Good to be home again

We’re not a sentimental family. If I was caught out of the borders, I wouldn’t be one of those sob losers (much as I sympathise with their plight) blaming the government for choices I’ve made.

But it’s more than great to see everyone again.

2nd Dec/Thursday

It’s so hot that my armpits feel as if something sticky is plastered on them (the anti-perspirant which does nothing anyway). For the longest time, I used this anti-perspirant called Old Spice Endurance. It was so industrial strength that not even soap could wash it off. I would use it everyday without realising that I was creating this layer of product that eventually transferred onto the armpits of my clothes, staining them white and ruining the; and my shirts aren’t necessarily cheap so..

I switched to a spray one that promises no staining but now I’ve learned to live with sweaty pits; I just need to remind myself not to raise my arms in public to stretch and displaying wet pits but who the fuck cares.

The more you worry about it I realised, the more you actually sweat.

Anyhow, it’s only 22 degrees in Auckland- but feels twice that and I’m thinking, I won’t be able to live in the Philippines anymore unless I confine myself in an air-conditioned prison. But no I don’t want to anymore to be honest.

Anyhow, welcome to the last 28 days or so for the shit-show that is 2021 (the world that is, and not my life).

It’s been so hot, Lily has taken to hanging out back where the sun never shines and sleeps on the cool concrete

Tuesday's Chicken Pot Pie

Pies are ridiculously easy to make, I mean if you have store-bought pastry you can literally turn anything into a pie. A pie is essentially just two things- the pastry case and the filling.

Don’t bother making your own though the only argument for that is if you’re doing large rounds and the square-shaped sheets just don’t cut it (you can roll them out again though).

And you can have literally any filling though make sure you have a binding sauce like cheese or maybe even a roux. I got one of the last two packets of chicken breast and minced them with onions, seasoning and oregano. Cooked it with a can of Campbell’s mushroom soup and two fistfuls of frozen spinach.

Put in the oven at 180 for about 40 minutes.

What are you reading? The Riftwar Saga by Raymond Feist

Just finished Dune, and while I was tempted to continue through to the next books, I thought that the Atreides saga was a bit heavy on my mind as well as evoking too close to current events. For those of you who haven’t read it, the gist of it is this- be careful of believing in leaders who promise you everything. Some nations make this mistake far too often, and we know who these are.

The difference however with Dune’s protagonist-hero Paul Atreides and real-life leaders is that he’s truly fair and moral because of course, it’s fiction. In real life, you get GARBAGE like Trump, Putin, Bolsonaro and Duterte. Well, the people who vote for them can certainly lie in the beds they’ve made and I hope they rot in them. So leaving the planet Arrakis for now..

And because real life in 2021 is still shit, I’m still doing fantasy. I’m sure I’ve read Raymond Feist before, but I’m not sure, so I’ll take a trilogy please..

26th Nov

It’s normal the doctor said, and R remembered a time when he would have argued with him.

So I take a 20 minute bus ride, fall asleep and relive dreams so vivid that I can literally feel the time I spent in that dream; and they were weeks, months even. And then just like that, I wake up at the beep of the bus telling me that I’ve reached my stop. And the beep is no louder than a phone notification.

There was nothing normal about this.

But then he was 167 years old, ‘frozen’ at 52 and looked no younger than 35, so he didn’t argue.

He went home and realised when he was on the bus, that he was supposed to drop by the supermarket for some stuff. Some time ago, he would take this as a sign that something was remiss. He likened it to snow loosening, slowly but surely gaining momentum and mass until it became an avalanche, a total collapse of his senses and his mind, but beyond that, he couldn’t really imagine what came next. Would it be total oblivion, a comforting blackness like dreamless sleep? Or would it be an endless dream that flowed from one scene to the next, again also comforting like being afloat on a calm ocean with your eyes closed?

But he would look at his face in the mirror- bright eyes, bright unlined, dewy skin- and know that nothing was really wrong. That he was only half-hoping, half-fearing and these two feelings never really met half-way, and after a while- fifty years to be exact- he stopped looking for signs.

New glasses

Under New Zealand’s traffic-light system, the country (Auckland) will be opening hand in hand with Covid, in the 1st week of December.

I can finally visit Doyet and the family; think of eating in a restaurant; last minute shopping (?); Physio-massage (carpal tunnel ugh); teeth (root-canal ugh) and glasses! Need an eye-check and possibly a new pair.

Here is the short-list:

24 Wednesday: hungry

I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but I’m always hungry- craving for flavour.

Restaurants are opening soon and I’m thinking, Filipino- pork sisig, crispy pata and pork barbecue. This photo was taken exactly a year ago when we had dinner at a Filipino restaurant called Kalye Manila.

I’m also craving for something sweet like cheesecake; peanut butter cheesecake.

Saturday night

Streaming is so pervasive, that sometimes I don’t finish what I’m watching and end up doing something mundane instead like laundry, a bit of work, cleaning the bathroom or planning meals. And then I realise that none of that is mundane- but stuck in bed binging on Netflix is. I feel that if I settle in, I’ll be trapped. It’s like cocaine for the eyes.

There’s a shit load of new movies and I’m not sure I’ll end up watching all of them, but here’s my list both current and upcoming:

Anything with Akwafina!

Anything with Halle Barry!

Anything with Dev Patel!

Hated the book, loved the series

If you want to know how a waking nightmare feels like, or how you want to slide your tender thumb across a sharp Japanese knife, watch this

ANYTHING WITH SANDY!

What are you reading? Dune by Frank Herbert

I make stories up a lot which I think of as being part and parcel of being a writer. But then I haven’t published anything; spent the last 20 years of my career being more of a graphic-designer-project manager type where copy was only a small part; and some have actually called me out that this story-telling is actually lying. Well.

Anyhow…I always claimed that I had read Dune. And I have read so many books that some I have actually forgotten until I’ve come across them again, and the 1st page is immediately familiar. And I have come across multiple copies of Dune when I was younger so in my mind, the probability was high that I had read it. The new movie version by the gifted Denis Villeneuve prompted me to try and re-read the book again so I bought a Kindle copy.

After the first page I was shocked to discover, that no, I actually have not read the book. None of it was familiar, even as I was equally shocked at how easy Frank Herbert’s prose is. In my mind, even the false memory of having read it, had within it, a false memory of what his prose was like.

Shoulder-day

When you eat or have sex or buy a pair of new shoes, the pleasure is immediate; it’s a shame that when you exercise, it’s not. You have to wait afterwards, and only if you’ve done it right.

I never liked exercise, but it’s all a matter of conditioning your mind. There are days when I give in, but that’s rare now and are usually the days when I need to rest anyway and recover.

I don’t have a six-pack yet, or a 25-inch bicep (that would make me look way asymmetrical so NO), or big legs (I’m short at 5’8 and I don’t want to look like I came from a farming family- and not the one who owns the hacienda- not that there’s anything wrong with that 😅), but I actually feel good, and that’s all you’d ever need.

Monday and the idiocy of not driving

I missed the chance last week to drive either with Mary or Sam to pick up my meds on the way to the supermarket, and the pharmacy was closed on a Sunday. So on a super hectic Monday- with back to back to back to back soul-sucking Microsoft Teams meetings, I had to go on an Uber before lunch to pick them up.

Took nearly 40 minutes round-trip- on what looked like a normal pre-Covid-lockdown Monday- and $32 dollars.

But thank the Lord for little blessings like my boss finishing one approval meeting in under 12 minutes leaving me to pretend that I was busy for the next 45.

So I had time to make my current favourite way to cook noodles for a late lunch, as if it was ramen (this is Nasi Goreng) which is leave a little liquid on what is actually a dry sort of noodle, and to swirl in a dollop of butter. For protein, I topped it with a pan-fried salmon piece.

It was very satisfying and just enough to make me slightly forget I could have used that $32 Uber fare for salmon at just under a kilo.

KFC Saturday & Aneesha finds a weapon that could kill the aliens

We finally gave in.

Too blah to cook. I had to wake up early to recreate the goddamned corrupted 3D file which was easier the 2nd time around because now I knew where all the elements went in. And I used objects in actual scale which didn’t make any difference as I belived it would, but shaved off heaps of time in scaling them down to size.

But the program did become noticeably slower as I added more and more objects into the 3D space and I was thinking, if I only had the new MacBook Pro with the M1 Max chip, mmmmm ($6,054!).

So it’s episode 6 already in Apple TV + Invasion and the slowness - while it’s done really well mostly- is making me ask a lot of questions with no answers in sight. Like what happened to Sam Neil’s retired sheriff character way back in episode one?? Is he dead or not? If you remember, he was digging around the strange crop circle in a farmer’s field when the aliens somehow ‘stabbed’ him with something. The last shot is of him somewhat looking either stunned or dramatically dead with his eyes open. But judging by how a slew of soldier’s bodies were shown mangled and mutilated in episode 6, there’s still hope that Sam was merely temporarily incapacitated. But it’s strange that it’s this far into the series and that story arc has been totally abandoned.

Going back to Aneesha, she manages to go back to the house and arrives to find it barricaded against something. Her family and the couple who took their family in Patrick and Kelly, are hiding in the attic and this is expectedly where the friendly, sympathetic atmosphere evaporates as everyone panics.

Aneesha declares that they were leaving, and this is where everything goes south; the daughter falls through the attic floor and Aneesha follows to rescue her. The noise alerts the alien, and we see for the 1st time what it looks like- a sort of octopus with tentacles and bristling, camouflage-like skin. Kelly falls through the same underlay flooring, but manages to hold on- but the alien gets her as Patrick desperately tries to hoist his wife up.

Aneesha and Ahmed make it downstairs but Ahmed is attacked while trying to move the furniture they used to barricade the door. Aneesha and the kids escape through a window in the basement and try to make a run for it using Patrick and Kelly’s car. But the alien rams itself through the windshield and takes its time to eat/kill/spit at Aneesha with its multi-layered mouth. Aneesha shoots it (no use), then rams a stick-thingy into its mouth (no use), then throws what looks like a phone-book at it (no use), before finding the weird, stone-age like spear flint that Luke had found and stabs the thing with it- success!

My theory is that while conventional weapons can’t kill it, material from their world can- like the way Kryptonite affects Superman. Because why would it be a special kind of weapon?? It doesn’t look like one and was most likely a shard of something that crashed/exploded when the Malik’s neighbourhood was attacked in episode 2.

The philandering Ahmed survives the attack after all and limps out of the house. Aneesha is relieved to see him, but had he not survived, she would have moved on, but I guess when everyone you know is dying around you, it’s probably comforting to have familiar people around. At this point, whatever they’ve done to you pales in comparison to the life and death struggle you all face.

Ugh

Friday should be a day of celebration, because it’s the end of (another hard) working week; but then life just continues to be the suck-fest that it has been since 2020. Like one of my favourite singers of all time, Carrie Underwood is a vaccination card non-carrier because she’s not only anti-vax, but also anti-mask, and most likely voted for Trump. They’re all the same really that fun bunch.

And to cap off a long work day- even if I get off at 2pm- the 3D file I had been working on for the last three days suddenly won’t open and I may have to redo the whole goddamned thing again.

FUCK YOUR STUPID EXPENSIVE PRODUCTS THAT WON’T WORK PROPERLY ADOBE!