It must be Friday because I’m wearing mascara.
It’s not because I have more time to get ready on Friday mornings. It’s not because Fridays are special at work. It’s not because Fridays are the only day I see someone I have a crush on. We’ve already established that doesn’t happen for average humans anymore. (Sorry, I.T. guy, Yuzu will always be in the lead.) No, it is because Fridays are Yuzupaluzu days. And Yuzupaluzu days are (like cream cheese gimbap) THE BEST.
Yuzupaluzu days kick off with the hourly (can’t miss one, have to be on time) Yuzu photo sent to my mom and sister. They usually start somewhere along the lines of the head on the table photo and work their way to blissful, skipping Yuzu around 5 p.m. as we race each other to the stairwell to head home. To be fair, Yuzupaluzu days are shared (mostly equally as long as my sister puts forth some effort) with Chansung. But I just couldn’t ever find a good name that incorporated both. I tried Chanaru, but that sounded like a music festival in Tennessee. Similarly, Yusung sounds like a Christian music concert. ChanHanyuYuz? Let’s get real. My sister can’t even pronounce Chansung’s full name. We were going to get nowhere with that. In her defense, she kept trying to say “Man Hwang Chansung.” I’m not sure anyone could say that. One time, she insisted she was using his full name because it was more polite. I would argue that she passed polite when she started commenting about the Italian sub in his jeans pocket. That one killed the text thread, and I did not need the fire extinguisher.
Yuzupaluzus take place at my apartment and have recently started to involve my mom preparing some type of dessert in my IKEA model kitchen. While the preparation takes place in the kitchen, the supplies are carted in. My mom brings all the ingredients (including any water the recipe calls for), the pan, the other pan, the container to store it in and the heat for the oven. I usually have to lend her my grocery pack mule since Yuzu is getting ready for the Paluz and can’t help with the Trader Joe’s bags. Once, just once, she used my whisk. Funny story. One Friday, she texted that she was going to make brownies covered in chocolate ganache. I told her I’d had such a rough day I was just going to grab the ganache bowl and kick her and my sister out and spend the rest of the night with the ganache and Yuzu. Her immediate next text? “You do have a whisk.” No question. A statement. I told her I thought that was somehow related to my plans with Yuzu for the night. Needless to say, my sister ran with it. And while it isn’t nearly as dangerous to run with a whisk as it is to run with scissors, I can safely say I now never look at my whisk the same. Never.
Once dessert has been made and the cleaning crews have returned my kitchen to its original IKEA floor model condition (4 hours later), we move on to the entertainment. The rest of the evening is filled with YouTube playlists of well thought out, carefully scrutinized videos which have been contemplated and agonized over through a very stringent selection process during the past week to ensure they are perfectly themed, timed, ordered, subtitled and edited to most accurately do justice to the most worthy subject. Then there’s my sister who simply throws videos up on the screen and hopes Chansung is in them. Sometimes she gets lucky. Other times we end up watching Thai Mammaw wearing a cat cape and playing with a dog for 20 minutes. You just…never…know. I’m holding out hope that maybe one day she’ll accidentally get a Yuzu video on her playlist, but for now we have to settle for a Korean middle schooler singing karaoke in his living room while Chansung sits in the background contemplating his choice of agents. For the love of cream cheese gimbap, can we PLEASE screen these better?
At the conclusion of the evening, my mom and my sister load up the kitchen mule and leave the magical world of Yutopia. As soon as I close the door behind them, I feel like I should turn to see piles of empty boxes, bits of wrapping paper and Chex Mix remnants as Bing Crosby croons…because Christmas has ended for another week. Instead, I turn on a Yuzu press conference…and wash the whisk. I can just hear my sister, “Is that what they’re calling it now?”
And thus the whisk becomes just as dangerous as scissors.