Category: Bits of Daily

What food is your home?

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Food is not just enjoyment. It’s history, geography, emotion, environment, relationship, memory, creativity, dream, reality…


I’m privileged enough in life that I’ve never starved. It was very sad for me during the period of time when I only had food to avoid hunger, when I chose to eat little to avoid gaining weight.


It all changed for even worse when I discovered that my mother had cancer.


I had to eat. Food became my safety net. As long as I could get my hands on the things I liked to eat, I ate them all.


Food could save me. Because I had a wonderful relationship with it when i was a kid. Because my mother was the best cook in the whole world.


She made these hand-pulled noodles that were just “home” to me. There are only flour and water in the dough. So the proportion of it all is the most crucial. When it’s done well, a layer of cooked oil is brushed on it. Then we wait for ten to fifteen minutes. Then we can cut them into strips and start pulling…


The water boiling… first round was for Papa. Then for me. Then the last was for my mom.
Then we would take our bowl of noodles and mix them with some cooked dishes, like Chinese version of spaghetti. We call it “Gan Ban”. It means “dry stir”. We literally stir the noodles together with the vegetables and sometimes meat cubes that belong to the dish. Then we add some vinegar, a little soy sauce if needed, and chilli paste and chilli oil. Stir, stir, stir. If the end result is too dry, we add a little cooked noodle water. But be careful. We would never add too much noodle water until it became a soup.


Stir, stir, stir.


Then we taste our own noodles. If it’s good, we can start our meal. If something’s missing, we add it however we’d like.


For some mysterious reason, mom’s noodles always tasted better than mine. So we always exchanged our bowls in the end.


My mom was not “creative” in the kitchen in a traditional sense. She had mastered something and make a good eater out of me. I’m not a picky eater and I have never been. But I have a high standard for what I find tasty and satisfying.


The people who love food are the ones who love life. My mom made me into someone who loves life through food, experiences life through food, explores the world through food. My mom loved life. So do I.

What food is your home?

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After taking a long break from wordpress, I decide to come back

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In the past months, I kept writing. Not strictly consistently, not 500 words every day, but frequent enough to keep me in the flow.

The reasons why I left were simple. I was too distracted by the notification button whenever I came up here. I wanted to know how my pages “performed”, how many people visited my site, and how many left some words behind them.

And I kept posting daily for a very long period of time and the notification bell kept telling me that I had not broken my streak for XXX days. Then one day something happened with my internet. The next day my streak was broken.

Does anyone know how I can keep publish on this site without having to come up to the wordpress editor every time?

And just please, can I turn off the streak counter/notification?

But now I’m back. The reason is simple, too.

I want my drops of words end up in the same container. 🙂

Attachment

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“Life was so simple before,” I thought. “Why do I have to get myself so much attachment in life?”

Such thoughts appear whenever something my husband or baby does that irritates me.

Sure, life would have been easier and simpler. Lighter and freer. I could go anywhere I want and do whatever I want; eat whatever I want and drink as much as I want. The world would be opened up to me and there would be uncountable possibilities…

Too bad we can only see the small portion of the whole picture of our own lives.

But we imagine the could-be life down another road as the shining, bright side of that whole picture.

It’s impossible for me to stop myself from thinking about “what would have been…” That’s my sincere reaction to every relationship I have had. I wanted to stay alone and independent. So there is no commitment, no responsibility. So that I can push the “stop” button whenever I can.

But life is just much too meaningful to live like the only star in the sky.

If I am brave enough, my pain triples and happiness times a thousand.

That’s only possible with strings attached.

Learn and build, play and break

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I took piano lessons for a few years when I was a child.

I had always admired how pianists perform for others. I was very interested in playing the written music. But more specifically, the music pieces everyone can recognise. Another thing I found amazing was composing. Or even improvising on stage.

For the eight-year-old me, a piano playing girl who can not only play the famous notes, but also is able to telling stories with her own creativity, is perfection.

But my piano teacher disappointed me by saying that I would have to take one step at a time to get to where I wanted to go. He said I had to “learn the rules so well so that [I] can break them”.

“There are 88 keys on every full-sized piano. There are innumerable ways to make music from tapping on those keys. So many that you can’t even start. But you’ve got to start from somewhere! The lessons we have here is where you will start.

One step at a time. Build the basic blocks, the structure, the system; develop your taste; discover what you like and what you don’t like; maybe then you will be ready to break everything down. Maybe then you will be ready to create something from these 88 keys that is yours.

But today, your job is to practice the third piece from Czerny OP. 599. Let’s go.”

You can’t break and play unless you have done with learn and build.

Can distractions be helpful?

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From birth on, my baby already had her traits: nice and quiet, patient, only using the sound of “crying” to “tell” us to check in with her needs.

She’s almost six months old now. Every day she’s become a little more like herself.

But there are still moments where something else takes over her. I can feel that she’s fighting that thing, whenever she’s tired, hungry, anxious, or scared. It’s like only one of them can be in front of the stage and she’s fighting for the right to stay.

What helps her at this moment is some kind of distraction.

If she shifts her focus on something else, away from her hunger, tiredness, or insecurity, she could stay.

Is distraction helpful to pull us out of our own obsessions too?

When we feel we are stuck, trapped, or swamped in something – “taken over by something” – can we use distraction to pull us out, too? In the end, our obsessions are just one aspect of our realities.

I’ll allow it (to take a pause)

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We need discipline in our creative life. Sure. But sometimes we tend to forget that leaving space to breathe is vital to our creativity, too.

And the hardest thing is to allow ourselves to make that space.

To take a moment, and breathe.

Creating is too important for me to make it into something I hate. Allowing myself to have that space in my creative work is how I preserve my love. For this reason, I will allow it.

The last one to go to bed

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I guess I will be the last one goes to bed. Forever.

Sometimes I do think it feels unfair. Why do I always have to be the one who is making sure everything and everyone is ok before turning in or just resting herself?

But on the other hand, it’s my own choice, too.

I choose to do all these things. I don’t do it perfectly but somehow I feel I have the responsibility to do it.

Is it a sexist thing to do? I mean, am I conditioned to do that and behave like the responsible adult in the newly established family which consists of two adult at the same age and a little baby?

I was not like this at all. What changed?

I was the person who’s taking care of her own shit but now I leave everything to my husband. What changed?

Well, I have him now.

I leave the things in my life that he does better. I take care of the things which he overlooks.

I guess that’s just teamwork.

I guess not everything has to be a sexist thing.

I guess I’m certainly conditioned in many ways. But it doesn’t always have to be that way.

How burnout feels like

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Burnout. Terrifying?

The danger of burnout is that you are likely not aware that you have it.

That’s when burnout gets you.

I felt down. Physically and emotionally. Every second of every day. Losing sleep, losing interest in other things, feeling like a walking corpse.

There was only one thing on my mind: you’ve gotta keep going. There’s no other way.

Burnout feels like a layer on your skin. It’s almost inside of your cells but your body knows it’s strange.

Or is it a curse? Something possible to get rid of, but you can’t if you are enchanted by it and don’t know that you have it, until it’s too late.

I needed someone else to tell me that what I was feeling — feeling exhausted from what I was doing and thinking about all day and never felt well again — was the result of having burnout for a long time.

I can’t believe I didn’t know. Because for such a long time, food and drinks didn’t have taste, my body didn’t feel like moving, and I was emotionally on the edge of losing it every day.

Should have known earlier. Life is short.

There’s always something

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There’s always something.

There’s always something that’s going to be on my mind which I will appoint as the thing that’s “pressuring me”. The reason why I can’t live in the present moment. The reason why I am not doing the thing I want to do but the thing I have to do.

I don’t know since when I started living the life from appointment to appointment. Deadline to deadline. Without knowing, I live by calendars and schedules. There’s always something coming up. If it’s not in the near future, like next week, it’s in the further future, like next year.

I’m tired of this.