October is the best month - part 3
(continued from October is the best month - part 2)
Further into October, my birthday a few days behind me now, I was spending the weekend with my family. Well, just my dad and brother - my mum had flown to the Philippines to visit grandma a week and a bit before since grandma wasn't feeling all too good then. It's been almost a year since granddad died and everyone's a bit worried for grandma, so away my mum went to check-up on her side of the family.
So it was just my dad and brother left in the family house in the suburbs, and my mum and I always joke about leaving the house in their care. Sure they can take care of themselves, but they're not the most proactively responsible members of the family when it comes to chores and general maintenance: meals are always eaten later because they start cooking when they get hungry, the washing/laundry never seems to be done as well when it gets done at all, and the fridge/freezer/pantry always runs dangerously close to being empty. I also doubt that they vacuum the house, or even clean the bathrooms in my mum's absence.
In the times I've visited when my mum's away, the house has never really been that bad, but there's always something missing about the way the house is held together when it's just my dad and brother, like the shiny veneer put in place by my mum's cleaning schedule is dulled without her care and that cracks start to show when the house is no longer receiving the same level of care. I jump to a worst-case scenario in my head, in that after an extended absence, my mum would come home to a broken home: the front door not closing properly, a large puddle of water not cleaned-up from a recent heavy rain, a corner of the rumpus room perpetually on fire, a family of wild animals making a nest in one of the rooms, and shit all over the place with the words 'there is no toilet paper' scribbled on the walls with faecal matter...
During this latest visit, I got the following text message from an unknown number:
Happy cake day. Look in your letterbox
Intrigued by the anonymous sender and their message, I went outside to the letterbox, and inside was a cake! It was in the shape of a meatloaf, but it was a cake! (some kind of lemon cake I would later discover) I sent my thanks back to the unknown number, and as I did, all sorts of questions came to mind:
- Who sent the cake?
- Who knew I was in the suburbs that weekend so as to deliver it to my parents' house?
- Who knows where I live?
- Is the cake poisoned?
A lot of my long-time friends would actually know the answer to question 3 - I had lived in that house with my family for almost 15 years before I moved out - and anybody with access to the internet knows the answer to question 2 since I publicized my location on Twitter the previous day. Suddenly the suspect pool got a bit too large for me to investigate, and thankfully the cake was not poisoned, otherwise I would have gone through my list of suspects much more earnestly.
So my birthday extended to the weekend that followed it with the mystery cake, and when my mum came back from the Philippines several weeks later she brought back a bunch of presents for me from a few of my cousins as well. We even had a belated family birthday dinner at the place we dubbed 'the new Maria Pia's' (Maria Pia's was the Italian restaurant I kept going to for my birthday, and the restaurant that had taken its place is also Italian).
Birthday day became birthday week, and birthday week became birthday month :) I was really liking where this month was going.
(to be continued...)
October is the best month - part 2
(continued from October is the best month - part 1)
I hadn't seen Katrina in a while. The last time I had was at her place when I tried to help her out by cooking dinner (one of my pizzas) since she was still just out of hospital and couldn't cook herself, and her family weren't yet home to help her out. That was at the start of August, while I was still in some sort of deal with my work that I could spend my Monday afternoons visiting her in the hospital.
Katrina has just been discharged then. She put out a plea for help, and a tonne of her friends answered the call. I thought to do my bit too, so used my last Monday afternoon off to visit her at home and make her dinner.
It's always weird cooking in someone else's kitchen: nothing is where you expect it to be, the microwave seems to operate on some completely foreign logic, and the knives are always too sharp or too blunt. I planned to make one of my pizzas there, and brought a tonne of my own stuff along since I was warned beforehand that Katrina's family's kitchen isn't the best stocked kitchen on the planet. So with some help from Andrea, long-time friend of Katrina and someone who I had talked to a bunch but never really hung-out with a lot before that day, she brought over some extra things: rolling pin, oven tray, baking paper because the oven tray had been severely 'seasoned', like a wok from a lifetime of use.
I had never used baking paper with my pizzas before, and the pizza base I rolled was a bit thinner than I'd normally make, so I think it was those 2 things that combined to create my stuff-up of the day: cooking the pizza and having it stick so hard to the baking paper that the 3 of us spent most of the dinner trying to tear the paper away from the pizza base rather than eating it, and because the base was so thin you actually ended-up losing a lot of it in the tearing process. Actually, Andrea and I spent most of the dinner trying to tear the paper away, Katrina had only 1 fully functioning limb (a left arm) so Andrea spent even more time tearing paper away from Katrina's pizza, and I eventually gave up and just ate the damn paper. Hey if red pandas can eat bamboo, then I can stomach a re-purposed tree.
I felt pretty bad about what I'd done afterwards. I went out there with the intention of helping out, only to add some unneeded plant fibre to a cripple friend's diet. It didn't help that Katrina spent the next couple of days telling everybody about it, and Andrea made it a point to rub it in my face the next time she saw me.
So that's how my last encounter with Katrina went. I'd been meaning to visit again, but the fresh guilt from that last incident kept me away. With over 2 months since then, what better time to try make amends than with my day off?
I met both Katrina and Andrea for lunch at a bakery not far from the hospital where Katrina would be finishing one of her physio sessions - just one of many she was undergoing those days to help put weight back onto her legs. When we went to order lunch, the girls surprised me by paying for my meal :D
As I was eating my free lunch, they surprised me again by giving me a birthday card and presents - a cookbook written by Pete Evans, one of the hosts of My Kitchen Rules (which is a show I watched very closely this year and mentioned a couple of times), and a book about chocolate which is part recipe book and part history/background of chocolate. I was actually reading through the chocolate book last night and it made me so hungry for some sort of dessert that I went out of my way to make a chocolate cake at 9:30 in the evening!
And just as I finished my lunch and thought all the surprises were over, one of the bakery folk came over with a slice of chocolate cake that had a birthday candle in it, and the girls started singing Happy Birthday.
I went home happy that day: a bag of presents in one hand and a birthday-boy grin on my face. The feeling followed me all the way back home. Once I got back home however, the sickness I had been pushing away and ignoring all lunch time pounced back on me. Suddenly I had only enough energy to make it to close the door and collapse on my bed, bag of birthday presents still in hand, and sleep for the second time that day.
I woke up maybe an hour later, still feeling tired, the stuffy nose really sticking this time around, and with a new symptom: a sore throat. I went to my computer, answered all the birthday messages / e-mails / text messages left for me, and that pretty much concluded the day of my birthday.
(to be continued...)
October is the best month - part 1
The Rugby World Cup was over a week ago, but remnants of it still remain throughout the city: the World Cup logo still flies prominently beside street lamps, country flags are still visible in shop windows, cars still carry the All Blacks flag proudly attached to passenger-side windows, and the aftermath of the parade - ticker tape and streamers all the colours of the visible light spectrum - occupy cracks in the footpath or are still tangled in the power lines that give life to our fleet of electric buses.
I've been walking through the city a tad happier than I normally do, a small smile making its way onto my face if I allow my mind to wander and think about everything that happened in October.
The biggest thing for me was of course my birthday.
Yes, I'm one of those October-born people, throwing all our birthdays into one month of the year to make peoples' calendars look super busy and to annoy gift-buyers. I passed my last birthday milestone a long time ago, which I reckon is the 21st. After that, card-makers stop being specific about your age and you find yourself receiving a lot of non-numbered birthday cards until your age starts resembling a new decade.
I didn't really know what to do this year for my birthday. I've already written that my normal birthday traditions have gone out the window, so I thought to do the only other thing I could still continue to do - take a day-off from work - and see what happens after that.
Melissa was in the country on the day of my birthday for the first time since... 2003? She took me out for breakfast, meaning that on my day off, I had to get up early. On any other day I might have complained, but I thought I better get as many waking hours as I can out of my birthday. That, and I'm not one to turn down free food.
Free breakfast on my birthday; a good start to the day :)
After I walked Melissa to her work so she could start her day of working and I could continue my day of not working, I went to my favourite place in the city to kill time: the library.
When I sat down to read through my current book, I found myself unable to stay awake. Sure waking-up at my normal time on a day when I would have normally slept-in might have taken away some valuable sleeping hours, but I didn't just feel sleepy: I was sniffling a bit more than usual, and I felt really tired already. Oh no, I thought to myself, don't be sick, don't be sick, not now, not today...
The only other thing I had planned for the day was to meet-up with Katrina, who I hadn't seen since she was discharged from hospital, at which time I tried (and failed) to make her dinner since she was unable to cook herself and needed help until her family were able to come home (they were all away at the time). I needed to be well enough to travel some 20km to visit her at the hospital after one of her physio sessions, and my stuffy nose was looking to ruin that.
I didn't catch-up on my sleep at the library (I didn't want to look like the homeless guy sleeping in the library since there was already one there in the far corner), and I didn't want to catch-up on my sleep on the train to the hospital either (I didn't want to miss my stop, which I had done several times before when I'd slept on the train), so with a few hours to go until I had to meet Katrina, I went back to my place, collapsed on my bed, and fell asleep.
I woke up with time to spare before the train I planned to catch, without that nagging fatigue I had at the library, but I still had that damn stuffy nose. So this is how it's going to be huh? Fine then. I told myself, and off I went to the train station with an extra handkerchief, just in case.
(to be continued...)
Over-sharing
I made myself a birthday cake earlier this week (I did get other birthday cakes on my birthday - an anonymous cake in the letter box and a surprise cake on my birthday - so I don't feel like a total 'forever alone' sad sack by doing this), and one thing I've been doing with my more recent cooking endeavours is, once I have a product I'm actually proud of, I feed some to my guinea pig.
No, not an actual guinea pig, but a human test subject. A pregnant human test subject. If my food's good enough for a pregnant woman (a group who seem to be the fussiest eaters these days. I don't know what it was like in my mum's day, but I'm pretty sure the women of that age ate whatever the hell they wanted and babies turned out fine), then it's gotta be good enough for everybody else right? I didn't actually seek out my pregnant friend for this reason, it just happened that she works near where I work and I could get a hold of her for lunch to try the dessert I made that time.
When I made my birthday cake - a marbled coffee cake with a layer of chocolate frosting in the middle, inspired by that site and a chocolate history/recipe book I got for my birthday - I asked my guinea pig if she'd like to try some. Before I could even list the ingredients though, she had already made-up her mind:
coffee = ick
?
don't hate me
I was actually quite sad to learn that she couldn't stand coffee and because of it she wouldn't be going anywhere near the cake :( I mean, I don't like coffee either, but in any form that isn't a drink, I can enjoy it. I sat at my computer with a sad face for a bit too, glad that the facade of Facebook chat was sitting between us so she couldn't see my disappointment.
I needed to find new test subjects, so in my disheartened state I overcompensated for the loss of 1 person by texting/messaging way too many others.
The cake ended-up being shared between 5 other people with who I was so eager to share it with (maybe because I was still all *sad face* over my guinea pig not wanting cake) that I ended-up with just 1 slice for myself.
Panda An Hour
My guitar buddy introduced me to this concept of 'love languages'. While the main Google hit is a page about 'the 5 love languages' what it basically comes down to is the idea that each of us has a certain way in which our affections can be won over and which we show affection ourselves. ie: some of us really like giving gifts as a way to show we care, and those same people might really respond to receiving gifts more than, say, complimenting them.
It's not a new idea - I'm sure we've all observed that some things will really get through to people and other things won't - and it goes a bit of a way to explain why some people can get along and others don't.
Personally, I'm a 'quality time' person (if you hit the Google link above and go to the first link which categorizes said languages) which I think a bit odd considering I have so much free time to myself (or maybe that actually explains why I look so forward to seeing my friends and going to whatever events they have). For another 'Octoberite' though, whose birthday was just last week, they seem to be especially fond of something that isn't really pigeonholed by any of the standard categories on that site: they really like receiving links to sites on the internet of cute animals doing cute things.
Coupled with my Spidey-sense like ability to know when someone's birthday is (my friend didn't have their birthday listed on Facebook), I sat down at lunch one day and came up with ideas for their birthday present. Mid-way through my open chicken sandwich w/ fries, I invented "Panda An hour".
Panda An Hour was the name I gave to the initial idea of posting to their Facebook wall a link to a photo/video of a red panda (I really like red pandas, as my About pic should leave no doubts about) every hour of their birthday, for as long as I was awake. The idea went to include other animals because I don't really have that much red panda material.
(Actually, yes I do have that much red panda material, but most of it comes from the red panda encounter I did last year.)
So I did my homework, and the day before her birthday I began compiling a list of photos and videos to use, starting with those in my own 'collection' of cute animal pics/videos, and slowly branched-out from there. I kept this up for several hours until I was up to my eyeballs (ie: 20+ tabs in Firefox) in cute animal material. I could feel my testosterone levels dropping as I brought up and bookmarked video after video, and picture after picture, compiling enough material to see me through the 16 or so hours I would be spamming her wall.
After finalizing the list of links, I went to sleep with doubts. Wall spamming isn't exactly the best thing you can do to someone, and with the internet just so full of stuff, we've even got videos and songs not-so-kindly asking people to lay-off the forwarding of stuff.
But when I get an idea in my head, I stubbornly follow it through, and this was one of those ideas. It's worked-out in the past... maybe 66% of the time. The other 33% have had me actually fall out of favour with people because of it because it can be read as very forthcoming, and in a very recent case I've somewhat frightened someone to the point of not talking with me for several months.
So I slept restlessly that night, only to be awoken by the alarm on both my cellphone and clock radio after what felt like mere minutes of sleep. After turning off both alarms, and even before eating breakfast, I turned on my computer and began the panda attack.
It was very likely to have been my least productive working day in a long time. I kept such a close eye on the lower-right corner of my computer screen, eyes glued to the minutes as they passed by, signalling the end of an hour and the beginning of a new one. When a new hour rolled-around, I double-checked my next choice of photo/video, even trawling for new ones if I second-guessed my initial choice. By the time I posted the next photo/video, I was maybe 30 minutes away until the next hour.
I also had a very brief lunch hour that day.
In short, it went down really well: I got a lot of good comments and I wasn't defriended before the day was over :) My own wall had the unfortunate side-effect of showing nothing but 'Emanuel Rabina posted a link on someone's wall...' activity, but I felt really good at the end of it.
Giving gifts has always made me feel good, and I've never really tried giving URLs as gifts before. In an age when we play-down the value of things like e-cards and generic e-mails, I wasn't really sure links would have a very high value, but it felt like I gave a little bit of me with every link I posted, much like how I'd feel when I give a real-life gift. Maybe it was the effort of spending my evening and half my working day tailoring those links for a specific person, and now that I wrote that, I feel like I've tread this ground before.
So maybe when that love languages site says 'quality time' is my love language, it doesn't just mean spending time is what speaks to me, but also that putting time into something can really grab my attention. It's certainly worked before :)
Black Forest Gateau 1.1, Cake Box 1.0
Day 15 without the internet...
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Shortly after the trial cake, I was able to create a much-improved version of it for my friend's birthday. Unfortunately I don't have any pictures of it for show, so just imagine the same cake as before, but with fluffier base layers and a diamond of dark chocolate sitting atop a cream swirl in the centre.
So I had the cake down, but the birthday girl lived on the other side of the city, some 30 minute walk from where I live, and I thought to myself, I can't just walk through the city with an exposed cake. I need to protect it from prying eyes, car exhausts, cigarette smoke, and emos. What I needed was a cake box.
I never thought to ask around at the local bakeries or supermarkets to see if I could take one of their many cake boxes (they have tonnes of them just sitting in the back, surely they could part with just 1). All that came to mind was that I had, at the corner of my desk, a horde of packaging material collected from deliveries ranging from NZ-based online stores like Mighty Ape, to overseas giants like Amazon and the resellers behind eBay.
It's like I had been preparing for this moment my entire professional programming career...
So, in the lead-up to cake-making day, I carried as many boxes as I could back home from work, then spent my Friday evening making a cake box out of various-sized packaging material. 2 hours, the cannibalism of 3 smaller boxes, and several metres of sellotape later, this was the result:
It's a very crude-looking thing, but it did its job well: the box was large enough to contain the cake, the lid closed properly over the box to protect it from the elements, and there's even this slide-out 'tray' to take the cake out of the box if lifting it out will prove too messy.
The next day, cake complete and ready to serve, I carried the cake in the box through the harsh city environment*.
The birthday girl was very pleased with her cake, and I was pleased she was pleased with the cake. But even with the lovely cake before the both of us, I spent most of the time talking about the box! I mean, I'd made the cake before and blogged about it - I was done talking about the cake before I had even given it to her. The box however: it was new, I created it from scratch with other boxes, scissors, sellotape, and my crafting know-how. I almost drew comparisons between it and Frankenstein's monster: stitched together from other similar pieces, and... OK, that's where the comparison actually ends - I never breathed new life into the box since it was inanimate to start with and inanimate to finish.
Luckily for me, the birthday girl was nice enough to humour my OMG-I-made-a-cake-box obsession, and we talked about ways to improve the box for a good chunk of the afternoon. By the time I left, I had plenty of ideas swirling through my head for Cake Box 1.1.
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* harsh for a cake anyway
Black Forest Gateau 1.0
It's not very often that I bake, particularly after learning that it'd be near-impossible for me to blaze my own baking trail when I'm surrounded by so many other spectacular bakers. But a friend created a cooking event, which he dubbed 'the non-charred cook-off', after we all lost faith in his cooking abilities - he burned sausage rolls - and I was under the impression us invitees were to bring something to help teach the guy some cooking tricks. With so many others bringing mains, I asked if I could make a dessert instead.
My request was two-fold in its purpose: to participate in the cook-off with something different, and for the dessert, a cake, to act as a birthday cake for someone whose birthday it would be. So yesterday I went shopping for enough ingredients to make the cake 2-times over: one for the real cake, and another for a trial run (like I said, I don't bake often, so I could do with all the practice I could get) which I did today.
The cake was a black forest gateau, which was one of the coolest looking cakes in one of the two cookbooks that I actually own, and I made it once before, a couple of years ago... and it took me 6 hours to make. It's not a cake that should take 6 hours, but I made so many stuff-ups that I had to redo things. At one point I was so fed-up with trying to whip cream with my arm and a fork that I went to the local homeware store and bought a mechanical egg-beater. Earlier that day I had to buy more eggs...
Anyway, this time I had the ingredients, but my technique was as rusty as an oil tanker, so today was more about trying to get the steps right for when I'd make the birthday cake proper next week.
To assist, I invited my friend the hug nazi who, as well as being named for making tonnes of hugs, has made several cakes in her lifetime, and has a camera infinitely better than what came with my mobile phone.
I started off with what I did the last time I made the cake, and came away with 1 very flat looking cake base that wouldn't have looked out of place at the bottom of a cheesecake. With my friend's help, she reasoned that the egg whites weren't fluffy enough, hence the cake wasn't fluffy enough either. With that, I let her beat the egg whites for the second layer of the cake to what she thought would be much better. It worked, and we ended-up with a layer almost twice as thick as the first one. I'll remember that for Black Forest Gateau 1.1.
When she wasn't helping though, my friend was licking chocolate off mixing bowls and cream off the egg beater. I was glad she had to go do some volunteer work this afternoon, otherwise she'd also have dug into the dark chocolate block and eaten half the cherries/strawberries when I was decorating the cake.
When she left, the cake looked like a gigantic oreo. When she returned, it looked like this:
(Edit: Thanks mum, but the spelling mistake is legitimate. Google 'caek', and it won't try to suggest or correct you)
So lessons-learned, or things I'd like to improve upon for next time?
Firstly, beat the egg whites very thoroughly for a fluffier layer of cake.
Secondly, the cake lacked a bit of the 'black forest' part that I would associate with a cake of such a name, and so what I ended-up with felt more like a 'creamy milk chocolate' gateau. So maybe a lot more dark chocolate, a lot more cherries between layers, and a little less cream between layers too.
But for all its shortcomings, it didn't at all stop my friend and I from having an early dessert.
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Edit: Bah, forgot to mention that the 'non-charred cook off' got cancelled the other night, but I went ahead and did this anyway. Maybe I'll still be able to get Black Forest Gateau 1.1 to the birthday girl anyway, we'll see.
New traditions
We all have our traditions: visiting the family on a major holiday, going to the midnight mass on Christmas Eve/Day, having eggs for breakfast on Saturday morning, etc. They can be something to look forward to, or something to dread, and you put it in your mental calendar regardless of the effect. One of my own traditions was something started on my 21st birthday, when I had dinner with my family at a little (yet quite popular given the size of the place) restaurant known as Maria Pia's.
I never intended it to become a tradition - I just wanted to eat at an Italian place for dinner on my birthday - but the staff and food made such a good impression on us that when my next birthday came around, I thought, Yeah what the hell let's go there again. So we did, and again the next yet, and... you can see where this is going. I even took my friends to that place one year, and another time I had a friend take me as a belated birthday present.
Another unintentional tradition that started around my 21st was that a friend of mine, the same friend who took me to Maria Pia's, and the one who I've often referred to as 'hug nazi' throughout this blog, would always be out of the country on my birthday. She does love to travel, and I never really thought much of it until I started noticing that it always happened around my birthday: OE, someone's wedding, a job, whatever the excuse, something would take her out of the country or she would make sure she was out of the country.
When she started to realize the pattern herself, she actually started to feel guilty, and it was that guilt that had her take me to Maria Pia's as a belated birthday present for after she got back from her latest overseas adventure.
With my birthday now within my range of foresight (which doesn't really look that far ahead), it's looking like 2011 will be the end of both of these traditions.
For the last year, hug nazi was overseas for work (the cause of her missing last year's birthday) and has recently returned, with no plans to go away for the foreseeable future. I brought this up in a Skype call between us a few months back, and while she was happy to be around for my birthday for the first time in... forever, I was feeling a bit odd about it, simply because it felt like we were breaking tradition. I even considered taking myself out of the country for my birthday, just so we'd be in different timezones so technically it would still count, but I'm already booked to be here because I've got tickets to the Rugby World Cup around then.
And earlier in the week I found out that Maria Pia's has closed. I went so far as to tweet that "...a part of me has just died", and then went to the site of Maria Pia's earlier today just to see what happened to it. Sure enough there were signs saying that it was gone and a new restaurant would be opening in it's place.
I brought this up with my guitar buddy over dinner a few nights ago, and she and some others at the table suggested that I could invent my own Maria Pia's atmosphere come this year's birthday (and kick hug nazi out :P ), or simply start some new traditions.
New traditions. Starting something new. Both exciting and slightly frightening prospects. Repetition makes us good at things, makes things easier, and tradition is really just repetition with a predictable time period - it's easy, you know what's going to happen, when it's going to happen, you have some idea of what to expect, and it's safe.
I'll admit: I'm pretty risk-averse - years of getting figuratively stabbed in the face after putting yourself out there will do that to you - so to have these 2 things suddenly vanish has made me a little uneasy. I tried listing the number of other traditions or little rituals I have, and either my memory is really crappy right now, or I only need the one hand to count them on. After all this time of trying to be the one my friends could rely on, to be the rock to help others through their own transitions, it turns out I have very little to rely on myself.
Is that irony? Or is that just some kind of imbalance that I need to sort out? Either way, I predict I'm going to have one of those thinking moments in my immediate future.
Sarcasm not necessary
I woke-up last Saturday morning with a very sore throat, which could only mean one of 2 things: I tried and failed to sing Katy Perry's Firework again, or I was being a loud and tipsy version of myself. I could have easily been doing both (that second one often increases the chances of the first one happening), but after letting my mind rack-up enough waking minutes to start thinking proper thoughts and not dream-addled fairy tales, I remembered: I was being a loud and tipsy version of myself.
The night before I was at a friend's little birthday drinks get-together, and the only person I really knew who was going to be there was the birthday girl herself. This seems to be happening a bit more recently - where I go to social gatherings where I will know only 1 person (at least, 2 if it's a good day) and that person will be the one who invited me in the first place. This would usually make me a tad nervous, but I think somewhere in doing all those ceroc dance classes, I've become a lot more comfortable talking to people who I didn't know an hour ago.
One of those things I've become accustomed to doing is to just let whatever thought is occupying my mind, based on the current topic of conversation, to come out. OK, so it's not as clear-cut as that (I still had to learn what to filter and what to let through), but it's like the internal censorship board within my own head takes a break for a couple of hours and lets through a lot more MA15+ material than normal.
I already do this to some extent in my day-to-day and work life, so I've had a bit of practice. If anything, it's taught me that once you start with your own thoughts on something, the other person/people can take that as a sign to say what they're thinking. If you ever worried that your own thoughts might be a little strange or borderline incriminating, just wait until the other person/people say what's on their minds and then be surprised at how much more ridiculous the things they're thinking can be than yours.
Case-in-point: that night I made a 'your mum' joke (it's a staple in my conversational repertoire), and after a few more different takes on the joke from others poking fun at other members of one's immediate family, eventually reaching to extended family, someone chimed in with words that amounted to: "Hold on, can you legally marry your cousin?"
I may have opened the floodgates, but it wasn't me that provided the water.
So it was a conversation killer... in any other setting. Instead, people got out their smartphones and started looking up the information on the internet while the rest of us who had phones that can barely connect dots, let alone connect to the internet, argued very loudly about it until someone could provide a comprehensive answer. Once someone did - quoting the New Zealand Marriage Act like they had at least 1 law paper under their belt - it became a bit of a recurring theme for the night. We were guys were all over the topic, whereas the birthday girl looked a bit ashamed at the company she managed to put together.
That wasn't the only time many of us got out our phones though. Maybe half-way through the night, a late-comer brought us the news that Japan had just suffered an epic earthquake. Our initial reaction was that he was talking about the one from a few days before, but no it was one that hit just moments before and that so much shit was hitting the fan: tsunami warnings across the Pacific, oil rigs in Japan on fire, towns being destroyed by multi-metre waves, and so-on. At that news, many of us got out our phones for more information or, like in my case, to find-out if our friends in Japan were OK.
Odd, that I had more friends affected by that earthquake all the way in Japan than I did by the earthquake just a few hops south in Christchurch.
I went straight to Facebook, and after maybe my 5th login attempt (my login e-mail is a .com, not a .cow) I found that my friends were alive and, while not as 100% as they would normally be, they were alive. So with my mind at relative ease, I breathed a huge sigh of relief, disconnected my phone from the internet, and carried-on with the night at hand.
So I may have over-done it with the 'say everything that comes to mind' thing, because the friends of the birthday girl were already quite open and very engaging, strangers or otherwise. Not every situation requires that I dial my sarcasm levels up to 11 (an 8 will often do, or even a mild 5) and not every situation needs me making loud or potentially inappropriate comment about someone's mother.
I didn't really need to overdo it and give myself a sore throat the following morning. I could've saved my voice the extra hurt and instead used it for another attempt at Firework.
6+ years in the making
A friend of mine had her birthday recently - a dinner on the Saturday night, with her birthday proper on Monday - and she had herself a little pile... OK, a rather large pile of birthday presents that took up a substantial amount of room on the dinner table at the restaurant. When I rung her up on Monday to wish her happy birthday (I didn't spend long at the dinner since I had to be somewhere else so didn't get much time to talk to the birthday girl), she said she had quite a lot more stuff on top of all that which I managed to glimpse at her dinner and said that this is probably the year she's ever received the most presents from friends and family. I laughed and said that my pile of presents has been dwindling as the years go by.
My comment came from the obvious thought that kids ask for a lot of stuff; I was no different when I was young, wanting pretty much every Transformer and large Lego set under the sun. But when the call ended, I gave some thought to what I've actually received this year under the 'birthday' umbrella.
The earliest birthday present I received this year was in early July! You see my friend, the Hug Nazi, has this sort of tradition that when my birthday comes around, she will happen to have some plans that will take her out of the country and miss my actual birthday. This has been happening every year without fail since I turned 21. This year was no exception.
To absolve herself of the guilt of missing my birthday yet again, she took me to the zoo for the red panda encounter - knowing full well that red pandas are my favourite animal (it was on a zoo trip back when we were 20 or some young age when I spotted them and they instantly became my picture definition of the word 'cute').
Then nothing until my birthday on which I replied to all the birthday messages I received over Facebook / Twitter / text message.
'Birthday week', as I called it on Twitter, continued as I received a short letter, Lego man, and penguin-shaped tape dispenser from the hug nazi via snail mail from Japan (does she really feel that guilty?), and she also got her boyfriend (still in NZ and not living far from me) to deliver to me an old magazine with an article for making pasta - Italian cooking is something I'm also quite into.
When I got back to work, one of my workmates gave me a cream bun that she baked herself, and when I had the weekly lunch with some of the friends I've made through work, the guys paid for my lunch.
That weekend, I had my family take me out to dinner at my favourite Italian restaurant/trattoria - another birthday tradition I've kept since turning 21.
Then nothing again for a while and I thought it was all over, until this weekend where I received a gift card that made me go "Whoa" like Keanu Reeves does in pretty much every movie he's ever been in (they do say that gift cards are kind of a cop-out when it comes to gift giving, but if you can get the right one it's totally just as good as getting a present), and another present some 6+ years in the making.
The latter came from another friend who also knows of my affinity for red pandas. Soon after that visit to the zoo back when I was 20, a short New Zealand TV series about zoo animals aired and had some soft toy merchandise to go with it. I went and bought the red panda soft toy from my friend's work when she let me know that they had stock and she held one for me until I could come by. That gave her an idea for a birthday present for my 21st which was to make a red panda painting.
I never had a 21st birthday party though, so the half-finished painting was left on the back-burner for several years.
She moved house recently, and while packing found the old picture and resolved to complete it this year. She did, and her card stated that it was several things: a very belated 21st present, a 'sorry my grandad died' present (more on that in a future blog post), and a 'thank you for helping with the computer science papers at uni' present.
When I look back throughout the year and think of all the things I got for my birthday, I don't know where the heck I get away with saying that I've been getting less and less stuff. Sure, as I age I find myself asking for less and less; especially now that I have the means to take care of myself and get most of whatever I want: clothes, food, the occasional video game, etc. But to make up for it, I've found that those around me like to give more and more of what I need - sincere birthday wishes, good times, and tokens representative of the what I mean to others.
It's a pretty good trade-off if you ask me.
Today is a Claire/Clare day
I've just come back from watching Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince with some friends. I organized the get-together and screening as a birthday present for one of those friends, Claire (the same Claire as previously mentioned in this old story e-mail), and wow, much better than all the previous Harry Potter movie adaptations that came before it.
I give it a thumbs-up for the story-telling: where all the previous movies had a rather disjointed method of telling the story (eg: the 5th movie using those newspaper-esque montages to advance the plot, yet still relying on your prior knowledge of the book to fill-in any gaps), this one cut-out the right bits from the book such that what was left was a good enough story it's own right.
So Happy Birthday Claire! I hope you enjoyed it - I certainly did :)
Anyway, today turned-out to be an interesting and fun day. Not just because of said movie screening to end my day, but also because of the way the day started...
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I visited my doctor this morning! Yes, exclamation mark! It's been years since I last saw the family doctor - whenever I get one of those run-of-the-mill illnesses (winter cold, the flu, SARS) I tend to just let the illness run its course and cheer my body's defences on. I'm still familiar with the whole process of visiting the doctor, but with the swine flu scare gripping the country and wringing every last modicum of usefulness from the national health system, today's visit was a bit more... interesting.
It started like any other early morning visit to the doctor. I entered the building to the reception and waiting area, a little surprised to see that there were many others here already. It may only be 8:35am, but it looks like things are already in full-swing. I made my way towards reception to let them know I've arrived.
Me: "Hi, I'm here for my 8:30 appointment [yeah, I'm a bit late] with Dr Watson."
Receptionist: "OK, I'll just add that in here..."*receptionist types/clicks a few keys/buttons*
Receptionist: "Now, have you been experiencing any flu-like symptoms?"
Well that's new. I don't remember having to answer questions like that, or any questions at all actually, when signing-in before. When I rang-up to make this appointment last week, it was about some itchiness in my joints. But in the weekend between then and now I developed a headache and sore throat. Headache's gone, but sore throat is still there.
It makes sense they'd ask that, being worried about swine flu and all. I better answer the lady's question.
Me: "Well, I have had a sore throat recently..."
Receptionist: "OK, I'm gonna have to ask you to wear a mask then."*receptionist brings up a box of disposable mouth/nose masks*
For a sick person being condemned to wear something that would advertise my sickness - I might as well have worn a sandwich board with "Swine flu party right here!" written on it - I didn't actually mind complying. In-fact, I pulled the mask out of the box with too much enthusiasm, and then proceeded to ask the receptionist for instructions on how to properly wear the thing. Sure, I knew how it works, seeing all those pictures on the news with people wearing the masks, but I was so stoked at the idea of actually putting one of these things on and joining the millions around the world who also have them.
So I took a seat in the waiting area and put the mask on, wearing it a bit too proudly - probably just as well that it covered my mouth so that nobody could see the stupid grin on my face. I looked around at the other patients in the waiting room, and found myself somewhat alone; the only other person in the room with a mask was a small boy who didn't really wear it, but had his mother put it up to his mouth when he was coughing.
I turned to look at the the children's playpen which was situated next to me, only to find it devoid of all books and toys. A sign above the pen stated that: "Books and toys have been removed for the duration of the flu season." They're really taking the whole flu thing seriously.
I wasn't all by my lonesome for very long. No, the next few incoming patients didn't declare any flu symptoms, but one of them turned out to be my friend and sort-of neighbour (she lives up the street from me) Clare (not the same person whose birthday it was and who I'd be watching Harry Potter with later tonight). After she told reception that she was here for her appointment, she looked around the waiting room for a place to sit, and overlooked me... twice! The damn mask has made me all but anonymous, reducing me to a member of the generic group of Sick People Who Need To Wear Masks.
I pulled down the mask, said her name, and waved at her. Then she noticed me and sat down in the chair across from me.
Neighbour Clare: "Hey Em. I didn't notice you with your mask on."
Me: "Heh, I'm actually finding it a bit too fun! I'm expecting news cameras to show up any minute."
Neighbour Clare: "Haha, yeah. I wish I had my camera here so I could take pictures of this."
Me: "I already tried to do that with my cellphone, but the battery's low. And to think, I got this mask when I was just coming in for an itch!"
We talked for a bit until the doctor came out to find me. I followed him into his office where I immediately noticed that he was wearing a mask too, albeit much cooler looking than mine: his looked to be made of much tougher material and had what I'm guessing is a filter (a small cylinder that jutted-out the front of the mask just a little).
After seeing the doctor, I made my way to the pharmacy about a block away to get my prescription medicine. Not only did the doctor get me something for the itches (turns out it was some pretty weak eczema) but also the sore throat (tonsillitis, whoop whoop). I handed over my prescription to the pharmacist, and as I was killing time by browsing the products at the pharmacy, I came across something called "mp3 gel douche".
When time came to pay for my medicine, I was expecting to have to fork over epic amounts of money for each of the meds. I was just taking out the credit card when the pharmacist said, "That'll be $9".
NINE DOLLARS! NINE NEW ZEALAND DOLLARS!! I quickly stuffed the credit card back into my wallet and paid in cash instead! Looking at the invoice, the government subsidy on prescription medicines reduced each item to $3. Yay for state-funded drugs! :D
For just 9 bucks I was able to transform my backpack into my own personal medicine cabinet, with supplies to fight bacterial infections and skin irritation for a month! Just like when I bought a McDonalds Apple Pie to discover they had cut the price of it in half, the $9 price tag for all this medicine made me feel like I had just won something. And to top it all off, I managed to get away with a souvenir: when I was paying for the visit to the doctor, I asked the receptionist if I could keep the mask.
She said yes.
"...growing up is optional."
I wasn't really going to write anything about this, but then I got an e-mail from someone wondering if my RSS feed was broken because I hadn't reported on it. So what happened to me? I moved into my own place in the city, and celebrated my birthday with friends (in that order too).
Over the past couple of months I'd been looking at places to live in the city as pretty much everything going-on with me right now is there: work, friends, your mum, etc. I used to live out in the suburbs and rely on the trains to take me between these places. I remember when my train buddy (a friend of mine who by sheer coincidence ended-up taking most of the same trains I did for all of our years at university) started talking about how much she hated the trains. After having taken the train for more years than I have fingers, she just got fed-up with them. I didn't understand her then, and soon afterwards she and her husband-to-be moved to Australia.
Earlier this year, I think I finally understood where she was coming from.
Somewhere between the beginning of this year and the date of this post, I got tired of having my life revolve around the public transport system's schedule. Running after trains, waiting at the station, leaving parties early just so I could catch the last train home... small frustrations that just started adding-up. I thought it was about time to do something about it, and so here I am, recently-relocated into an apartment in the city, when I had my birthday.
So my birthday isn't usually something I post about, but it has been a long time since I actually celebrated one of mine with friends. This year's one was a simple affair; dinner at my favourite Italian tratorria (a place I had been going to for every one of my birthdays since turning 21), talking about matters close to our hearts: AIDS monkeys, ginger kids, your mum, etc. I got presents too!
The most notable would have to be the flying alarm clock. And yes, it works as well as the web page suggests: the clock does have a loud shrieking alarm, it does have a propeller that flies off to some dark corner of your room, and it does require you to retrieve the propeller and return it to the clock otherwise THE DAMN THING DOESN'T SHUT UP!
I haven't been late to work ever since.
I've also been a lot grumpier than normal.
Go figure.
