In the Midst of the A Levels...

I got a text from my Literature rep.

"Hi guys, Mrs Tan will be saying a prayer for us before the paper tomorrow. You are welcome to join in. Meet at 1330h at the staff room benches."

Ah! The benefits of being a Saint.

Thanks, but no thanks. The paper starts at 1400h. I think I'll take that 15mins to study some more. But you guys are welcome to pray for me. Gosh, such a free-rider I am...

But whatever. Help me pray for some easy questions. And World Peace because God's being pretty stubborn about that one.

And also help pray for those Utopians to crawl their way out of poverty... Has all faiths forgotten about the 3rd worlds?

Am I asking for too much? Oh right... also for the mother to cook stomachable meals.

Scratching Beneath the Surface of Humanity

Chloe brought her classmate home for project work today. And while I was in my room doing my usual shit, stoning out of the window or observing my facial hairs intently in the mirror, she called for me and like her slave, I was at her service.

"Yi Wen," she says. "Can you help me open up my Stuart Little project?"

"Sure," I say, "why not?"

Chloe narrowed her eyes slightly.

"But you owe me one," I told her.

"HA! I knew it!" She screamed like she'd just got the grand prize in some powerball lottery. Her friend observed at the side curiously. "How could I believe you would help me without strings attached."

"Great, Chloe, you know me well."

So I plugged her thumbdrive into the computer and headed to open the folder titled, 'My Computer', opened 'Removal Disk F', the file popped open, and when I double-clicked on the powerpoint slide titled, 'Stuart Little Project', an empty powerpoint file opened.

"There's nothing on the file," I told Juan. "Did you save it properly?"

"Oh," Juan says. "That can't be empty. Jessica (her friend) and I worked on this for already one month."

"Oh dear, Chloe.. I think you didn't save it properly!" And then I genuinely felt bad for her. "EVERYTHING IS GONE!!! POOF!!!"

"Hmm.." Juan says. "Well, I guess I didn't save it properly."

"Whoa... one month of hard work, research, and pair meetings..." I snapped my fingers. "Gone."

"Well," Juan says, "It's not the end of the world." She looked over at Jessica for confirmation. Jessica nodded thoughtfully. "We'll just re-do it again!"

"What?!?!" I exclaimed. "You guys are supposed to be devastated! You're not supposed to be taking this monstrous disaster so calmly!"

"Yi Wen," Chloe says. "Being agitated won't solve the issue. One must be rational." Then she turned away from me, turned towards Jessica, and restarted her Stuart Little project.

To-do-list: Bring Chloe to see a psychiatrist.

Ponzi Not?

I eavedropped on the parent's and the sister's tele conversation 2 nights ago and if I'm not wrong, they were talking about finances. Again.

And again, if I'm not wrong, I think my sister's aspiration is to be Bernie Madoff 2.0. Squandering vast sums of money from innocent (but incredibly moronic) folks by promising maximum returns with minimum inputs. The sister thinks that there is something beautiful about the way he scammed the bejesus outta the stupid people of America and squeezed every drop out of the financial sector till it ran dry.

I remember the mother's horrified gasp at the monster over the line in Shanghai, "Eileen!!!" The mother breathes laboriously. "You're tooooooooooo kind for thatttttttt!!!"

"Eileen!!!" The father squeals, "You are very ambitious!!!"

The Mother glares at the Father over the phone.

"Why not be Warren Buffett?!?!" The mother advices. "He earns money the RIGHT way." (Emphasizing on RIGHT.)

And then they went on as to which investor Eileen Chan of Shanghai should turn out to be: The Convict or the Philanthropist? I think the parents went so deep into their discussion, tailoring their arguments to support their own values, that they clean forgot the ambitious scumbag at the other end of the line.

"Hellllllllo, Yellowwwwwwwwwww?" The sister inquires over the other line. Then she bangs the phone on the solid object. Thud. The parents still go on.

"You're teaching the kids allllllll the wrong things!!!" The mother scolds the father. "Then I always have to be at the back picking up alllllllll your dirty work."

"Wrong things?!?" The father retorts. "Just because it goes against your own beliefs doesn't mean its wrong..."

"ANYBODY THERE?!?!" Comes the insignificant 'kid' from Shanghai.

I was in my room trying to do some work but the noise just got louder and louder and it was increasingly harder to concentrate even with noise reduction earphones stuffed in my ears.

"SHUT THE FUCK UP!!!" I screamed from my room. "I can't concentrate!!! And if I can't concentrate, I'm gonna screw up my exams and then you guys aren't gonna have old age security."

They shut up for a while, contemplating the dire consequences of an old age in poverty, then the dad tells me that Madoff will provide money for them anyway. That's when they go back to square one and goes on over and over again. The last thing I heard before I died of misery was Eileen still calling for attention over the crazily over-priced IDD call to Shanghai.

Ugly but Delicious!

The Mother and The Father and The Chloe are out because Chloe has an appointment with the Skin Doctor (they call themselves dermatologists to make them sound more respectable but really, all they do is aggravate your pimples and rashes even more). So with no authoritative figures inspecting my every other move, it was the perfect opportunity to spend quality time with the computer. Then the doorbell rang. It was... The Neighbour.

The Neighbour likes to come over with food sometimes because she's from abroad and she doesn't really have many friends around. I'm not complaining. She and the mother like to talk at the gate like they live on Wisteria Lane but I benefit because the mother is the one who has to do the talking while I eat all the fruits of her labour. But today, there was no one home and unfortunately, I had to open the door because the neighbour lives one storey up, opposite my unit. This means she knows when I'm in, when I'm out, what I'm doing, what I shouldn't be doing... So I got up from where I was sitting and opened the door.

The son of the neighbour happens to be this incredible genius or rather, more hardworking than me so he's the recepient of many prestigious awards and travels across the seas to represent Singapore in global summits... even though he's from foreign lands. The Neighbour sees the fact that her son and I are both taking the A Levels as a common topic that bonds our two families. And as every proud mother and annoying neighbour, she brags on and on and on about his accomplishments when I clearly don't give two hoots about his impending nobel prize in Physics..

Today, she came over with biscuits and grapes. She says they're for me because I've been so-o-o hardworking but I have a feeling the Mother may have paid her to send it over to me when the mother is coincidentally not home to watch me so as to pull on my guilt strings. Her plan fails because I'm now eating biscuits and grapes like the Ancient Greek people during the Greco-Persian wars in donch-know-what B.C.

I have to show my gratitude so I tell her, "OHHHHHHHH biscuits!!! I LOVEEEEE biscuits!!!"

She smiles satisfactorily.

"NO WAY!!! Grapes as well!!! How KIND OF YOU!!!!!!" I gush.

Her smile widens.

After like 30 minutes at the gate, talking mainly of her son's accomplishments, with me responding with an, "OHHH!!", "WHOAAA!!!", "GETOUTTAHERE!!!" (though she took it not the way I intended it to be...), I finally managed to pull the bladder stunt and told her that I gotta pee ASAP.

She relunctantly relaxed her iron grips from my front gates and went home while I HAD to pretend to go the bathroom to pee (because like I mentioned before, her house gives her the power of GOD... she can SEE what I'm doing...) So I went to the bathroom and when I came out, I looked at the biscuits she brought... Very interesting, I must say...



BRUT MA BUON! UGLY BUT DELICIOUS! (I donch know anyone like that)

Anyway, after I'd taken that picture, it got addictive and I finally know why so many people go into the Food Blogging industry...

I took picture of my breakfast cabinet.

When I say I'm made out of cornflakes, you gotta believe me because... well, just because.

And when I say The Mother is a health fanatic, I mean it... because this was what the Mother



Cooked for my lunch...




If you call that cooking. I tell her I'm not a horse. She says she knows. That's why she's boiled some Corn on the Cob! I tell her that I'm so happy and I'm reallllllllly looking forward to living the rest of my life with her. And that her healthy meals will extend both my life expectancy and this pleasure :)



And this is what I should be doing... (This is for those who haven't seen me in a hairband and want to sneer at my domestic appearance).

Along came Bug

I donch know about you guys but I don't really fall ill often. I think the main reason why The mother may feel some sort of maternal affection towards me, her second offspring, is because even as a young kid, I eat my greens, which means I build a healthy immune system that results in lesser hospital visits, more leisure time for the mother to do more house chores, more extra money for the mother to safe up for my college fund.

I cannot remember the last time I visited the Docs for illness related visits. If I do catch the rare flu-bugs (last time was possibly 3 or 4 years ago), I drink water, eat a fruit, and the next morning I bounce right back up like a bball.

Yet today, my nose is acting weird. It's been running like a leaky faucet and I've sneezed at least 28 times. If one sneeze means, someone's talking behind your back, and 2 means somebody's thinking of you, what could 28 sneezes mean? I do hope it equates out to wealth, power, normal fertility, positive correlation between physical appearance and time, increasing trend between metabolism and age, world peace, revival of the Dodos, and a breakthrough in scientific discoveries for immortality (Subjected to further revisions).

On my fifth sneeze, the mother brought up the fact that it's unusual to see me sneezing but I brushed it off as a morning sinus. But when I started sneezing violently like I'm an ant and someone is chopping me into half, I knew something was amiss.

Before today, I used to think that if my generally good health persists, I can die a normal death of old age.. The one where you die in your sleep smiling and then you're discovered in the morning by one of your relations, which they then gather around your death bed, with absolutely no thoughts of how to split your wealth and property, but start wailing and wishing they'd spend more time with you... Rather than dying in the middle of your chemotheraphy treatment where you're bald with droopy eyebags, Sahara-parched colorless lips, and several holes in your body where the needles enter and exit with all sorts of drugs.

Oh god, I just sneezed and there's mucus all over the keyboard.

I'm going to die in the most catastrophic manner ever.

Ant before dissection: O~O
Ant after dissection: O ~O

Karma.

SCHOOL KETCHUP!

(My stupid teacher IC was so lazy she didn't even bother sending it in for us. I'm trying not to feel like I wasted several days colating information and having fruitless meetings with the other members to derive at NOTHING...)

It all began with a muffin.

The first time I heard of Culinary and Homemaking Club, I was scratching my scalp raw, threatening to pull off all my hair follicles, wondering what it was exactly that they did every Wednesday in the Cocoa Tree kitchen; with a sink, an oven, and a stove.

It was during the CCA fair day that I chanced upon the CHC booth where they were handing out free muffins. Being the stereotypical Singaporean, all I could see was muffins, muffins, and more muffins. Naturally, I disregarded the sports and the performing arts, and decided to cut the chase and made a beeline to the CHC booth.

“Culinary, fine… but homemaking?!” I’d asked one of the members manning the booth. “Is this some aspiring domestic home agency?!?!” The first image that popped up in my mind was of Cinderella scrubbing the floors and singing lullabies.

“No,” she replied matter-of-factly, passing me a muffin; on the house. “It’s different.”

“Then what do you guys do? Learn how to fold blankets?” I stared at her incredulously.

At that point of time, I did not see the point in learning house chores such as spring cleaning, clearing cobwebs from dark corners or cooking meals three times a day. To me, being a homemaker was of low ambition and it involved you being a hermit and never leaving your home.

However, the benefits of being in CHC are endless (unlike the global food supply). Firstly, they evidently are concerned about your physical well-being. Before you even reach the kitchen, there is a four-storey flight of stairs to work on your quadriceps before you start stuffing your face. Then, the teachers constantly remind us to eat by the healthy dietary pyramid of two servings of fruits and vegetables a day.

Taking a trip down fond memory lane, my batch (students; not cookies) had consisted of absolutely no guys; zilch. Not meaning to be Gertrude Stein, it felt like a typical member of CHC was like the anti-thesis of the modern female ideal. Even more ironic was that practically all top chefs are male. And last year, Ms K cooked pasta and went wild on the Olive Oil (which we learnt, is HEALTHY oil). This year, Mr. Moses Lim (aka. Brad Pitt-at-certain-angles) baked the healthy whole-wheat Banana cake, and Mr. Peh Bock Kiat (The-Jacob-Ballas-gate-guard), who claims that, “baking is therapeutic,” presented us with the sophisticated-9-minute-almost-instant ‘Baby Molten Chocolate Cake’ (Layman term: Tiny chocolate cake).

Of course, fulfilling our duty as every responsible citizen should, we contributed back to society. This year, we baked cookies for Valentine’s Day and managed to raise a substantial sum to help the less fortunate.

We did not take part in any competitions; neither did we embark on epic adventures. Then we ask ourselves this question: What is the whole point of this club? Why do we meet up every Wednesdays just to watch cooking demonstrations again and again and again?

The answers to the above are simple. As cheesy as it sounds, they say ‘the proof is in the pudding’. There is something beautiful in this journey we have experienced during our two year stay. Success is not in becoming a Michelin-star chef, achieving a renowned title, or having a breakthrough in culinary history. Deep inside, it is the process that matters. The bonds that we have created will remain with us forever; the values that have been taught to us will shape our character and will be passed down to the future generations; and most importantly, deep appreciation for those who have contributed to our lives. After all, as Chef Gusteau in Ratatouille would declare, “Anyone can cook!”

(And of course, it's all bullshit to feed to the school paper...But alas, the school paper doesn't eat crap...)

It's 0026am. New day. There's 6 nocturnal people from my class still online (empirical results supported by MSN). I guess tomorrow we know how many people's gonna konk off in class.