Dear Subway,

Your steak and cheese sandwich made my taste buds cry for justice. Your website claims it contains, "Hot steak, grilled onions and peppers, melted cheese and standard vegetables," but should be corrected to say, "contains failure."

1) "Hot steak" - The meat was taken from a bin and toasted to a lukewarm room temperature. Cheesesteak ingredients should be grilled on a well-oiled griddle, not getting a tan. This is as elementary as saying, "A pizza should be baked in an oven, not a microwave." If you're not going to grill a cheesesteak, don't call it a cheesesteak.

2) "Grilled onion and pepper" - The pepper and onion were raw, which is fine if I'm eating a salad, but I'm not. As a result (of that, and the lukewarm toasting), the steak was watery. Certain things are meant to be watery, like aloe, gruel, and the Florida Everglades. Sandwiches, not so much.

3) My friends have been saying, "You should know better than to order a cheesesteak at Subway," which, retrospectively, was good advice. Perhaps I shouldn't have had decent expectations, despite the steak and cheese picture displayed quite prominently on the menu. It still does your company a disservice when low expectations are proven correct. Having a reputation for doing something poorly does not justify doing it poorly.

I am disappointed. Your steak and cheese sandwich brings shame to its ancestors and should commit sandwich seppuku. Only then can its dishonor be atoned for.

(P.S. Much love to the customer service reps, who are the front line infantry against the seething masses of swarming, angry customers. You poor, poor, souls.)

See, yesterday I was told that I'd be going to a barbecue. I was wondering how Uncle Jim would manage a barbecue at the tail end of December. I thought maybe it was one of those joke 'summer in winter' theme party things or something. But no, it was just a hotpot.

Those Chinese things where you set a pot of boiling water on a portable heater on the top of the table, and everyone sits around and tosses raw stuff into it, like thin slices of beef, stuffed fishballs, squid, shrimp, tofu, tofu skin, leafy vegetables, carrots, taro root, and noodles. You can ladle it up again from the water when it's cooked with a little wire net (there are different nets and different chopsticks for the raw and cooked foods). And you put it in your bowl, which is filled with a sauce of some sort, though at some hotpots you can crack an egg into your bowl, so that when you put the hot food into your bowl and stir it into the yolk, it cooks the egg, and you have a sort of batter on your food.

I still like barbecues better. For one thing, hotpots make me feel rather discombobulated hanging out with a bunch of old Chinese people.

Yes, Mainland (nickname: Big Green) China is now officially the most ghetto place I have ever been. Not so much as ghetto, but totally random. Let me demonstrate. Visualize what I'm about to say, instead of just reading over it, otherwise you won't understand me.

It is nighttime in July, and it is hot and humid. You see a large mall. Right in front of it, is not a parking lot, but a tiny lawn, maybe the size of a blacktop. There are large green spotlights pointed at the grass, so that it's a nice crayony shade of green, as if someone thought, "Damn, the grass should be green." Without thinking that grass isn't green at night. On the grass is some metal playground equipment. You know, swings, slides, etc. There's maybe a hundred people, coming and going into/from the mall, green kids (the lights doing their job) playing on the playground and random people sitting. On the grass. There are poles on the grass. There are Christmas lights shaped like fireworks on the poles. Around this whole scene are colonial style apartments badly in need of repair. There is a giant KFC sign in Chinese. Looming above the sign is a crane. And a clocktower.

I'm not sure if I'm getting across, but what I was thinking looking out at this was.. What the hell???

A fairly dumb tour.. we went to the beach, and just stood around acting like idiots, since it was blistering hot, even with the free fans and free water we were given. I hate beaches. The only thing distinctive about it was that you could see Taiwan. Chinese tea ceremony demonstration.. good tea.. but I didn't understand the Mandarin, and didn't pay attention to the Cantonese. Went to a nifty Buddhist shrine and ate a vegetarian meal there. The cooks were amazing- they could make everything taste like meat. They made fried glutton that tasted like pork kabob, and had some strange fungi mushroom thing diced up to taste like calamari, and mushrooms basted to taste like sea cucumbers, and some awesome vegetarian pan fried noodles.

On a wall in my cousin's room, there is a quote. "I am more thankful to God for my friends than for my daily bread, for friends are the bread of the heart."

Which leads me to wonder if a starving man with friends but no bread would feel the same way. I suppose he could eat his friends, but they don't have as much nutritional value.

Easter is boring, so I'll have to talk about yesterday.

Yesterday was a good food day. Food was basically the highlight of my day. I had.. um.. Breakfast/lunch at the IHOP close to RM. It was tasty. I wouldn't call it brunch, because that implies a snack between breakfast and lunch. That was my breakfast and lunch.

Bought a dress for my sister's wedding, and I guess for junior prom too by default even though I have no one to go with, since it seems a shame to buy like a $160 dress for just one occasion. It's real purty, but too big in the chest. Who'da thought? Still, I'm happy. I'll have to postpone cutting my hair though, since I don't want to do anything weird with my hair so close to my sister's wedding that I can't fix it beforehand.

Talked to my mom about my problems. Suckage. Problems seem to magnify when you talk about them.

Dinner at the Olive Garden, where I got to meet all my brother-in-law-to-be's relatives. I didn't know I had another sister. Geez. I'm so out of it. (Apparently she's my half-sister's half-sister so really not my actual sister... Maggie and I share a dad, but not a mom. Jessie and Maggie share a mom. So me and Jessie aren't related by blood at all.) Her boyfriend is cool though. (Selfishly) I hope they get married so I can hang out with him more. DAN DA MAN!

Went to midnight Easter mass to see Maggie baptized (to Margaret, named after the saint) at the Glorious Korean Catholic Martyrs Church or something. Many paintings in the hallways of Glorious Korean Catholic Martyrs being Martyred in various painful ways. Joy. I hate the word martyr now since Osama uses it so much.. Blah. First time attending a Catholic mass, unless you count watching midnight Christmas Mass by the Pope last year on tv... Lots of dunking faces into water, dudes in white robes, women in lacy veils and chimas, eating wafers, lighting candles, swinging censors, praying on padded knee cushions, asking for donations via baskets sent through the pews on poles, chanting and singing hymns in Korean, maybe some Latin. Some carrying around in a procession of what looked to be Jesus Onna Cross (I'd say stick but that'd be blasphemous). For two hours. I amused myself by calculating powers of two.. I got up to 8192 and then stopped. It's not very far, but my math sucks. My dad had attempted before Mass to swordfight with the unlit candles before my oldest sister acted properly horrified. Dan was lucky because my brother-in-law-to-be, Dongwoo, was sitting next to him and had a prayer book or something in both English and Korean so he could at least follow along. And he does know what's goin' on, being a disillusioned Irish Catholic. Blah. It was interesting, sort of though, and uplifting, sort of, and on the whole very boring. I used to be inspired by this sort of stuff at one time or another, but not anymore. Understood some works. "Isa-ray-el", "Egyptai", "Hosana" (should mean something, don't know though), "Deus." Familial comments on how my oldest sister married a Buddhist, and Maggie is marrying a Catholic, so what about me?? (Atheist, I'm thinking.)

Some good quotage all around.

"If you can't have fun at church, where can you?" -Dan
"Well, Muslims read the Koran in Arabic, and the original Christian Bible was in Aladdin.. er.. Latin.." -My mom

I must recommend a Chinese restaurant. New China Kitchen, formerly House of Chinese Chicken. Yay.

Wow. Today, I win a record for eating the world's nastiest egg salad sandwich ever.

I ate a bag of carrots. What an accomplishment.

Wow, I'm in a fowl mood. Fowl. I'm hungry, cuz I'm blogging at lunch. And Nick is sitting next to me blogging too but not hisv iydxf ah!!! stop! my keyboard! ;bkulaty ahhhH!!!!! his public blog. It's his private "sweet alliealliechu"jb uvuy7 vhycf blog. HAEY!

It would be funny if, in the basement of our school, we had an Underground Cafeteria or something. That served real food in secret to the poor, and you needed a password and everything. And the cafeteria ladies would wear aviator goggles and trenchcoats and randomly yell, "VIVE LE RESISTANCE!"