From Point A to Point C

The remaining effect of leaving a comment on my friend Gary's blog about quitting a job makes my bleached past and uncertain future hovering in my head during these few days.

After my graduation from university, I have only had one full-time job experience which lasted for about eight months in a law firm. How was it? Well, to make it short, what I can tell you is all units in the world for measuring will never be big or heavy enough to describe the pressure I had.

The image is still vivid when the junior lawyer Kevin who had been working in the law firm for ten months showed me the three fingernail-size areas on the back of his head that had no hair. While Kevin paid the price to keep his decent office with losing some hair, I defended my pride and expectations about my first real job with the price of having my period late for more than three months without any explanations after some medical checks. It is definitely the longest eight months in my life.

Even though this segment of my memory is too bitter to swallow and will be buried deeply at the darkest corner in my head, I seldom feel regretful about accepting the job. Because it made me rethink about what a job really means to me and what kind of life I might really want. If to explain it with my philosophy, the eight months were an inevitable and necessary "Point B" that I needed to pass through in my life journey, or I can't become who I am now.

My best friend Gina, who went to the same law school with me has depressingly yelled at her parents to stop expecting her to become a lawyer when we graduated from university. She firmly claimed she really had no interest in it. But after receiving a master degree in Marketing from Leeds University and came back to Taiwan in 2007, she recaptured her passion for becoming a lawyer and decided to go to a cram school to prepare for it. Many people consider it was totally a waste of time and money for Gina doing a master degree in Marketing in the UK. But somehow I can understand it. It's just Gina's "Point B."

After walking on some unexpected and winding roads of my life journey during the past few years, sometimes I really believe before reaching the goal of our life or finding what we really want to find, we need to go somewhere or do something else first, even we don't plan to. And now think the next thing I need to learn is to appreciate the scenery during the journey from Point B to Point C.

A Yellow, Yellow Sun

O, my friendship has been like a yellow, yellow sun,
But is eclipsed by your elusive appearance.
O, my friendship has been like a sweet, sweet bun,
But is consumed by your successive indifference.

As selfish are you, my utilitarian friend,
So deep in disappointment am I,
That I will not give you a red envolope, my friend,
Till all the seas go dry.

Till all the seas go dry, my friend,
And the rocks melt with the sun!
And I won't give it to you still, my friend,
While the sands of life shall run.

And fare you well, my SINCERE FRIEND,
And fare you well forever!
And we'll never talk again, my FRIEND,
Unless the imbalanced friendship is over!

I've endured the fact that my cell number only appears in your contact list when you need my help. But after not hearing from you at all for more than two years, today the way you started your greeting really irritated me - "Hey, my mum said everyone in their life should have a lawyer friend or at least a friend graduated from Law school. So, today when I got my legal problem, I think about you right away. And oh! By the way, I may need your address soon since I am going to get married next year. You know who I am, right?!..."

You may just try to be funny and you may say I have no sense of humour, but I didn't feel amused at all!

After trying hard to hide my disappointment and measuring the frequency of your sincere phone calls during the past five years in my head, I could only offer you very limited information about your legal problem.

I know you may not read this. But just don't bother if you are trying to send me your wedding invitation and ask for a red envelope. Cos there will be no money in my envelope but my blessing and what I just wrote above!

Overestimated legs

Went hiking on Saturday morning as my first practice for going climbing Yushan (玉山) next month. I didn't plan to do any special training until recently some friends and relatives tried to convince me that jogging or cycling only do little help to hiking or mountain climbing. And even with going jogging or cycling at least three times a week, I'll still need to experience and get used to the different pain that hiking will bring to me.

With the eager to proof the "threats" from my friends and relatives were not applicable on me, there was not even a pore for a tiny sleepy fairy to stand on my eyelids when I heard my alarm. I met my uncle and aunt precisely at 6am at the bus stop.

Despite sitting at the last row on the bus with my uncle, a glance at the faces of other passengers was unnecessary. I could tell undoubtedly I was the youngest person by merely looking at those almost bald and gray heads.

45 minutes later, Yangminshan (陽明山) was getting bigger and bigger. I expected her to be familiar and hospitable as usual since my friends and I had spent countless evenings and nights enjoying the night view with beers or coffee and sharing tears or laughter in our recent life with her. But she didn't look exactly the same and I also found during the daytime she wore not only a different colour of her outfit but with a fresher face.

When you go hiking at Qixing Mountain(七星山), you will get enough chances to practice saying "Good morning!" in Chinese to or back to people you don't know and may never see again in your life. But almost every one did the practice, even the two westerners we met.

My aunt, uncle and I were only trying to chat with each other in the very beginning of our hiking. Cos we knew it was very rude to interrupt the fervent conversation between birds, cicadas and other insects. Besides, think even without our own manners, my heart beat would still violently remind me.

A billionaire must drop and scatter some teeny diamonds on his way hiking. With the diamond-like water drops, the leaves and grass at both sides of the trail were shining. The dust carried on our shoulders were blew away by the natural A/C while the dark green window shutters blocked the stalk of the sunshine for us.

I don't know it's my seventy-year-old uncle or me trying to show "I am still young enough", my aunt said she couldn't keep up and wanted to give up going to the top with us. (Ok ok, I admit after feeling the gentle ache of my knees, it flashed through my mind for a few seconds that I wanted to stay with my aunt.)

It took us slightly more than an hour to stand at the highest spot in Taipei area, 1120m high to be exact. Due to the coming typhoon, the strong wind made me walk like a drunk person. And with its violence of rolling my eardrums, I had an illusion of riding a roller coaster.

Although I brought my camera with me, think it's the muscular pains of my lower legs mainly took the job of recording the whole trip for me. Now great, my friends and relatives do successfully make me start to worry if I can finish climbing Yushan in less than two weeks.

Practice will make perfect (hopefully)

Bought a cooking book a few days ago, which is about recipes of making a dough for Chinese cooking. After rehearsing with some flour and water for several times in my mind, today I finally got a whole and quiet evening to hear the word - "Action!"

The scene for this evening was about me in my black cotton shorts and white vest reading the cooking book in a small kitchen for five minutes in the beginning. Then after some mixing, kneading and dry frying, I should show to the invisible camera about my speckled-brown 蛋餅. (蛋餅 is something similar to tortilla. It can be used and presented in many different styles.)

I followed the recipe successfully until I needed to cut the big dough into equal pieces and rolled them out to very thin pancakes. It was easy to make them oval, square, or other unidentified shapes but somehow they refused to look like a full moon. The best one I got looked like a three-year-old kid's butt.

I know it requires a lot of techniques to make a nice dough, but it just never came to my mind that to roll it circular does, too. It looks easy!

However, the feeling wasn't completely strange to me. I remember the first time I tried to learn how to serve in tennis. My excitement quickly turned into puzzlement when my coach told me to put my racquet down. I tried hard to hide my puzzlement and not to ask him, "I have never watched Roger Federer serving without a racquet. Why should I put my racquet down?"

After showing me the serving pose, my coach wanted me to throw the ball high and then caught it with the same position and at exactly the same place. I was thinking, "Oh, come on. I've watched plenty of tennis players doing it on TV. And it is just throwing a ball. How hard can it be?" But for the next 20 minutes, I felt I was dancing Cha Cha with the ball. I just couldn't stop moving back and forth to catch it.

Even with a perfect circular shape, think the cooking was still doomed since I used a different kind of flour. Although the texture was different and the shape wasn't quite right, it didn't bother me at all. Isn't it what cooking about? Fun and full of experiments.

Before it stops looking like a butt, my dear family and friends, please be patient!

Generation undecided, still

Cinema is one of the pretty good shelters I would highly recommend if you feel you are going to melt or vapor soon from this small island during this season. Today I went to Shin Kong Cineplex in XiMen and watched another film from Taipei Film Festival 2009.

The film is called Generation Undecided, directed by Elmar Szücs, who suddenly found out that apart from having a new born baby, he was in the middle of nowhere with his coming 30th birthday. I was immediately intrigued when I read the introduction of the film from the program booklet - Isn't it also about my story in a certain way?

Guess many people were as interested in generation classifications as I was. The seats were almost occupied with different sizes of butts. Without any unreasonable and fancy scenes of digital effects or a sexy actress in her lace tank running with her breasts counting beats, (Go watch Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. You will understand what I'm talking about.) the film was rough and plain in a very friendly way and I enjoyed my visual travel in Germany very much.

But don't know if it's because I didn't pay enough attention to the film, I left the cinema without any enlightenment and still carried the same question with me on my way to the cram school.

Special moments in our life

Got an email lying in my inbox this morning with a subject - "Want to share this special moment with you." "The special moment" had nothing to do with any romantic atmosphere, but a special (well, at least, to my friend it is) combination of numbers.

The email said, at 12hr 34 minutes and 56 seconds on the 7th of August this year, the time and date will never happen in your life again! (123456789)

Although obviously I would not only share the special moment with my friend but also with at least 30 unrecognizable recipients, I still appreciate his time clicking my email address from his contact list.

I am just wondering : How special was the moment? Doesn't it also make "at 10hr 10 minutes and 10 seconds on the 10th of October of 2010", "at 11hr 11 minutes and 11 seconds on the 11th of November of 2011" and so on special, too?

Maybe there is an implicit message in my friend's email that some special moments indeed will never happen again in our life, but some special moments are still there, waiting.

Priceless egg fried rice

It was almost five o'clock when mum and dad got home this evening. Usually if the kitchen still remains dark after five, it means my sisters and I should probably start to decide later in the evening - turn left or right? Shida night market or Yong Kang street?

As the cheap but delicious Thai restaurant on Yong Kang street and the Japanese style roast chicken in Shida night market were still trying to fight for the championship in my head, dad knocked my door and asked me if I want some egg fried rice for dinner.

"errr...ok", I answered with many question marks on my face.

Don't get me wrong. I have no bias against egg fried rice. I was just googling in my head if I had tried any delicious egg fried rice in Shida or on Yong Kong street.

I tried to find out which food stall or restaurant we were talking about. But, "No, I am gonna cook it for you all myself." That's the answer I heard from dad.

From kindergarten to high school, no matter how early I needed to get up, I often had my breakfast at home which was made or at least prepared by mum. Even for Taiwanese women, it's still not that common to make breakfast for your children in the morning. I have many classmates that their mums were still sleeping when they went out to school.

I remember when I was about 10, for a child who seldom had any chance to eat outside I used to envy some classmates who could have their lunch box ordered from the school. But after trying it, I immediately realized I was just charmed by the colourful pictures outside of the lunch box.

With a really good cook in my family, sometimes it's hard to show how much cooking talent I have, let alone dad. The only memory of dad cooking for me that I can still scoop out now is about twelve or thirteen years ago when mum went travelling to Canada for around two weeks.

Even though curry and chicken noodle soup took their turn to be my sister Ruby's and my dinner for quite a few days during that period, we never complained about anything. Because after seeing dad trying to toss the pan like a chef to give us a tasty fried egg for breakfast, but ended up with the egg clinging passionately on the wall, it's hilarious enough to convert our attention of the constant attack of the curry and the noodle soup.

As a thoughtful daughter, I asked dad if he needed any help when he was heading to the kitchen. He said, "Oh, come on. It's just egg fried rice! It's easy." Well, he might be right since eggs and rice were really the only ingredients he used.

Not like the good egg fried rice we have tried, dad's rice didn't separate from each other completely enough and without any supporting characters, the only two leading characters were clearly recognizable.

But, believe it or not, the bland food was very delicious.

Chinese idioms with animals

After learning some idioms from my dog-tired friend Gary this morning, it kind of reminds me when I was a little girl, a comic book about idioms related with animals used to be my bedtime reading for quite a while.

We have a lot of idioms about animals/insects in Chinese, from a tiny ant to a big elephant, from animals with no legs to animals who need plenty of shoe racks. Below are some I find interesting. (And literally translated by me.)

A cat crying for a rat (貓哭耗子)
showing insincere sympathy

A three-legs cat (三腳貓)
doing something clumsily, especially because of not having enough knowledge or skill

Playing piano to an ox (對牛彈琴)
talking about something to someone who can't understand it at all or is not interested in it at all

Looking for a horse while riding a donkey (騎驢找馬)
looking for something you have already had, or keeping staying with something you're not that satisfied with while looking for something better to replace at the same time

Add legs after drawing a snake (畫蛇添足)
doing something unnecessary

Roars from an east riverbank lion (河東獅吼)
shoutings from a very angry wife to her husband

After watching the great match played by Andy Roddick and Andy Murray and being struggling in which Andy I am going to root for during the whole match, I am dog-tired, too. Bed time.