Do Ga Ni Tang 2019

The weather finally got cold enough to renew the early morning Korean soup special at a nearby restaurant.  I've missed the ritual. This morning my hopes for a chance to contemplate the past year were shattered midway through my meal when the wait staff cranked up the background music. The playlist for the morning in general seemed to be candidates for James Bond movie theme songs. Despite my best efforts to ignore this and continue my contemplation, I eventually noticed that all the songs were being sung in the Mandarin dialect of Chinese, which is quite different from Korean. This reminded me that this particular branch of the restaurant was catering to a Chinese clientele, which in turn prompted a tangential line of thought sparked by my continuing to mourn the passing of CNN host Anthony Bourdain. While it was nominally about the food, when he got to CNN the tenor of his show changed and it became about finding out the real & relevant stories of the people there. I really respected and admired that even as it become apparent that what he did came at an apparent cost to himself. While I'd love to get a chance to do what he did, something I'd read suddenly made a lot of sense. I wish I could give an exact quote but I'm going to have to paraphrase it. In essence, the point was that when you travel the world, the world gets bigger - but you become smaller. If you explore and invest yourself into your own neighborhood, the world gets smaller - and you become bigger - in a good way. And this is part of the path I've chosen by feeding the homeless. I've got a 501(c)3 funded by someone who hoped we could get 6-7 figure funding and allow me to draw a full time salary feeding hundreds of people weekly - if not nightly. If it comes to that, great. But if not, that's OK too.