"Having a good time?"

There's something about the Aussies that make them ask this question all the time. Are you supposed to give them a perfunctory "Right ho, mate!", or think earnestly about the question and dissect your conflicting emotions right there and then: "Well, you know, there's good times and there's bad times and one musn't complain TOO MUCH but what the pluck were they thinking when I already told them I don't want to touch it and they still approach the manager, asking for permission to force me to handle it? Jerks!"

Aussies are great people: always looking at the bright side, easy-going and friendly, with a ready supply of inoffensive jokes and jibes and pleasant small talk (OK, I'm stereotyping. Bad me.) but....why do I always feel the pressure to say "everything's great!" to their friendly, off-hand questions? Like if I do not, I'll be seen as a moody grey cloud that crosses their path of eternal sunshine and darkens their skies momentarily.

I should probably learn from their optimism and explain away my moodiness with a cheery: "Just doing my part to block out the ultraviolet, mate!" :P

Enjoy interactive dining (subject to cooking dexterity)

Interactive dining experience with fresh, au naturel food sans oil, fat, condiments = lots of listless fiddling with food and pointless scrapping of chao ta bits on the grill with utensils and while waiting for said food to turn "golden and deliciously crispy" = enduring with a bored sulk the "nice-try-but-u-suck" rhyming with the word Mraz = chao ta dory fish/beef/squid full of carcinogens = cough and flu.

Recommended to all who has alternative tastebuds for steamed broccoli and badly burnt barbecued food. Didn't the shockingly bad camp food we churned out at the secondary school camp teach us anything about our cooking aptitute?

Baking virtuoso in the making (VI): Father's day edition

So, you thought you've heard the last of the baking apprentice? Well, no, of course not! You underestimate my determination to churn out one confectionary fiasco after another.

But after the disaster on Mother's Day, I did tell myself that this time round I'll be meticulous and on-task and pay attention when making a cake for my father. I decided to take on a more intricate receipe: an orange mousse cake. Very foolish, but if you've read my mother's day edition post you'll know that irrationality is my guiding light when it comes to baking.

It looks not bad, doesn't it? Those yellow things on the cake are jelly diced into small cubes. It tasted OK too; at least that's what my father says. Well, the catch is, it took me 5 freaking hours to make it! From 2pm to 7pm. And my mother gleefully told me that she baked a butter cake in just 40 mins last week. ( -_-'') This includes an intermission when I polished off a packet of nasi lemak; and when I had to abandon the whole thing and scurry off to buy another packet of dairy cream after a failed attempt to whip up the mousse. Wiped out, I tell you.

I think my father ought to be touched. Maybe he'll give me a big b'day prezzie this week.

We're the summer kids

Next week is a good week, a special week. 'Cos it's my birthday and the other june baby's follows on the 23/06 and by that I mean.... J. Mraz! Haha, and WL's also lah. Aren't you honoured to be sharing your b'day with Mr. Mraz, huh? We're the summer kids, made of sunshine and blue skies and holidays and I don't know, erm, heat wave?

Anyway, I was telling H that I wanted to bake a Milo cake and courier it to him, but he's travelling for fun before going on the next round of touring so I don't know where to send the cake to. Looks like I'll have to send it to WL instead, but I don't think she would appreciate it.

Oh, I know! Maybe I'll give her an Oxford dictionary! But I think she'll just use it to whack my little head. Well, we'll make it the mini version then.

Remaking friends

As I grow older, I tell myself that I cannot afford to lose friends because I don't make them easily.

I saw quite a few of my old sec friends yesterday night at a dinner which I've dreaded, because I've made myself incommunicado to them for the past years. I wondered how they would react.

They were my closest group of friends in lower sec, and they still made the effort to reach me. Why was I so mean to them? A columnist wrote about her own experiences fighting with and cutting out friends in the papers today. She said that people change, and when friends no longer offer you what you want in life, you should decide whether to keep the friendship. Sounds selfish, but I guess my mentality was a bit like that then.

We were the model students. Some of them were in leadership roles and we were all hardworking and getting good grades. As a group, we even reported to the science teacher about how some of the students in our class got tips about an upcoming practical test. We were snitchers; I couldn't believe it now, though it seemed the correct thing to do then. I'm glad we were not ostracized by the class then.

I was the one who changed, I think. Being "model" takes effort and was just less fun. I'm not a rebel but being a bit quirky and imperfect, and failing maths, and occasionally geography, was just more me. They seemed so sure of everything while I was just fumbling along. I hate being judged and corrected.

But yesterday, spotting them in the crowd, my first feeling was relief, especially when a friend who sat next to me in class and whom I didn't know was coming was there also. I told some of them I was happy to see them, and I meant it.

I've also cut out a number of friends from JC that way, because JC left me with a lot of bad memories and I wanted to start with a clean slate: I wanted nothing to do with them. Kind of like a memory surgery. Cut out the malignant bits. I was not myself in JC and therefore the friends I made there are not really my friends either. It was not their fault that I had a difficult time, but they formed part of the experience nonetheless.

Now, I think differently. Losing friends through deliberate neglect seems very selfish to me now. I'm quite certain that friends I've ignored do not understand why. The reason, simply to sum up, was that I was unsure of myself as a person. I presented slightly different personas to different groups of people. When I became uncomfortable with a persona, I shed it, along with the friends who knew that side of me. I think, I hope, the personas are converging as I grow older, and that I can remake the friendships I've made and lost along the way.

Food, deplorable food!

I've never been fussy about food. I don't even eat much of it.

Food that I like are mostly cheap junk like instant noodles and veg crackers (I can't remember how many packets I munched through while watching a marathon of a drama series, Jewel in the Palace).

And to emphasise my apathy, my colleague likes to narrate the tale of the day when we escaped from the office and holed ourselves up at a hotel in Orchard Road for a sumptious high tea buffet that was supposed to last a few hours and test our gastronomical stamina, but I quitted after a tuna sandwich and a piece of fruit jelly. All that for 30 bucks. That was an exaggeration on her part for dramatic effect I guess, because I did recall dutifully cramming in some finger food before whinning while they soldiered on with sashimi and cakes and dim sum.

So if I say that a meal I partook irks me, you can be sure it was really irksome. I had a dory fish dish with some pretentious name at a coffee club outlet. Another friend also had dory, with red chicory(?) and anchovies. We were complaining aloud about how dry and hard the fish was. Below are the pictorial evidence of those nasty dishes with names to trip up customers' tongues.

Looks a mess, no? Pieces of dry, cardboard-hard fish with red, unidentifiable crap heaped upon them.

A sorry excuse for the use of dory fish, if you ask me. An indistinguishable mishmash of fish, potatoes, and crumbs with the gritty texture of sand. M asked me how it was and I spat kindly: "Indifferent."

H's beef whatever was no better. Pieces of suspicious-looking meat and mashed potatoes drowned in a grey-brown sauce, creating a gruesome mess. M's "excellent food award"-winning garlic prawn pasta fared somewhat better, though she blurted out that the spices were "weird".

We each had to fork out about 24 bucks for the meal, including drinks and the passable calamari. I guess what irks me so much was that our country is known for an abundance of good, local, cheap food and yet we had to pay to endure such indifferent food with phony names. Give me the food court next time.