “eat real food,” some use whey protein shakes. the room has sponsored advertising from a company called progenex. it sounds like a pretty good whey protein powder mix, but it has sucralose. the instructors have never flat out told us that we must be “paleo.” our main instructor at the san josé location pat barber said that he’s on the “primal zone diet,” and does do dairy.
one strange phenomenon that i have noticed at our box is that many of the newcomers (or “newbies”) tend to be vegetarians of all things. the die hard regulars are definitely not, but i have overheard quite a few conversations in which some new person (usually a woman) says tells an instructor that she (or he) is vegetarian. then the instructor usually answers as a charismatic apologist for the high protein, low carb, real food movement by saying something like, “oh, okay. yeah, i tried to be vegetarian for a while. it’s good, but it’s very hard to get the protein you need and a lot of the minerals that you need too.” the response is very respectful of beliefs and might even praise the environmental and animal rights implications but always gets down tot he nitty.gritty truth of the deficiencies of vegetarian diets.
you know, speaking of vegetarian diets… yeah, when i saw that many asian.american yuppies that i find myself around aren’t that focused on extremely healthy diets (such as the paleo diet or going gluten.free or grain.free), the most common way in which my friends in this circle will insist that they keep to a good diet is to say that they are vegetarian to some extent. after all, many of my south indian friends are vegetarian. however, i have noticed more of my “cjk” asian (chinese, japanese, korean, and taiwanese) friends have been declaring vegetarianism as of late. that’s “nice,” but when i speak of this struggle between finances and healthy diets, i am not talking about vegetarianism by any means. no, i am talking about eating organic food, eating probiotic food, eating gluten.free and grain.free food, eating natural and preservative.free food, eating grass.fed animals, eating game meats, eating wild seafood, etc., etc. once you venture that far into the extremely healthy diets, you’ll know just how much they hit the wallets and bank accounts. just eating vegetarian, just eating low fat, just eating low sugar, even just eating low carb… all that is a totally different animal and doesn’t apply. well, there is one breed of vegetarian that counts: that is the raw food vegetarians. i don’t think that all raw food people are vegetarians, but i bet that most are. just as the media speaks of an “educated elite” (especially around election time), i am speaking of a nutritionally elite. the diets i speak of are the harvards, mits, princetons, yales, and berkeleys of diets.
i have already stated that richer people do not eat more healthily. at some point, my next question will be if better educated people eat more healthily. i’m not sure. i’ll have to think about that one. do smarter people eat more healthily? after all, many people try to say that people who eat more healthily are smarter. that kind of statement upsets me because it resembles the logic of the pharisees that said that a diseased person lived a sinful life. it couples health with morality. can you get away with saying fat people are lazy? can you say a kid was born with a deformation because one of his parents committed adultery? can you say that high carb diets create adhd kids that misbehave in class? the coupling of health and morality…
- articles about health and diet:
- “how to help your children maintain a healthy weight,” by alice g. walton, published in the atlantic on 2012년05월10일
- “nothing should be restricted. the ‘no cookie’ rules almost never work because i can guarantee you that children are finding the foods elsewhere.”
- “one of the most effective methods for helping children lose weight is when the parents change their own habits. . . your behavior will rub off on your child more than you may want to believe.”
- for ewan, our aim isn’t weight loss but simply a healthy body. if anything, i want him to be a very sturdy, well.built, little boy. our friend ben said that our diet for ewan is like that of an mma (mixed martial arts) fighter. i took that as a compliment. i would love for ewan to grow up as strong as an mma fighter.
- i totally agree with the quotes above. i don’t see how we can have all these dietary rules for ewan and then not necessarily follow them ourselves.
- i notice that ewan is developing very bad emotional complexes over food, especially the ostracisation over food. already, he’s not allowed to eat the junk food that all his peers eat, all the cheerios, cookies, chips, goldfish, and desserts that he sees his friends eat. i know that hurts his self.esteem because he feels like a second class citizen. he wonders why he’s not allowed to eat the food that everyone else is eating.
- i feel so bad when we even do that to him within the family! i mean, obviously, he’s not allowed to drink coffee, wine, or bier; but if we’re eating a dish at a restaurant that has wheat in it but won’t let him eat it, then it’s just another time when he’s told he’s not allowed to eat what everyone else is eating, and that’s sad.
- “why it matters that california teens eat less than their peers,” by allison aubrey, published on npr.org on 2012년05월10일
- “‘gluten.free’: a diet fad or medical necessity?” by laura snyder, published on coastweekend.com on 2012년05월09일
- articles about wealth and the super rich:
- “secret fears of the super.rich,” by graeme wood, published in the atlantic back in 2012년04월
- “american excess: a wall street trader tells all,” by philipp meyer, published in the independent way back on 월요일 monday, 2009년04월27일
- the subtitle: “fine wines, lobster lunches, and million.dollar salaries — life as a wall street shark was thrilling at first. but amid the extravagance, philipp meyer was sickened by a moral deficit at the heart of america’s financial system.”

because my mom took ewan for the night, kaela and i managed to have a spur of the moment "date night." we used a groupon to dine at three seasons vietnamese fusion restaurant in stanfurd territory and then watched the avengers on imax 3d at the vallco amc. we hadn't done something like that in a long time. it was a much needed break from the usual routine. the shaved head guy in the background just so happens to be one of my coworkers.

































