When the clock strikes 12

She had no slipper to leave behind, but the headphones were a dead giveaway.

"I thought Asians didn't like cemeteries!"

Was what the caretaker said as he ushered two very embarrassed, very relieved Chinese girls and their cameras out through his private entrance, a full hour after the gates had been locked.

You know classes have resumed when...

ProQuest comes back into your 10 most recently visited sites.

What to cook is evaluated in terms of whether it counts as a "thing you can pack for lunch that won't have to be heated up so that you can escape using the Nukes of Terror in the student centre".

You actually start going to bed at 10pm, instead of only talking about it.

You read less in order to have more time to read.

Boo-hoo, bring back the hols.

On the bright side... each week is another week closer to graduation ;o)

More adventures in public healthcare

Two nights ago, I was trying to fall into a more respectable nighttime sleep pattern as befits a second-year postgraduate student.

Then I heard what I thought was an assault victim gasp-screaming in surprise as he got taken out from the rear with a heavy blunt instrument, like maybe a psychological manual. Must be The Housemate winding down with some soothing late-night TV, I thought.

Then my "better safe than sorry" voice kicked in, and I went to investigate and decided that "heavy blunt instrument" should have been substituted with "food poisoning" and the only victim in question is the person who occupies the next room.

And the next few hours turned into a blur of racking my brains for a temporary home remedy for persistent vomiting; searching online for 24-hour clinics; driving around the Inner West searching for the non-existent 24-hour clinics...

... and making the mistake of thinking that A&E at the huge teaching hospital around the corner from home would be an appropriate place to go, for by that time it was beginning to look like a bona fide emergency.

It was a mistake, because:

1. We had left the house in a hurry and didn't think to bring the patient's passport, birth certificate, insurance card (which BTW doesn't exist) and mother along as proof of ID, and the belligerent triage nurse refused to even hear what was wrong until she had been registered, and in order to register her, she had to know WHO SHE WAS!
2. Clearly, we showed up at the wrong place looking for the wrong thing. Y'see, what we wanted was swift medical attention. We weren't expecting to jump ahead of DIY accidents and premature labour, just maybe a doctor's consultation before sunrise. Simple enough, right? Want to see doctor, go where the doctors are. Problem, solution. Done. But the solution being provided here wasn't "medical attention", the peg that fits in the hole, "repeated and violent vomiting over 90 minutes". What was on offer at this hospital was instead the answer to the question, "Where can one go to be verbally abused, repeatedly, while one's stomach continues to be attacked by very hostile microbes?"

Fortunately, we eventually got out of that bizarre parallel universe where it's acceptable to yell at a sick stranger who comes to your organisation seeking medical assistance. After one more false start (can somebody please tell me why a place called "24 Hour Medical and Dental Practice" is not open 24 hours?) we finally found a hospital staffed by human beings: lucid, warm, competent human beings who didn't penalise us for the fact that their jobs involved staying up through the night.

And they wonder why some people would literally rather die than go to public hospital. I can understand if triage nurses in busy hospitals need to be abrupt and skip the "soft skills" when there are people waiting to be assessed. But there was no queue at this hospital, and in my book there is no justification for the rudeness.

Y'know, if I want to be snapped at, I know where to go. Like maybe I'd offer to tape the tail end of a TV movie for my grandma, and then program the VCR wrongly and tape the pilot of Dogs At Work instead. (I really did do this once, she really did snap, but the rest of the time Mama Saw is to me a cuddly bundle of good grandmotherly lovin', and a killer cook to boot.) Or, I could go back in time to Latin dancing class and exit a hockey stick with sloppy turnout and no headwork. There would be the snapping, but it would be worth it because everyone knows that WL is a great instructor who refuses to let dancers perform below their potential. I might even pick the fond "Don't take three meatballs! After you can't fit into your New Year baju, you don't come and scold me!" reprimand from my friend the chap fun uncle in Taman Mayang. The point is, if I want to be yelled at, the last place I would think of to get it is an emergency room at 1am.

Breaking bread

Meet my new friend who rode over from Singapore in Michelle's luggage and didn't raise any suspicion in the Australian customs bloodhounds. It has been three days since its arrival and it's still soft and yeasty-smelling, more than I can say of buns that have turned to stone overnight.

However, some things have changed. It no longer resides on a stylish square plate, having taken up a spot next to my computer on the desk. And something of its freshly-baked appearance has changed. Because Ren is a tenacious little cookie, and right after presenting me with my ocean-crossing "snack" from near home, Michelle had told me to break it open to see what flavour it was. And I obliged. To her great surprise, I did indeed break it open, instead of stopping after several grunting attempts and staring in surprise at Wonder Bun, here.

Apparently, this distinguishes me as the first of her victims to manage to break one of these uncannily realistic phony baked goods.

Hear my surprise when she tells me, "It's not real, LAH!" in a hurry, once I've done the deed.

Ah well. It's quite a good mouse wrist support, even with a surreal crack in its forehead. And it's still smiling, the trouper.

I thought I was too late. All the way to Tamarama, I kicked myself for sleeping in that extra 45 minutes. I watched the sky brighten all too quickly as I drove. I regretted the pictures I wouldn't get to take of first light emerging in the east.

Yet, despite my getting there long after light had hit the sands, I got this:

Strangely, that came about half an hour after this:

And these:






No profound conclusions this time, just awed adoration of the artist behind it all.

And a happy Moo year!

Whether you're temporarily back in the loving circle of family in the homeland,

or recovering from a surfeit of home-made macadamia pralines brought on by an overzealous sister-in-law's festive food gift,

or shivering over a homemade steamboat for one in the wintry Northern Hemisphere...

I hope you'll have a hoof-stompin' start to another great year.

Me? I am not any more homesick than usual (which is to say, not any less homesick, either). I've seen more Chinese New Year decorations in the city, non-Chinese-populated parts included, than you might expect. The only difference is that every shopping mall I step into, driven by the heat into the embrace of free air-conditioning, is not pulsing with the sounds of the classic Chinese New Year soundtrack led by 'Cai Shen Dao' followed by 'Gong Xi Ni, Gong Xi', in an assortment of dialects and accompanied with any number of cymbals and gongs. That pushes the list of New Year thanksgivings up a notch.

This New Year season is definitely different from the childhood ones spent in Penang, days that whizzed by yielding an average of at least 3.4 lions, a dozen butter cookies, a couple dozen chocolate chip, and countless Melting Moments and pineapple tarts each. Not to mention Grandma's very traditional Hokkien cherry cheese squares, my aunt's matchless sugee cake, and that jelly thing that is apparently nothing more than coagulated egg white and sugar. The staccato blasts of firecrackers that sent plump housecats racing for the nearest dark corner, tails afluff and claws on alert. The noisy family steamboats, the New Year's Day breakfast of vegetarian noodles with real veggies and mock everything else, the drives around the island in search of relatives, more cookies, more laughter, shade, an icy-sugary-red-bean-sweet-corn-grass-jelly-attap-seed-bedecked something to bring core temperatures down before the whole family melted into a puddle of festively dressed sludge.

But it's not all different, oh no. I haven't walked into a negative of my life back home. Because the heat, folks, the heat is just the same. I am still wondering where I can get a good-quality icy-sugary-red-bean-and-everything-else something to bring the core temperature down before I melt down into a puddle of sludge, festively dressed or otherwise. Forty-degree weather should be outlawed.

Happy New Year again, and just in case you were wondering, this isn't the lion dance from last night. That was a little chaotic and shot too close up, but in keeping with the season, I thought this clip from the Shanghai junket I took two years ago would do.

The greatest...

This post began life, with a sterile mouse click, as a sarcastic crack at an e-mail I received today. Said e-mail exhorts its male recipients to forward its minimally proven, scantily detailed health "warning" contents to their "wives, daughters, girlfriends". I took issue with the assumption that every guy reading the e-mail had all three of these. And it occurred to me to ask, don't the men in these guys' address books deserve to know, too, of the toxicity of dried mushroom water? And also, what do women who receive the e-mail do, since they are not given similar instructions to inform their nearest and dearest (presumably, only of the opposite sex) of what the press, the medical community, the aunties who gossip in loud whispers at every corner of Sea Park Market have failed to tell us.

> For those of you who cannot read Chinese, this message is to
> warn you against using the
>
> water you soak your mushrooms in. Most of the mushrooms on
> the market are from China,
>
> and are contaminated with chemicals (I think it is carbon
> bisulfide, correct me if I am wrong)
>
> which are soluble in water. You must discard the water in
> which you soak to soften the
>
> dried mushrooms.
>
> Guys, please forward this to your wives, daughters,
> girlfriends.

And, of course, I was riled by the implied sexism of the e-mail, because of course what it really boils down to is: men don't soak dried mushrooms; women do. So guys, your involvement in this only goes as far as forwarding the e-mail, because if anyone is going to end up stiff as a board on the kitchen floor with a puddle of toxic fungus water nearby, it's going to be one of the three women this e-mail assumes are in your life.

So, while we're occupied with boiling things down to their basic content, what's really bugging me about this e-mail is:

1. the assumption that men don't cook/prepare food, or that only women do.
   
2. the lack of detail. What about this chemical is so harmful?
3. the lack of scientific substantiation. Has anyone been lab-testing mushrooms and finding this particular chemical, in amounts worthy of being mentioned?
4. that it fails to answer this absolutely unimportant, but nonetheless nagging question. Have people not been discarding their mushroom-infused water?

Anyway... all this should prove that I do have my moments of ridiculous pettiness over the most trivial of matters. As if you needed proof. But my irritation was broken by the presence online of a good friend and hymn-harmonising buddy back home, who sent me a song and told me she misses me. That was all it took for the bubble of irritation to burst, and for me to be reminded of what really matters. More of this boiling down business. When the excess matter of my life has bubbled off into vapour, when the scum of my unresolved character flaws has been scooped aside, what remains?

A writer I know of also seemed to be in the habit of boiling things down to bare bones.

"And now these three remain," the apostle Paul wrote centuries ago. "Faith, hope and love."

"But the greatest of these," he concludes...

The greatest...

That which I hope will be all that remains when my life is distilled...

"The greatest of these is love."

New Year whats?

I returned their phone calls shortly after the second (watching Alvin and the Chipmunks, didn't hear phone ringing) and hours after the first (cleaning house that I had been sitting). New Year's wishes were exchanged. Movie reviews were, briefly, shared. Food, check, fireworks, check, and what else did you do for New Year's Eve?

And then, "So, what are your New Year resolutions?", where the exchange ended, because I had nothing to contribute, being completely baffled by the mentality behind waiting for a specific time that comes around at the paltry rate of once a year before you want to change something about the way you're living. I'm rather more into February 3rd resolutions. And June 18th resolutions, etc. Like, as and when something negative about my lifestyle bites me, I would like to be able to get out the proverbial bug spray on the spot rather than put it on hold until the end of the year.

But if you're the once-a-year-resolutions type, have fun and all the best.

Another one of those analogy things

So, sometimes it's hot and everything around you is unattractive and unspectacular...

... but maybe that's because you need to shift your sights by a few degrees.