Author: Gabby Park

I am a person who loves to eat food.  There are those who eat to live and who live to eat; clearly, I am the latter.  One of the foods I enjoy eating is sushi.  Those balls of delectable rice-y goodness, covered by clean slices of fresh, chewy raw fish, those rolls of seaweed wrapped rice melded with morsels of fish and vegetables– with the slightly stinging pickled gingers and nose-pinching wasabi laden soy sauce… It’s totally delicious.  No doubt about it.

Eating, I realized in Paris, is as much of an art as cooking is.  In all the cultures around the world, there is a certain kind of etiquette that is considered to be proper during meal times– in European societies, it is to begin with the outer utensils (in total of which there are like 10.. -___-), in America, it is to refrain from burping or picking noses at the table, etc.  Recently, I came upon a random website that taught the basics of eating sushi.  That was when I realized that… I HAD BEEN EATING SUSHI WRONGLY ALL MY LIFE!  Horror of horrors.

Okay, not that I care, really, because no matter how I eat it, it will always taste sooo goood and it all jumbles up in my stomach anyway.  But, it was a gain of new knowledge to me and reading about the different ways to “properly” eat sushi showed a lot of the logic and values of Japanese food culture.  In the case that anyone goes to Japan or a culturally Japanese restaurant in the future, here are some of the basic tips.

1. Do not rub the chopsticks together. I know, this is a hard one; we just really want to get all those little bitty splinters out– after all, who wants to be stabbed in the mouth while enjoying this deliciousness?  Yet, it does make sense that doing so would be a bit gauche: not only do we seem like OCD freaks, but also it could pose an insult to the owners, like their chopsticks are high quality enough (this is pure speculation).

2. Do not put wasabi into the soy sauce. Eeps– but how are we supposed to eat it, then?  In all of its mustard-y, spicy, salty soy sauce-y goodness?  Well, apparently, the thing is that sushi chefs have already placed dabs of wasabi under the fish, determining what he deems to be the correct proportion of wasabi.  However, if more kick is wanted, then we always have the choice to add more.

3. It is acceptable to eat nigiri (rice + fish) with hands. *gasp*  The only thing is, sashimi (raw fish slices) must always be eaten with chopsticks.

4. When eating nigiri, pick up the fish and dip it into the soy sauce, not the rice; otherwise, the rice will soak up too much soy sauce and overwhelm the flavor of the nigiri.

5. The pickeled ginger is meant to be a palate cleanser, eaten between bites or different types of sushi.  It should not be eaten together with the sushi.  Aw…sad.  I love the combination of the sour ginger with the slightly sweetness and saltiness of my sushi!

6. Eat nigiri sushi in one bite. It sounds hard, but nigiri should be easier to eat than rolls.  I don’t know what we’re supposed to do when we eat a giant spider roll the size of a baseball… Force it in?  It can be quite fun to do that, actually, and hold competitions with friends to see who can eat it all in one bite.  But I’m sure that that would not be considered “proper etiquette”.  Haha.

7. When handling food not our own, use the unused end of the chopsticks, not the end we put in our mouths, so as not to be unclean and rude.

Art doesn’t have to be limited to just the canvas or theatre stage.  It can be found everywhere.  It is the birth of an idea, the process of creation, and the result in creativity.  Even the way we eat our food in our daily lives is an art.  Each different method, each different utensil we choose to eat with, each decision to mix and match– all of these are personal, individual choices that affect the final outcome of the taste and experience of eating.  These processes are creative in itself, not to mention the final combinations of taste that are diverse and thus, very creative as well.

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Gabby Park is a triple concentrator in Communication Studies, French, and History of Art.  In her spare time, she looks up restaurant menus that make her hungry and consequently dream about eating all the great food in the world one day.

Directed for a senior thesis, the 3 hour long play, O Lovely Glowworm, was probably one of the highlights of my week.  It’s quite a strange play.  Firstly, it is narrated by a stuffed goat.  Secondly, a jumble of events take place that leads the viewer a bit confuzzled and confundled but ultimately very happy at the simultaneous humorous and insightful endings.  It wasn’t the typical play that one would imagine– a cast of 6, performed in a small studio theater in the Walgreen Drama Center, it began with a soliloquy by a stuffed goat with an Irish accent who does not know it is a stuffed goat.  For the next few hours, we partake on a journey unraveling the true identity of this suffering creature, who bespeaks of a pain so deeply felt yet unrecognizable.

I have a friend performing in the play and to see him perform was quite an interesting experience.  I have previously seen a lot of my friends in theatrical productions, playing this part or that, and every time, it takes some getting used to.  As good as they are in their roles, it is still difficult to separate the person that I know from the person that I am watching.  In the first moments of this play, I encountered that same difficulty.  When he was the character, sleeping, I had to stifle a giggle, seeing as he sprawled out on the set, acting the part of a humorous, lounging soldier.  But as the play went on, my vision of my friend as the person I know was replaced by the performance of the character I did not know.  And with that, I became a lot more entrenched in the many facets, rivets, and turns of the production.

The play’s plot in itself is hard to convey– as previously mentioned, it centers on a stuffed goat’s imaginative thought process in reaching the solution to his true identity as a stuffed goat.  He placed himself in various roles– a mother, a dog, a grandfather, etc– and along the way recounts the tales of those whose lives are unknowingly intertwined and all of whom suffer through some kind of unspeakable tragedy within themselves.  Of course, this explanation makes the play sound like some Grecian tragedy where everyone dies in the end, but no, it’s not.  It is extremely hilarious and witty and viewers can’t stop laughing, even in the saddest of moments.

O Lovely Glowworm is play, however, that yet again teaches something so subtly (and sometimes not so subtly) to humanity, inviting the audience to endure and persevere in their own lives, to suffer and live through the worst moments in their lifetimes to reach the happiness that could be at the end.  To live for those things other than oneself, to have faith in that which is not visibly apparent nor scientifically evident, to be at peace with what and whom one is instead of always striving to be something or someone that one is not and perhaps shall never be.  In a season where Christmas quickly approaches and Winter sets its snow in ice, O Lovely Glowworm was a wonderfully befitting story reminding us that to be human is to love and be strong.

(WARNING: Twilight fans beware… May contain offensive content)

Twilight is quickly becoming the new Harry Potter for female fans from the ages of 12 to 52.  What is it about this crazy wacky novel that has these ladies going so over the top to get their own sparkling Edward?

Not knowing anything but the simple basics of the story, I accidentally happened upon a link on my friend’s facebook site (“Why Breaking Dawn should be made into a movie”) and read a very sarcastic ending of the final book of this series.  I wasn’t expecting such a comedy, honestly.  I mean, the idea of sparkling vampires was amusing enough and could be somewhat endearing, but this series seems to have taken a scary turn.

Is this what our younger generations should be reading?  Initially, I played it off as a fantasy romance novel for teens, a little strange but innocent enough.  Yet the more I heard some of my Twilight-reading friends talk about it, the more I became aware that it wasn’t as innocent as I had thought.  Even they, too, were conscience of the sexuality and rooted physical tensions of the series.  The content itself is not what is being posed as a problem (after all, writers are free to express their creative energies as they wish); rather, it is the simple fact that in the beginning, Twilight was marketed to teenagers– even tweens.  This target audience was thereon exposed to a wide range of subjects that does not seem too appropriate for them.  Especially in the newest and last book when it speaks of Edward and Bella’s consummation and Jacob falls in love with a newborn child.  Is this something girls 12 years of age should be reading?

In this current day society, people cannot and should not be held back  from their own personal liberties in freedom of choice– the choice to express, the choice to decide what to read, what to consume all remain rights in a democratized and capitalized society.  Censorship is considered to be wrong.  Perhaps the fault lies not in the creators or consumers of this content or products, but in the intermediaries– the market, the marketers, the businesses who choose which content to place where and what products to sell to which customers.  While the Stephanie Meyer’s agent or publicist or marketers may not have known the direction that this series would take, was it their social responsibility to rework the promotion of Twilight to better fit its natural audience (ie older, more mature young adults)?  Particularly in this period where young mothers are increasing in statistics and children engage in sex from the ages of eleven or twelve?  Could the insistence on Twilight’s younger generation audience have social ramifications on its impressionable readers?

On November 17 at around 4AM, I witnessed a meteor shower for the first time. Every November, the Leonid Meteor Shower occurs, scattering hundreds of stars among the skies for eager, waiting eyes to see. At 3:30AM, my friends and I bundled ourselves up with layers of clothes to combat the cold and trekked over to the Arb to lie down on the grassy fields and stare up at the skies, waiting in anticipation for the streaks of fire that would burn across the ashen sky.

As the ten of us sprawled on the grass and listened to music streaming from a friend’s iPod Touch, I lay in silence, looking up at the sky sprinkled with constellations that I typically can never see nor notice, and that, I am sure, most people can never see nor notice. It’s funny that stars are constantly surrounding us and they are consistently present in our lives, without fail, due to the sciences of nature and the solar system, yet a lot of us hardly realize or recognize these brightly shining spots in our lives.

Art is not always considered to be things of beauty, especially with the realization that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but after seeing these blazing balls of flame tearing across the night sky, it made me wonder if the one thing that is always beautiful would be nature. People can vary on their views of physical beauty, of “artistic beauty”, but I feel that it is cultural-wide, this notion of nature as beauty. Maybe the one thing that is always beautiful in our eyes is that which we can never escape. Nature always encompasses us, our small human selves, in this great expanse of the world, and whenever we are approached by the awesomeness of the natural, we encounter the sublime and we tremble and we are affected by something so intangible and inexpressible, but something we recognize to be beautiful.

Indeed, that early, dark morning, with the entire, never-ending skyline looming above us as we lay, each linked to the other in testament to our friendship and the closeness of our emotional ties with each other, as we ‘oohed and ahhed’ over the various constellations and the fast-moving snippets of meteors entering our atmosphere, I was yet again struck by the beauty of it all. The beauty of the stars, the sky, the trees, the grass, but perhaps most importantly, I was struck by the beauty of the mere moment. This precious hour when people who love each other and enjoy each other’s companies gather together to partake in a moment that is once-in-a-lifetime and so breathtakingly beautiful. Maybe it will happen again next year, maybe not. But this year, it happened, and painted such an amazing picture in my memory, one that I am sure to never forget.

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Gabby Park is a triple concentrator in Communication Studies, French, and History of Art and enjoys lying on the grass to look up at the stars.

“I swear, if you take one more picture, I’m going to shove that camera up your ass.”

Umm…excuse me? Sitting in the sixth row of the symphony concert, my friend looked back in astonishment as a middle-aged woman leaned forward in her seat to curse her out as she held up her camera to take another photograph of the soloist, our close friend. My friend merely stared at her, turned forward and took another picture, completely ignoring her rude remark. Then throughout the remainder of the piece, she proceeded to take more pictures, not merely to make a point, but to support our friend, whose performance was on a near professional level and who had worked so hard for many months to come to this point and desired that we document this momentous occasion in her musical career.

Apart from the evident fact that the woman’s incredibly déclassé comment was over the line, it als brings up an interesting point about our current society and this impulse for documentation. Who does this desire to constantly capture the moments of our lives serve? It seems like the obvious answer is ourselves. As humans, we always have this desire to preserve our memories, to continually think back and clearly visualize the good times past, and of course the easiest way to carry this out is to take a photograph.

While this endeavor is often a personal one, it is also true that occasionally, it can be irritating to others. This incident at the concert notwithstanding (especially since it was so uncalled for), another instance comes to mind where incessant photographing became more irritating than endearing. At a School of Public Health event featuring the fashion designer, Kenneth Cole, one woman sitting in front of me tried several times to capture a perfect, non-blurry photo of the designer using flash. Seeing the white glare on his face for about the next 5 to 10 minutes quickly became incredibly annoying and it peeved me that the woman seemed more intent on taking her pictures of this famous figure than actually listening to what he had to say about corporate social responsibility.

To a certain extent, there is nothing wrong at all with wanting to capture the important moments in our lives, and I would certainly encourage the preservation of our good times. But it is very possible that in our great desire to constantly document the events that pass in our lives, we end up becoming removed from the event itself, that in being the one who takes the pictures, we become someone who isn’t completely engaged in the moment and able to enjoy it. We become so focused on just taking pictures that we sometimes miss the emotions and the subtleties taking place within the moment.

I confess that the lady actually yelled at me, not my friend. And I won’t deny that I am oftentimes that girl who loves to take pictures of events. I just really like to see the reactions and expressions on people’s faces as they are confronted with the joys, sorrows, surprises, happiness in their lives; to show them and others the instant responses that overwhelm them and that they would not otherwise be able to see. Yet, I also do realize when to stop and merely drink in the moment with my eyes and not just my camera. I know when to disengage my eye from the viewfinder and put my heart into the minutes passing in the blink of an eye, rather than the blink of the shutter. That evening of the concert, I honestly do feel that the woman’s remark was unwarranted and extremely impolite, however, I am willing to consider her point of view, where perhaps she is the type who doesn’t like pictures to be taken at classical concerts. And having been that woman where I have been annoyed by picture-takers, I can understand where she is coming from. But I do wish that she had been nicer. And I do wish that more people would realize that as much as documenting a moment is important and incredibly meaningful to each individual, so is the enjoyment of a single moment that ends as soon as it begins. And vice versa.

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Gabby Park occasionally likes to listen to classical music and most often loves to take photograph the events taking place in her life.

♫How high does the Sycamore grow? If you cut it down, you’ll never know♪

Ah, Disney songs. There are few things in life that give me as great pleasure as blasting them from my laptop and singing along, or move me as much, bringing back so many memories. I know, I know, am I so obsessed with Disney that I would be a Disney princess for Halloween then speak about it again in this post?

Well, yes… I won’t deny that I do love Disney. For all of its big corporation characteristics, its unrealistic and unattainable childhood dreams so deeply inculcated within us since our births, its stereotypical and standardized representations of different people, its formulaic story lines, I love Disney. That is to say, the old Disney. The old Disney where we cheered on the mice as they sewed ribbon onto Cinderella’s pink ball gown; where we urged Prince Eric to kiss Ariel then cringed with their boat got turned over; where we became fearful as Jafar gained power and made everything his in the kingdom. Where we learned life lessons of looking beyond appearances in Beauty and the Beast, to ignore social class distinctions in Aladdin, to keep fighting for love in Hercules, to keep an open mind about others in Pocahontas. Where we learned how to be strong even as a woman from Mulan, to pray and care for others in The Hunchback of Notre Dame, to be a leader and take responsibility in The Lion King. These are the morals taught by such movies.

What are Disney movies like nowadays? They’re filled with fodder for teenyboppers, featuring favorite artists like Hannah Montana and talking about everyday life and everyday things sometimes not befit for children. There are little clear moral values and lessons, there are no inspirational and scene-fitting songs. There lacks the sweet simplicity of childhood movies and in its stead is a complicated plot involving love triangles, dating mishaps and disobedient children. It just isn’t the same.

I’m afraid for the future generations. Those children who won’t know who Aladdin is or what Mulan did for her family. Those who don’t grow up having learned the tragedies that sometime overtake a family, like in The Lion King, or those who don’t understand the importance of painting with the colors of the wind (of course, highly metaphorical). Kids don’t seem to learn from the media anymore. When they do learn, it’s about boys and makeup and dating; it’s about how to skip class or make peanut butter sandwiches. It’s not about the broader life-integral lessons anymore, it’s about the normal day-to-day things.

While, yes, many academics have made the case for culture being the ordinary, perhaps the media industry takes that too far in this day and age, using this as an excuse to just produce the same formulaic, unstimulating fodder for an audience who no longer uses its ability to critically think or function. Where, because what is portrayed on the screen are the everyday images we are used to, we stop analyzing or critiquing them in an edifying manner. We don’t really learn anything. At least these Disney movies, as removed from reality as they were, still managed to teach us core values still inherent and relevant in society today, and which we carry within our hearts to this day.

It makes me sad to know that these movies ended with my generation. I think we were at the peak of the cycle of awesome Disney films and of course, as the crest has ended, so has the trough come. Maybe I’m being nostalgic, but I’m also speaking the truth. Greater inspiration will seldom be found than from great old Disney movies.

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Gabby Park likes to wear maroon tights and go swinging in the playground.