just saying.

I have a thing for words.

And people.

And especially --especially, people who are good with words. 

Mmmm. 

"you're my crutch when my legs stop moving."

I have been wondering endlessly about why I've been so jittery and restless this past few weeks - aside from the fact that I am finally, finally, bidding farewell to my working place for the past four years; my second home. And I realized that maybe it's because I haven't had a chance to pour it all out here. 

I don't know any routine other than getting up early, get on the train/car and head into my office, turn on my computer, chitchat with my friends while it hums to life, check my emails, go over my to do list, then head down/upstairs to grab breakfast with them. I don't know any other routine than to have hectic mornings, cut off by a lunch session where all of us go upstairs to crack jokes, fuss and curse about clients, and go back to work blasting out 8Tracks in my cubicle until 5 p.m, followed by coffee/desserts break only to hear about the continued part of those absurd, out-of-this world jokes and curses made by my friends. I don't know how it will feel tomorrow knowing that there won't be any familiar voice yelling dinner orders. I don't know how I can ever get used to turning left or right without seeing my friends there. I used to know the place inch by inch; even with my eyes closed. Come Monday, I will be placed in a completely new, strange environment with unfamiliar surroundings; back to square one. Back to zero.

Notice how I wrote 'friends', instead of 'colleagues'?

Because that's how they feel to me. This love-and-hate relationship between all of us is something I've always treasured deep inside. The non-bullshit way we treat one another and the fact that no matter how hard we tried to disguise it, the sincerity to back up each other and help one another out always manages to show. I will miss each of these unique characters, types of people whom I would never have thought I'd get along with if I hadn't met them there. It's surreal how different yet how alike we all are. 

It has been one heck of a ride, and I will never forget the moments leading up to my last day there. Good or bad, I think I learned a hell lot in that place both personally and professionally. It makes me smile, frown, laugh, shake my had in disbelief to think about how naive I was and how I should've been smarter in picking which issues I needed to respond to and which to ignore. And these past few months in particular have been utterly indescribable. I've gone down roads I have never even thought to touch before, allowed myself to feel things I never thought I'd feel before, made decisions I never thought I'd have the guts to make, and said words that surprised even me - in a good way. It's been amazing. Maybe this whole growing up process wasn't a bad idea after all. 

(If you knew how much papers and stuff tend to build mountains on my desk, then you know how this pic tells a million words.)

So I guess this is it; on to the next, then. Can't wait to see what other surprises life has in store for me in my next chapter. Looking at how things have been going recently, all I can say is - bring it on, Universe. 

:)

says Comfort one night,

"Checkmate."

The Wall, in all of its rock-solid glory, looks down shamefully and retreats back in to the corner, feeling a thunderous rumble coming in the distance that will soon make the fort collapse.

And the Universe; the Universe is smiling somewhere, leaning back at his seat with a happy, satisfied sigh.

(to be continued)

2013 Lesson #2,7964

Learn to keep your mouth shut.

Just because it's in your head, doesn't mean you should say it out loud. Just because you're easily restless and thus always feel the need to let out how your mood is or how you feel, doesn't mean you can't sink back to your shells and clam up. Permanently.

It's a freaking fun method, bottling up. Try it. Of course it's not your usual trait; but maybe that's always been the problem. You were right to zip your lips and hide behind the walls. 

PS: You have to be brave.

How do you fall in love?

You don’t fall in love like you fall in a hole. You fall like falling through space. It’s like you jump off your own private planet to visit someone else’s planet. And when you get there it all looks different: the flowers, the animals, the colours people wear. It is a big surprise falling in love because you thought you had everything just right on your own planet, and that was true, in a way, but then somebody signalled to you across space and the only way you could visit was to take a giant jump. 

Away you go, falling into someone else’s orbit and after a while you might decide to pull your two planets together and call it home. And you can bring your dog. Or your cat. Your goldfish, hamster, collection of stones, all your odd socks. (The ones you lost, including the holes, are on the new planet you found.)

And you can bring your friends to visit. And read your favourite stories to each other. And the falling was really the big jump that you had to make to be with someone you don’t want to be without. 

That’s it.

PS: You have to be brave.


(Jeanette Winterson in Big Questions from Little People & Simple Answers from Great Minds)

2013 Lesson: #34

Spend more time with Mom and Dad. 

And then enjoy their sincere, pleased smile when you propose it.

a dream.

I am well-aware of what you think of patissiers, pastry chefs, desserts experts. That compared to culinary chefs, they're small, useless, insignificant, invisible--or as Bourdain says, like a bunch of orthopedists in a room full of surgeons. A bunch of pretentious people making fairytale,non-manly foods with the level of coolness being minus one out of five. 

But you'll be damned if you think that it ever stops me from wanting to be one.

I know it's probably too late for me to learn pastry through an official institution by now; but a lesson is still a lesson nonetheless, right? Spending two hours in the kitchen on a Sunday with your mom (who is not any nicer than Gordon Ramsay when it comes to cleanliness and tidiness and efficacy) (and worse, she's doing it in Javanese) learning how to whip eggs the right way is just as useful as a session in Le Cordon Bleu, no?

I can't quite put my finger in how I got my first passion in desserts. When I was little, my sister and I used to be so excited every night before Lebaran because we got to help her make cornflake cookies using a recipe that goes back to my grandma's years. I remember seeing the scrawly handwriting in a yellowed note and thinking I wanted to leave my daughter and grandchildren with this kind of heritage, too; a family recipe. I remember climbing up the kitchen chair and shoving my small hands into a big bowl of batter and taking a lick whenever mom turned her back on us. The rush of feeling (perhaps from all that sugar) and giddiness was easy to recall. I remember mom teaching us and guiding my hands into making the perfect cornflake balls. Small, round, crispy and moist, and competing with my sister on who could roll the fastest (although after a while, she got bored and just left me alone at the table. She's fun like that.)

And my dad - I blame him for my constant craving of colorful, illegal-looking drinks I've had in my life. He's my partner in crime in smuggling weird syrups and ice lollies into the shopping cart whenever mom isn't looking. He shares my love for ordering colorful desserts and after my parents' divorce, when he still had the time to visit us every Saturday, I made him banana milkshakes or ice cream sandwiches which he always ate despite his dietary requirements. 

I get most of my influence from my mom, though. My mom is a terrific cook. She's cooked since she was in her teenage years basically because she didn't have a mother to grow up with. No mother to look up to, can you imagine that? No one to hold you and tell you everything's ok when you're crying your eyes out after spilling a bowl of chocolate paste to the floor. My mom cooks cuisine and pastry, both equally excellent. We would go to a restaurant and I would order a dessert (the most colorful, weird-looking one) and we would discuss how we can imitate one at home. 

We still do that now.

I remember a family event at home when my sister invited her boyfriend's whole family for dinner at our house a few years back. Always one to please guests with foods especially in my house, I volunteered to to make an frozen Oreo cupcake for desserts. Imagine Oreo in all of its gloriness, the thick vanilla filling and rich chocolate cookies. What happened was I presented them with a gooey mush of black-and-white fillings and lumpy cupcake muffins, with too much Oreo crumbs and too little chilled time. Luckily, being a bunch of polite people that they were, all the guests finished it off without forgetting to send compliments to the cook (and for that reason alone, kak, I think you married the right guy.)

The one thing I would change from my current routine now, the only good thing to have a strict 9 to 5 job is that I would have more time to bake. More practice. My hands are already rusty from all the non-baking over the past year, it makes me sad sometimes. But I still assure myself that I still have Sundays to squeeze it in and I motivate myself by collecting easy recipes from the web. Nothing fancy, nothing with a name I couldn't pronounce. Just simple pastry and sometimes they don't taste good. Sometimes I let it in the oven too long or too soon. Sometimes I incidentally used the wrong type of flour and it doesn't flourish like I want it to. Things go wrong most of the times and that's why I love it. It makes me questions things, makes me want to do better every. single.time. It tickles my curiosity, my desire to be better. I have had eggtarts that taste too egg-y. Chocolate brownies that are too sweet (yes, there's such thing.) Shapeless marble cakes and an even more shapeless Momofuku cookies, to cite recent examples. 

But I can't wait to go back to the kitchen. I can't wait to lay out all the ingredients at the countertop table and try each step from the recipe. I can't wait to fail. 

I just finished Bourdain's first book and that is perhaps where I got all this culinary sentiments from. It's amazing to read someone pouring out his passion like that. There was this particular page where he wrote an advice on how to be a great chef (coming from him, that's like bible.) I fully understand that both physical and mental solidity are required to be one and that you have to be prepared to work endless hours. Which, I think, will seem like seconds when you do something you really love. Check out the interview below with Craig Koketsu, one of my favorites who is also a former resident chef at Lespinasse. (It's hard not to idolize the guy when he looks like this, btw):

"Unlike many of his contemporaries, Koketsu didn’t go the culinary school route. Classes as a rhetoric major at UC Berkeley didn’t inspire him, but a visit with his sister, who was enrolled at the local community college culinary school, did: Koketsu realized that he wanted to be in a kitchen, too. But he’d worked his way through college and couldn’t afford more schooling. Instead, he lucked into a job with “an incredible teacher,” Chinese American chef Steve Chan at the Silicon Valley French- and Asian-influenced Martha’s Restaurant. 

There, Koketsu absorbed the fundamentals of cooking during grueling 15-hour days that “flew by,” he says, “because I loved it so much and knew I was doing the right thing.” One night on the line at Jeremiah Tower’s Oakland Stars, he had a light-bulb moment. Koketsu asked Tower what the key to his success was. Tower’s answer: “I don’t separate my personal from my professional life.” It made sense to me, Koketsu recalls. “When you’re completely absorbed in something, it becomes your life.”

The book also mentioned one name that has stayed for me for so long and resurrected again in my mind thanks to Bourdain mentioning him as the greatest pastry chef in the world: Richard Leach. I've seen his book in Kinokuniya once, his Sweet Seasons recipe book with ingredients that allows cooks to mix and match that is now not available anywhere else THAT I DID NOT BUY and remains as one of my biggest DINDA WHAT THE HELL WERE YOU THINKING moments. (and to make things worse, I forgot to look it up in Melb.)

It made my day that I had the same preference with Anthony Bourdain. Nice. (and probably a million other people out there, but I'd like to think of it as a private moment with the chef.) 

Anyways, I can ramble on and on and on here if nobody is stopping me. And I don't like rambling. I just needed to let this out, this frantic feeling of awakening and discovering what you like again. It's a pretty damn good feeling, though. It's a reminder that, despite the fact that it's impossible for me to be there now, at least I've gone here to this sacred place of mine, sat on one of the benches, peeked at its library, acted like one of its students -  no longer admiring it from afar and thinking what it would be like to step through the gates.

And for me, that's good enough; for now.