SheLoves Magazine

Napkin Notes: On Sherlock Holmes, Homelessness and Seeing what is Invisible to the Eye

By Shirley Eu | Twitter: @ysoblu

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“The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost.” – Gilbert K. Chesterton 

“I’m intrigued about people. I’ve always been. When I get to know someone, it borders on being slightly intrusive while maintaining a veneer of voracious curiosity.  People compel me. They can be distracting, befuddling, irresistible, cantankerous, discursive or polemic. There’s always something exacting about someone and I’ve learned to discover lots about a person from the best gumshoe bar none who never lived.” –Sherlock Holmes.

Sherlock Holmes was created in Beeton’s Christmas Annual in 1887. One of the riveting things about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s remarkable protagonist must be the fact that he was based on an actual person–Dr. Joseph Bell, who was Doyle’s old teacher when he was still in Medical School. A short excerpt from A Scandal in Bohemia will illustrate what I have come to love about people-watching.

Holmes: “…You see, but you do not observe. The distinction is clear. For example, you have frequently seen the steps which lead up to this room.”

Dr. Watson: “Frequently.”

Holmes: “How often?”

Dr. Watson: “Well, some hundreds of times.”

Holmes: “Then how many are there?”

Dr. Watson: “How many! I don’t know.”

Holmes: “Quite so! You have not observed. And yet you have seen.”

We see people everywhere but we seldom observe.

The homeless are arguably some of the most invisible members in society. If I had to ask myself why, perhaps it might have to do with feeling uneasy (Oh uh, he’s going to ask me for money!) mixed with self-righteousness (Well, why isn’t he working like everyone else?), a tiny bit of sympathy (How long has he not eaten?) and a whole carking stockpot of quasi-guilt-slash-helplessness (Well, God, what do you expect me to do, give him money so he’ll get more liquor? Drugs?!) The above palaver was brought to you by a weak generalization of such stereo-types in our society. I too, stand convicted and guilty. I see homeless people but I don’t know how to, or dare approach someone because I don’t know what he or she may need specifically from me.

“Don’t just pretend to love others. Really love them. Hate what is wrong. Hold tightly to what is good. Love each other with genuine affection,and take delight in honoring each other.” -Romans 12:9-10

One evening while entering a noshery for dinner, I couldn’t have missed seeing Daniel (not his real name) sitting by the front door. If I had, I’m quite sure I would’ve tripped over him, and hurled myself headlong into the fengshui fishtank neatly placed in my flight path. There was something about Daniel that betrayed his grimy exterior that nagged at me throughout my meal. I felt as if God was compelling me to take note of something truly important and if I don’t stop to understand this person, I was going to miss a valuable lesson.

There was a person not-so-hidden behind the man.

In the twenty minutes I took to listen to Daniel’s story, I observed two different persons emerge. Daniel was injured while at work in a construction site, whose life unravelled when he could not work, who didn’t blame his wife taking their young son away because he was suffering from depression followed by alcoholism and other –isms which hastened his crow-on-a-wire look and lifestyle.

The skeptical woman in me warned not to be taken in by his sob story. I wasn’t sure how to react to what he was telling me, so I simply asked God to show me what he needed, despite the obvious and the not-so obvious. As Daniel talked, I listened and as I looked, truly looked, (which meant sitting on the floor with him) some things became quite evident.

He wore his hair neatly, even though it was long.

He wrote his name on his clothes, his duffel bag and on the few belongings he had.

He kept pulling back his shoulder periodically and held his stomach in a painful way several times as he spoke.

He had curried stains on his tee-shirt and a brown paper bag of what smelled like curry beside him.

When I asked if I could pray for him, I took a small leap of faith to pray for the things I thought he needed.

1. I thanked the Lord for him, and that by his own admission, God loves him and still has a good plan for his life. Praise God he had remained sober the last two months.

2. I said his name several times and prayed for his wife and son by name.

3. I laid my hands on where I felt he hurt most and prayed for his injuries to heal including what I believed was an upset stomach.

Immediately, Daniel told me about the curry a family had left for him the night before but he had gotten a stomach ache from it. From where I stood, it reeked from not being refrigerated. I ended our time together by handing him my uneaten spring rolls (and chucking the rancid curry). He accepted it but what did Daniel need specifically from me? The last thing he thanked me for was calling out his name. He had forgotten when the last time was someone called him by his name.

The first person who emerged changed was Daniel. The second person to come away changed was me. God sees Daniel and He simply wanted me to see his son as precious, someone who needed to be loved and honoured.

“Here is my secret. It is very simple. It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.” – Antoine St. Exupery, Le Petit Prince

Earlier this year I chanced to watch a movie called “Happy-Go-Lucky.” I like Mike Leigh’s Aesopian-type films, always insightful, polymorphous and chock-a-block full of real human sentiments. (Secrets and lies, Vera Drake, to name a couple. ) The story revolves around Pauline “Poppy” Cross, played by a nonplussed Sally Hawkins as an irenic 30- year old woman who sees the good in every person. One powerful scene that stood out for me was Poppy having a conversation with a batty homeless man in London, yaffing about “the rubber knocker man, she’s she’s she’s, she’s, ya know what I mean?” He definitely has a dozen bats in the belfry, but there’s a heartbeat of understanding from her, and she looks him in the eye and sincerely says, “Yeah, I do.”

All the punch from that scene was delivered in those three words where she simply connects with him before he goes off muttering to himself again. Sure it’s celluloid quirkiness at Mike Leigh’s braggable Golden Globe-winning best, but what the scene conveyed to me was how it impacted her.

Our hearts are fragile and myopic. Only when we focus outwardly to risk loving others will we be able to turn inward to see ourselves clearly in God’s grand scheme of things. God loves us whether we are tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, rich man, poor man, beggar man or mad man.

“Jesus saw the huge crowd as he stepped from the boat, and he had compassion on them because they were like sheep without a shepherd. So he began teaching them many things.” – Mark 6:34

We are lost. Essentially, that’s how Jesus sees us. We are like a sheep without a shepherd. The lost cannot lead the way. Someone who knows the way must teach it and teach it, Jesus does, because His compassion drives him to love.

This month, as an act of love and healthy curious people-watching curiosity: Let’s observe our friends, our family; what they wear, what they talk about, what music they are listening to, how they react to things, to us and have a ball of a time deducing their unsaid (and often unmet) needs and offer to pray with them. What do you think?

About Shirley:
Inquisitive quidnunc (without the gossip), voracious learner, atypical culture vulture, impulsive linguist, simplicity-addict, people-watcher, friend-collector, food-experimentalist. I have a bio. It’s somewhere.

NAPKIN NOTES: MAD magazine, Mrs T and the Giggliest Day of my Life

Mirth–the merry medicine, immunity-booster and mood lifter-upper.

By Shirley Eu | Twitter: @ysoblu

One score and ten years ago, Reader’s Digest was the ubiquitous literary fodder found in every doctor or dentist’s front room. For some inexplicable reason, I would connive to pilfer the magazine just to read the section Laughter, the best medicine. A footnote at the end would invite submissions which promised monetary reward for real life anecdotes if they were printed. Taunted by the giddy possibility of fame (a million readers!) and fortune ($10!) I took up the task of writing the winning anecdote at the invincible age of 15. Back in the day, that would have bought me enough bottles of Coca-Cola to make me diabetic. If memory serves me well, I believe it took over ten submissions before one was finally printed.

“The closest distance between two people is a good laugh.” –Victor Borge

Over the years, I have found that my really good friends have a self-deprecating and slightly catawampy sense of humour. We grew up on a steady diet of Beano, The Dandy, and MAD magazine. We were vacuous yet not complete dolts, insanely curious about topics no grown-up would touch with NASA’s 60ft long robotic arm. It was the best of times (Read: infantile), it was the worst of times (ignoramus).

The giggliest day of my life happened one day in Biology class.

I remember being named class clown for my insatiable need to perform in order to procure chuckles from classmates. I had three chums and we were notorious for being one tortilla short of a fiesta platter. Amidst the tittering, we also acquired frowns and sighs from the sombre and un-bemused pedagogic establishment. The only source of entertainment for what seemed like a bum-numbingly long hour in the lab was to make the rigid teacher crack a smile. What better lesson to do that than with the chapter on human reproduction?

Mrs Tan was in her early fifties, as traditionally Chinese as the cheongsam she wore and as enthusiastic to talk about sex as my 96-year-old grandmother.

Mrs. T: (mumbling through four pages of zygotes and gametes) …zygotes through fertilization between a male sperm and a female ovum—

Me: Excuse me, Mrs. T, but how did the male sperm get into the female ovum?

Girls in class muffle their giggles

Mrs. T: (turning a pinkish hue) That will be discussed in the next chapter, grrrls.

Chum 1: (flipping to the next chapter) Would that be under “Plant reproduction”?

Mrs. T: (turning a slight coral) Uhh nooo, … okay, okay, when the human spermatozoa, which has a flat elliptical sphere begins to doodle what looks like a tadpole with a long tail on blackboard starts its journey from spermatogonium, spermatocyte, spermatid and spermatozoon-–

Me: Yes, the sperma-to-go-knee-um the egg.

Chum 2: Sperm on a failed mission? Spermatocide.

Mrs. T: Girrrls, remember when we talked about the life cycle of a frog last week? The male bull frog? Mounts? The female? (Most of us are completely blank-faced) Turn to page 63!!

Chum 3: (Finding the page and eagerly reading it out loud) Oh here it is, “For the male’s SPERM to make contact with as many of his mate’s EGGS as possible, the MALE needs to POSITION his—his…”

Mrs. T: Clo-ah-ca. Position his cloaca as close as possible to hers. Yes, a cloaca, which is a posterior opening–

Chum 1: In his back? (Needing desperately to clarify) Of a human?!

Mrs. T: (now an unimaginable maroon) No, the frog!!

Me: Frogs have sperms that look like tadpoles?

Girls in class straining to hold it in

Mrs. T: (blushing fire engine red, her piece of chalk stabbing mercilessly at the blackboard) No! This is a human spermatozoa.

Chum 3: The human sperm looks like a tadpole?

Mrs. T: YES!! Now ARE we CLEAR, girrrrls?

Me: Yes. (As mud) Now ova to you.

Mrs T turned her back on us and planted her face into her hands briefly, her shoulders hunched over. Oh uh. Is that the detention bell ringing? Perhaps we’d gone too far? When she lifted up her face and turned towards us, it was wet with tears, mouth gaping but the tell-tale mid drift jiggle saved our bacon. That was the best day in biology class in that we all got a good laugh. We may have learned nothing about how humans reproduced but that day, I think something very godly good happened between Mrs. T and our class.

Remedy for the blues

When I am feeling blue, I watch reruns of A bucket of French Saunders or Monthy Python. Their parodies and over-the-top satires on multi-million dollar Hollywoody movies reduce me into a wheezy, teary mong. Try their spoof on Lord of the Rings, Mamma Mia or Star Wars.

Humour, of course, is a very subjective thing. It is also a very telling thing. It rags on your outlook in life; or how seriously you take yourself.

One More for the Road

Imagine being at a funeral, and being introduced to the surviving sister of the deceased–a kind, but rather portly elderly woman called Mrs. Mylene Baum. You can almost feel the dread of a giggle threatening to erupt through your nostrils. The only way to get past that was to think of Bambi being tortured or slamming a door on your finger. Have you ever noticed–the more inappropriate the sound of laughter, the more disproportionately horrible it is to withhold it? Now imagine her waving her heavily bearded husband over. A mutual friend of yours decides to join in only to pronounce, “Oh, have you met Mylene and Harry Baum?”

My mum used to tell me to never hold in your laughter as it will cause internal injury, so I simply roared.

Imagine finding out later that weren’t even their real names!

What makes you laugh? I mean–really–laugh? Belly-jigglingly, side-acheingly, rolling-on-the-floor-holding-your-middriftingly (rotfhym) lawling? I discovered that I love being around people who laugh themselves into silent mode. It could start off innocently with a rambunctious guffaw, followed by a gentle wheezing but because the lungs are working hard to inhale from the nose while exhaling laughter from the mouth, they end up going silent while everything between neck and diaphragm is trying to process “air”. From the back, one can easily mistake the person for going into an epileptic fit.

Laughter is the great contagion I’m committed to infecting others with.

It’s been said that laughter is the first cousin to hope. Proverbs 17:22 is one of my favourite reasons to make my friends laugh. “A cheerful heart is good medicine, but a crushed spirit dries up the bones.”

I think it was Al Pacino who said, “You should keep your friends close, but your enemies closer.” I say, ditch the enemies and put a comic there instead.

About Shirley:
Inquisitive quidnunc (without the gossip), voracious learner, atypical culture vulture, impulsive linguist, simplicity-addict, people-watcher, friend-collector, food-experimentalist. I have a bio. It’s somewhere.

Image credit: Girls Giggling, by Pinterest

Napkin Notes: Throw a summer fête

Unposh nosh easy on your dosh.

By Shirley Eu | Twitter: @ysoblu

I cook five days a week; six, if I am entertaining on the weekend. Improvement is the necessary incentive to keep both meals interesting and I, interested in cooking.

I am a firm believer in good book-lending practices so I frequent the library twice a week. Anyone who’s ever been in my home will tell you I cook by sight–foodography is a kind of stomach pornography to me. To entice the senses, the best cookbooks are easily 95 percent big glossy prints and 5 percent instruction. I tend to think verbose chefs lose their audience unless they’re on tele and actually have something instructive to say. Take Michael Ruhlman’s The Elements of Cooking. Not a photo in 245 pages of circumlocution. I would have had more stamina to sit through a year’s subscription of Opera News than read that. Well, maybe not a year’s subscription. Maybe two months.

Remember Chairman Kaga–the original host of Iron Chef, Japan? Darting eyes, flaring nostrils, and frilled cuffs (with Bill Bickard’s campy English voice-over)? How the knob did that series survive 2,000 dishes? Oh yes, it was because of the droolicious rations that whet your stomach juices into industrial strength pressurized jet sprays when the cameras linger on the finished dish. It doesn’t matter if the secret ingredient was cabbage or potatoes; they looked like they would cost $300 more than the actual cost of the ingredients. I suppose that’s what happens when you ply on the foie gras or bedaub everything with caviar.

So much of what we eat begins with our hungry eyes, noses, mouths and stomachs.

So, after surveying the Surrey Library shelves for the glossiest spine that will preface some cuisine whose ingredients are not beyond Canadian grocers, but not finding any, I decided locally gotten fresh ingredients are the panacea for all guests with a persnickety palate. I turned to the pages of my 1994 travelogue lunch notes in the old quarters of Nice to one of the simplest fares my tastebuds had ever had the presence of mind (if tastebuds did such a thing) to enjoy and recall. There was the least fancy dish called socca which I had mistakenly believed was made of cornmeal when it was made with chickpeas. We also had Farcies a L’assiette (“farcies,” meaning stuffed; hence stuffed tomatoes, stuffed zucchinis, stuffed onions) and moules-frites (mussels and fries).

I coined a new word that day – “Delumptuous” to mark a meal that was good and fresh and simple. Everything we farcied into our faces was delicious and sumptuous.

These bygone memories make up my kitchen homilies. The most successful parties, in my humble but accurate estimation, only have two outcomes:

1. People know they are loved.

2. People want to come back.

It’s summer and I’ve a Throw-down à la Bobbeh Flay for you. Find your foodict friend who squeals like a Billy-o when you hint you’re having a delumptuous party for five using only five ingredients from the farmer’s market within 5km of your home. (I’m making this stuff up as I go along …)

Strawberries are in season in Surrey, BC where I live, as are summer squash, kale, basil and thyme. Nothing has to be fancy nor expensive and sit-down meals are entirely overrated. One need not be careless about liquor if the host’s intention is to compliment the dinner and not catastrophize it. Crushed fresh strawberries with a splosh of wine cooler is a refreshing winner when you garnish it with basil mint and flowered chives. I grow these in my backyard because they’re hardy as mahogany.

It’s astonishing what anyone can get away with when the food is tasty and the company connecting with each other. I’ve also gotten away with food piled high and pan drippings resemble a Rorschach gravy blot of two people dancing. It’s lovely when the biggest headache your guests winge about is whether to have more quiche lorraine or kale with pinenuts? That’s a champagne problem: having to choose between two ideals.

Questions for your guests to make the fête funnily memorable:

Make a list of things you don’t know. (If you are like me, I would suggest a less comprehensive list of 20.) Give your guests your problems. Here are some of mine:

1. Why do we need a turkey baster when it’s impossible to clean and what’s wrong with using a big ole spoon?

2. Why do clothing manufacturers sew their labels in such an uncomfortable place?

3. How do you tell someone with very bad breadth, that?

4. How do you think they make clothing out of banana or bamboo fibres?

5. How do you tell the person who can talk the hind leg off a donkey, that he/she talks too much?

Bring weird/wonderful kitchen doodads and ask them what else they can be used for. See #1 above.

Value-add your evening soirée by giving them tips. My suggestion is make them ALL up. It helps to put some Unhelpful tips in with the mix too. My favourite? Chew gum right after you’ve eaten seeds or nuts to clean the grit lodged in your teeth.

Introduce your friends to dubstep; if they fail to appreciate that, play Kajagoogoo, Howard Jones, David Bowie, AHA or anything from the 80s.

Remember, anyone can throw a successful party when pigs fly. And we all know, pigs fly when they have enough love and thrust.

About Shirley:
Inquisitive quidnunc (without the gossip), voracious learner, atypical culture vulture, impulsive linguist, simplicity-addict, people-watcher, friend-collector, food-experimentalist. I have a bio. It’s somewhere.

Napkin notes: A letter to my son to be opened when you turn 21.

On raising a son and leaving him the costliest part of me: my memories.

By Shirley Eu

To my 16-year-old,

You’ve arrived at that weird place called the tweenager years. Your terrible twos never came, but instead it made a beeline into splenetic sixteen, which I regard as tame, compared to the foofaraw that was fifteen! I’ve arrived at forty-three, which I facetiously call:  forgetful-me. Incidentally, that’s the reason I’m writing this letter.

I had written you letters ever since I was pregnant with you in Switzerland. While you were busy growing up in Singapore and Surrey, so did the pile of signed, sealed, undelivered letters  to you. I’ve written a letter every birthday, major event and holiday, drew out the floor plan of most hotel rooms we had slept in, mapped out the best places to eat and which ones to avoid, what garish museums we’d been to and names of villages/cities we had futzed about, lost for hours.

I have a voluminous stockpile of leave-behinds I hope will not sedate you. In it are our adventures, of the people around us and of friends who have become family. In short, I have left you the costliest part of my brain matter–my memories. Costly, because I shall lose my memory one day and no amount of dollars will buy them back. That may or may not be a good thing. We’ll see …

You know me quite well, and I’m sure you would’ve seen right through my thin façade that this is no billet-doux from maman. You are no yahoo. No, this is an open letter of a mum who wants to say what I find hard to say vis-à-vis. As a sideline, it’s also a note to salute the many single mums out there who are trying their utmostest to bring up their progenies into successful earthlings but feel like a monumental, EPIC failure. To you both, I say, “This too, shall pass.”

Here’s Myron with his deceased dad, Moses:

Let me start with an apology, apropos the cartoon on your sandwich bag … okay, I admit that I had too much time to kill last Tuesday morning when I had decided drawing a bunny rabbit and signing “love, mummy” seemed quite twee. Yes, I did get your churlish text message after your classmates decided to pass your sandwich wrapper around and embarrassed three years growth out of you. Yes, I am sorry I made you feel like a half-grown, wet-behind-the-ears twit when you are desperately trying to grow up. A part of me desires you to stay small and near me. I’ve learned my lesson. I promise to never make fun of peach fuzzy facial hair, uncut toenails or unattended acne. It is un-kewl.

Secondly, self-confidence is rubbish if you don’t know where your self-worth comes from. Your value is intrinsic to who you are and you cannot give yourself a price for you cannot know it. To know your self-worth, you need to ask your Maker. I know God has made you special because I’ve seen what you can do when you’ve got a bee in your bonnet–creating sounds and beats, or drawing intricate, fantastic robots. That’s not the only reason that makes me believe you are one of the elect, special ones. There will be times you struggle with the meaning of your existence. I think of the caterpillar emerging from coccoon. If we helped them out of their dark worlds, we would kill them, because struggling is part and parcel of life as God had meant it to be. It is within reason to wonder if Jesus Christ is really God, if “what the hell” is really an objectionable phrase, and if I am really your birth mother? Self-confidence is not obtainable if you do not grasp where self comes from. So: push back, ask, query, interrogate and investigate!

This inevitably brings me to the third point: Yes, I do ask too many questions. It’s a gift/curse of being maternal. God has put me here as an aegis for your soul, but I suspect my time was up six years ago. You are a tweenager and you answer too few times, seldom completely or even relevantly. I am learning to live with it, thrive under the future thrill that you will one day emerge as a parent and begin this circuitous conversational tango with your teens. By then, I pray we shall at least have grown to become allies or at least frenemies of a sort.

Words are vitally important. Learn a word a day, but learn the kind words first. The gnarly, obstreperous ones will come in handily at a pedestrian crossing, but learn the constructive adjectives first. You will use them more often when you have an arsenal of make-em-feel-good vocab. I love this proverb, The tongue has the power of life and death, and those who love it will eat its fruit. Not just because it’s true, but powerfully transformative.

Five mum-isms I leave for you–pearls of wisdom you may wish to pass on to my grandkids:

1.     Use things; Love people. Loving things and using people is wrong, and frankly, extraterrestrial. Jesus said Do unto others what you would like others to do to you and because I’ve tested this truth, I’m a thousand-fold more considerate.

2.     The button with the squiggles in Business class means there’s a built-in massage in your chair-bed.

3.     Very few people realize how large an income is thrift. Save some, spend some, give the rest away.

4.     Facebook has an undo button; Life does not. Pray before thinking, and think before doing.

5.     Taking the trash out is a privilege. Mowing the lawn is a privilege. Loading the dishwasher without being told is a privilege, but all of the above is a blessing to others and yes, I have noticed and am blessed.

Know the true value of time; snatch, seize, and enjoy every moment of it. No idleness, no laziness; no procrastination; never put off tomorrow what you can do today. I wish I could have had the distinction of saying that but the Earl of Chesterfield beat me to it by about 260 years. I’d sooner give you the book he wrote to his son Philip-a collection of letters, called the <Fine art of becoming a man of the world> but you probably won’t enjoy reading it and there’s something abhorrent about becoming a man of the world. You were meant for greater things, for far more outlasting, grander and potent themes than that.

I probably don’t say this enough, but I believe in you.

Love,

Mummy.

About Shirley:
Inquisitive quidnunc (without the gossip), voracious learner, atypical culture vulture, impulsive linguist, simplicity-addict, people-watcher, friend-collector, food-experimentalist. I have a bio. It’s somewhere.

Napkin Notes: Exploring the Great No-no-phobia

On shaving blindly, self-respecting “nos” and reading tell-tale parenthesis

[Click to download Shirl's comic strip: LosingweightSheep // Adorable!]

By Shirley Eu | Twitter: @ysoblu

Six months in the gym and I get eight calluses, two reddened bunions and not too many visible signs I had actually rowed, biked, and tread-milled. (Unless one counts the uploaded photos of a certain mileage counter on FaceBook.) Sometimes all the hard work can only be seen in the subcutaneous layers on a molecular level too biological to go into without experiencing the heebie-jeebies.

Still, while at the gym one day, I went past all the heavy-duty ironman equipment to try the bench press. There are steel donuts of all sizes and a young muscular man sidled over to offer help. Now, I’m no weakling (I’m no Irene Andersen either …) but when he asked if I needed help, I said, “Yes.” He locked and loaded the scrawniest 5 kg on either side. It behooved me to internalize the universal question: “Why is it so difficult to say ‘no’?”

Sidenote

I say “no” as frequently as I take afternoon showers. This reminds me of something quite untoward as I had my second 3pm ablution this year. I never shower with my glasses on, a bit of information that does nothing but inform you reader, other that I’m quite blind while reaching for sharp instruments, like a razor. Can we say “hematophobia” (Fear of bleeding)? No, because it’s not a real word, but it has never stopped me from using it indiscriminately. It’s a matter of time before it circulates to an unfamiliar boondock in Australia where a word-embracing tautologist will use it in a blog and, Voila! Instant acceptance in the slanguist’s dictionary.

Not forgetting my point at the beginning of this sentence –call me “meanderthal”–it’s fairly difficult for many of us to say “No,” mean “No” and follow through with a clearly defined, absolute irrevocable  “No way,” “Not happening,” “The opposite of yes.” I find this a particularly female-prone malady, do you?

Dessert Dialogue

Take another example: my little naughty excursion to dessert last night at Sammy J. Peppers with my womanpal. Now most woman would read between the lines (or skim around my parenthesized thoughts). This is going to come to a complete, utter, no-win, sorry, self-deprecating end. A chocolate mousse cheesecake by any other name is sweet re-toxification! The internal commentary went like this:

I just had Rack of Lamb Paidakia. I’m stuffed!

I still have some space in my stomach.

We said we would be done at 9:30pm and it’s 9:30pm.

I haven’t had dessert for a long time; I can afford this.

I brought this home to my 16-year old son who sliced through the fog of my bimbling like a hot knife through herbed butter.

Wisdom of Youth

“Mum,” he said, “you really don’t know yourself and you care too much about looking like a good person.” Ouch. Trust a tweenager to deliver the coup-de-grace with a sledgehammer. As I said before, I’m no weakling (especially in the verbal jousting department), so I pressed for clarification. He made several poignant and brief points that only a tight-lipped, 16-year old of the male species can. His observations:

1. Think with your brain, not with your stomach. (we can also think with other organs but that’s another blog entry) If you look at my internal dialogue again, it’s brain-stomach-brain-stomach.
2. It’s about knowing yourself.
3. It’s about respecting a person’s choices.

I found our little jaw-jaw most enlightening. The fact that I feel more obliged to preserve harmony at the expense of internalizing guilt and regret is a viciously debilitating thing. A dim 15-watt slowly got replaced with the Cree TrueWhite light bulb and it made an impact in my brain the same way the chocolate mousse fell to the pit of my stomach with a dullish thud. Strangely enough, it brought to memory the lasting words from Polonius to his son Laertes in Shakespeare’s play Hamlet.

“This above all: to thine own self be true,

And it must follow, as the night the day,

Thou canst not then be false to any man.”

By “true” he means loyal to your own best interests and by “false,” disadvantageous or detrimental to your image; so, cut to the chase and put this down on my chocolate-smeared napkin before I lose the plot: <Respect myself, respect others> which makes perfect sense when one begins to respect and know one has the God-given freedom to choose; one would inevitably respect that someone else also has the same. Next time you have to say no, if it’s in your best interest to say “no,” then by golly, that’s all the valid reason you need have in order to say it.

How you do it

As the old adage goes, it’s not what you say, it’s how you say it. So remember to smile, and with a gentle tilt of your head, deliver your most deliberate and firm, “no”. Give it a go. I’m fairly certain you will be able to comment here, and live another day to tell someone else the liberating, self-respecting, non-offensive way to say what you mean and mean what you say.

[Don't forget to download Shirl's comic strip: LosingweightSheep // So adorable!]

Questions:

• Struggle with saying no:  Yes or No?
• What wisdom have you learned to help you Just Say No?
• Remember a time when you said Yes, but should have said No?

About Shirley:
Inquisitive quidnunc (without the gossip), voracious learner, atypical culture vulture, impulsive linguist, simplicity-addict, people-watcher, friend-collector, food-experimentalist. I have a bio. It’s somewhere.

Napkin Notes: Inspiring the next Picasso

On scribbles, scaling down and creating space for new skills

by Shirlock | Twitter: @ysoblu

When I was a teenager, I had a nasty habit of writing on the palm of my left hand. I was not from the Post-it note generation and long before any electronic Palm came on the market, there was the original palm and the Papermate–the pen you can write upside-down with and on greasy palms.

Gradually, I advanced to scribbling on napkins and the bottoms of coasters, all in the name of remembering OMT (One Main Thing)–a pithy fits-on-a-mug epigram. A maxim, if you will. In time, I had a rag-tag compilation of common-sensical notes written to self, so that historical blunders will not be repeated and witty cleverisms will be recorded for posterity.

Once, after an eight-hour horror movie marathon during my freshman year in college, I spent the next 72 hours regretting in leisure and replaying the most gruesome parts where Freddy Krueger would torment his wide-eyed, sleep-deprived victims with razors for hands. Consider the memorandum après my first (and last) horror movie: Stick a pin in my eye before I watch another horror movie. I have not watched another horror movie since. Granted, I’ve watched horrible movies but you’ll agree, that’s not quite the same.

Here’s my napkin scribble, the OMT I want to share with you today:

When I turned 19, I decided to renew an old skill. I took on the task of training my left hand to manipulate chopsticks, to write and subsequently to draw. Why would anyone want to do that? Well, if one can be mono-dexterous, why not ambi? After all, God gave me two hands …

Have you ever wanted to upskill? It could be learning to speak Polish, or cooking dinner for your friends. What about making stuffed animals out of old socks?

Too busy? Life too full?

Socrates once said: “Beware of the barrenness of a busy life.”

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