I figured it’s time that I post something, too. I’m never to sure what to say when someone asks me, “So, tell me a little bit about yourself.” I have a couple “elevator speech” answers, but I have some room to blog out my thoughts. So, let me tell you about some things that I am passionate about and why.
Wushu: When I first told my dad that I wanted to take martial arts when I was eight years old, my reasoning was 1) I liked the Power Rangers, and 2) I am Chinese, so it wouldn’t make sense for me not to take classes (STEREOTYPE WIN). Needless to say, I have stuck with it better than most things in life, and I feel that I’m the better because of it. Most recently, I have been taking Chinese Wushu. Here’s a little video demo of the style:
When I studied abroad in Xiamen, China in 2005 for a semester, I took some private lessons from a master who turned out to be the best all of the south east provinces. He stretched me so well I thought I was going to tear my hamstring nearly every time, seriously. About two years ago I joined up with a club that meets at the Wheaton Park District.
I sometimes wonder why I do love martial arts so much, especially wushu, which is not the most practical style to learn. I mean, if I were to be attacked in a dark alley, I probably wouldn’t spin twice in the air and kick the guy in the head. This has been discussed many times over with my best man from my wedding, Dhiraj Masih. To paraphrase my genius (at the very least in this realm of philosophy, that is) friend, there is something very cathartic about the movements. When you get to the point where you are aware of your body and you feel the punches, kicks, and blocks effortlessly glide out from your body like water, you feel a sort of self-expression that is unique to wushu. It’s like dancing or running, you feel the flow when you do it well. So, I’m not opposed to learning more self-defense, but I’ve really taken to the forms.
Well, I’ll write a little more about stuff that I’m passionate about… but right now it’s dinner time.
Looks like our goal of posting every week hasn’t been met. How does life get away from you like that? We do intend to keep up with our “deep” posts, but for the sake of writing SOMETHING, ANYTHING to keep our readers coming back for more, here are some not so deep updates.
I (Angel) started working part-time for the customer service department at Matt’s company. It’s been great getting to know the people I work with and having something intelligent to fill my time with after these past two years of work that mainly consisted of trying to convince kids to eat and changing diapers. I also have a newfound appreciation for the people on the other end of those automated “contact us” portions of websites. Though I have to say, our company does a much better job of responding to our inquiries than most of the companies I’ve had to contact. Unashamed plug.
Things have been busy at work for Matt, and he’s also been focusing a lot on wushu (Chinese kung fu) for a competition he competed in last weekend and so he can test for his next rank soon. He got three sweet plaques from doing so well in the competition. And he looked pretty hot too (in my non-martial-arts-oriented opinion).
We have been trying to get our budgeting on track post-wedding and figure out joint finances. Not the most fun way to spend evenings, but a necessity. Especially since I realized that when I hadn’t checked my old checking account in awhile, I had been racking up daily fees for having overdrawn my checkbook from a check I had written but forgot to record in my bank book. Yikes. We’re going to talk to the bank about that and see if there’s any way to get those fees, even some of them, revoked since I had a bunch of money in my savings account that they could have transferred over for me. They did end up transferring the money about a week ago, finally, but not until the account had incurred $200 in fines. Yeah, it would have been nice for them to think of doing that after the first couple of days instead of waiting a month. Or at least to have contacted me to let me know what was happening.
We’ve also been trying to maintain our social lives in the midst of the busyness. We hung out with some friends from Matt’s wushu club this weekend. We watched “The Nightmare Before Christmas” to get ourselves in the fall spirit on Friday night with Matt’s former roommates and co. We had our neighbors over for dinner last week and enjoyed getting to know them and meet some of them for the first time. I love having a husband to meet and greet neighbors with; it’s the best Much less awkward than when you’re a small, vulnerable single female trying to build relationships with strangers who live near you. I read “The Suburban Christian” last year and wished that I could do more connected things with my neighbors, but it just didn’t feel right trying to do that with our single male neighbors. Confusing signals tend to happen a lot in our culture with male/female interactions, and I have to say it’s nice being married and not having to deal with quite as many of them.
Okay, that was about as deep as this post is getting. One final update: we’ve been thinking a lot about what we’re going to try and do next year. A few options are on the table, so please pray for us to have wisdom as we seek God’s will for our next step and when to take it.
We interrupt this series of deep, thought-provoking blog posts to present a post entirely devoted to the disgusting capabilities of the human body. Warning: graphic content ahead. You may want to quit now. But for those with strong stomachs and strong curiosity, I (Angel) will give you some insight into recent dietary changes I’ve been making. Some of you may be aware that I’ve started cutting out regular milk from my diet and drinking only soy milk. I have participated in short “detox” fasts a couple of times in the past, so I had switched to soy milk before for limited times and don’t mind the flavor. (Rice milk, however, is a whole other story. Not a fan.) Anyway, this current switch is not for the purpose of getting healthier bowel movements, finding spiritual enlightenment, or encouraging self-discipline. It came after I dislodged this baby from my tonsils:
Tonsil Stone next to a penny
The penny was not in my throat. That’s just there to give perspective on the monstrous size of the tonsil stone that was in my throat. Since many people have never heard of tonsil stones, I’ll give you the run down. They are essentially lumps of old food particles, bacteria, old mouth cells, and white blood cells. (See more detailed info here.) I have always had these things, for as long as I can remember, and thought they were a normal part of life that everyone deals with. It makes sense, especially if you still have tonsils, like I do. You eat food, you swallow most of it, some gets stuck and eventually goes down later. Occasionally an old piece of food would come out (usually very small in size, like a speck) and it smelled really gross. I still felt like that was normal. After all, decayed, old food should probably smell pretty awful. Then last year, I was at a family party and a big one (not quite as big as the one above) came out. I showed it to Matt and a few other family members, not thinking much of it, other than it was funny that such a big one had formed before being broken down and swallowed. I had even had a sore throat for the week before and thought I was getting sick, but after the “stone” came out, I realized it had just been rubbing on my throat every time I swallowed and had made my throat sore. After Matt and all of my family members told me they did not think it was normal, they had never seen anything like that before, and I should go to the doctor, I decided to research it online. I hate going to the doctor, so I do everything I can first to check stuff out before going. It turned out that these weren’t as common as I thought (not everyone deals with them), but they are still fairly common. After a bunch of research, I found out that they are more common for people who are lactose intolerant, and eating a lot of dairy contributes to them. Also, alcohol contributes to them. While I don’t drink alcohol, I am religious about my mouthcare routine, as anyone who has lived with me knows. I was gargling mouthwash (with 20% alcohol content) twice a day every day, not realizing that was actually contributing to the problem. I also am a huge dairy lover and over the past couple of years have ingested quite a lot of ice cream. I eat cereal with milk almost every day and often drink milk throughout the day. My mom has dealt with lactose intolerance for many years, and I was worried that someday I would develop it. The increasing size of my tonsil stones seems to be indicating that that day has arrived.
Over the past year since that big stone came out at the family party, I knew in the back of my mind I probably should do something about my diet and start using a tongue scraper regularly (to help minimize the amount of bacteria at the back of the throat). I didn’t know about the mouthwash problem until recently, but I had found that gargling diluted hydrogen peroxide helped clear them out, so I thought about doing that every day, but was too lazy. Tonsil stones would form occasionally, but nothing major enough to change my habits. Then that sucker in the picture above formed in the side of my throat. It was hard, big, and stuck behind a little flap of skin that made it difficult for me to push it out with my tongue. It stayed in there for over two weeks and drove me crazy. In my desperation to get it out, I went back to researching online. I found an amazing tonsil stones website that offered a lot of practical suggestions from a guy who also has had tonsil stones all his life. That was the site that taught me about the mouthwash problem and recommended gargling with grapefruit oil extract to get rid of stones and keep them from forming. I ordered some of the extract, started gargling with that and hydrogen peroxide every day, started using my tongue scraper regularly, and within a few days, the monstrosity came out. I decided to take a picture of it to remind myself of how badly I needed to change my habits so these things stop forming. A few days later, I switched to soy milk and am in the process of swearing off dairy ice cream forever. (We still have a little left in the freezer, and I wouldn’t want it to go to waste ) Happily, I found some soy ice cream at Trader Joe’s yesterday which isn’t too bad. It’s definitely not real ice cream, but it’s close enough to make me happy.
I've added grapefruit seed extract and hydrogen peroxide gargling to my daily routine
Trader Joe's Soy Creamy Mango Vanilla Flavor
Through it all, Matt has been the best husband. Last night, my dietary changes and two weeks of regularly gargling GSE and HP paid off. We were sitting in bed talking, reading, and watching “The Office,” and through it all I was pulling tonsil stones out and depositing them on kleenex. Matt didn’t get mad or disgusted (that he let on, anyway). He is very supportive and encouraging in the face of my smelly tonsils. He even checked with a flashlight afterward to see if there were any more left. Ahhh, true love. And he has been drinking soy milk with me. Quite the gentleman.
Look at all the vitamins in soy milk!
So now when I refrain from ice cream and milk in your presence, you’ll know why. I’ll keep you updated on how the new diet goes, but won’t plan to post any new pictures of tonsil stones that come out unless we get some intense interest. It really is pretty gross. Hopefully this post is enough to explain without further need for disgusting photos.
Much less awkward than when you’re a small, vulnerable single female trying to build relationships with strangers who live near you. I read “The Suburban Christian” last year and wished that I could do more connected things with my neighbors, but it just didn’t feel right trying to do that with our single male neighbors. Confusing signals tend to happen a lot in our culture with male/female interactions, and I have to say it’s nice being married and not having to deal with quite as many of them.
