sorry, John (signed, my intestines)

John McCrarey is in Korea to visit folks from his past, and I was supposed to meet him at 9 this morning to hike up Namsan, then head into Itaewon for a Brazilian rodizio lunch, probably at Tabom. Alas, I sent him a cancellation email last night, saying I wouldn't be able to make it because I'd contracted a stomach thing.

Suffice it to say that history had repeated itself. Thursday night, I had made a huge pot of wonderful chicken soup to be eaten over the course of this austerity period: chunks of chicken, bite-sized bits of carrot, potato, and celery, all in a balanced chicken broth. Surely, this will survive until morning, I thought to myself, aiming to containerize the soup when I woke up. But Friday morning, I woke up late and didn't have time to containerize the soup so, as happened before, I assumed the soup would have been sterilized by all the boiling and left it sitting in its pot on the stove. I went to work and thought no more of it.

When I got home, I beelined straight to the pot because, as before, something didn't smell right. I lifted the pot's lid... and sure enough, the soup was rotten. Angry at the thought of having wasted so much money and material (there was enough soup to serve ten people some large bowls of it), I decided I'd try to rescue the soup by re-boiling it. The soup, because there was so much of it, took a million a years to get to temperature, but it did finally start boiling furiously. I boiled the contents for a full fifteen or twenty minutes, and while the smell coming off the soup did start to improve as billions of bacteria died horrible deaths, the steam spread the smell of soup-rot throughout my apartment, turning my studio into a chamber of mockery at my failure—mockery from which there was no escape. I needed to let the now-boiled soup cool down to smell and taste it properly, so I poured the contents into several wide, flat cake pans to maximize the exposed surface area for faster cooling.

The smell actually seemed just about fine, but there was a lingering aroma that made me suspicious. Since I'm the type of person who performs morbid scientific experiments on himself, I scooped a bit of soup into a small bowl and reminded myself that, if the soup were still contaminated, it'd be about twenty or thirty minutes before my guts would start gurgling, and my bowels would turn watery. Right on schedule, about a half-hour later, my guts did indeed begin to gurgle. With no other recourse, I solemnly dumped my soup down my toilet in batches so as not to clog the flush. My studio still smelled of rot, so I rummaged around for a bottle of cologne that I never use. I saturated a paper towel with the cologne to create a makeshift diffuser, then got some tape and hung the diffuser close to my electric fan so as to spread the aroma and, I hoped, cover the rotten odor at least a little. By that point, it was near 2 a.m., so I typed out a message to John saying I wouldn't be able to go hiking with him thanks to my delicate guts. Not long after, I went to sleep.

By some miracle, I didn't shit the bed. Woke up today not needing to fire out any diarrhea, which led me to believe the soup had still been corrupted even after all that boiling, but only a little corrupted. Part of me still thinks I might have been able to save the soup through a bit more boiling, but there's no point in crying over rotten soup now. I feel like a fool for having let the same thing happen a second time so, as that smug asswipe Bill Maher likes to say on his HBO show, "New rule!" From now on, I must immediately containerize and fridge/freeze anything soup-like the moment it has cooled down.

I've been up and about since late morning, without any problems, and I might even go for a walk this evening. If possible, John and I will meet up sometime soon, but we haven't settled on when, partly because John is a social creature with tons of friends and acquaintances to see both in Seoul and in Pyeongtaek, thus making for a crowded, jostling vacation agenda. My introverted ass will probably have an open and flexible schedule this coming week: my small handful of friends is eternally busy with jobs and academia, and we normally don't see each other that often over the course of a year. The only real sticking point is that I want to do my crazy walk out to Yangpyeong next weekend, so I'll be unavailable on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. (John, if you're reading this, well... now you know!)

I've got things to do to occupy me this weekend: I have chili to cook and more pancakes to make, plus vegetables to pickle and, maybe, more chicken soup to make (which means once again breaking my austerity in order to shop for ingredients). I also have several reviews to write, so that's going to take a huge chunk of time and dwindling brainpower. In all, this has the potential to be a productive weekend.

That said, my apologies to John Mac for flaking out on him this way.

ADDENDUM: I'm beginning to think that the problem is the apartment itself: the moment I turn off my lights and shut off the A/C as I leave for work, the place becomes a humid sweatbox, and this is exactly what bacteria love. Whether in my sixth-floor shithole or my current, sparkling, renovated digs on the fourteenth floor, the problem perdures. When I was on the sixth floor, my huge window faced east, thus letting in a ton of morning and early-afternoon sunlight. My current window faces west, which means the sunlight streams in, but later in the day as the sun goes down. The end result is the same number of hours for the greenhouse effect to wreak havoc on any food that's just sitting there on the stove or table, minding its own business, oblivious to the ravening hordes of bacteria waiting to take advantage of warmth, humidity, and darkness inside containers.