In our last What’s For Lunch? Wednesday, we visited the Navajo Hogan in a throwback to my time as a missionary in New Mexico. This week, we decided to try the cuisine of Joel’s mission: Korean.  The place we chose was E Jo. I don’t know what that means in Korean, and neither does Joel, which makes me wonder if he really knows the language at all.

Actually, it means “Rob is a jerk.” Don’t be jealous that you didn’t get to go to “the land of a thousand smells.” Now, in selecting Korean food, it’s important to strike a balance between “authentic” and “good.” While some of their food makes you jump for joy, other dishes simply make you jump for the nearest exit. So, since neither of us had been to E Jo before, we knew we were in for an adventure.

A very clean spoon.

The restaurant was clean and well-kept, but very cold. And the table was some kind of polished stone, which made things feel even colder. We were brought salad (with really terrible ranch dressing) and miso (which is my favorite kind of soup). And, as you can see in the accompanying photo, our spoons came wrapped hygienically in paper. Think about it: cold, clean, sterile—I think “E Jo” means “hospital”.

After explaining to Rob that those wooden things are chopsticks, rather than complimentary ear cleaners, we perused the menu. They had a number of dishes I enjoy, but in the end I decided to go for the bulgogi, or “fire meat,” which is one of the better known Korean dishes. If you ever find yourself in a Korean restaurant with no idea what to order, go for one of the meat dishes (not counting octopus, which is just kind of chewy and tasteless).

Bulgogi

I think that Bulgogi sounds like it ought to be Eastern European, not Korean. And the same goes for my dish: Dolsot Bibimbap. Mine was essentially a fried rice type of dish, served in a sizzling stone bowl. It comes with a raw egg on top, and you mix it all up and it cooks in the bowl. It was accompanied by three sides: some kind of weird seed pod thing that we couldn’t identify, some kind of potato, and the infamous kimchi. I’d never tried kimchi before, but I hadn’t heard raving reviews. It’s fermented spicy cabbage, served cold. Mmm…

I did look up the root thing, and I would like to state for the record that I was right—it is lotus. So there’s a little something exotic for you, although I was a bit disappointed that we didn’t get boiled quail eggs. I can eat those things like popcorn. Anyway, my meal was delicious. And it was presented on an attractive and not-at-all-authentic tray. The woman who served us was courteous and deferential, her only failing being unable to translate “yun-gn” to “lotus” (we heard other patrons asking the same thing about the side dish). In the end, the only irritation was Rob’s complaint that his food didn’t have enough flavor. Next time I’ll convince him to order something so spicy that his eyes will melt out of their sockets.

Dolsot Bibimbap

My rice dish indeed was bland bland bland. I added the red spicy sauce to it, but that only added heat without any kind of flavor at all. I was getting ready to give E Jo a very mediocre rating until I did the unthinkable: I mixed all the kimchi into my dish. The sizzling stone bowl heated it up, and the overpowering flavor of the kimchi balanced perfectly with the tastelessness of my food, and I had a rather excellent meal. So, kimchi make a come-from-behind win!

My final rating is going to be a 3.5ApB.  It was tasty, but not fantastic. Had I rated this immediately upon leaving the restaurant, I’d probably have ranked it a little higher—maybe a 3.75ApB—but the kimchi flavor lingered in my mouth for HOURS AND HOURS afterward, and it kind of soured me on the experience.

Having made the return trip in a small car with Rob, I can testify that the kimchi did indeed linger ( I refrained from partaking, having had enough kimchi over the course of two years to last me a lifetime). As for my rating, it’s a solid 75 belt loops. It’s just Americanized enough to be unintimidating for the average novice, but it had a pretty extensive menu. I’ll be going back to sample some of the other Korean dishes I miss.

Astute readers will notice that last week I died and the nation had a day of mourning, and it was very sad.  Weeping in the streets. A reporter saw a lone man, standing the middle of the street, crying: “It’s Wednesday, and I don’t know what Rob and Joel ate for lunch!”

What did I eat?  Nothing. In fact, in the last eight days, I’ve had a grand total of about six meals, and most of those were broth.  The reason? Strep.

I started getting sick last Tuesday, with a scratchy throat and some general aches. Before going to bed I had a mild fever. And then I died. I don’t know what happened, but some time during the night, my body decided that it hated me.

This is living inside me. Come closer--give us a kiss.

The next morning my wife made me go to the doctor, and I actually did (which indicates how sick I must have been). He took a chest x-ray to check for pneumonia, then a strep swab and a flu swab. (How To Get a Flu Swab: Get an eight-inch wire. Stick it in your nose, pointed toward the back of your head. Push it way-too-many-inches in. When you hit resistance, keep pushing. Then, high fives all around.)

While waiting for the swab results, my doctor tentatively called it the flu. He gave me a mask to wear (to hide my shame) and a prescription for Tamiflu. I spent the rest of the day being miserable, and–TO MY DELIGHT!!!–began vomiting that afternoon.  Not to go into too much detail, but when your throat hurts so much that a swallow of water is almost too daunting to attempt, vomiting is not exactly comfortable.

So, the next day went in a rather awesome fashion, consisting of being too sick to think. I wasn’t on my laptop, or reading a book, or anything: I was waiting for a bright light to appear. My wife, concerned, called the doctor and he told her to send me to the ER.

Turns out I was dehydrated, in addition to my other problems. They filled me full of fluids, gave me anti-nausea pills and pain meds, and I finally got some sleep.

The test results came back the next day. Strep, not flu. The other thing that came the next day: goblins. A combination of high fever and pain meds led to me seeing shadows out of the corners of my eyes, and once, during the night, I felt something jump on my chest and hold a knife to my throat. So, that was AWESOME.

Anyway, I’m slowing getting better. The fever finally broke on Monday.  I still feel generally lousy, but I’m back at work and able to think straight (well, as straight as usual).

Not sure if there will be a What’s For Lunch Wednesday this week. I also need to finish my Overcoming Obstacles to Writing series, and I should have Part Three up by Friday. So, stay tuned and thanks for your patience.

Nothing new here from me today. Instead, I’m guest blogging over on the Crowe’s Nest, the blog of Sara Crowe (my marvelous agent).  I talk about how things never work out according to plan, and give a little history about how I got published.

Last week I started recapping a recent workshop I taught at the UVU Book Academy.  The topic was Overcoming Obstacles to Writing, and part one focused on self control.

Time Management

Last week I talked about value decisions, which is ultimately the biggest part of finding time to write. What do you value more:  Writing or TV? Writing or video games? Writing or sleep?  When we recognize what we value the most, we can sacrifice the other things in our life that are less important. For example, I’ve often found that, when working under a deadline, getting up at 4:00am to write is a fantastic solution.

I suggest the 4:00am solution a lot at writer’s conferences (or the staying-up-till-2:00am solution) because of a pet peeve of mine: multitasking.  If you read a lot of aspiring author blogs, you will inevitably hear the advice that you should cram ten minutes of writing here and ten minutes there–lunch breaks and waiting rooms and in-between meetings.  While I’m not saying that you shouldn’t do that–I think it’s great to be constantly thinking about writing–I really don’t think that kind of writing should constitute the bulk of your efforts. If you do that, it should be completely, entirely secondary to your serious writing time.

Why? Because multitasking will always be less effective than focused, uninterrupted writing.  A couple quotes from recent articles:

“Workers distracted by e-mail and phone calls suffer a fall in IQ more than twice that found in marijuana smokers.”

—2005 study from the University of London Institute of Psychiatry

“We have to be aware that there is a cost to the way that our society is changing, that humans are not built to work this way. We’re really built to focus. And when we sort of force ourselves to multitask, we’re driving ourselves to perhaps be less efficient in the long run even though it sometimes feels like we’re being more efficient.”

—Russell Poldrack, professor of psychology at UCLA

The human brain is simply not designed to multitask. Psychiatrist Richard Hallwell referred to multitasking as “a mythical activity in which people believe they can perform two or more task simultaneously.”

When I was working in the technical design field, the stat floated by my company’s management was that if we were in the middle of a design project and really working intensely, and the phone rang, it would take twenty to thirty minutes to recover from the phone call (to get back to that level of intense work efficiency). So, if it takes twenty to thirty minutes to reach peak efficiency, then a multitasking writer might never reach peak efficiency!

I realize that some people (parents of babies that don’t sleep, people who work 80 hours a week, etc) will have to multitask, or they’ll never get anything done. I’m not saying it’s impossible. I’m just saying that you should avoid it if at all possible. If you don’t have big chunks of time during the day, then you ought to try writing during the night. Get a babysitter for the kids. Take a vacation day from work. Quit watching TV. Give up your time-consuming hobbies that you don’t value as much as writing.

So, enough of the psychologists. What do writers have to say about this?

Some think that quill, some parchment, an idle hour at midday, a soupcon of ink daintily tapped on paper will suffice, given inspiration’s whiff.  A few words an hour, a few etched paragraphs per day and—voila! We are the Creator!

Nothing could be further from true creativity. Nothing could be more destructive.

—Ray Bradbury

I don’t want to dwell on this too much, because I don’t want people who are legitimately overwhelmed to feel guilty for not writing enough.  But I do think that there are an awful lot of writers who could be much more effective and efficient if they’d turn off the internet, turn off the phone, wake up early in the morning, and get some serious writing done.

Whenever I bring this up in writing workshops, people always argue with me. What do you think? Do you write in big chunks of uninterrupted time, or do you multitask? If you do both, which do you like better?  And if you have to multitask, how can you be more efficient?

Part Three will come on Thursday.