Happy New Year 2008

Happy New Year 2008! Thanks for being part of my life this year. As usual in my annual messages, I give you a few statistics and offer a short essay.

Stats
Miles on a plane: 12,705 (down 84% from last year, but will make up for it in 2008)
Miles in a rental car: about 1,300
Miles in a Zipcar: 784 (including 206 km in Toronto, Canada)
MB of email: 1,304 (up 24% from last year, mostly spam)

Cities Visited: Washington, D.C., Atlantic City, Toronto, Cincinnati, Seattle, Portland, Las Vegas

Heroes and Mentors
My fiancée’s dad was showing us how to make dumplings – you know, the kind you can get in Chinatown, 5 for a dollar, boiled or fried. He’s a retired Chinese chef, so it was easy for him to whip up the filling (ground pork and the cleaver-minced fresh shrimp meat for that homemade touch) and roll the skins from scratch.

Now, the filling is not difficult for anyone that can follow a recipe. The hard part really is the crimping — making sure that the filling stays inside the skin when boiled and fried. In the standard scalloped dumpling, he can seal in 9 to 12 beautiful ruffles. Then just as quickly using the same materials, he can switch it up with the Shanghai style xiao long bao, and then move on to Cantonese siu mai. In the span of a half hour, he pumps out 4 trays of these tasty morsels. In some ways, it was almost supernatural.

Is it better to be a hero or a mentor? They are both people that you look up to, and they have skills, characteristics, or achievements that we wish we had. But they are not the same. The difference is that heroes are people who are set apart from normal people, while mentors are people that are close to you.

I searched for references to this relationship and many cites point to Joseph Campbell’s “Hero’s Journey”. Formally trained writers are familiar with this template for the universal story, or “monomyth”, which is illustrated in the Star Wars series of movies. One step in this journey (“Supernatural Aid”) focuses on the mentor-hero relationship: Obi-Wan Kenobi to Luke Skywalker in A New Hope, or Yoda to Luke in the Empire Strikes Back.

In these stories, it is the hero that gets things done, but it is the mentor that makes it possible. It is also not unusual for one to become the other: Obi-Wan is the hero of Episodes 1 to 3, but becomes the mentor in the original Star Wars movie (Episode 4).

This year I was fortunate to revisit the mentors from my past, family and friends who in the course of time our paths have drawn away from each other, and perhaps making them into heroes. I was also able to meet some of my heroes in person, and discover that they are people too!

Getting back to dumplings, at first I made meager attempts to imitate the proper sealing technique, but at best it looks like a raw mutated Jamaican beef patty. He encouraged me to keep trying, saying that I could do it, and over time I got a little better – not pretty, but the two parts of the dumpling kept together.

Due to my incomplete knowledge of Chinese, there’s a lot I don’t know about my fiancée’s dad. The one thing I know for sure is that in the universe of dumplings, he’s both a hero and a mentor. Let’s be both heroes and mentors – they need to be kept together too.

Resolutions
Last year’s resolution was to join the YMCA and learn how to swim. We were successful in joining the YMCA, and I did make it to the pool once, but quite frankly I can’t say that I know how to swim with any confidence. I didn’t get it together with organizing lessons, and then I messed up my left ankle (you can read about my second degree sprain at https://www.triscribe.com/wp/archives/1340) which took until this month to fully recover. I’ll try to complete this one this year, as well as the other one, to marry my sweetheart (for those that have been counting, the engagement has been going on 2 years) this October 11, 2008. Here’s to an awesome year for you – I’m looking forward to it.

Please send me any updates to your contact information. I’ve also given in and joined Facebook, so please look for me there and challenge me to a game of Scrabblous sometime. Thanks again!