Everyone loves tiramisu, and I don't blame them - its pure awesomeness with every bite. The melt in your mouth satisfaction makes you wonder why you weren't spoon-fed this from birth.
So today is Matt's birthday. On Saturday, we celebrated his birthday at Congee Time, where, not so coincidentally because we celebrate every special occasion at every 'Congee' type restaurant, I also celebrated my 20th birthday. Annabelle bought Matt tiramisu for his birthday and we only managed to only devour half the cake there (blasphemy!).
That night, Annabelle, my dad, and I went over to my grandmas place to say hi to my Aunt who's visiting from Vancouver, since she was to leave the next morning. As a token of what I thought was proper gesture, we left the other half of the tiramisu for her. *sobs*
Only problem was that we didn't tell Matt.
This morning, Matt woke up in a good mood, happy that nearly all his friends texted him 'happy birthday!' He bounced out of bed and looked for the cake - only to find it missing. The poor kid. I came home today and found him dejected, demanding where his cake was.
I feel slightly guilty. To make up to him, I promised him that he can eat half my cake on my birthday. *double sob*
Anyway, so Matt is 20 today. When he was a kid, I had slight authority over him and played tricks with his mind. Once, when he turned 16, I told him that my guy friends already had a cascade of armpit hair, so Matt checked his and became alarmed at his lack of armpit hair. Since then, every year on his birthday until he turned 19, he would check and grow increasingly worried. The sad thing was that I didn't even know how much my bad joke impacted him - I mean, I didn't even have any guy friends at 16, let alone know what state their armpit hair was in.
I also realized tonight that Matt is 20, Annabelle is 21, and I'm 22. I don't know what to make of this, all I can think of is what a headache my mom must have had (and probably still do).
Archive for January 2012
Birthday Cake Incident
Everydayness of Commuting
There’s this guy who went to the same high school as I didwhose name always escapes my mind, so we’ll call him allusively with the letterK. So K is a really interesting person. After graduating, he made a lot ofmoney through computer programming, or something of that sort, since he’s apparentlyan untapped genius whose brain was just waiting to be harvested.
But now that he’s done with making money, K, in his sparetime, drops in on random lectures at U of T such as: astronomy, some weirdengineering course, an ancient Greek philosophy course, a poetry class - all ofwhich he actively participates in with insightful questions to confuseprofessors and students who have not seen him before.
If I were K, I’d just enroll and get a degree while I’m atit, but I guess all he’s after is knowledge and not a title. He’s the kind ofperson who just laughs at everything, though not mockingly, because everythingis just so entertaining.
Anyway, we ran into him at Downsview station since we alwaysseem to run into people there at night. The night we ran into him, we also raninto Abdi, who I’ve mentioned before. Abdi is also an untapped genius, butunlike K, he’s in for a degree. It’s really weird, because during our nightlycommute, we always share about our days:
“I had to attend an empathy class today, we talked aboutphrases to use on patients so we can be empathetic. You never say, ‘it’s notthat bad!’ because you’re assuming it’s really bad.”
“Did you have to attend it because you just don’t know howto have empathy?”
“Oh snap! High five!”
*slap*
Or
“What does it mean when a girl texts you this? I had a great time tonight, got home ok.And then look, she says this after, I waswith Alex. How does that even relate!”
"It just means she's hinting something at you."
Or
“I was watching A Street Car Named Desire tonight in classand I felt like I was going to go crazy – it's hard to explain.”
So as you can see, our conversation is all over the place,and I’m afraid that not any one of us really knows how to help the other personsince we just can’t relate to what they mean. It wasn’t until we ran into Abdiat Downsview and he said, “Oh you mean, by Tennessee Williams?” that I feltlike someone actually finally understood me.
Oh well life is weird. Maybe we should all be more like K.
Chinese New Year
Several kids at work were happy to show me that they can say “Happy Chinese New Year!” in both Mandarin and Cantonese yesterday, and then asked why there were two languages so lectured them: “China is a very big country and is what the Roman empire would have been if it stayed an empire. There are many different cultures and languages in China.”
I could tell they weren’t interested and just wanted to show me that they have accepted the fact that I’m Chinese, so I stopped talking and said my family doesn’t celebrate Chinese New Year anyway and wouldn’t be able to correct them if they’re saying it wrong.
My family is notorious for not celebrating holidays because celebrating holidays would mark us as normal, which is the last thing we want. So, instead of celebrating Christmas, Chinese New Year, Easter, and other religious holidays that we get off work, we turn birthdays into big celebrations instead. And in particular, my birthday happens to be a cause for celebration, which is probably because I’m the oldest of the oldest of the oldest of an only surviving child.
Not celebrating Chinese New Year is just one of things that has helped me become de-asianized in many ways, which painfully evident when I’m invited to a hot-pot dinner and don’t know the proper etiquette or when my non-Asian friend uses the chopstick better than me. But I make up for it by spicing my diet up with a variety of East Asian dishes and going to U of T.
Anyway, it’s officially the year of the dragon now. When I was a kid I thought people who were born in the year of the dragon were the epitome of everything cool – or rather, I just highly admired the kids who were one year older than I was. My old logic: “well I’m year of the snake, and dragons and snakes are essentially the same except one has wings, claws, and can breathe fire. That means I’m almost cool.”
Actually, now that I think about it, the only reason I might have thought they were cool was because I had a crush on this kid who was a year older than me and I wanted to have everything in common with him. Sad but true.
Sizing Up
This past week, I noticed the same group of students get together in two separate occasions in the morning to huddle together in prayer, and more mysteriously, it was a continuous flow of students - one would leave and another would come. They never seemed to finish and I could never get any work done since I'd be straining my ears listening to them. But oddly enough, at another table sat a couple of theology students with their professor talking about the Bible, and I've seen this same professor around talking about the same thing to different people.
I ran into Khevna and she explained the phenomenon to me: that they were praying for an upcoming Christian Conference they were going to have. The intensity of their prayer made me thirst for the same kind of intensity - to have the kind of faith where you're just so desperate for God to provide.
I couldn't help but think that this is so weird. Casper just got saved and people everywhere are praying and talking and praising God in public.
Last Thursday, I got into a random conversation with an elderly man, who, as he got off his stop, said, "God bless you!" What if I had been offended? I guess he didn't care, and maybe I just need this same kind of carelessness.
But what about this year? What kind of victim should I be?
Jessie's Photobook
As some of you probably remember, back in the summer when Jessie left, I wanted to make a Cupcake and Mango themed photobook for her which included pictures of some of you guys holding signs expressing your regrets on having to see her leave.
WELL I'm happy to announce that I have finally finished it. Since it's the last evening of the winter break, I figured I might as well finish the project and mail it to her before I get too busy again with the semester.
First I wanted to give it to Jessie before she officially left, but she left before I could finish it. Then I wanted to give it to her for her convocation, but when I missed that deadline I decided to give it to her for her birthday. Not surprisingly, I missed her birthday too, so I decided to give it to her for Christmas. Since it's obviously past Christmas and I'm only blogging this now, I obviously missed that as well. Now it's just going to be a New Years gift. (Would this count as re-gifting?)
Here's what the project ended up looking like:
Last summer, we had a movie marathon at Jennifer's place. Since everyone was already gathered together, I pulled people aside and took pictures of them holding signs of how much they'll miss Jessie. You can't see the signs in these pictures, but I later on went over the signs in photoshop to make them more visible.
Selina's message: Bye Jessie! I'll miss you! God speed!
John's message: I don't know how we'll recover ...
(I noticed that only the girls drew hearts. The guys are too manly for hearts.)
Anyway, I'd like to take a moment and talk about rubber cement glue!
When I was in jr. high, I had a really intimidating science teacher who always preached about rubber cement. He scared me so much that I have not been able to use any other glue ever since.
Rubber cement stinks though, and you need proper ventilation when using it. I like it because you can rub off excess dried glue after it dries and it comes with a brush, which is handy when dealing with photos.
Ok on with the photobook. Basically putting it together is simple, you just need to think of how many pages you want in your book, grab the appropriate number of pages, cut them to size, and fold them inside-out like this:
Next, you have to make a front cover which has to be sturdy. I took a plain folder, cut it to size, and glued it together.
Since Amy Tang knows her stuff, I listened to her. She told me to never cut with scissors since you can never cut straight with scissors. Instead, use an exacto-knife with a ruler. It's actually faster.
I added a front cover to jazz it up. The reason I used a button was because I lost the 'o', but it worked out well didn't it? (For the button and the string use permanent and school glue, cement glue won't work.)
Here are the pages:
And voila! A sturdy photobook. I'll be mailing this tomorrow.
Casper
Last week, Annabelle went to a Campus for Christ week long conference with her friend, Casper (not her real name since Annabelle insisted I don't mention it in my blog even though most you know who it is). Casper and Annabelle have been friends since they were kids, quickly bonding over whatever it is little fourth grade nerds talk about.
Since high school, Annabelle has been praying for Casper. It seemed very unlikely that Casper would get saved though, since she had her own personal issues to sort through, some of which christianity as a religion seem to rally against strongly. Besides that, Casper seemed like the last person to ever turn to Christ because of her off handed comments, especially every time Annabelle tried to invite her to church. But anyway, don't we all have friends like this? Someone we pray for, but deep down, we still think that they'll never turn around to accepting Christ.
So sometime last semester, Casper was going through a hard time, and turned to her two friends, who invited her to a C4C meeting. Something happened then, and she begun to attend regularly and became more interested. Up to the conference last week, everyone was sure she was on the verge of being saved, even Annabelle, who was extremely surprised at the turn of events.
Eventually during the conference, Annabelle confronted Casper and asked her if she wanted to receive Christ, and surprisingly, she answered, "I already made the prayer, otherwise I wouldn't be here."
WOOAHH.
This is really encouraging, especially since I'm pretty sure most of us have friends like Casper whom we've been praying for for what feels like eons, and sometimes we loose hope and want to give up.
Take home lesson: Never stop praying.
Ending this post with a picture of Annabelle:
She had her White Coat Ceremony yesterday, where she had to swear an oath into the Ontario Pharmaceutical Association (or was it a Pledge of Professionalism?) and received a white lab coat.
Instant Noodle Feast
It's no secret that when it comes to food, I have three main weaknesses: tiramisu, peanut balls (this is not the official name, I just have no idea what it's actually called), and last but not least, instant noodles.
Instant noodles has become such a staple in my diet that I even attempted to name my blog after it, the only problem being that I have MAJOR issues with spelling and misspelled 'noodles' into 'noddles'.
Anyway, so over the winter break I decided that it'd be a fantastic idea to have an instant noodle party. I picked up a couple (more like 9) different kinds of instant noodles/ramen from a fake h-mart in Korea town. The point was to try as many different kinds as possible and then vote on the best one.
Side note: h-mart is a chain of Korean grocery stores and the 'h' stands for Hangul, which is the Korean alphabet. I learned this from one student, whom I am assuming is a reliable sources of information on all things Korean, being Korean himself.
If anyone, especially Hannah, who had triple portions of everything, procured sodium poisoning after the event, these are the culprits:
I only took pictures of the first four instant noodles as they were cooking since the kitchen became somewhat of a fire hazard soon after, since everyone was crowding around the kitchen:
Jin Ramen
This is a personal favourite.
I made this wrong. I was suppose to add the seasonings to the noodles after draining the water. Whoops.
This turned out to be Jajamyun, even though I thought it would be more spaghetti-ish because of the name. This became an instant favourite with everyone as well.
We made this wrong since we added too much water and it ended up tasting like nothing. I'm sure it would have been good otherwise though.
We labeled the packages and people had to vote by writing their names.
Jin Ramen is a win with Clement, Hannah, Johnny and me.
I forgot to vote for the Kimchi Ramen, I actually liked this one. Clement said this one was too mainstream.
Johnny, Selina, Hannah, and Clement REALLY hated this one. Emily liked it, and Tabi was mutual. I forgot to vote, but I'm sure the only reason this tasted bad was because I didn't make it properly ...
Chapagetti was a win with everyone except Emily, who probably just forgot to vote so we'll just assume she liked it also.
Chinese Soybean Paste Ramen: Votes from Emily, Hannah, Clement, Tabi, Selina and Johnny x2. I forgot to vote for this one again (great host I am) so I'm going to steal one of Johnny's votes. This one was a lot like Chapagetti.
The mess in the living room: chips, pork, cheese, suman, shrimp, cake, candy canes ... no wonder most of us ended the night with upset stomachs.
Everyone pretty much felt crappy after the 9th one though, you would have been super human not to feel crappy. I guess this is proof that it's not advisable to consume 9 different kinds of instant noodles in one sitting.
This all made up for a very interesting evening, haha.
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