Entry 13: Yum Cha

I went to yum cha yesterday with a group from the department. (If you don’t know what yum cha is, it’s the same thing as dim sum. If you don’t know what dim sum is, it's a meal composed of a lot of little dishes, like Chinese tapas.) They call it yum cha, but it was more like yuk cha to me. I was severely disappointed. A few years ago I had a Chinese roommate who would occasionally cook up an extravagant meal of what he called real Chinese food (he would mock me if he saw me eating orange chicken or something like that), and it was always super delicious, so I was really looking forward to this meal, because this restaurant was supposedly terrific – the real deal. What a letdown. Some dishes were average, some were bad. Nothing was good.

One of the bad dishes was chicken feet. Now, I was wary of this dish when it was ordered. It certainly doesn’t sound very appetizing (it looks worse), but I thought, “Screw it. I eat chicken wings, what’s the big difference?” Turns out a lot. A chicken foot is just gristle, skin, and bone – it’s disgusting. Even if you can get over the fact that you’re eating a foot, which is not easy, it’s still terrible. Everybody else loved them though (“mm, I found that foot quite enjoyable” is an actual quote from the table). When the beef tripe came out next I cried uncle. I wouldn’t touch the stuff, despite some peer pressure. I ate a few dumplings that were so-so, a pork roll that was decent, and some subpar vegetables in oyster sauce. I enjoyed the company, but from a food perspective, the only thing that I really liked was going out for coffee afterward. They put ice cream in the iced coffee here. That’s a nice touch, a nice touch indeed.

Anyway… I’ve been listening to a lot of podcasts lately, one of which is Adam Carolla’s, and I decided that I should do my own podcast, because I find myself listening to him rant about things that I was just ranting about – how Lady Gaga isn’t sexy, how Heidi Klum is annoying*, the whereabouts of Yahoo Serious – you know, the important things in life.

Another podcast I listen to is Fresh Air with Terry Gross. Recently, she had a guest on who was discussing how intrusive modern communications can be, and the topic of multi-tasking came up. Here is a bit of the interview.

GROSS: "Well, that's very ironic because we think when we're multi-tasking that we're really doing great, we're getting two things done for the price of one or three things done in the amount of time it should take to do one thing. But what are scientists learning about how efficiently we're doing any of those two or three things when we do them at the same time?"

MR. RICHTEL: "Yeah, this is another place where I don't have to equivocate. It's pretty clear to scientists you cannot do more than one thing at a time. This research goes back years... What you are basically doing is switching rapidly among those tasks, not doing them at the same time. And all the research says when you switch among those tasks, you cut your effectiveness at each one of them by a significant degree."

I’ve always thought this was true about multi-tasking, so I feel vindicated by this discussion. S is a chronic multi-tasker. She’ll have work, email, gchat, Skype, and the TV going all at the same time. The merits of multi-tasking (or lack thereof) is an ongoing battle between us. I always tell her she would actually save time by doing things in succession, and she always makes fun of me for “zoning out” and not being able to handle the simplest of tasks simultaneously. I emailed her the transcript above, but her response is that for her personally multi-tasking works – it actually saves time. My response to that is that she probably just thinks multi-tasking works for her, and if she actually did some sort of objective test, she would find that this isn’t the case. I seriously doubt such a test will ever be administered, however, so the battle will go on. It’s okay though, it’s a friendly battle, for the most part.**

* While writing this I thought of Seal and wondered why his face is scarred, so I Googled, “what’s wrong with se” and the number one suggestion was “what’s wrong with seal’s face?” Think of all the things it could’ve been: “what’s wrong with seattle’s sports teams?”, “what’s wrong with secondary education in the US?”, “what’s wrong with sex before marriage?” Nope. “what’s wrong with seal’s face”, number one. And it’s what I wanted. Turns out he had a rare disease that causes scarring, if you were wondering.

** I’m finding that all our friendly spousal battles require the “for the most part” qualifier, because there are always those moments when we’ll catch each other on a bad day or hit a nerve and it goes from laughing and joking to S suddenly being in her PJs and under the covers at 7 pm, while I’m in the other room brooding over a game of online Scrabble. That shows you how self-absorbed I can be, by the way. I have to entertain myself while I brood. I'll storm out of a room in a fit of anger, but be sure to grab the crossword puzzle, a pencil, and my glasses before I go.