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A Walking Tour

General

It begins innocently enough with simple admiration and a comfort knowing you can come by and visit anytime. You know you’ve happened upon a good thing, an opportunity other people might wait a lifetime for. It starts just like this, with the looking and the never touching.

Soon your quick glances become intense, longing stares. It soon absorbs your mind and it’s all you can think about. Temptation becomes too hard to resist and all efforts to deny the magnetic pull between the two of you are futile. Because the advances are laid on thick and strong day in and day out, and you’ve grown weary of fighting, you give in.

You see, the kitchen at work knows my weaknesses. Looking back, I know now it saw me coming when I walked through the front doors that first day. With its amazing, magically-replenishing varieties of cookies, chips, frozen goods, beverages, fruit, Chinese food, pizza, pasta, sandwiches and Boston Market it holds me completely mesmerized. I hadn’t had so many different flavors of Pop Tarts within eating-reach since sixth grade. And even then we usually only kept one flavor on store.

But to every sweet affair, there comes a down side. In this particular relationship, that down side is my inability to limit my gluttony. The kitchen of low-hanging fruit relentlessly offers a mid-afternoon pick me up, a treat to fit any craving and lately has been my main source of sustenance providing the bulk of my meals every day. Everyday, it presents me with full cupboards, stocked refrigerators, boxes of baked goods and because it never says no or asks for anything in return, I have shamelessly taken advantage of its kindness.

I know it’s gotten out of hand because now when I sit down to a “normal” meal of “normal” proportions, I wonder if we might enhance the flavor by adding crushed Cool Ranch Doritos on top? It also becomes curious to watch others in the act of cooking food in small pots and pans instead of having entire meals of honey walnut prawns, shrimp fried rice and chow mein magically prepared and delivered on command in giant aluminum trays piping hot right to my front door.

For the love of the poor, starving Cambodian orphans my mom reminds us of anytime someone thinks about wasting food, I simply cannot turn my back on such abundance. So since cutting back on packaged, over-processed and fast-casual food is infeasible, I have decided to increase my physical activity intake by epic proportions. This even includes rigorous exercise on the weekends. For example, this past weekend, I suggested going for a walk. Since it was Alan whom I asked, our little jaunt in the sun turned into a full-fledged walking tour.

Saturday, after waiting for the Comcast man, we explored my new neighborhood and the surrounding Little Korea. Preethi and Birt came to visit later and asked if we were hungry. I thought it might sound odd to say we had just finished an 8-mile walk in which we had tried Korean fried chicken, frozen yogurt and Korean Cheetos along the way, so instead I summed it up and said we were full.

Sunday we took the walking tour on the road and decided to continue on in the City. Walking through the mission, we soon found ourselves at my favorite city bakery.

Alan made friends while waiting in line to order. They discussed the particulars of such and such fruit tart.

Can you guess where we were? I’m sure I have brought everyone I know at least once.

After melting into the decadent baked goodness, we pieced ourselves together again with a little water and a bit of energy drink. Distantly we remembered what the point of the walking tour was and so we continued on to the De Young museum. We accidentally parked not close to the museum at all and soon my legs felt as though they might fall off. Once we got there, as we were standing in line to buy tickets, two exiting visitors offered us tiny little stickers to attach to our shirts, which we did without question. They told us these were tickets to the Chihuly show. We exchanged thumps on each others backs and then were on our way.

Last modified: January 10, 2019