Outside it’s snowing, but inside it’s a clatter of carts and dishes. Dim sum is mostly seafood, especially shrimp, but the most common ingredients are oil and monosodium glutamate.

My parents go full out with the tripe and the phoenix talons (a euphemism for chicken’s feet), dishes that scare most Westerners, and even some Canadian born Chinese such as me. The dim sum here is much better here than at the restaurant across the street, they note. The rice-flower skin of the shrimp dumplings is delightfully smooth and thin, a demonstration of the chef’s skill. The mooli cakes, made from fried daikon radishes, taste especially savoury. Even the buns are steamed well and slightly sweet.

The praise of my parents is a testament to the quality of the food. They have the ability to find fault with almost anything, the root of years of childhood despondency and confidence issues, but today the food is nearly impeccable.

Short and sweet.

I’ve been falling sleep with the TV on lately. Discovery channel, trashy tabloids, commercials every quarter hour. The constant chatter keeps me company the way old movies on DVD can’t. It’s like the world never sleeps. Someone else is awake, and watching the same thing as me.

It’s one of the things I like so much about you. If you hide that, you’re hiding the best part.

The little girl was taken to Humber River Regional Hospital, and later transferred to the Hospital for Sick Children, where she was diagnosed with what police call “a significant brain injury”.

The J is like an H Ricky, Hal-a-peen-yo

This is live.

Sometimes I wake up with a song in my head that I may not own, or even particularly like. Sometimes I wake up knowing some news before I read it on my lunchtime break. Sometimes my dreams will take off in a strange direction, and I’ll be cooking something complicated or unloading automatics through house windows or fucking someone I’d never have a chance with in real-life.

 

 

 

People always say that this song or that book or some movie is a story about themselves in some way. One of my friends is truly determined that his life has been prophesied in the eight and a half minute rock-opera Paradise By The Dashboard Lights. My story was told in Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind, but it wasn’t anything with as much grandeur, it was simply about a girl.

Interestingly enough, it’s not the stories themselves, but the details of each story that give them such relatable conviction. In Paradise By The Dashboard Lights, Meatloaf sings about a coerced committment leading to an eventual eternity spent with the wrong person because of a stubborn, but more importantly moral, refusal to break a promise. The prognostication of these particulars sends my friend sweating whenever he hears the song.

For me, it took the form of pangs, from the details of Clementine’s character. The fucked up girl looking for her own peace of mind, who applies her personality in a paste. A person who keeps you off balance, always guessing, and constantly frustrated. A girl who sends off sirens in your brain telling you to run as far as you can before you get burned, but you stay anyway, against all logic, resigned to the eventual fate.

And here I was, waiting to be saved, thinking she’s a concept, or she’ll complete me, or she’s going to make me feel alive. When it didn’t work out, I used to say that it was for the best, that I was in it to have no regrets, but it was really beacuse I couldn’t leave. I was drawn magnetically, inexplicably, to the last person to deserve even the effort of all the torn up thoughts.

On the weekend, I discovered that I could finally watch Eternal Sunshine without those pangs when I had felt them for so long, even when I already knew how important it is not to forget these experiences, as Joel figures out while hiding Clementine in his subconscious. All the residual emotions have passed, and now I can talk, and laugh, and think, and share the experience like an embarassing adolescent memory. It only took two years.

Everybody’s gotta learn sometime.

Pita was over for the weekend. He had a competition in the city, in both Standard and Latin, and needed a place to crash. He tells me that he’s at the point where he’s stuck between achieving a higher level and prioritizing the sport as a recreation, especially after coming back empty-handed this weekend when he won two golds at the last competition. 25 is getting old for a competitive dancer, and his instructor, who’s the same age as him, is already the Canadian champion.

I have an interesting relationship with Pita. He was the first person I met when I moved to this city, sharing a room on the 15th floor of a residency. Similar interests and intellects meant that we got along much better than the other pairs of frosh roommates, most of whom got stuck with the crazy, the irrational, and the disgusting. We went separate ways the next year, but moved into an apartment together for the following two years. After parting ways as roommates, when he moved 12000 kilometres to the place he was born, before coming back to this country, we didn’t speak to each other for more than eighteen months.

Now, whenever I see him, whenever he’s in town visiting old friends or participating in competitions, we can greet each other without formalities and just pick up where we left off. It’s on odd state between acquiantance and friendship. We share ourselves, and what we’ve learned and how we’ve changed since last seeing each other, but never keep in touch otherwise. We also give each other perspective. He often speaks as if he’s asking for advice or guidance, without actually asking. I offer my point of view, which he always interprets in a different way than intended, and this keeps me on my toes.

Forget what went wrong. The tiffs, the tantrums, the tears.

Remember everything we had. The comfort of cradling under sheets in the summer, the quintessential excitement of the unknown, the rush of being saved from a prosaic life.

Show me which constellations you know.

And we’ll walk along the beach forever.