SPICY, SPICY

Doyoun Kim took me to a Korean restaurant two weekends ago. This place is close to Kenmore but I can not remember now the name and the exact address.

The restaurant is really good. It looks brand new, it is well attended, and pretty clean. I loved Kimchy but actually, my favourite dish was spicy Korean soup. Trying to recreate the recipe, I remember water, oil, onions, garlic, tomato juice, rice noodles, carrots and spicy kimchi.

While I was eating, some phrase brougth into my mind: "Love come in.....througth the stomach". And if I think in this phrase in a metaphoric way, I could say: eating spicy Korean soup is like fall in love. Actually, you can find this soup pretty normal at first glance. Nothing special. As a many really good people. When you taste the first spoon, you get confuse. What is it? (Who is him/her?)...And you want to see again. Why is it so nice?. You can never understand. Your cheeks get red and hot with each spoon and you get mute and sweat (think in the nervous first date). Your companions at table are going to make fun of you. With each spoon you start to know better and to be familiarized with the flavor, so that you can feel more comfortable. And suddenly, when you have the situation under control your soup is gone.

Scientist have studied what happens with spicy food. They say that when you eat spicy food you are going to have a double reaction: first a pleasure sensation and then an unconscious defense of your brain (due to the painful spice taste) that makes you deliver endorfins. Endorphins are endogenous opioid compounds. This substances have named the hormones of the hapiness (even thougth they aren't truly hormons).

Like if I had fallen in love, I felt happy when I ate spicy Korean soup.

Thanks Korean friends for your advice to go there.

As a Winston Churchill said “History is written by the victors”. It could be possible that if wampanoags had known gunpowder first, we were celebrating another kind of holiday. But even if there is a hidden history, Thanksgiving Day has an important meaning of unity for many people. Actually, we cannot do anything for changing what happened many years before. But I think the history should be understood since several points of view in order to enrich our knowledge of the past and may be of the future. This is a goal that should be reached in the schools; by ignoring thanksgiving we aren’t to fix anything. And also I think the best way to make a tribute in this day is by keeping this soul of unity and quit the ancestral hate which continues inspiring so many wars.

Why our pursuit of happiness is so riddle with violence?

Wilfing on the web I found the title of this blog as a good definition of the documental object. I think in this movie Michael Moore have a good touching of some of the deepest causes of violence. And quit behind the economic problem which I think is the cornerstone; I love two ideas: The ancestral fear that is explicit in the cartoon and the analysis that is made in the documental about the mass media as a clue driving force of violence. I just would add the intolerance of orthodox religion beliefs as another important cause. And I want to suggest one antidote remembering what was said by William de Baskerville in The name of the rose: "laughter kills fear".