Pickles n' Tickles by JJ

MY life in Doha can be summed up as a cross between Bree Vanderkamp's and Gabrielle Solis' at the moment. I find myself re-visiting an old hobby of baking like Bree and earning the right to eat the baked goods and sample new restaurants by working out like Gabby, although I do worry like Susan every now and then with the ardent hope of wanting to get back to the corporate world like Lynette. Oh, I miss the Desperate Housewives alright!  Getting back to baking has been therapeutic. I'm once again reminded of why I'd started baking during my teenage years in the first place. There's definitely something relaxing about breaking and beating and throwing things into a chamber of heat. It's a greater joy to see the beaten ingredients rise up to their best an hour later and the best est part is when I'm able to share it with others. Washing up is the only thing I absolutely dread. Right now, my Sri Lankan neighbour is enjoying the perks of living next to a baki...

THERE is an old joke about my dad getting my mom todrink rose water when she was pregnant with me so she could birth a child with the coveted rosy fairness. Asians in general associate beauty and perfection with a fair skin. The fairer you are, the prettier. It's an asset. Men look for fair-skinned wives so they could produce beautiful, fair-skinned offsprings.  Upon my birth however, my dad became the butt of the joke while my grandma had the last laugh. She lived on for almost 30 years after that to tell and repeat the story of the rose water recipe. Apparently I was the darkest baby in the baby room with the deepest indentation between the lower lip and chin :)  It's funny how a notion with such frivolous flavour still continues to manipulate the present and future generations on their definition of beauty and self-worth. I can't say it bothers me much because I'm confident in my own chocolate skin. After all beauty is in the eye of the beholder, no? ...

THANK you for the well wishes! I'm doing pretty good and having a speedy recovery. Hope I haven't spoken too soon but for someone with shingles, I've very little blisters. Still have all those random shooting pains in the head, and weird phenomenon like my arm feeling icy cool sensations still exists but it's a big relief to be moving around and doing stuff. Not too bad.  Just woke up to news alerts on a woman shot dead at South African Olympian Oscar Pistorius'( right ) home. Media speculations suggest that the arrested 26-year-old is Pistorius and the woman in question was his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp. Now this peels my attention away from the rogue Los Angeles Police Department   ex-cop Christopher Jordan Dorner  (He  has my sympathies in some ways though). Currently  perched in front of the TV watching CNN, I can't imagine what led to this awful news alert but to speculate like the rest of the world, although by speculating, I'm allowing myself ...

THIS time when I told the front desk lady at the hospital that I was suspecting chicken pox, she was really surprised. Not sure why. But   I wasn't going to take any chances with the few blisters which had magically popped up around my neck.  Dr. R was nice. Checked me throughly and concluded that it was shingles (it's from the same virus that causes chicken pox) and further confirmed it when I told him about the one-sided neck ache. He put me on anti-viral Acyclovir which I've to take five times a day for six days, together with some tablets for itchiness and pain. PAIN . He kept stressing it though. Which got me really worried.  "You can take this for the pain . It should be okay but if you can't stand the  pain then you go on this,". I smiled a nervous smile. Shingles, one of my greatest fears, is here. I've read and heard about it. It's far worse than chicken pox on the pain scale.  "How much pain can I expect, doctor? It sou...

"HOW   prominent is your fever?" Seriously? Prominent? Can't you see that I'm prominently dying here. Idiot .  "I don't know. Why don't you check."  My temperature read 38.1 degrees. Every joint in my body ached as if there were little men with tiny hammers, going about hammering on my bones unrhythmically. The left side of head and face hurt especially more and the ears felt pressured. My eye balls were individually hurting in their sockets. With great effort,  I rolled my eyes away from the doctor who didn't quite know what she was dealing with and eyed the husband with a sense of irritation. What the hell is she doing ??? Urrrgggghhhh.   " How long have you been feeling this way?" Didn't I just tell you like a second ago? Talking hurts my entire E.N.T network! " Three days. The left side pain has been intense and I've been on Advil the whole time". By then, I think I'd told her about th...

I GUESS you can't really tell how you'd deal with skin ageing until you're living it...which momentarily brings me back to a conversation I had with Martin a few years ago.  "What would you do when your glory days are over?" Martin asked.  He had just laid out my possible initial reactions to future dealings with skin ageing with the focal point being my spotless, velvet-smooth face. Our conversations usually have random pit stops like that. If I could graph them by topic and time, you'd see a rather erratic pattern, much like the current USD/JPY Forex charts.  "You know what I think, Martin? Youth is temporary and when it's time to let go of this perfect skin, I'd surrender gracefully," I said with a saint's conviction, not doubting one second that it'd only take a wrinkle to break a saint. I mean who has a dry T-Zone ? Most google searches would only give you useful references on  oily T-Zones anyway.  Now that the halo i...

LET'S just say that I wasn't very fond of her. Mrs N was a woman with an apple-shaped figure, always dressed in matching tailored maxi skirts and blouses. Her well oiled black hair was combed back and tied in a low ponytail which sat snuggly at the back of her rather short neck. She had a face round as the moon and her forehead was always dotted with a huge, red third eye ( pottu). She spoke with an old-school authority and at that time, most teachers did so and that didn't bother us one bit.  Mrs N taught my class Bahasa Melayu (the Malay language). It's a compulsory subject for a few reasons. First, it's the national language and second, all subjects are taught in the Malay language under the Malaysian education system. Science, Math, Geography are all taught in Malay and the text books also come in Malay (although I never saw a logic to it). So it's important for a student to grasp the language very well. Unfortunately, Malay wasn't my first language,...