T Minus 13

Last Friday I celebrated Chinese New Year with some dear friends. This is an annual ritual for us. Each year we patronize a restaurant on Chamblee Tucker Road, a part of town known a bit racistly as "Chambodia." (I am sure you can draw your own conclusion as to why). Anyway, this restaurant, like many restaurants in Chamblee, is the kind of place that like, real Chinese people go. So every year we wander in a bit timid and conspicuous (cuz, um one of us is Ecuadoran and another half Persian and three of us are towering white girls of hardy Kraut stock). In fact, it would not be a stretch to say that we are usually the only people of the Caucasian persuasion in the joint on Chinese New Year, which is bedecked with all manner of red dragons and red carpet and red lanterns and gi-normous kitchy glass bead and plated gold chandeliers. I think the natives can smell our fear because they generally do look at us with one eyebrow collectively arched as if to say, "Um, you can't get General Tso's Chicken up in here."

No kidding. The minute you walk in you are greeted with a wall o' aquarium tanks filled with frogs, weird looking fish A, weird looking fish B, lobsters, crabs, weird looking fish C and some other crustaceo-amphibi-Pleistocene era looking beasts. There is no chicken coop here. And folks, to our pasty-white-ass credit, we play along. We order the "special dinner." A five course extravaganza of all manner of fish-on-a-plate-with-head-still-attached and seaweed-and-pig-snout-vegetable soup and cross-sectioned-mammal-bone in spicy mammal-bone sauce and boiled carcass of crustacean with jellied ginger coating. It is curious and scary and sometimes ravishingly delicious and sometimes stomach turning. But it shakes you up and rips you from your comfort zone and drops you in the middle of some other amazing culture for a few moments in the blah January/February of your otherwise ho-hum pasty suburban Atlanta life.

But we didn't go to that restaurant this year. Actually it was my idea/fault. I guess I figured I'd been out of my comfort zone enough in this last year and a half of exploring the nethermost regions of my fractured marriage, my own troubled psyche, and Georgia divorce law, so I convinced everyone to go to Bamboo Luau's Chinatown on Cheshire Bridge Rd. A place where you can get General Tso's Chicken goddammit and Mu Shu everything and Beef with Broccoli and all the wonderful "Chinese" comfort foods that we Americans like to think of as Chinese. Plus, they have the "Luau Bowl."

For those who don't know, which is probably all of you, the Luau Bowl is a large ceramic bowl painted with bucolic Polynesian scenes (for all it looks like the owner's four year old painted them at one of those cutesy paint-your-own-pottery places with a cutesy name like "Fire in the Hole!" or something). But the bowl has a "volcano" in the middle, and they put Sterno or something equally flammable in the cone, and then fill the moat with enough pineapple juice and booze for everyone at the table and then set the fucker on fire. Then they bring it to your table with enough two and a half foot long straws so that everyone can suck up the nectar of the flaming font until they fall out. And all I really wanted this Chinese New Year was to plunk my weary mug in a vat of flaming hooch and lap. We ordered six of them. There were five of us.

So Bamboo Luau and the Luau Bowl it was. And despite the considerable annoyance of being forced to listen to Delilah on the radio in a Chinese restaurant for godsakes, the food was good, the liquor better, and the company better still. But you know, I kind of found myself missing our blinged-out, Asian mafia hide-out looking restaurant with our dinner of mystery fish and mystery vegetable and mystery stomach illness afterward. I was ultimately kind of sad that we didn't go there. And it reminded me that sometimes, after a long, hard road what we need is not always the familiar, the comfortable, the blissfully alcoholic, but rather the stimulating, the different, the new, the uncomfortable.

So even though I am nervous about my trip to Spain (a country whose language I don't speak a syllable of and whose culture I don't know anything really helpful about), to do a sport (hiking) that I have never undertaken for more than a couple hours at a time, I am excited to be launching into the unexpected, impossible to completely plan for, predictably unpredictable and comfortably uncomfortable journey I am about to take.

Perhaps I need to be shocked into life again after the divorce like a cardiac patient who just flat-lined. And I do feel like my heart has not quite started beating again. Perhaps all this counting down of days until Spain and preparing is just the EMT yelling "clear!!!" so that the shock that restarts the heart beating can be delivered promptly and powerfully the minute I step off the plane in Biarritz.

Sounds a little painful, but sounds invigorating more than anything else.