After a ten month hiatus, I’m back into my regular table tennis routine again. I started out extremely rusty, feeling as if I was learning how to play again, but now I’m almost at the level that I ended with. It feels like it’s advantageous to take a step back from playing so that I can forget all my bad habits while remembering all the theory, because I can tell exactly what I need to change to improve now. I wish I could say the same for my golf game when I get out on the courses every spring.

My bout with gastroenteritis left me with a smaller apetite and emaciated frame. The sudden weight loss — bringing my weight precariously close to 100 lbs. — has been rather noticeable; my sweaters are baggy, my rings slip off my fingers, and I’ve lost two notches on my belt. Most people struggle to lose weight, I struggle to gain it and stay above 120. Table tennis is one of the best things I can do to fix this. After every session, I’m ravenously hungry, and this usually continues through to the day after.

Table tennis is also one of the only sports that I enjoy enough to not have to drag my ass out every time, which is definitely an advantage when the venue is an hour away. Unfortunately, my schedule on Tuesdays and Thursdays now consists of:

1. waking up at six thirty in the morning
2. going to work for eight and a half hours
3. coming home and sleeping for half an hour
4. eating a dinner which I’ve prepared earlier in the week (with no time to cook)
5. travelling to the gym
6. playing for two hours
7. travelling home
8. showering and falling asleep by midnight

There are no breaks in between, which means that I have to watch the clock during almost everything that I do. It’s a complete rush from start to finish. The upside is that when I’m at the gym, working on better short-ball control, or trying to achieve a backhand smash, I can forget everything else, which is something that doesn’t happen for me easily.

He admitted to me that in his car, when he’s driving alone, there’s a compulsion to put together the details of his father as he writes in his mind the speech for the eventual day that a eulogy will need to be delivered. The only other person he’s admitted this to is his girlfriend, who’s labelled the practice as rather disturbing. Morbid, I’ll agree, as his father is far from passing, but not as strange as she makes it out to be. In return, I admit to him that I do the same thing when I piece together stories of his life for the speech I’ll be delivering as best man at his wedding, an event just as grave, and every bit as tragic.

He humorously finds relief in this.

Cats are always curious in the snow. As they sniff, the touch of their noses melt the snowflakes, and their tongues come out to lick away the moisture. They cautiously walk into it and inspect their paws, wondering how they suddenly became wet.

As for me, I’m comfortable at home with a warm drink and the glow of my monitors. The week has me burned out nowadays, and the weekends have become the only time for me to relax, the only time I can enjoy the sunlight during the shortened winter days. You can always recognize a winter sky by its paleness, causing particularly bright days and orange nights.

Christmas will be here soon. Vacation and trips home and family and the spirit of the season. Fall has come and gone. How does the time pass so quickly? Did I imagine I’d be here, at this stage in life, a year ago? Not at all.

I never realized how much I missed the winter, until the snow started falling.

Last week I was so sick that it felt like my brain was slowly leaking out of my head through my nose. I’ve had a jar of lingzhi, or powdered reishi mushroom, sitting on my kitchen counter for months, but I never felt like I was sick enough to have any until then. After one glass of “tea” and a night of decent sleep, I felt better than after anything else I tried. My sinuses cleared, my nose dried up, the headache at the back of my neck went away, and the only thing left was the scratchiness in my throat.

I’d heard of lingzhi before, as my dad started drinking it daily a few years ago, but never really understood, or believed, it’s magical properties until now. As a child growing up in a Chinese family, it’s not uncommon to be exposed to all sorts of esoteric appendages and vegetation, but nothing was as revered as the reishi mushroom, not even ginseng. It turns out that it has a history as the oldest mushroom to be used in medicine over 4000 years ago, and peasants were once executed for consuming such a valuable resource as it was reserved exclusively for the emperor and his family.

As described in Wikipedia:

Lingzhi is anti-tumor, immunomodulating and immunotherapeutic. It is also adaptogenic, anti-allergin and anti-hypertensive due to the presence of triterpenes. Apart from these properties, lingzhi has also been found to be anti-inflammatory, anti-viral, anti-parasitic, anti-fungal, anti-diabetic, anti-hypotensive, and hepatoprotective. It has also been found to inhibit platelet aggregations, and to lower blood pressure, cholesterol and blood sugar.

It makes me quite proud to have such a significant substance as a part of my cultural history, a little secret known only to those lucky enough. Perhaps I may feel the same way about tiger penises some day.

The only downside is the taste. I’m sure it’s nothing like eating cockroaches on Fear Factor, but it’s definitely a play on the palate that takes a bit of getting used to. The smell reminds me of the musty scent of old, dried, golden coloured lumber, that’s crumbly and falling apart. This comes as no surprise, as it only grows on the trunks of dead trees. Even though it comes in (clumpy) powder form, it doesn’t exactly dissolve in water. At all. The picture of the mug is after a good stir and five minutes of settling. For some reason, half of it sinks and half of it floats. I tried to describe it to John, and the best I could come up with is that somehow it’s an entire glass of dregs.

I received a birthday reminder two days ago in the form of a card from my parents (a Richard Scarry-esque drawing of a crowd of cats, cell-phones to their ears, with the line inside, “Can you hear me meow?”). I had mostly forgotten, although it came to mind about a month ago, and the thought remained dormant until Pat brought it up today.

During the week I made plans to meet Pat and Jen for dim sum, not knowing that they secretly invited Aaron and Karen as well, and that it was really to take me out for my birthday. Afterwards, we came back here to play some Donkey Konga and Mario Party. As simple as it may seem to sit around playing games with a bunch of friends, it’s rare to find a day that our schedules match. It’s even more rare to hang out with a group of people I can totally relax with and just have a good time, let alone be able to indulge in the pleasure of a bunch of addictive party games with them. These are real friends, people who remind me how good it is to laugh, and help me realize that I don’t do it nearly enough anymore.

On a day that I ask for nothing, I was given everything that I could have wanted.