Petit Fours

I hate myself.

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What does one do on a sleepless night?



Bake cookies for rabbits. Inspired by Tomoko's healthy dog-snack bakery and a bunny biscuit recipe from Mommy24bunnies, the biits can now have some carrot-banana oatmeal cookies this weekend.

Lampyridae

To me, it was a typical college town, but to hear Tuan and Xangas reminisce, even its ordinary places take on a mythical quality. It was not my alma mater, but what impressed me was the fixed sameness of the undergraduate experience. There were the stories about greasy spoons, watering holes, professors, pranks, basketball games, hallucinogenic drugs, roommates, crushes, relationships long dispersed.



Yale was a hermetically-sealed jar of fireflies, enclosing us for a brief moment in this rarified incandescence before floating us out to the wilderness. Then, social concerns centered around the hilarity of dining hall seating, laundry room etiquette, pretentious 3 a.m. debates on the biological roots of human nature, a shitload of coffee, homemade spa treatments, and the sheer worth of innocence. Now, as attorneys, professors, surgeons, etc., they’ve taken on the weight of marriage, parenthood, alternative minimum taxes, and mortgages.

Somehow, this firefly flew straight into a tempest, emerging years later wind-blown and lost. DH asked me if this was what I wanted, what normal people want, a down payment on emotional security. Do I want a husband? Do I want children? Are we finished? What now? I wonder if this—the anger, hope, fear, strength—is simply a resurgent adolescence, recovering once more all the intensity of feeling that has since eroded over time. I'm weary of it.

What I want: to recover my faith in the exceptional life I intended to lead.

Damn pigeons

Fang Geh Zi is a Chinese idiom that translates literally: to release the pigeons. It means to ditch. To cancel. Invalidate. Nullify.

SMS at 12:44 p.m. He couldn't make it to lunch today. There was a crisis at work.

Little did he know the new crisis that was just born.

Chowderhead is hungry

Violet tells me that I should stop casting negative spells on myself—my words can come true if I am not careful. But what if they already are true?

I feel like a loser chowderhead today. There, I’ve said it. In fact, I have been a loser chowderhead this whole month. I got A’s on mid-terms with minimal effort, but scored a big fat C- on my personal project. I don’t know why I do not try harder to impress the people that matter—the ones that actually care about me and not the ones who do so in words only.

I left class at 8:30 p.m. with nowhere to go, having been cancelled-on by the same man today. 12:58 p.m.-Flight delayed. How about tomorrow? 3:03 p.m.-Oops! Daughter’s play is tomorrow evening so that’s bad, too. Lunch? Bollocks. I’m going to Pearl’s.



A lot has been made of the rivalry between Pearl’s and Mary’s: Who makes a better lobster roll? For my money, that’s really asking the wrong question. Why Pearl’s? The Brussels sprouts, dear reader. I pounded on the counter and asked the waitress for a plate of it, a big heaping portion, two to three servings on one dish. Did I know that it comes with carrots, parsnips, and lardons, she asked. But, of course!

Perhaps it was wrong of me to find solace in food after two hours of blowing hot air on socioeconomic disparities and the institutionalization of hunger. Oh wait, sorry. “Food instability” is what we’re calling it now. Because “hunger” is an emotionally charged word, embedded from infancy with ideas of well-being and love.

Feeding is more than the squirting of nutrients into a gastrointestinal tract…It is a situation of embrace, pressure, contact, fondling, cooing, tickling, talking, stroking, squeezing; it is the warmth of the body, the pulsation of the parent’s heart, the brushing of her lips, the smells of her secretions. This extended environment reinforces the child’s fused image of security and food. (Willard Gaylin, In the Beginning Helpless and Dependent)

The waitress laughed when she saw me. I was a ravenous biit before a bowl of julienned carrots. I had the urge to put down my fork, stick my face into the steaming dish, and savage the vegetables. The French woman sitting to my left stared for a minute, checked her menu, and then leaned over towards me.

-Excuse me, what are you eating? Whatever it is, it smells great.

-Bwussels Spwouts!

NOTE: The recent Joint FAO/WHO Expert Consultation on diet, nutrition and the prevention of chronic diseases, recommended the intake of a minimum of 400g of fruit and vegetables per day (excluding potatoes and other starchy tubers) for the prevention of chronic diseases such as heart disease, cancer, diabetes and obesity, as well as for the prevention and alleviation of several micronutrient deficiencies, especially in less developed countries. (FAO/WHO, September 2004)

You ask if I am drunk, dear reader. After three and a half glasses of Sancerre with only Brussels sprouts in my belly, you’re goddamn right I’m drunk.

Sea cucumbers

I told him that I didn’t want it, didn’t like it. My left hand extended over my plate to block the offering. But my father scooped a heaping pile anyway, disregarding my repeated refusals and nudging my hand aside with the communal spoon. He dribbled a brown slug-trail from the center platter, across my left knuckles, and onto my dinner plate.

I wiped the back of my hands on the pink tablecloth. Maybe he didn’t hear me above the babel in the restaurant. I looked around banquet table, across the circle of half-eaten platters of steamed carp, soybean sprouts, seafood soup, barbecued meats, sautéed prawns, and crispy bean curd. I searched the various “aunties” and “uncles” at the table, who not only appeared unmoved by my distress but exhibited tacit disapproval and annoyance for the interruption. There was not one ally among them. Uncle Jiang said that it was a delicacy and only dummies didn’t know how to eat sea cucumbers. Bu huei ci—not knowing how to eat—is a phrase that refers not to inability but intrinsic lack of appreciation for the food. It was a character deficiency. Thanks for nothing, uncle. And with that, the matter appeared to be settled. The dummy was expected to shut up and eat.

Every several months, whenever he would let us know that he was in town, my father would pick up the two of us, my sister and me, from mother’s house to take us out for dinner. These occasions were intended, ostensibly, to spend some time with his daughters. But, he operated under the “more-the-merrier” concept of socializing, double-booking paternal responsibilities by inviting his brother’s family and some colleagues, thereby upping the efficiency of the evening. What’s the harm in that? He can see his daughters and at the same time engage in grownup conversations about business and gossip. And, from time to time, he could update his friends about us.

“She’s ten years old now. Ten, right?” Eleven.

“She plays music a lot. Piano. Tell them what you play.” Piano and violin.

“She reads all the time. She does well in school: that’s all her mother. Yeah, we all know she doesn’t get that from me.” He would shake one hand and chuckle.

“She likes to write. Poetry.” Yes, I liked to write, but not poetry. I wanted to be a writer when I grew up.

“That’s not good. Writers make no money. You should want to be a lawyer.”

From the corner of my eye, I saw my cousin smirk. She is only one year younger than I am and her mother regularly pits her against me in competition whenever possible. The conversation turned to some other topic about money. They had already exhausted all interesting, relevant, and obligatory details about me.

With a plastic chopstick, I poked the one-inch chunks wading in an unctuous pool on my plate. One, two, three, and a half pieces. Was it my imagination or were they still quivering? Like their distant starfish cousins, sea cucumbers are echinoderms, possessed of leather-hard spiny skin and gelatinous body. As the name suggests, they are shaped like cucumbers. Or in Chinese, hai shen means sea ginseng, promising all sorts of restorative medicinal benefits. Several intensive days of preparation—gutting, washing, repeated boiling, dehydration and rehydration—ensures that impurities and flavors have been leeched out of these bottom feeders. The texture is a little bit chewy, a little bit crunchy. Every time I “try” it, it tastes like fishy bicycle tires.

“It’s good. Try it.” My father said this as if it were an incontrovertible truth: sea cucumbers are inherently good. It was inconceivable that any sensible person could actually reject it, even an eleven-year old who remained firmly unconvinced of its merits but would be compelled repeatedly to try it anew every time. It was not a matter of taste—at least, not mine. Certainly, his was not a willful disregard, but the fact that his daughter must be a reflection and beneficiary of his own absolute values. My ideas, feelings, or sensibilities had no place here.

My father is no longer around to force sea cucumbers on me. Even if he were, I probably would be better equipped to handle it, having had half a lifetime and adulthood to help me with the adjustment. At the time, it was difficult not to resent what appeared to be my father’s negation of me. I glared at his shoulder and sulked. To my right, my older sister was eating dutifully. She told me to stop acting like a spoiled brat: “Just eat it already.”

Smee

Smee likes Dennis Kucinich.

Bollocks

It is a reflexive response. I say sorry when I haven’t done anything to be sorry about. I say okay when I am far from okay. Here I am, the anti-Senator Clinton, ready and willing to capitulate to other people’s macho bullshit. Mea Culpa. I consider how long I can bear the accreted weight of stored up apologies and assurances in my heart before it breaks. Yes, the bruises come easily and the pain is so keen it is nearly unbearable, but never mind me. I’m okay. Sorry to be a bother.

And what of repressed disappointment?

From now on, I have a new word.

Oh, didn’t you mean to wound me by willfully misunderstanding my words and actions? Isn’t that what you were doing by employing sarcasm and making me feel ashamed of my writing, so that you may mask a hurt ego? Bollocks.

Is it so important for you to have the upper hand that you have to torture me by showing indifference? And will you deny me the opportunity to make things right by telling me not to worry about it? Am I forgiven? And just what is it exactly that am I asking forgiveness for? Bollocks.

It was a gift. It was a piece of me. I was writing about you as if you were a god—my god. Bollocks to you that you don’t understand. Bollocks to you that you don’t love me.