Fries with Ice Cream

Proof my mum still sees me as a kid in elementary school:

I was working on a project that required the use of colour pencils and so, on my table there was a flurry of pencils, coloured pencils and eraser dusts. My mum comes into my room and she frowned.

“You should put the colour pencils away carefully, you wouldn’t want to lose them.”

“But I’m working!” I whined. “I’ll put them away when I’m done.”

“No, you should put them away after you’re finished. Finish one colour, put them back and take out the next colour.”

I was about to comply when it suddenly hit me. My mum was nagging me about colour pencils.

“Waaaait! I’m like twenty-something! You’re nagging me like a six year old! I’m not going to lose my colour pencils! And I bought them! I’m an adult and I can do what I please with the colour pencils!”

“Oh, yeah! Sorry, box of colour pencils, automatic mom-mode. I’m still traumatised by the number of colour pencils I bought for you over the years.”

***

We Malaysians eat normal things. We do!

So Eizwan’s boss, AK is a Norwegian who is posted to Malaysia. All around nice guy, he’s a little tentative about the food in Malaysia. Who wouldn’t be after being tricked into eating tempoyak (fermented durian) at the office?

It was a celebratory dinner after their team slogged in hours of hard work on a database project. I was utterly gleeful of being invited to the dinner, especially when there was plenty of dessert and most importantly a chocolate fountain.

I think I spent most of the evening at the chocolate fountain, I don’t remember much of the other stuff at the buffet, and after munching on marshmallows dipped in chocolate, I could not help but sit back, semi in pain from the chocolate overload.

“Done already?” AK teased me.

“Not quite,” I said. And further proof why my mouth has a tendency to speak before the brain processes. “It’d be perfect if we had fries with ice-cream right now.”

“What?!” AK said. He made a face,apparently reminiscent of the time when one of his staff tricked him into eating fermented durian. He gave Eizwan a look, a look which suggested that your fiancee may be out of her mind.

“Hey, it’s not bad!” I said, a tad bit defensively.

“It’s fries. With ice-cream,” he intoned. He turned to another one of his staff who was sipping mango lassi who was listening to the conversation, but did not contribute.

“Arief, what do you think? Fries with ice-cream. She’s crazy right?”

Arief nodded wisely. “Well…Actually, it’s very good, especially if it’s hot fries with McDonald’s sundae.”

“Oreo Mcflurry for me!” another colleague put in.

The best way to describe AK’s facial expression was something along the lines of him unable to wait to head back to Norway. Where they eat normal things, I presume. Like fish soaked in lye water. Yumm.

Growing up with Who

*Mild spoilers for DW: The Stolen Earth. Don’t read if you don’t want to know the flavour of the episode*

It’s crazy on how much I adore the series Doctor Who and I’ve tried over and over again to express the best I can why I adore the series. It really isn’t about the an alien who looks awfully cute and travels in a time machine that looks like a police box.

After postponing as much as possible, I finally decided to watch “The Stolen Earth” with my sister. Both Hani and I broke down at the ending, possibly not as much as I did for “Doomsday” but enough nonetheless.

Later on in the evening, I tried to explain again to Eizwan on why Doctor Who resonates for me so strongly. I said  that it had something to do  with the fact that I could watch these characters on TV, fall deeply in love with all of them, the Doctor and his companions and be taken on this incredibly complex and emotional journey, one so emotional that it really felt like someone had taken your heart and ripped it apart. This is, in my mind, the ultimate skill of a story teller, to take the audience on a journey with you, to believe and to love as deeply as the writer/creator does.

This morning, I found on the Guardian, an article analysing the impact of the Doctor’s emotional journey on children. It never occurred to me, as deeply affected as I maybe by the episodes, the kind of impact it had on children. The parents wrote in about how their kids would be unable to sleep at night and parents would spend Saturday evenings calming down their kids’ hysterics.

According to child psychologist Charles Fernyhough,  empathetic sadness, or feeling unhappy because something unhappy happened to someone else, is the most complex of all emotions and parents try their best to shelter their kids from a difficult emotion. Doctor Who, the writer claims, is teaching children a very difficult and sophisticated emotion where their hero goes through devastating tragedy after tragedy. This is in contrast to  most happy endings (or surrealism if you watch Spongebob) in most modern Western fairy tales. I say Western as Japanese anime tend to have a darker flavour to them most of the time.

It’s not to say one is more superior over the other: a Disney fairytale where there’s happily ever after vis a vis Doctor Who, a darker fairy tale where the hero does not get the princess (or in the case of DW, the hero loses the girl to another universe, the only other “family” left in the universe dies etc etc) but I do wonder, what it means to force children to “grow up” so quickly with darker fairy tales. In a world where nine year olds where high heels and make up, do we need them to understand devastation and melancholy so early?

But I am not a parent, so I cannot imagine to comment. If I were a parent, I’d imagine I would love my kids to watch Doctor Who (not because I’m a psychotic fan, that’s besides the point) but to share with them the wonderment of the Who-niverse and the complexity of understanding grief, sacrifice and happiness from a hero who is always optimistic about the future.

….and possibly to scare the hell out of them, because DW is awfully scary.

Growing up…sort of

Met up with a bunch of my uni mates in Porto Romano in Taman Tun tonight, to celebrate Jo and Fani’s last few moments of singledom before their tying the know in April 5th. Whilst the food ain’t that great, the company was as always fantastic.

One of my biggest fears when I first came back from the UK was that eventually, we’re just going to grow apart without our Warwick experiences holding us together. Tonight was the first time where I felt quite comfortable about who we’ve become. Warwick  dominated very little of the evening’s conversation, the conversation veered around our jobs, politics and then mostly topics that when I try to recall later, make absolutely no sense and could have only been made by people on substance abuse. Except we weren’t smoking up anything, since Dilla is pregnant and is a doctor, so that’s quite impressive.

The cracky insane conversation  assured me, that despite impending marriage and babydoms, my friends are just as silly and ridiculous as they were six years ago when I first entered university as a wee, naive child of 19. Despite their respectable jobs, their outwardly mature personas and their kind demeanour, lie people with wit and an insanity streak that give me so much hope for the future.

Their kids are lucky to have them as parents.