Recently, I’ve been in a sort of Thai food kick. In the past I wasn’t really in the mood to eat Thai food very often. I like to call it a food vocabulary, where you think of what you want to eat and end up making it or eating it. It’s not that I didn’t like Thai food at all back then. I just never thought of eating it when thinking about food options.
A friend of mine recently introduced me to a Thai restaurant in NE Portland called Chaba Thai. The outside of the restaurant makes the place look pretty old. The door is made of old wood painted white. Nothing special, right? However, upon entering you’re blasted with a wide array of bright colors and a more modern atmosphere. Every table is laid out with colorful plates and decor. The walls are vibrant. This was not what I expected when I saw it from the outside.
One of the mainstays of a Thai food restaurant is, of course, Pad Thai, so that’s what I ordered. We also ordered their Lemon Grass Chicken. Both of these dishes were well prepared to be aesthetically arranged as well as to be delicious. The Pad Thai was served with bean sprouts, peanutes, and a lime. It had a smoky flavor and was probably the best Pad Thai I’ve ever had. The Lemon Grass Chicken was served with Peanut sauce and a lot of broccoli. Broccoli is one of my favorite vegetables so it almost overshadowed the main dish, which tasted pretty good as well.
Chaba Thai quickly became one of my favorite restaurants in Portland. Their prices are reasonable. Expect to pay about 10 dollars a person. Their food is great. I’d recommend their Chicken Satay as an appetizer. Check it out if you’re ever in NE Portland driving down Sandy. You won’t be disappointed.
For more information:
Chaba Thai profile on Portland City Search
For most of the last 5 years, I’ve been having weird sleep hours. I’m usually up late, past 2 or 3AM on average, waking up any time between 10AM and 4PM depending on when I go to bed or if I have class or not. Being unemployed as I am, this hadn’t changed for a while. It actually got worse for a while. Let us establish that I’m not a morning person whatsoever. I’m a creature of the night. I like night time. I like being up. That’s just how I am. However, for the past week and a half, I’ve had this uncanny and uncontrollable ability of waking up before dawn and not being able to go back to sleep. It started last Friday night when I went to bed at a reasonable hour (let’s say 1AM). I woke up on Saturday at 6AM. The next night I went to bed around 12AM and woke up at 5AM. This has really messed up my day. I don’t know what to do in the mornings. I’m not used to being up in the early mornings so I’ve been wasting a lot of time. I get tired in the later afternoon and sometimes nap (which doesn’t at all help my sleep at night). Plus I usually work out in the evenings, which has pretty much gone out the window.
Long story short, I need to fix my routine to accommodate this new occurrence. I still haven’t figured out why it’s happening, but I find that it’s somewhat of a blessing, somewhat of a curse. I sleep more regularly now but I don’t know if I’m really getting enough sleep anymore. I used to be able to sleep ten hours a day whenever, now I can’t even get back to sleep in the mornings. Weird thing is, when I take a nap and wake up a few hours later, I could easily fall back asleep again, but I don’t because it’d mess me up even more.
This morning was interesting, though. I had a dream where I woke up around 9AM and was surprised that I broke the “curse” despite going to bed before midnight (if I go to bed at 5AM, 9AM is when I would wake up now). I soon actually woke up from this dream and checked the clock. It was 5:30AM. I was not happy. Fortunately, I was actually able to fall back asleep and wake up around 8AM. Perhaps I’m actually making some progress.
I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about things. I do that a lot, in case you didn’t know. Today I found a site that talks about the different personalities from the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (personality test). I took that test about a month ago and it turns out I’m an INFP, which is somewhat rare in our society. Incidentally, most great writers are also INFP. That’s kinda interesting. What is it about INFPs that make us more apt at writing? I don’t necessarily consider myself a great writer but I’m working on it. I’d like to be a good writer. The site’s description of my personality type told me a lot of things about myself that I don’t like, and a lot that’s fascinating and interesting, most of it was dead on. It’s scary to me how close it was to how I actually am. It tells me a lot about why I do act the way I do, but the most important part was it told me a lot about my strengths, which isn’t something that I always knew but was never able to concretely describe them. Interestingly enough, the description also talks about how INFPs have a hard time figuring out their strengths.
I still don’t know what I want to do with my future, but that site helped me realize more and more that I want to do something different, something creative. I want to express myself. I want to describe the world through my eyes with my words. The hard part is following through without much experience. How does one just write for a living? Don’t you need a portfolio of some type? Just write. Keep writing. Rewrite. That’s how it’s done. I just wish I had started sooner, and I had something to show for myself. It’s the story of my life. I guess we all have to start somewhere.
I think I figured out something last night while trying to get to sleep. For as long as I can remember, I’ve half-assed every important thing in my life that I didn’t feel like dealing with. I go the extra mile for friends and stuff but for school, work, working out, eating right, etc. I’ve half-assed it (with exceptions, of course). I never knew why. So I was laying around thinking about the job search, which I vastly underestimated how anxiety inducing it would be, and I realized that I really don’t like doing my best and giving my all because I’m afraid of getting hurt and rejected. Same reason why I never made a website in years past. I didn’t want to put myself out there and be proud of what I do only to get shat on by the outside world.
It’s been the same with girls, school, whatever. But you know what? It’s a bullshit way of thinking. I can’t live in my own world thinking everything will be okay without doing anything like I did when I was younger. I need to stop sabotaging my own life and future. I have to stand on my own and find out what I am good at, work on things I’m less adept at, generally make myself a better person. Then and only then will I be happy and comfortable with who I am and thus become someone that other people are happy to be with.
Over the last few years, especially in the last few months, I’ve been noticing something about the relationships between people and how fragile they really are. I’ve more and more realized how important contact is in keeping people tied together. Sure, you can say that the internet ties us together but it’s so easy to just have small talk conversations to people you’d normally talk to more deeply in person. It’s somewhat saddening that people we think we made good connections to in a context will so easily lose contact with you after being apart. I thought when I left Taiwan last year, I’d keep in touch with the new friends I made there but I rarely talk to them, and sometimes when I get around to messaging them on Facebook or whatever, they never reply. When I left Japan I was thinking of keeping more in touch with my host family but I got lazy and never made the effort.
Losing connections with someone doesn’t even have to be through distance. It’s so easy for a relationship to go from friendly and comfortable to awkward. For example, if you avoid someone for a week just because you don’t feel like dealing with them, it could easily become a habit. People tend to keep the status quo. If they break the silence they may feel the need to explain themselves and are embarrassed for acting that way in the first place so they’ll just continue to avoid that which makes them anxious, when it could very well be not a big deal at all.
I feel kinda sad how easy it is for relationships to deteriorate, despite nothing bad actually happening and despite both side having generally positive feelings about each other. But I guess that’s just how life works. You have to try to make things work or else we’ll all fall victim to group think.
This week has been fairly eventful for me and for video games in general. We saw the release of Burnout Paradise, No More Heroes, Endless Ocean, and Advance Wars: Days of Ruin. There were likely a few others but nothing that caught my attention. I’ve only had a chance to play two of these games, but I must say, they were amazing.
I expected Burnout Paradise to be great from the hype I’ve heard on the 1Up Yours Podcast. For those who don’t know, Burnout is a racing game series where one of the main features (if not the main feature) is you try to get your opponents to crash. Some modes let you crash your car to create as much damage as you can. What separates Paradise from the rest of the series is that it has an open-ended world, as opposed to just having races that you pick and choose from with defined courses. In Paradise you start events at different places in Paradise City, which tell you to go somewhere (one of eight destinations) with some objective like get there first or get there without being totaled or take down as many opponents as you can. Basically it took the original race course formula and turned it into a point A to point B race in a world that is explorable. You can choose your own path. Of course there are downsides. The game can’t handle local multiplayer (but the robust online features more than makes up for that). It’s pretty easy to get lost. All in all, it’s a very solid game.
The other game I played this week is Suda 51’s greatly anticipated No More Heroes. I played his prior game, Killer 7 and really enjoyed it despite how much others disliked it. It was a good game, definitely not amazing, but a pretty solid game. So from that experience and the fact that the Wii library is filled with solid but not very amazing games I expected this game to be just a good game. But much to my surprise, I later heard that X-Play gave it a 5 out of 5 (in the same episode, they gave Burnout Paradise a 4). So I really had to try it out; so I did. I must say, it’s really good. Using a cel-shaded look not unlike Killer 7, it oozes style. But unlike Suda 51’s prior game, it’s much more developed and a lot less confusing. It actually makes some sort of sense. The game is along the lines of a beat-em-up. You play the role of a new assassin named Travis Touchdown (haha) and your main objective is to kill other higher ranking assassins to become the number one assassin, who all for some reason live in this messed up town called Santa Destroy (I’m not kidding). Travis’ weapon of choice is a beam saber that you bought off eBay, so most of the attacks you do are sword slashes. The battles are quite fun, the controls are some of the best done on the Wii. Between missions you are trying to earn money (in order to get set up to fight other assassins) by doing odd jobs like picking up coconuts or mowing lawns. There are also a few simple assassinations you can do for money. The thing about No More Heroes is that it doesn’t take itself too seriously. It’s a game that knows it’s a game and it makes fun of that fact. Most of the user interface uses an 8-bit sprite style. There are quite a few Star Wars references. It even makes fun of video gamers with a subtle jab. There’s no question about it, No More Heroes is a gamer’s game. It doesn’t take itself too seriously (the save points are toilets) and it does what it set out to do extremely well. I highly recommend it to anyone that likes games.