Monday, May 16, 2005
Deaths
With a title like that, you'd have thought that the post I'm about to make is a depressing one about lost friends or relatives, and how they had affected my life.Thankfully, I'm not about to do that.
Instead, I'll be talking about three different kinds of deaths that occured over the weekend, of which the first is one of wheat and yeast. Here's a picture of the scene of the crime;
Yup, our food supply was sabotaged once again by the friendly neighbourhood rodent population. This really pissed Yee Kiat (roommate) off, because both packs of bread were his. And within the space of a week, too. Anyway, we still have not gotten the rat trap we wanted to get yet, but by the look of things, we'll probably never buy one (because we're just too lazy to go looking for one). Moreover, it isn't as though we're starving, or that a little 'rattrition' (har har) can kill us. Hooray for the mice.
The next death is that of crustaceans. A group of us choirboys and girls went out to Marina South on Saturday night to eat (semi)live seafood, steamboat-buffet style for the low, low price of only S$12. What made an already enjoyable gastronomic outing more, well, enjoyable, was that we get to cut up and clean the live crabs ourselves. The only problem was that we didn't have any idea how to do that, and when we did ask around for advice, we were told, helpfully, to "Just wash the thing lah". Thanks a lot. Kel Ley and I then proceeded to chop and rinse them like surgeons suturing with a jackhammer. It didn't really matter in the end; only three of us (out of ten) actually ate the crabs. We had more decapod than we could handle.
I must also add that the prawns were so fresh that some of them actually jumped into the pot out of their own accord (okay, they were really struggling to break free from human fingers, but thinking along such lines spoils the narrative). Not that it made us any less guilty cooking them alive, though. We were already remorseless to begin with, for one thing...
The third and final death is Death. As in the Grim Reaper, the skeletal one with a scythe to harvest your soul when you pass on/cease to be/expire and go to meet your maker/become stiff/are bereft of life/rest in peace/push up daisies/are off the twig/kick the bucket/shuffle off your mortal coil/run down the curtain and join the bleedin' choir invisible (if you know where that came from, you are my new best friend. For a day). This particular Death is the one found in Discworld books by Terry Pratchett, recommended to people with a warped sense of humour and a predilection to British wit and lameness. The book is Reaper Man;
And it's about Death facing forced retirement, and as a result, spirits of the dead have nowhere to go, causing the Discworld to be flooded with lifeforce; ghosts appear, dead people come back to life, poltergeist activity, etc.
It's also the primary reason why I slept at 3:00AM last night and had done absolutely no homework over the weekend. Wish me luck...
Until then, may death entertain your life but hopefully not make you a morbid individual.
