Dinners,

Which now happens with me feeling so utterly exhausted that they seemed to have turned into a state of otherworldly affairs; I’ve been dining with aliens and dragons and King Tutankhamen himself (who, after a couple of mouthfuls of coke, told me he wished that everybody should stop making a fuss about his cursed tomb, which wasn’t cursed in the first place, only booby-trapped and clogged with unwashed sewage), and that wasn’t even the weirdest sensation; there was one dinner which I remembered ordering a plate of tom-yam chicken rice only to get a plate of rice with chicken and no tom yam but some really bad tasting sauce like Bolognese only burnt and too salty.

But the sad reality is that I’ve been dining pretty much alone most of the nights, which can be somewhat dull, and it came to a point where I quoted this to a girl at work; “Like the song, ‘I don’t like to sleep alone’, I don’t like to eat alone. Let’s go for lunch.”


She didn’t know the song and thought I meant that we should sleep together as much as eat together, which would’ve gotten me a sexual harassment suit, only that she must’ve thought I was making a very bad hit-on and decided to brush it off as a cold joke. Thankfully and sadly.


But there are some nights in which I didn’t eat alone; one dinner I managed to give the work an early slip and found myself at grandma’s eating a heavenly dinner with the parents. Heavenly, which is just about what orgasm could get you, on the right circumstances, and having eaten nothing but MSG coated meals over the past months, home cooked food probably beat whatever it is a bed and a lady would get me.


And then there was the dinner with friends; Pauline, Vic and Kelv-ster, at Nando’s Mid Valley, where the food came fast and the company great fun, and there was a lot of catching up done. And it was like the reunion of the nonsensical study-group. A very noisy, very funny one.


Friday, I was at grandma’s again, and what was supposedly a short trip to take a trough home ended with me washing down a miserable dinner with a supper of Lap Chap Choy, which meant A Mess of Vegetables; one of grandma’s specialty.


Work is all same-same. I didn’t even feel like I was doing any work at all; just type, call, type, call, talk with Ji Lin (which I will now refer to as Mademoiselle Escargot) and go to the rare meeting, in which I try to take in anything, fail, and end up nodding like a very attentive fool.


The garden is now done; the cement is on, the roof thingy up, and whatever modifications and placements my dad wanted was pretty much taken care of. There’re only grass to mow and aquariums to clean, to which tomorrow will be occupied with.


The Rastafarian pup is now placed outside, in which he now experienced his first feeling of neglect, the bitter cold of a thundering rain and the lack of company. Now he looks at me with all the sadness any puppy-dog eyes would generate, but dad never considered having a dog in the house, and he now has a very big kennel with a makeshift bed to sleep on.


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Stand at the edge, and know that you’re alone.

I read that somewhere, forgot about it, remembered it but not who wrote it; anyone know?