Coffee and Tea: My Adventures and Woes
Posted: February 19, 2012 Filed under: Cooking, Dune, Health, Japan, Korea | Tags: Coffee, Tea 6 Comments »This post is dedicated to reader “Kendall” who inquired about this recently. 
Coffee has been my life for years. I am sure I have spent thousands of dollars in the last 10 years drinking nice coffee from the many excellent cafes here in Seattle, or brewing coffee at home. I am picky about coffee, which was an issue when I lived in the EU because iced coffee is uncommon (but the lattes were awesome), and I can’t drink coffee straight-black. I am a coffee-snob. 
This is a problem because it costs both money and calories. Money because it’s an expensive habit, and calories because of all those sweet espresso drinks (and the pastries they sell with them).
I’ve tried many times to quit coffee, or just switch to tea, but it often fails. In my last trip to Japan, I really developed a taste for oolong tea. It has the same benefits of green tea, but doesn’t taste like lawn clippings, and is really cheap and easy to get in cold, bottled form. I drank it often instead of Coke or Coffee, and had big plans to keep drinking it here in the US, but that plan quickly ran out of steam because bottled, cold oolong tea is hard to get and expensive. You can buy large gallons of it, which are good, quite not practical where I work. And sometimes, I found I still craved coffee for improbable reasons (probably because of the sugar).
The wise sage over at AJATT wrote a nice post about the problem with personal projects: like military strategies, they quickly fall apart in real life. As his post explains, you have to make the process fit the person, not the other way around. Make a clear, concrete goal, and then adapt your process to reach toward that goal, even if process is slow and flawed.
So, my goal is to stop buying coffee at cafe’s. Just doing that will at least save $100-$150 a month, and save plenty of calories I don’t need anyway. If I can break the coffee habit altogether, that’s a bonus but not required.
I realized that in order to stop doing something, I have to put something else desirable in its place. For me, this was tea.
True to AJATT’s advice, I’ve been experimenting and evolving my strategy here. We have coffee and tea bags at work but frankly they don’t taste good. So instead I just bought some cheap tea of my own:
The Yamamotoyama brand of oolong tea costs $5 a box but has 20 bags in it, so I pay some money up front but I save a lot in return. Also it’s pretty good tea. Not gourmet but easy to prepare and good. The green tea is also good but hard to find so I probably won’t buy often.
But with help from my wife I discovered other good alternatives. Lately, my family and I have been enjoying Korean corn-tassel tea (옥수수수염차, oksusu suyeom cha):
My wife tried it first in Japan after shopping at Shin Okubo, and because it has no caffeine my daughter can drink it too. Soon all 3 of us started drinking it regularly. It’s slightly sweet but has a good, smoked, earthy flavor too. Because we shop at a local H-Mart regularly, it’s very easy and cheap for us to buy a large box and drink that for a couple weeks.
But even for coffee we found we liked Asian freeze-dried coffee a lot too:
This brand, Maxim (맥심 maegsim), comes in small packets, complete with sugar and freeze-dried cream so you just add hot water:
It’s not gourmet coffee but surprisingly good for something so cheap. Somehow it reminds me of the “Spice” from Dune. Unlike the Spice, it doesn’t cost a planet to buy it; you can buy it in bulk-sized containers for cheap and it will last a while. It won’t save calories but does help when I still crave coffee. Sometimes, I drink coffee, sometimes I drink tea. But I am trying really hard lately to avoid buying coffee at cafes. Each time I do, it saves me at least $4 or as much as $7.
The point here is that having a concrete goal and being flexible about how to accomplish it has proven much more effective and fun than my old method of self-discipline followed by procrastination and guilt.
The Buddha-Dharma as an antibiotic for the mind
Posted: February 10, 2012 Filed under: Buddhism, Health | Tags: Amitabha, Kannon 2 Comments »Disclaimer: I am being metaphorical here.
Anyhow, recently I was fortunate to receive a large shipment of Buddhist books from a friend overseas whom I’ve been exchanging books with over the years. The books are a mix of Theravada and Mahayana books, and this week I started to cherry-pick various books and reading them. One such book is Pure-Land Zen, Zen Pure-Land which contains letters from Ven. Yin-Kuang, a Chinese Buddhist master with a background in both Pure-Land and Zen (Chan) Buddhism. The book is also available online as well if you’d like to read it.
Anyhow, one part, letter 17, really caught my eye. He writes:
Heavy karmic obstructions, excessive greed and anger, a weak and ailing body, a fearful, apprehensive mind — these symptoms will, in time, disappear naturally if you singlemindedly recite the Buddha’s [Amitabha] name.
He then quotes from the Kannon Sutra, which is the 25th chapter of the Lotus Sutra:
If … living beings much given to carnal passion keep in mind and revere the Bodhisattva Regarder of the Cries of the World [a.k.a Avalokitesvara Bodhisattva], they will be set free from their passion. If [those] much given to irascibility [hatred and anger] keep in mind and revere the Bodhisattva Regarder of the Cries of the World, they will be set free from their delusion.
– Translation by B. Kato, et al, The Threefold Lotus Sutra, p. 320
Somehow, this reminded me of the idea of “antibiotics” in the medical field. Antibiotics are supposed to be taken as a series of pills over many days. At first, you don’t feel any different; the disease is still there. But if you stick to the routine, eventually the symptoms will lessen and lessen. However, like a real antibiotic, you have to keep taking it all the way to the end until you’re fully cured. Even if you think you’re cured, you have to keep taking it regularly Otherwise, the problems may return later. Devotional Buddhism, like any Buddhism, is a very slow process.
P.S. Special thanks to “A” for the excellent reading material.
You’re Not Getting Any Younger
Posted: January 26, 2012 Filed under: Buddhism, Health, Religion, Zen | Tags: Aging Leave a comment »Recently I found this old comic from Sinfest,1 and wanted to talk about it here.
The Buddha described the “Four Sufferings” (or “stresses” as I like to call them) in his first sermon:
- Birth is stress (as a parent, I understand this now after watching my daughter being born)
- Old Age is stress
- Disease is stress (we all know this one)
- Death is stress
Old Age is the worst in some ways. It’s very slow, drawn out and leads to increased chances of disease and death. Someone who’s healthy and robust at 30, may discover at 60 they have colon cancer, or succumb to pneumonia like my wife’s family neighbor did recently. Or as in the case of my late grandfather, dementia slowly sets in, and one simply becomes more and more feeble until one finally wastes away.
But even if we know in our minds that we’re getting older and it’s unavoidable, it still frightens us deep down. That’s really part of something very fundamental to our identity, our sense of self. Or rather, our illusion of self.
I remember a quote from Rev. Fujiwara in his book “What is Zen?” (reviewed here) where he describes the night of the Buddha’s enlightenment like so:
It began to dawn on Shakyamuni that the right way to live is to accept the four sufferings and live our this life one has received to the fullest. And in this fashion, Shakyamuni’s meditation gradually deepened.
But then he noticed a negative energy arising from the depths of his being that refused to accept the four sufferings. He discovered that desire, the refusal to accept the four sufferings as a part of life, was actually the cause of the four sufferings. He recognized a kind of negative energy underlying and controlling that desire, a primal, dark force that could not be dealt with by reason or intellect. That primal darkness is ignorance, or mumyō (無明).
Shakyamuni went on to continue to explore the self. The self that was controlled by the powerful force of ignorance could not be the true self. He concluded that without conquering this fundamental ignorance, it was impossible to accept the facts of birth, aging, sickness and death and liberate the mind.
This is very much how one might feel about their own mortality. We know logically it will happen, but our deeper, primal self will still resist it when we least expect it. And that “hidden” self is our fundamental ignorance, the root of our problems.
Getting old and dying is perfectly natural, but our behavior toward it is something worth observing and learning from.
Namu Shaka Nyorai
1 For those who may not be familiar, the character in the 4th panel is the Devil. In the Sinfest comic, the main character, often sells his soul to the Devil to get things
Getting Used to American Portions Again
Posted: January 15, 2012 Filed under: Cooking, Health, Japan, Travel | Tags: Diet 16 Comments »So now that I have been back in the US for a couple days, I already have to re-adjust to American portion sizes again. There’s a joke in Japanese about amerika saizu meaning “American size” and now that I realize how true this phrase is.
We ate Friday night at a Japanese restaurant here in Seattle and I ordered ramen. Halfway through the meal I was already full and it was hard to finish the meal. To be honest, I had eaten some appetizers before, but at the same restaurant, I remember finishing the same meal (plus appetizers) and still being hungry and that was before I went to Japan.
This kind of thing happens every time I go to Japan: at first, I am hungry all the time because the portions are so small (as shown here in a recent visit to the KFC in Shibuya Ward in Tokyo):
…but then my body adjusts to it, and I find the meals more satisfying. My stomach even gets smaller. But then when I get back to the US, the portion sizes are too big, and I have trouble finishing. Then after a few weeks, I adjust to them again and my stomach gets bigger.
A friend I met in Japan told me that when he moved there, he lost about 10 kilograms after the first few months, but adjusted just fine. This friend is from Europe, not in the US, and in my experience living in Ireland, portions sizes are a little smaller than the US, though not quite as small as Japan. So, if he can adjust to smaller portion sizes and lose weight, imagine how much I would lose if I could adjust.
The problem with obesity in the US is simple: culturally, the portion sizes are TOO GODDAMN BIG. But it’s a cultural phenomenon, so it’s hard to notice it until you live somewhere else.
But it wasn’t always this way. In our grandparents’ generation, they ate the same food we did, but just smaller portions of it. What’s considered “small” now was normal then, or even generous. Gradually we’ve become adjusted to bigger and bigger portions. To accommodate this, the food quality suffered as portions increased. That’s why American food tastes like crap, while the portion sizes are so big. And because the portion sizes are so big, your stomach stretches and gets used to it, so when you do eat smaller portions, you feel hungry even though you had enough calories and nutrition.
I don’t want to live like this anymore. Knowing what I know now, I cant believe I ate the amount of food I did before. It was disgusting. It’s not even necessary! If you’re 40 pounds overweight like I am,1 you don’t have to live like this.
While staying in Japan for the past few weeks, I ate the same food (more or less) that I did in the US, but it tasted better and was much more satisfying, even though I ate less. But now that I am back in the US, it’s hard to avoid large portions, because even healthy food is served that way.
Instead, we as Americans have to make a collective effort with our wallets, our spending habits, and our eating habits to demand smaller portions, and better quality food. Business responds to demand (or rather the Law of Supply and Demand), so if you change your habits, they will change theirs’ and the culture changes as a result.
As for me:
- I will never order anything bigger than a “tall” coffee. Grande is called “big” for a reason, it’s really big.
- Better yet, I am gradually trying to phase out coffee altogether for tea. More on that in a later post. Those espresso drinks are full of calories, and I don’t like black coffee very much (nor does it have the health benefits of tea anyway).
- If your restaurant meal is big enough to have leftovers to take home, it’s too big. I will be ordering smaller meals at restaurants. If need be, just eat appetizers.
- I will eat one slice of toast, not two for breakfast.
- One cup of cooked rice at home is enough, not 2 or 3.
As I said, I really don’t want to go back to old eating habits anymore. I am tired of it, and it’s bad for my body anyway, so I really want to maintain the portion sizes I adapted to in Japan as much as possible here.
1 40 pounds overweight is probably the new “normal” in American society. That’s really depressing when you think about it. Just because being fat is “normal” doesn’t mean it’s healthy, or even attractive to look at. Sorry, but it’s true.
T-ara’s Awesome Footwork
Posted: January 13, 2012 Filed under: Health, KPop, Music | Tags: T-ara 2 Comments »Yet another KPop group I’ve come to enjoy lately1 is T-ara (티아라, sounds like “tiara”), but I found this video particularly interesting because it shows them practicing in the dance studio. No alluring costumes, lighting effects, etc. Just them dancing in plain view, and if you watch, that’s some really amazing footwork (complete with a Moonwalk or two):
The song Lovey Dovey is highly addicting, and you can see the finished product here:
Anyway, going back to the original video, it’s just amazing how physically exerting that dance is. You can hear them at the very, very end breathing heavily. Seeing it in the studio like this really makes you appreciate what singers and dancers do to prepare for shows and such.
Also, I wish I was that young again. I get tired just running to the end of the block. ;p
P.S. A good example “from the guys” is Teen Top’s “Crazy“, which has a lot of cool little shuffles that go along with a very catchy song.
1 They’re not my favorite, as I am not too interested in “dance club” type music, but I do love their energy. Also, seeing so much young talent coming up with innovative dances and music makes me glad to get older in a way because it means that the music industry isn’t locked into the same music I listened to 20 years ago.
Radio Taiso
Posted: December 26, 2011 Filed under: Health, Japan 2 Comments »One of those time-honored traditions you see in Japanese television is a small TV show on NHK,1 the national TV station, called rajio taisō (ラジオ体操). The word taisō means exercise or calisthenics, and that’s basically what it is. Aired in the morning (mid-morning here in Seattle), the show usually features three or more ladies doing a simple workout with some light piano music in the background. One is always seated, so that elderly or disabled members of the audience can still follow along, too.
This is an edited, but pretty representational episode:
Since we have TV Japan here in the US (which plays a lot of shows from NHK), sometimes I see it at home. My wife likes to keep trim, so when the show comes on, she will follow along. Sometimes my daughter will too if she’s home.
According to this article, the concept started as far back as 1928 on radio (hence the name), but was adapted from an American radio broadcast that had started in 1920. It was briefly banned after World War II by the US Occupation because of possible military undertones, but resumed after some edits and changes were made. So, the show has continued in one form or another for the last 83+ years.
I always thought this was a great idea. Since Americans have a problem with obesity (myself included), it seems like any exercise is better than none. Radio Taiso is fairly intensive; you will sweat a little bit after 10 minutes. However, it’s pretty easy too, so really anyone can follow along. It reminds me many years ago, when I studied in Hanoi, Vietnam. When I went to Lake Hồ Hoàn Kiếm, I saw lots and lots of elderly people doing Tai Chi together in groups. You only see this if you go there early in the morning (around sunrise) because it gets too warm and busy later. As the article above shows, Americans used to have calisthenics programs too, but it seems we’ve lost that tradition (and gained weight too). It’s a shame.
At the very least, having a small routine like Radio Taiso gets people thinking a little bit more about their health. Speaking of health, I am going to the gym now.2
P.S. It was a coincidence that I wrote this just before Christmas….maybe. 
1 Growing up in the US, where all major TV stations are privately owned, I was surprised in my youth to find out that other countries had national channels (Japan, UK, Ireland, etc). :p
2 I am happy to work in an office building with a gym. Having a gym really close by helps ensure success I think, rather than having to commute to one after work.
Overcoming Sleeping Problems
Posted: December 14, 2011 Filed under: Health, Japan | Tags: Earthquake, Fukushima, Sleep, stress 4 Comments »A recent, interesting article talks about persistent and widespread sleep problems among Japanese people since the Great Tohoku Earthquake on March 11th. Not just people directly affected by it, but also the general population who feel uneasy over fears of radiation, the economy and so on. It’s a kind of cultural anxiety hitting people all over Japan, and for many the common symptom is sleep problems.
I guess it’s kind of a mass post-traumatic stress disorder or something, but it shows how Japan as a society will take a long time to recover from the devastation of the earthquake, not just economically.
The article has a nice infographic on the upper-right showing some tips on dealing with insomnia and stress in general. It’s a good read in my opinion. To reiterate the articles recommendations:
- If you can’t sleep, don’t force it. Get out of bed and do something else.
- Don’t put more stress on yourself by thinking about how much you need to sleep.
- Avoid lengthy naps, which will disrupt the sleep cycle.
- Avoid alcohol before bedtime.
As someone who tends to sleep poorly, I have found some of these tips useful, especially the first two. Hopefully people in Japan and elsewhere will get better rest soon.
Before and After Coffee
Posted: December 12, 2011 Filed under: Family, Health | Tags: Caffeine, Calories, Coffee, Diet 6 Comments »This is me before drinking coffee in the morning:
This is me after drinking coffee:
More on coffee.
Sick
Posted: November 23, 2011 Filed under: Health, Japan 5 Comments »
I’m sick. Some kind of cold or flu I guess but it’s not fun of course. My wife gave me a face mask which I am wearing here. It’s much too small and is pink. :-p
Actually it was for my daughter but my wife thought I might be able to use it.
If you’ve ever been to Japan you see such masks pretty often. It’s considered impolite to cough and sneeze all over the place so people put these on to avoid getting others sick. I wish we had social customs like this in the US, because when I ride the bus to work, I get nervous when the person next to me is coughing and sneezing. Work too.
As for me, lots of fluids and Nyquil. Off to bed.
P.S. Observant people probably noticed my grey hair. I am 34, but I have a lot of grey hair. My father has it too, so it’s definitely genetic. Also, my beard has some red hair as well, so I have 3 colors of hair on my face. DNA is strange that way.
Clean your vents!
Posted: November 6, 2011 Filed under: General, Health 1 Comment »Warning: this post is gross. :p
My wife and I moved into our house about 2 years ago after returning from Ireland, and we’ve had trouble keeping it warm. The house has a cement foundation, and just gets really cold in the winter. We’ve spent a lot of money on electricity in winter for heating and the house is still cold. So, we decided it was time to hire someone to help clean our heating vents in the house, to try to make them more efficient. We hired Better Air Northwest and they came out and cleaned our air ducts and here’s the results:
The house was built 30 years ago, and it was clear that the vents haven’t been cleaned in 30 years.1 The technician was very professional, and sealed the vents all around the house (after cleaning each one individually), and then sucked everything out. What you see above is all the stuff they sucked out. The technician pointed out that there’s dust, dirt, fiber and such, but also spiders, mite feces, debris and so on. They vacuumed out 5 inches of dirt. :-0
Also, our dryer vent needed to be cleaned too:
The service was surprisingly cheap (less than $300), but already we noticed a huge difference in the house. The heating airflow sounds much stronger now and feels more effective. We don’t have to raise the temperature as high as we did previously either to get the same heat.
But also, when I wake up in the morning, I noticed my sinuses feel a lot better. My throat and nose don’t feel irritated as they did before. We were breathing years of dust and insect droppings and wasting electricity on inefficient heating.
The cleaner also mentioned that we should clean our vents every 3 years. We definitely plan to clean out our vents again in 3 years. Think of this as a warning to others.
1 To be fair, the previous owners seemed like really nice people and did a great job on the house overall, but probably weren’t aware of the dirt in the vents.
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