eating italy.

my pesto

Everyone is destined to be someone and I am not to be a chef. But I love food. I love to eat. Food unites everyone, literally. There’s this time of the month, two to three days before the 15^th or 30^th, that I and my housemates usually gather to share what is left of our supplies. A period of scarcity bordering poverty. A time when your budget has reached its tolerable limit. A time for sharing. And we always laugh about it. Abundance is always preceded by scarcity. It’s inevitable. And we still laugh about it.

While supplies last, or shall we say while money lasts, I try to taste “good food”. Good food means it is prepared exhaustively and not commercially in some known or unknown restaurant. But when you’re tired and lazy, you can’t be choosy. I sometimes satiate my hunger with the instant satisfaction from the oily fries and a pretentious meal which nutritional value is mediocre when compared to your food supplement. I suggest you go home and swallow the pill of your choice. Your vitamins. Or your sleeping pills, it won’t matter though. My point is that fast food chains become our refuge when hunger and laziness collide. To cook requires a lot of patience, and good taste. Experimenting is good but taste buds can also experience trauma. We don’t want our friends to eat our food for friendship’s sake. That can be fatal. Kidding.

Today, I choose to eat good food. Of course, prepared by me. Cooking, for an amateur like me, is like experiencing writing for the first time. Your inexperience becomes a great factor. First time experience means “food in danger”. Everyone can be a cook, at least, after you pour that Dead Sea-like broth you made after a multitude of practice. Cooks are made. And I am making one out of me. Hahaha.

I choose to cook pasta. I love pasta. Every time I eat pasta, I feel like I’m a step away from Italy. Italy means gastronomical delights waiting to be relished. Though I have not been there, eating pasta always transports me to this lovely place. My Italy is food and imagination combined. I cook pesto with tuna. It was like six years ago when I first tasted pesto and I realized I love Italy. The feeling was like “unusually and exceedingly peculiar and altogether quite impossible to describe.” There’s a sense of wonder how the mixture of oil, leaves, nuts and pasta could make such a miracle. It makes me utter “bon appétit” a couple of times. And I am uttering one now. 

Ms. Ching, a colleague, shared her secret in cooking: to cook an exquisite meal, just mix everything. Well, after tossing everything in the bowl, I toss also all my hopes to be a good cook with it. The first batch is a little bit salty but somehow considerable for someone who's really hungry. The second one is an utter perfection, enough to let me say all the Italian words I know while eating. Hehehe...

Good food comes with a price. And I pay it all while I eat my pesto with gusto. 

subtle dementia.

picture from here

I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to write. With the music drowning me from the noise around, I felt compelled to produce something since I am within the arena of my own world again. This is what is beautiful when my head is empty: there’s an ample space for the thoughts that I can think about. Though my mind can hold tanks of ideas but my memory seems to take ounces only. It is like a funnel. There’s the big mouth ready to absorb good and vile thoughts but only some of these can pass through the other end. Maybe I have a good kind of Alzheimer’s. Good, since most of the time, I think humanitarian. Occasionally, my mind brings out ignominious thoughts that I don’t even know they exist. I think in volumes but I produce ounces. They just slip away from my mind. What remains are egregious thoughts. What I deliver are domesticated ones.

I think caprice. I am volatile. I always submit to the subtle whims of my id. I am a brat of my inner urges. I always play with the inner me to see the consequences or the outcome. I like walking in tightropes with my inner self. I don’t know if there’s such that exists but I feel secure when I am attuned with myself than when I am with the outside world. I feign absence to feel my presence. I become one piece when I am scattered. There’s a part of me that wants to get hold of my lunacy. There’s a part of me that controls it. I am a coin. I am where the side is up but I am always both.

I am always intrigued by the lunatics or the “crazy” people. They own the pedestrians and the world is their playground. They are tax-free and no one seems to bother their misbehavior. It is always charged to their derangement. Are their worlds as colorful as we claim our surroundings to be? Or are their worlds as complicated as the labyrinth of our ignorance? We find them funny, repulsive and unacceptable. But when they talk to an unseen comrade, I am always at awe. Have they had destroyed the portion of their brain for sanity or have they finally tapped on their inner psyches? I want to reach that inner psyche. I want to converse with my inner self. Without appearing crazy, at least.

I haven’t had a close encounter yet with someone crazy of the literal sense. However, I have met several people suffering from metaphorical insanity. They deny the fact that they live in two faces. But their actions are reeking with the smell of their sanity in trouble. Man is an ugly creature if one wills him to be so. He can also be ruthlessly beautiful. Man is always a two-way conduit. And I admire it. I don’t admire though, the thought that most people adhere to the idea of simplicity or singularity, albeit the idea that living in complication is their twin.

I am a complication masked by my being a simpleton. My ignorance is my scapegoat. I am still unable to tap on my deepest psyche. I want to touch that realm. I know everyone has his own insanity, though properly in placed. I have a safe for my own dementia.

How does it feel to be crazy? How will you know if you’re already one? How is the world in a crazy man’s mind? Are you already one?