life

here we go—the second post i've been meaning to write.

on valentine's day i went out with some friends for dinner to an awesome ramen place here in hitachi. i gave them their valentine's chocolates (see previous post) as we were just finishing up our bowls.

my phone vibrated—it was a facebook notification. it was a wall post from a friend back in america. i hadn't heard from him in a long while, so i was anxious to see what was up.

he posted a link whose caption read: "Melissa Joy Dietzel: Decomposing body of woman found 30ft up tree in Sydney is missing US tourist".

what.

the.

hell.

???????????

melissa WROTE the article? no...melissa IS the decomposing body?

it's a joke. he posted some sick joke on my wall.

he's said some pretty mean things about her before. but...really?

load. load. FUCKING LOAD!

"Was it suicide?...decomposing body of a young woman...the remains of Melissa Joy Dietzel, 22, of Redlands, California, were found by a tree surgeon..."

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ramen ended awkwardly. i don't think my friends knew what to say. i didn't know what to say.

when i got home i poured over every article i could get my hands on. i read all the posts on her wall back to when she was last heard from in november.

but what was i to her? what was she to me? i didn't even know that she had been missing!

we hadn't spoken in quite a few months. we last hung out a few weeks before i moved to japan last april.

when did i first meet melissa? was it 2009?

i remember it was the fourth of july. swappo met her at smith's or a 7-11 or something and invited her to hang out with us.

we hung out a lot that summer. must've been 2010 (i was in japan in the summer of 2009). really? i'd only known her for a year and a half?

was it really a suicide? there must have been some sort of foul play. she wouldn't have taken her own life!

she was so chill. down to earth. upbeat. people like HER don't just call it quits.

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my thoughts were all over the place.

i know somewhere, someone has written down the stages of grief.

i don't really care to look up what they are, but here's what i felt:

"shock" --> "denial" --> "bizarro" --> "sad" --> "bittersweet" --> "sad (again)" --> "wait, did something happen?" --> "reflective" --> "distracted" --> "anxious to blog"

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i'm sorry i just vomited all over you, but i needed to get it out.

life gives us lessons, and death does too. it may be a futile hope, but i want to keep this feeling—that life is too short to be mean or petty. you just gotta love.

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hope i can be as rad as you someday. you are and will be missed.

the first

i have a lot to write about. let's see if i can't get back into blogging on a regular basis.

now, i don't want to overwhelm you (or myself, for that matter). that's why i'm only going to cover one topic in this post.

the topic? chocolate!

in the weeks leading up to valentine's, japan became focused on one thing: chocolate. and i felt that i should join in on the excitement.

you see, valentine's day is special in japan. it's a day when a girl gives chocolate to the boy she likes. typically she makes it herself (store-bought chocolates just lack that personal touch, ya know?). of course, she also makes chocolate for her friends (義理チョコ girichoko - "obligation chocolate").

now, i don't have a boy i like (or a girl), so i decided to just make some girichoko. originally i planned to make enough for all the other teachers at work, but...well, we'll get to that.

making chocolate!

so i found a nice confectionary cookbook at my school library, and i took a picture of some key pages on chocolate making.

here's the recipe i ended up going with:

it's a pretty simple one. chocolate nut clusters.

i didn't have a thermometer, which meant a little bit of guesswork. and i didn't have the patience to cut the chocolate into fine bits before i melted it down, so i'm sure i strayed pretty far from the temperatures i was supposed to aim for.

and not having an oven i had to roast the nuts on an electric stove in a nonstick pan. definitely less than ideal. i nearly burned some, while others remained blissfully raw.

again being lazy, i didn't want to chop the almonds by hand, so i stuck 'em in my coffee grinder. within 2 seconds i had nut powder. oops. i decided to chop the rest of the nuts with a knife.

temperature control with the chocolate was difficult once i added the nuts. the first few globs of nutty chocolate i put on the sheet looked alright, but the chocolate was slowly hardening and becoming more difficult to coax off of the spoon. so the last 10 looked a bit choppy.

well you can see for yourself:

i sprinkled some coconut on top, hoping it would stick since the chocolate was still quite soft. it didn't really stick, but it was a nice thought.

the batch was supposed to yield 20, but because the chocolate was hardening i had less control of the size of each successive piece. i ended up with 15, and had enough ingredients to make another batch. but i needed 40 for everyone to have one. so i thought, better that no one gets them than some people feel left out.

so i just called it good, and dedicated the batch to my friends (who i would have made a third batch for, had portions worked out properly).

it was well received, so i either did something right, or i have nice friends.

and now i can make chocolate (i think)!