food glorious food

i've never been a food lover. to me, it's more sustenance, less enjoyment. sure, i can appreciate a good meal, but i don't particularly have any special feelings towards it, nor have much inclination to seek out good food, or as they now so annoyingly call it, #foodporn.

any food is fine to me as long as it doesn't taste disgusting. doesn't have to be good, but definitely cannot be bad. i think the reason behind this can be traced back to when i was a little boy, eating some of the most borderline-inedible food that my legendary maid used to cook.

i can still remember the afternoons sitting in the kitchen being fed lunch, and i would chew and chew and chew the food forever while refusing to swallow it because it was so gross, and meanwhile my maid would feed me more food in the hope that it would force me to swallow the previous mouthfuls.

the food would be a tasteless mash, any flavour long gone, but for some reason i felt that it would be more disgusting to swallow it than to simply carry on chewing. that was how i spent most afternoons as a boy.

my maid stayed with us until i was 20, and her cooking did not improve for the 18 years she was here. by then i had grown immune and i could eat most of her food without much difficulty.

now that i think of it, i do wonder why didn't i react in the opposite manner and start to appreciate good food instead? i don't know, it just never happened that way.

shit my teachers say

"does anyone know how the sperm gets to the egg? DON'T TRY TO BE FUNNY I DON'T HAVE TO EXPLAIN IT TO YOU IT'S NOT MY JOB."
- primary 6 female science teacher to class, i genuinely had no clue how the sperm gets to the egg and hence no idea why she got mad

"there's a fourth state of matter, plasma, like blood plasma."
- secondary school teacher, it was a few years later that i found out what plasma really was

"english is so confusing. why is it I for idiot, not E for e-diot? I should be i-diot."
- secondary school chinese teacher, out of the blue

"jet lee, jackie chan and bruce lee are all descendants of wang fei hong."
- same chinese teacher, this statement convinced me he was nuts

"WHAT DO YOU MEAN 'YOU ADVISE ME?' YOU THINK I'M YOUR FATHER IS IT?"
- sec 3 form teacher to classmate, yet another characteristic random moment of madness

III

i was listening to billy talent III today and this song caught my attention for the first time ever.

this is where we are now, standing over the edge.

but everyone's already headed down the same road.

where do i go?

peace, love, and FUCK SHIT UP

during my ns days we had to take all sorts of bullshit from all sorts of bullshit people, mostly because of their rank. i probably haven't had it as badly as some of the other poor souls, but there are still some incidents that stay with me till this day, and still piss me off whenever i think of them.

it was somewhere along the way when something in me changed and i knew i was no longer gonna be on the receiving end of any such thing. i'd rather fuck shit up than try to be peaceful and regret it later. and it all went well for me until last sunday...

we booked a school field to play football against another team, and when it was over, there were 30 people waiting to use the tiny changing room, which was basically 2 toilet cubicles, 3 shower cubicles, and 1 circular bench in the middle.

obviously there wasn't any point in trying to squeeze in, so some of us had a little kickabout first. after some time, the crowd cleared and we went in. i was the last one to enter the shower, untying my shoes on the bench when the caretaker came in the changing room and turned off the lights.

i looked up at him and he gave me a hand action like 'wtf are you doing?' i didn't respond and went back to taking off my shoes. this caretaker was an old indian man, probably over 60 years old. so far he's been very quiet and just minding his own business and none of us had bothered him either.

"you going to shower ah?" he asked. yeah, i said. "just now you got sooooo much time why you don't wanna shower you waste my time you know?!"

"just now so many people, we're waiting for them to go off," i replied. "ay come on lah don't gimme this kind of excuse. just now all the while i been watching you guys playing around outside. if you really want, you can even use that to shower," he said, pointing to a water hose going into the toilet cubicles that people used to wash their ass after shitting.

is he kidding? "how to use that? people use it to wash their backside," i told him. this statement really set him off, that crazy fucker. "wah your reply reeeaaally sarcastic ah, boy!"

well i had no intention of being rude to an elderly person and it seemed like he took real offense, so i tried to explain but he just went on ranting and all his logic was off-kilter, like how 'i should know' and that it's 'common sense' that there's no other team coming to play next and he was going to lock up the place.

since i had already taken the apologetic stance in this situation, i decided to just continue with that as i figured he would shut up soon and also we would be playing here in the future and i didn't want a crazy ass caretaker messing with us. if it was just a one-off incident, oh boy...

but damn this fucker just continued scolding me with his crazy logic, and i was like how the hell would i know this? then i tried to placate him by saying the next time i will know and shower quickly until he finally got tired and walked off.

anyway the point of this story is, even now after a few days, i still feel uncomfortable about the situation, how i allowed this old stupid fuck to walk all over me.

lesson learned here: when in doubt, fuck shit up instead of regretting later.