Medium Delirium

The weather this week has been infernally hot and humid; the storms and cool weather of the Lunar New Year seem to be well and truly over, and we hurtle straight on into the furnace that is March. Simply doing nothing at all seems to generate a sticky and uncomfortable layer of sweat. On the way to my mum’s place yesterday, we walked past an older caucasian couple. The husband had on a shirt, jeans, and, unbelievably, a scarf around his neck. It was late afternoon and the air had well and truly been stewed in the blazing heat of the day. This was the sort of weather in which one wishes to divest oneself of all unnecessary articles of clothing (even some of the necessary ones), so it’s hard to imagine what possessed him to not only not remove any clothing, but add more on. Perhaps he was ill, or from a climate even more oppressively hot than this.

Last week I ran into a friend from my teenage years at the hawker centre. This friend of mine had been quite popular as a teenager – you know the type. Loud and funny, played basketball, busts out obscure references to American culture. Tall, quite good looking, physically fit, cool. It’s probably fair (though quite unkind) to say that he has aged like, if not milk, then definitely something with dairy in it. In place of his abs (probably) he now sports a sizeable belly, and appears to have inherited not only his father’s good features but also his receding hairline. He doesn’t look bad, just, well, normal, significantly different from his youth, and probably not how he expected himself to look at this age. To his credit, he seems well aware of this physical decline and often pokes fun at himself on social media, with a great deal of mock (I hope) bitterness about the genetic card he has been dealt, and his penchant for fried chicken. When I said hello he did however look a bit embarrassed to see me and we had a brief but awkward exchange where I laughed too loudly in front of his sleeping baby. Maybe he felt uncomfortable because I had known him when he was in his physical prime, and I’m sure it’s also harder to make fun of yourself convincingly when you’re not typing a caption but speaking to an actual person. I suppose therein lies the benefit of not peaking too early, especially in your teenage years. Fifteen years down the road, when you no longer have a sky-high metabolism and bountiful supplies of collagen, people are less likely to wonder ‘what happened?’; at best, they regard you as having glowed up, and at worst they think it’s just more of the same.

J got his medical report back – bad cholesterol at astronomically high levels. He has now been placed on a diet (by me). This morning I made 3-ingredient oat pancakes (banana, oat and egg) that looked disconcertingly like meat patties, but turned out to be quite delicious.

Happy weekend!