Tuesday, December 28, 2010

Hard boiled eggs

In this post, we would like to share an important reminder:

One must not reheat a hard boiled egg in the microwave.

Because if one should try to reheat a hard boiled egg in the microwave, one might hear a loud pop as one moves the egg out of the microwave, and suddenly find that the egg has exploded all over the kitchen. Then, rather than calmly prepare for the morning with a breakfast of egg and toast, one will get to spend the next half hour cleaning egg off the cabinets, floor, table and chairs, and scraping it off the ceiling. Then one will have to change clothes and even wipe off one's glasses.

Hard boiled egg: Not for the microwave.

This public service announcement has been brought to you by your clueless friend Artax.

And meanwhile, we hope you are enjoying the holidays in the way you love best. Here, that would be a Final Fantasy marathon.

Tuesday, December 21, 2010

Homesick

I like to travel. Or at one point I used to say I liked to travel. And I like my job. I really do like my job. But five days in the cold in a gray city in the eastern US, rushing from sidewalk to subway to sterile university building, eating too much restaurant food, working... I would like traveling more if I could relax and enjoy it. But then if it were really about relaxing and enjoying, why would I travel? The people I love are back at home.

Two more days, loved ones.

Monday, December 6, 2010

A passing shadow

Age is a funny thing.

I've been looking around at work and in my neighborhood recently, at all the elderly people and those at the gates of retirement. They have worked long. They are a little more feeble. A little less sturdy on their feet. To me, they look Old.

And then only very recently it occurred to me that these feeble old people are the age of my parents.

To me, my parents are frozen in time and personality in about their late 40s or mid 50s at the most. Sure, they are winding down the family rearing years, but not without a fight.

My dad has reached retirement age, and he will very soon be retiring. Grandchildren are coming and growing.

How strange that is. How strange it must be.

I have a picture that I love, of the ten of us -- my family -- in a field in springtime. I must have been about 13 years old, and I am holding the baby and smiling, my siblings crowded around me smiling as well. And since then every one of those little siblings has grown up and been a teenager and fought against curfews and chosen a college and moved away. Permanently. And now they post pictures of their own, smiling families.

And all the pictures stack up. All the families. All the smiling children. But the people in the pictures no longer exist. They only existed for an instant in time. Light on film. Scattered and captured in a single moment. The moment long gone. But the pictures are still there, oblivious to the emptiness behind them.

What will I look like soon when I am old? What will the middle aged woman think of me, she in the thick of family and career? Will she wonder, too, how I happened to grow wrinkled and gray? And will I recognize her, watching me?