#Friday #Vibe
Wish you were here...
Shānmǔ shēngrì kuàilè, xīnnián kuàilè
When did we all start celebrating other culture’s/people’s holidays?
Don’t mind it and the only time that I do mind is when some idiot drags it through the political/racial mud and calls it freedom of speech.
So today is the Chinese New Year and because S wasn’t able to celebrate his birthday yesterday, we thought that we were clever for doing a double-celebration; if that isn’t lucky I don’t know what is.
For good measure, I made sure to make dishes that were auspicious - spring rolls, dumplings and noodles which I got from the supermarket on my lunch break. On our cat’s Insta feed, there was some lady peddling advice on Feng Shui. Apparently, one needs to clean up the south-east part of the house which turned out to be our spare bedroom, the bed of which was filled with unsorted laundry from last week. So I cleaned that up and finished all the dishes in 30 minute.
I thought I could feel a hum in our house, that invisible pulse of energy that meant we were prepared and fortified for the coming year- never mind that NONE OF US WERE CHINESE.
Wonderland
In Auckland city alone, there are over 4,000 parks and reserves, covering almost 11% of the land area. There are no snakes, poisonous plants, pesky insects, scary predators or weird people with bad intentions.
If you feel like reconnecting with nature or simply decompressing, you don’t need to drive far; there’s always a patch of green somewhere.
Epiphany
Over dinner at the second reincarnation of this chicken place in Pukekohe, B asked us the all important post-Christmas question of, ‘when will you take down your Christmas tree?’. I joked that we would still have it standing on the 17th of January so that we would have the pleasure of having M retrieve her birthday gift from under it.
M grinned, making a face and while we all laughed, deep inside, I was still baffled that a woman who has perfected thoughtful, tasteful and financially appropriate gift-giving could forego NOT putting up a tree in her flat. But that’s a boundary we didn’t want to cross; it’s her space and she had all the right in the world to do anything she wanted to do in it including NOT putting up Christmas decorations. It rankled, but I had to respect it.
The answer was that we didn't have a date, or rather, we left it to when we got around to doing a major start of the year clean-up which could be anytime up to the 1st week of February. It wasn’t really a big deal and besides, we liked having the twinkling lights.
‘Tradition states that you could have it up until the Epiphany- 12 days after Christmas- and if you don't, it would be bad luck.” B declares after having looked it up on Google.
Well then, nothing like the Asian in me to be immediately convinced at the mention of two words: ‘bad luck.’
We ended up removing all the Christmas decorations on the 1st of January.
Goodbye 2024, hello 2025
Thank you to M for the books. I’ve read most of Nick Joaquin’s work, but not this one (The Woman who Had Two Navels and Tales of the Tropical Gothic) so looking forward to getting reacquainted with Nick again.
And see when you ‘manifest’ something so hard that it does come true (!!). I’ve been waiting for an update to the iPad mini 6 after completing my divorce from my iPad Pro M2 (irreconcilable differences) but I didn’t want to purchase another digital device, so I put it out there to the universe and I got one for Christmas (well, thanks S!).
I have a couple of e-books already queued up:
Currently reading and awed by Alice Munro’s Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage
Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Paramo
Richard Powers’ The Overstory
Zadie Smith’s White Teeth
Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West
Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto
Currently reading
(NOT) New Year resolutions
I just realised today that I may have confused tasks I need to do (and can actually do), with New Year resolutions (which you’re not obliged to do).
So here’s my (initial) list:
Have a proper pedicure
Go to an actual dermatologist
Finish culling your clothes
Go to the gym during the working week
Study stuff properly
Put financial savings into aggressive mode
EAT more vegetables
Bake PROPER stuff
Better food planning
Better time planning
Christmas 2024 photo dump
The weekend
Had to pick up some gifts at Smith & Caughey in the city so I thought, might as well see that Olafur Eliasson exhibit at the Auckland Gallery, as well as those Impressionists generously gifted by a wealthy, Republican-supporting American hedge-fund one-percenter, the late Julian Robertson.
“My wife didn’t like the Picasso,” Robertson says in a video clip during an interview with a New Zealand journalist some years back, “…so I put it in the bathroom.”
The collection includes several other Picassos, a Cézanne, a Gauguin, a Matisse, several Braques, and works by lesser-known (or perhaps just less famous) artists.
The Eliasson exhibition was fun. Various rooms featured playful light installations that invited you to see yourself as projected multi-colored shadows. One dark room sprayed a fine mist of water, which captured and reflected light like a rainbow.
But my favorite was an installation of frozen river ice, slowly melting into a metal cistern. The dripping water was amplified to create a mournfully elegant audio effect.
The Robertsons would have loved the installation and probably wouldn’t have thought twice about installing it in their swanky 6,000-square-foot Central Park apartment.
After all, nothing says “soothing bedtime ambiance” like the sound of the planet dying—especially when you know it won’t really affect you.
5 days before Christmas
The bathroom was finally done, along with a million touch-ups for the laundry area and the toilet. The man from the vanity place took one look at the stain on the quartz top and declared gravely that if it ‘looks like a thumbprint, then it most likely is a thumbprint’.
I was bracing myself for a 2-3 week wait for another custom-cut replacement if it wasn’t.
So that’s done.
Final round of work meetings with everyone making the usual small-talk and the big question of ‘what are you doing this Christmas’? I was tempted to do an animated spiel of all the quirky, non-traditional things we had planned to do, but I was actually exhausted this week so I simply said, ‘just spending it at home’, which was essentially true.
You can do a lot at home.
I’ve always fantasised about spending Christmas elsewhere, but I must say that the allure of spending it with people you actually love and care about has a stronger pull, though if I was paid to spend it in New York, I probably would!
Anyways, took Friday off to get things ready like clean the house, clear out the fridge and just generally relax as I’m still working on the 23rd and half the day on the 24th.
Partayyyy
Hard to believe that I literally go to only two scheduled social-affairs a year, and now that B&E have moved on from hosting their epic New Year soirees, there’s only one left- our work-do.
That’s nearly 14 of some of the most memorable get-togethers with people you see five days of the week.
We’ve done everything from simple barbecues (at a colleagues spacious home), to hotels, historic venues and even a boat (actually missed one). And I look forward to it because it’s the only time I get to drink alcohol (prior to New Year’s) which in hindsight, has probably saved my life. Before leaving the Philippines permanently, I was literally drinking every other day. It was fun but it couldn’t have been healthy.
And I make an effort, because why not? I buy an entirely new outfit (like literally even the shoes shown on the lookbook) which is also my outfit for Christmas dinner. I get to either have a puff of someone’s cigarette or better still, get an entire cigarette all to myself (thanks D!). I miss smoking, but I’ll be damned if I ever go back to the habit.
And I get to finally see who my co-workers really are are outside of work which can be very entertaining (!).
The answer is YES
I don’t have a lot of friends, and I’m glad that within this small circle, WE ALL SHARE the same political values.
At this point, would you really care about ethics, when the line in the sand has never been drawn more clearly or more deeply?
DITCH THEM, GHOST THEM if you haven’t already; life is too short to waste on total cunts.
Wedded bliss
Congratulations B & E.
When you're ready but life (or other people) aren't
I’ve purchased the towels. I’ve decided on and bought the shelving. Waited for and got great deals from Black Friday promotions for bath mats, runners, decor (vase, fake coral, real calla lily leaves from the garden in the photo) and even several month’s supply of toiletries (Sans Ceuticals and Aesop) so you know, it would look good on the shelves.
I already knew how the bathroom was going to look and more importantly, what looked good in it even before the renovation started.
But for something so tiny, it’s far from done. I mean, the issues aren’t really dramatic- visible gaps in the door and window framing, the problematic walk-in shower, a factory stain on the custom-sized quartz vanity top, unfinished electricals - but it’s just baffling how something so straightforward (yes it is because I finally paid attention during the renovation process) can stretch out longe that it should just because some people actually don’t do their job well.
And that’s the fucking truth.
the tree is up
We’ve had several memorable Christmas trees growing up.
The earliest one I could remember - and I could be wrong because my memory is so bad- was a shrub in a pot and there were Christmas balls hung on the stems.
Then my mother went through her crafty phase. She had the idea of filling a chicken coop/fencing wire thingy shaped into a cone, with shiny green cellophane cut and pinched to resemble ‘leaves’. The cone ended up being so big that for some reason, we only filled the part that was visible; a trick I still use to this day, because why waste ornaments on a side nobody sees??
Then we had the infamous soap-sud tree! We used the branches of this tree that grows beside the river called pakar. We wanted something that came out of a winter’s day when the whole world was covered in snow. To achieve the snow-effect, we dissolved packets of laundry powder detergent in as little water as possible, and whipped it up to create dense suds that resembled meringue.
These were draped onto the branches to create the illusion of fallen snow. I can’t remember now how it lasted, but as we grew older and conventional, store-bought trees came to the shops, you realise how more fun it was to create something out of nothing with your family.
Unfortunately, while I’m creative at other things, crafty DIY stuff seems to be impervious to my enthusiastic attempts. So I’ve given up and have resigned to the fact that when it comes to Christmas trees, the safest route for me was to do a conventional one with conventional materials.
This year, we’ve decided on a gold and white theme and New Zealand being the small country that it is, didn’t have what I was looking for but thank God fo Amazon.
The future looks so bright
My reasoning is, if it’s something you use every day, it has to be good. It needs to last. It needs to add something to your personality. It shouldn’t make you look like a sad fool.
But no, I didn’t get a new pair of sunglasses because the only time I ever do is when I lose my current pair which I’ve done EIGHT TIMES (#RaybanCurse).
I finally gave in and went to my optometrist to have lenses put into this pair of Prada frames that I’ve had for a while. Didn’t really want to spend $$$$ putting in progressive lenses, so just opted for distance and transition lenses.
This Monday
Monday was great, because I guess it started off differently.
Sam had to drop the car off for servicing at around 7 a.m., so I tagged along. We had bagels and coffee at a totally empty Krispy Kreme store just around the corner, and it was one of those mornings when everything was just right. I never really took a shine to bagels, but the KK house-baked one had a nice crisp exterior with a pillowy soft centre. The avocado was fresh, and the coffee was nice and strong. Traffic was light and the sun was out against an utterly cloudless blue sky.
What could go wrong? Well, nothing really. Or if to does, who gives a fuck right? It’s not personal.
You just do your very best to solve it, get on top of it, put it away.
Smashed it
I believe I may have written about smashed burgers a couple of times and that:
It’s the only way to make home-made burgers for me
That I may never again order fancy burgers when we eat out with the exception of McDonald’s.
The only bun to serve it on is brioche (this is non-negotiable).
But I’m writing about it again because I’ve managed to make it in less than twenty minutes (including prep time) with the least mess possible. I guess, familiarity creates a perfect system.
The trick is, to start cooking your beef the moment you press the on-button on your air-fryer for your fries.
It takes about 15 minutes for the fries to cook and in that space of time, you smash/fry your patties on the skillet; put the cheese slices on top; and then onto the oven at 180 to finish cooking, and then a resting period as the fries finish cooking.
I always weigh my beef, and a 60+ gram patty within this time frame ends up being medium-rare which is how I like my beef.
The small bun can be misleading; I’ve attempted to eat two and it ended being two much.
The weekend
Funny thing is, mac and cheese isn’t one of those dishes I would personally pick.
I think it’s a dish that personifies the excessiveness and wanton disregard for health of most American comfort foods. Sure, if it’s on the table I’ll have a couple of spoonfuls.
And yet I make it every so often (coz it’s such a crowd-pleaser), and everyone loves it to the point that I actually get requests to make it personally for get-togethers and parties. The recipe that I’ve been using is not anything special. I think I simply Googled, ‘best mac and cheese recipe’ and used the first one that came up that didn’t look complicated or excessive (truffle, barf).
But the trick to good food is simply making it well, and for pasta dishes, the same fundamental rules apply: salt your pasta water generously and don’t overcook your pasta. I also learned that having at least three different kinds of cheese creates a more dimensional flavour.
I also layer the pasta the same way I would do lasagna. For the quantity of 650 grams of elbow macaroni for a 15 inch x 7 inch pan, I did three layers, including the crumbed-parmesan and smoked paprika topping.
I made this for my friend Jordan’s uncle who had his birthday this weekend.
