A Sad Loss

I suffered a terrible disappointment today--completely crushing, it was. I'd embarked upon an ambitious project, see, an ambitious culinary project. I was going to have sticky rice mixed with fried vegetables, glass noodles, and plum sauce. I started making it at ten o'clock this morning, and finished some time around eleven-thirty. It took a long time because I wasn't feeling well, and had to do the whole thing sitting down, instead of standing at the counter. I sat cross-legged on the floor, slicing vegetables into a bowl with a butter knife and listening to Die Fledermaus on the radio. I sang along every time someone said "Fledermaus", "Eisenstein", or "Mein Herr Marquis". The rest of the time, I kept my non-German-speaking yap shut and attended to my veggies. After forty-five minutes, I finished slicing and put on the rice. Sticky rice takes a long time to make. I would've started sooner, but I wasn't thinking.

I spent an interminable time over the frying pan then, on low heat, with warmth getting in my face and making me woozy. Little grease-fleas bounced up and splattered on the backs of my hands. I wiped them repeatedly on my trousers. I hate the feeling of grease on my skin, even a little bit. I can never wait till I'm done frying and wipe it all off at once--the minute I feel it, it's got to go. Soon, the vegetables were softening nicely, and it was time for the noodles. I was very proud of myself, keeping three pots going at once without forgetting any of them and letting the contents stick to the bottom. I added cabbage leaves to the frying pan, whistling happily.

At length, everything was ready. I zapped the plum sauce in the microwave, and stirred the whole mess together. It smelled so wonderful I came over dizzy and Stella started squealing her head off. I scraped part of the food onto a separate dish for her, and betook myself to the living room. That was when it happened, the horrible disappointment. It was my television's fault. (That's right--blame the telly!) My television's haunted, see. It keeps switching itself on at random intervals. Recently, it's also started switching channels on its own. At first, I thought it must be responding to someone else's remote control, but then I found out that remote controls use infrared, and require a direct remote-telly sightline to function. So there's no other explanation but that my television's got a malicious ghost in it. And this morning, as I shouldered into the living room with a plate in my right hand and a plate in my left, and a cup of white grape juice under my arm, the ghost pulled its usual trick. The TV blared to life. Stella screeched. Strauss warbled. There was just too much noise, too much hubbub, and I got so confused I tripped. I didn't fall, but I lost all my stuff.

"No," I howled, feeling great despair. Sticky rice fanned out over my chair, my carpet, and a dogeared copy of Corelli's La Follia for violin and piano. Both plates landed face-down, ruining any chance of eating the last few clinging scraps. I never eat anything after it's touched something dirty, such as a rat or the floor.

"Skeeeeeeeeeee!", went Stella, smelling the food near her cage.

"Shut up!", I snapped, scraping plum sauce off my white carpet with my fingernails. I hated the feel of the sticky sauce on my hands, hated the greasy spots spreading over the sheet music, hated Stella for being excited, and hated a world in which I could spend an hour and a half cooking, then have my breakfast taken away in the blink of an eye. Swearing and muttering, I scraped all the food into a Tupperware box and put it in the fridge--well, except the portion I gave directly to Stella, that is. I saved the rest to feed to her later, of course, not to eat myself.

After the breakfast disaster, I was glum and tired, so I heated up an oven pizza, ate half of it with no particular relish, and napped for half an hour before getting to work. Work went much as my morning did: slowly and unsuccessfully. I improved the picture I'm snailing my way through, but I didn't finish it, and I promised myself I was going to. I'm going to work some more on it when I'm done writing up my day. I've improved the lighting in the background, but now I need to alter the figures in the foreground to reflect that improvement. I hope I can crawl out from under this mountain of work soon: I've hardly seen any of my friends in ages. I even feel guilty talking on the phone, because it eats up time which ought to be spent glued to the drawing pad. Although I don't write much about my social life, I do have one, which leaves a void in its absence. I've been making up for the lack of real-world interaction by chatting online every night in the dozy hour between work and sleep, but it isn't the same. Two portraits, a sheaf of small ink drawings, and--er, another portrait--and then I'm done. I still have a note on my fridge, reminding me to draw a weed strangling a daisy, and I'm looking forward to that.

Ah, my sticky rice! I still feel your absence now! It feels sort of...growly and gnawy, right under the ribs, sort of thing. I could eat a horse!