honest to blog

i’ve never cooked a day in my life before. never.

nil.

nada.

until that fateful day in january…

armed with guts, a basket, and a flicker of neanderthal instinct, i stood facing the supermarket aisles praying hard that the preparation would go well and minimal tears would be shed. all these times, i’ve always treated supermarket journeys as novelty activities, where one goes for the sake of going. i want chocolates, let’s go. i’m running out of chips, come on. but that particular day, i realised that that journey was more than going for going’s sake; it was a defining moment for my survival as a human being, and as a young adult responsible for fending herself in this cold, harsh world.

out of every housework that i’ve done, the kitchen has never been my forte. yes, i would wash the dishes gladly. but my experience in culinary preparation has been limited to sideline boss-ing at best. add this, add that, whoa, overcook alert! or something involving instant noodle *cue for eyes rolling*. home economics in high school did not help much either. only one minute into the chopping board and my partner had re-assigned me indefinitely into the cleaning sector. oh, she of the wise student. 

so gathering all the common sense that twenty years of spoiled existence could give, i marched into the frozen section and spent quite some times pulling a flight attendant. chicken, or beef? chicken, or beef? after one of the cashiers managed to grow a beard, i decided upon cooking a spaghetti dish (hey, everyone has to start somewhere right???). and being the clever girl that i am, i also decided to grab some granola bars as a contingency plan. damn i felt good about myself. first stage, done.

so i entered the kitchen, and all hell broke loose…

the excessive oil (no worries, i picked one that is approved by the heart foundation, wheeee!) gave the frying pan severe ammunitions in its attacks that it almost felt like the beef was fighting back. undeterred, i went on, trying to stand the needle-like mini stabs on my arm. the spaghetti had to be re-boiled like 3 times before i got it right. the sauce, oh, the sauce, i kept suspecting that the pan ate them because it kept pulling a houdini over the frying course.

fast forward thirty-ish minutes later, i sat on the dining table eating the spaghetti dish which surprisingly turned out decent. and i figured that i might live on after all. but i remembered somewhere that it is written,"for man does not live on spaghetti alone." or something along that line. and decided that the next day i would branch out to the next sweetest thing; ze omelette.    

as i sit here typing after four days of home-made diets (with no ostensible records of death casualty, starvation or food poisoning), i’ve decided that i’d be more adventurous next time. and therefore with this shall pledge myself to start getting educated further on dining hospitality.

during which of those trials, if anything goes wrong, i’d always have my faithful granola bars…

the plane began slipping out of gravity when i decided that Dylan would have the honour of serenading me away from sin city. too bad i was barely legal there. the law prevents "youngsters" such as myself from partaking in the feast of coin-sucking machines, plastic cards or chips; the latter not referring to those you usually eat. i was half a year too early for coveting that title as a patron sinner of the strip.

looking down, robust neons glittered across the blanket of the earth. nothing beats the view of festive citylights from above they say. well, they say right. though somehow i couldn’t help but notice that those illuminations came to an abrupt end on a certain eerily nearby horizon, replaced by a vast spread of black nothingness. the logical aspect of one’s upbringing would have dismissed it as random overcast of mountains that have actually been there since forever. but some other aspects thought otherwise. there were no stars in sight and the plane seemed like it was being lured into the gaping enigmatic atmosphere.

—

what? maybe i was running out of time. maybe i had questions in my mind. maybe i was mentally seeing the changes that might happen in the not so distant future. maybe i felt that if i reached out i would only grab thin air. a lot had passed yet a lot was still to come. Dylan kept asking me these random questions about my feelings. i shrugged. even those were dull unknown.

my vision started to darken. i was late. but for what, i wasn’t sure.

sideways, the plane glided into obscurity. and i was slipping further into helpless oblivion…