Midnight Snack

The can of chili can was marked "HOT" in capital letters. Spicy American chil? 'Big deal,' I thought to myself. Koreans dip green pepper in red pepper paste as snack food. Eating spicy food is a sport in Korea. When I was a kid, my mother filled a bowl with water and washed half the Korean food that was put on the dinner table for me. The water diluted the spicy red pepper sauce/paste/powder on the food. I remember the specks of red pepper powder floating around in the bowl of water that grew darker shades of red as the meal went on. All Korean kids went through years of training to eat spicy food. As an adult, almost nothing would come across as "spicy" unless you were directly squirting Tabasco sauce onto your tongue. I looked at the label on the can, again. 'Seriously, whatever.' I dumped the entire can of chili onto the sauce pan and stirred.

Half an hour later, I am wiping tears from my eyes. My nose is runny, too. I am currently pacifying my tongue and stomach with a cold glass of milk.

While I was eating the bowl of chili and my eyes watered up, a couple of things crossed my mind. The first was that if it's hot for Koreans then they should have a warning sign on the product - "Spicy even for Koreans." In fact, I think that should be the official name for the highest level of spiciness that people refer to on the "spicy scale" if there is such a thing.

Koreans have an entirely seperate word for spicy, hot, food that makes your eyes and nose water. It's pronounced (roughly) mep-dah. It means that the food is so hot (not in temperature but in taste) that it stings. Koreans think that meh-woon (a verbal variation of the noun above) food chases away the heat. So we eat a ton of meh-woon food in the summer. In fact, Korean people actually say, "It's so refreshing and cool," when they eat anything that is especially spicy.

As I chewed on the last bit of my chilly, I wiped the tears from my eyes, and continued with my mulling. Wait a minute. How COOL would it be to write a scene in the future (this is the writer in me kicking in) where the main character is eating food that is so spicy she/he is crying and then while she/he is wiping tears from her/his eyes and eating the chili, her/his friend (significant other, family member or friend - it can be anybody) steps into the room. They start talking. It starts out as a normal conversation but then ends up with the other person leaving the room (out of frusturation or anger) and the person eating the chili pushes the bowl of chili away and start crying vehemently. This time because he/she is upset.

I think that would be cool. Both ideas. I guess I have power over the second idea but not over the first one.

*Reading this post over, it doesn't even make any sense. I can't follow my own logic.