jom, pergi makan

after many days of hard work and perseverance, not to mention orgasmic pleasure, i have graduated. ta dah! okay, for those who was just about to run out the door and register for the course, the orgasmic part was just a one-off split second thing. please, calm down and sit back in your chair.

as you know, i have been very busy doing some juggling recently. perhaps i should be hard at work today, making up for lost time. after all, from the very existence of this post, it will seem that i have some free time on hand. however, my friends, today is friday and what good is friday if not for slacking off? :-) besides, the boss is out of town and the mouse has come out to play.

i had a lot knocking around in that cranial center of mine lately, almost like the random movements of atoms. thoughts and deliberations were formed, but as time passed and i have failed to build on it, it vaporised into the thin air. the only part the qi gong hasn't seem to help is my brain. it seems to be as forgetful and muddled as ever. or maybe those are thoughts that my sub-conscious are not too keen to explore.

what my mind is more eager to note, perhaps, is the tendency of our people to celebrate each and every occasion with.............has anybody guessed it?......eating!

maybe it's just my family that is really strange but i do see this tendency everywhere i go. are we the only culture that celebrates so much and with each event... food, food and more food.

july perhaps was the worst. it started out with my bro and mum's chinese birthday, which of course, we had an in-house gastronomic fest, prepared none other than the great master chef herself; my mum. yes, i have often wondered about the wisdom of wanting to slave for others on perhaps the only day when you should be pampered and spoilt. you have another 364 other days to do that, if watching people savour your skills is your kind of thing. aha! i have digressed once more. then again, what is story telling without one for more detours?

the week after that was followed by my mother's actual birthday, whereupon we had a full i-don't-quite-know-how-many course dinner at the restaurant. this was the genuine shark fin, abalone, blah blah blah material and needless to say, i walloped everything.

scarcely three days later, my bro's birthday came and once again, we headed down to another restaurant for another round of over-extending our stomach. should we have abstained? it hardly seems fair to the birthday boy, for after all his birthday will always come a few days after mum's. so, come what may, eat first.

before that week was up, my cousin had a birthday. maybe this we could have skipped. but her mother was recuperating in the states after some intensive treatment for cancer and we didn't want her to celebrate her birthday all by herself. so, the entire extended family turned up with gusto, with empty stomachs and all, ready to pour the contents of the buffet table into our now-groaning and complaining stomachs.

no more birthdays for the rest of july. ahhhhh! i could almost hear my tummy breathing out a sigh of relief. that was before we surprised it with a nightly gastronomic spread of supper during the entire 12 days of qi gong class. i think most of them looked forward to the food more than the class. i have no idea what qi gong has to do with food, perhaps it was a nice way to entice the students to continue coming back, after each back-breaking 3-hours sitting. everybody brought a little something to contribute and as a result, each night we were faced with the tiresome decision of which yummilicious food to restrict our stomach to.

food, thy name is like poison. looking at the calendar, i seem to have the rest of the month's respite. come september, i will have to once again brace my stomach for i know 15 people who are born in that beautiful month, including yours truly :-)

hmmmmm, is it too early to plan how i want to celebrate my birthday? that sounds like a post for another day.