A Study of a Dead Moth

Sometime ago, I had a class assignment to read Virginia Woolf’s “The Death of the Moth”.

It was around the time I finally had enough of that one tattered People magazine in my bathroom. So I was pretty excited about having a new intellect material to update my look. I’m aiming for a sexy-bookish persona.

What’s more, I actually know Nicole Kidman Virginia Woolf! She was that writer who was depressed and who eventually killed herself, an event that may or may not be related to her nose.

One fine day, I took the book to work so I could read it during lunch at the Boston Public Garden just across the road from the office. (The perfect place for a sexy bookish woman to read a serious book.)

The essay is short; it’s only 2.1 pages long.

But here’s the thing.

It’s only about a dead moth and NOTHING else, not about a guy named Moth not even about a butterfly that looked like a moth. By the 2nd paragraph, I got bored and went on to read the interesting facts on my sandwich wrapper.

The class came and went but we never talked about Woolf’s work so the moth soon disappeared from my mind.

A couple of weeks later, however, I had to re-read it again since someone confessed to the professor of having not understanding it at all. Bastard.

That night, I took a second try at Woolf’s essay, forcing myself to read every single line and using my index finger to trail the words. You know, just in case I got lost again.

No dice. Time for a drastic measure. I got up and brewed myself a big cup of Joe, my first since… Damn, I can’t remember. Was it 2 years ago?

Third try. The moth was still a moth. You have got to be KIDDING ME!

No way was I going to devote a fifth read for Woolf if I didn’t even do a fifth pass on the Snuggie parody. No, I refuse to succumb to a moth! The fourth read must be the last.

I walked around the room to calm myself, gulped down another swig and took out the big gun: my bright blue sharpie pen. Not a wimpy pencil or a pathetic black ballpoint but bright blue ink that clings to the very pores of the paper.

In the name of literature, I proclaim this book un-refundable!

The technique is simple, taught to me by my father decades ago; I am to read each paragraph and underline its main point. If it worked for “Computing Cryptography 404″, it most certainly will work for “A Study of a Dead Moth 101″.

Really? What would a day-flying-moth be called then? (Yes I googled it)

I like this because I can visualize it. I imagine a tiny little black moth in my head, named Mothy.

I shall call this profound #1. I’m not sure why, but something so poetic must be important.

What’s this?! A twist in the plot! Something big has happened…

Continuing the investigation of the mysterious reason.

Aha! Now this makes perfect sense! I shall call this profound #2.

In conclusion: A moth was flying, then he was dying and then he died, so Woolf thought of profound #1 and she found the culprit to be profound #2. Many years later, thinking about the moth, she bought a mirror, looked at her reflection, finally saw the nose and committed suicide.

My bright blue sharpie pen has saved yet another day.

My life is missing some spice, but there is plenty of drama

Kaffir Lime Leaves, if you can find them, fresh ones cost around $4.50 per ounce.

Talk about a rare and pricey hit!

Photo taken from GroceryThai.com

If you know me or, for the unfortunate, have lived with me before I moved to Boston, then you know I don’t like to cook. In fact I stocked the pantry only with instant noodles, eggs and bread in case anyone expects anything more.

But when I moved to Boston, I was faced with a dilemma. We didn’t have the money to eat out everyday and it was Ramadan, the holly month of fasting for Muslims where we don’t drink or eat from sunrise to sunset. Somehow, eating instant noodle for breakfast at 4am doesn’t sit right with the concept of fasting. It’s just morally wrong.

So I started to cook real Indonesian food: Dendeng, Ayam Tauco, Soto Lamongan, etc. I know what you are thinking, don’t worry my husband is still alive despite the initial shock.

“This is actually edible!” he cried with relief.

Thanks for the vote of confidence, honey.

The only problem is finding the spices. Back home, I could have used prepackaged blended spices but here I have to resort to basic ingredients. Even then I couldn’t find many of them in Boston, a city without taste. (Can you believe there are no Indonesian restaurants around? They are so missing out!)

That’s why… when I went to New York one weekend and found this great spice shop called Kalustyan at 123 Lexington Avenue, I went berserk. My head was spinning, my eyes were frantically reading every single label, my ears were muted to any sounds but my beating heart and I ran from aisle to aisle knocking people over.

I found: corriander seeds, cumins, nutmegs, indian bay leaves, curry leaves, kaffir lime leaves, cloves, tamarind paste, cardamoms, star anise and the list goes on. For some of these spices, Kalustyan not only have one brand but multiple brands from multiple sources. (What is the difference between cloves from Indonesia and Srilanka?), And many spices came in various forms: fresh, dried and/or grounded.

My husband, sensing that it was going to be a very long trip, repeatedly mentioned the time every few minutes. Bad idea. It only resulted in the increase of adrenaline in my blood which I (unfairly, I know) blame it on him for what happened next:

I grabbed every single item of even a remote interest. Am I going to cook Chicken Tikka Masala soon? The total damage of my frantic shopping spree? $68!

My reaction? I broke down outside the store, mumbling and pleading to no one but myself, “why why why??? why did I pay sixty-eight dollars? Sixty-eight … Aldi, why didn’t you stop me??!!”

Followed by repeated mutterings of “$68? $68! $68? $68!”

Going through the numbers was emotionally taxing. Do you know how much is $68 in Indonesian Rupiah? It’s 680,000 rupiah. That’s a lot of zeroes for something that you can find literally in every tiny wet market.

Back home spices will never, not in a million years, cost me $68. At most it would be $6. Unless if the packaging is made of gold with diamond linings. And if I could afford that, why would I be cooking anyways?

So the drama continued for about 20 minutes during the walk from the store, to the subway, back to the store, and again to the subway. I was literally walking around in circles with my husband in tow. Every now and then we’d stop and argued about $68 in Indonesian. Bystanders would have thought we were arguing about the end of the world.

“Should I give some back?”

“But I need them”

“Do I really need them?”

“It is very expensive!”

“How much will I use them in six month?”

“I can’t measure that!!”

“But then again maybe it’s worth it”

“It’s just spices!!”

“But you can’t find them anywhere”

“I should buy a smaller package”

“But it’s just one dollar difference!”

“What about getting frozen ones?”

“They don’t taste as delicious!”

Oh my god, drama, drama, drama.

At the end, I gave some back — no, my husband gave them back. In truth, we walked back to the store and were waiting in line when I had another change of mind and exited the store. At which point, Aldi — my husband, my rock, and clearly the saner one, –stopped me a few meters outside the store, pried the extra spices of my hand and went back inside to refund them. This must be what it feels like when something evil is exorcised for good.

The revised total cost? $40. Great! Nothing that a month of therapy can’t fix.

Until I came back to Boston and found that I had bought not one but two of the spice I had from before. Wonderful! Now I can pay the therapist’s fee of three bags of cumin.

A walk in the Cemetery

Kramat Pela Cemetery, Jakarta, Indonesia

Mount Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge, MA

From Jorge Luis Borges’ Blindness:

What always happens, when one studies a language, happened. Each one of the words stood out as though it had been carved, as though it were a talisman. For that reason the poems of a foreign language have a prestige they do not enjoy in their own language, for one hears, one sees, each one of the words individually. We think of the beauty, of the power, or simply of the strangeness of them.

In my mind, a cemetery is a vast expanse of headstones and earth mounds packed together so tightly that walking between them is a balancing act. Beringin trees with its hang roots and foliage so dense that any grave under them are perpetually living in night. Scattered around are the delicate Kamboja trees, sometimes growing from the grave itself, with green flower petals that smells sickly sweet of death. At night, the owls or “ghost birds” in Indonesian, whisper warnings of unseen creatures that dart from one shadow to the next and mask any sounds of civilizations in the distance.

No one visits the cemetery at dark. Even in daylight, I always stand one hop away from my younger sister or brother. If any “thing” decides to emerge and give chase, I am at least confident enough that I can outrun my siblings. Survival of the fittest, as they say.

This summer I visited my first European church in Rome. I was absorbed in the grandeur of a hall littered above with paintings and sculptures hundreds of years old so when I looked down I was startled to discover that I was standing on someone’s face. On that ancient slab of marble, was a life size carving of an old knight. It took me a few moment to realize that I was standing on a tomb! I quickly stepped aside, and looked around for an angry priest. But no one came. No one thought anything of my terrible act except maybe the old knight.

The knight was depicted wearing his armor, a big sword on his hands. Perhaps he was ruthless and had killed many people with that big sword, but here he was, resting peacefully in a house of God atoning for his sins in eternity as opposed to plotting in rage under a big Beringin tree miles away. On the other hand, my grandma turned evil the moment she was laid in her burial plot, cursed far away from any house of God and avoided by anyone who can help it. How very strange that I am more afraid of my sweet grandmother’s grave than that of a cruel old knight?

Then again just last week, in Mt Auburn Cemetery, just after our five minutes bus ride from Harvard Square, I was surprised to see that we have arrived in what I thought was a beautiful park. I did a double take on the sign, yes it was the right place but how could it be? So scenic, with were the rolling hills and trees turning yellow and red with fall. The headstones seem like works of art instead of grave markers. If someone were to tell me that this was the famous Public Garden of downtown Boston, I would have believed him or her because in truth the cemetery is more beautiful than the old famous park just south of Beacon Hill.

As our group walked the expansive ground to the viewing tower, an even stranger feature in a cemetery, I saw that the headstones were not aligned in rows but instead placed strategically as if purposely designed so by a landscape artist. Some had carved wings, some were obelisks and I saw one in the form of a Sphinx. We passed a group of teenagers, with Goth makeup and a pumpkin, taking a Halloween themed picture and another group of schoolgirls working on a science project. There was no sickly death Kamboja smell, just that of wet leaves and fresh breeze. The background sound was that of laughter as my colleagues exchanged office gossips. Perhaps even if the spirits decides to come out, they would have a picnic instead!

I mentioned this to my colleagues..An American colleague wasn’t too thrilled of our little walk in the “park” and some of the European colleagues thought the crypts in Rome were just as spooky as ever.

“Wait till you come to Indonesia,” I told them, “then you can see how spooky is a real cemetery.”

Do NOT get a Eurail pass!

This is a slightly outdated post about our regret of buying Eurail passes but I still think it’s relevant for those of you thinking of going to Europe. I wish we knew about this earlier.

Things to get from the Staples and the Hardware Store

When friends visit me, I take them shopping. Nine West. Gap. DKNY. Banana Republic.

When my mother visited me, we went to  Home Depot, Staples and any hardware store that we stumbled upon.