The National Food Week we struck up and enjoyed comes to an end abruptly. This week, especially the coming weekend, is supposed to be Pakistan Week, during which my adorable German language learning buddy Atabak will cook us barbecue on the electrical stove at the 4th-floor kitchen. Although our German language skill both notably sucks, that after an entire semester of training, we still only know how to greet each other and then ask for names, I was very much looking forward to seeing him cooking for us. I'm not a usual fan of barbecue, or to paraphrase, I'm not a usual fan of food, however I still like to occasionally hang out with people who care about me and to whom I can talk - I think there is something special to this.
Atabak then told us that he's not making anything because he has a midterm on Monday. I thought it was fair for him to prioritize mid-term as opposed to our lunch, after all, we have lunch every day and mid-term only once in a semester, and that I'm going to the Asian Supermarket downtown to buy some hotpot ingredients, instant noodles, and wonton so eventually we still have something going on. Considering Muslim people cannot eat pork, and Muslim-converted agnostic has mentality too fucked up to tolerate it, I might as well just cook it for my girlfriend and Alin - I recently picked up playing Dota 2, because again I successfully uncensored my previous Chinese Perfect World version, and Alin has several hundreds of hours of gameplay in it, I could learn some Dota 2 skills from him. I presumed, Dota 2 skill, together with the skill I acquired from my 12 years of traditional Chinese education, though only partially useful, may recouple into a grander framework on which I will sustain myself. And then I forgot to do so. Because on the train I was reading extensively for German A1.2 Quiz One, which was then looming in one hour; in the shop I'm too amazed to have found something with a 40-cent price tag - the Taiwanese instant noodle which I was just eating, and during the checkout process I was overwhelmed by the cashier's claim that I'm the biggest customer of the day (for having spent half a hundred euro on convenient food). My forgetfulness didn't make me feel acutely guilty, therefore, labelling everything under the category of social redundancy, I went ahead and left it behind - excusable, and totally reasonable, because life is about moving on and pushing forward.
Speaking of wonton, my woeful love for this particular type of food has its origin in my mom. Although married to my father and carrying a child, she insisted patroning a small food stand at the back door of a school where I would spend 6 years as a pupil. What's special about the wonton food stand I cannot lucidly recall - from what I remember, the owner always uses a kind of wooden furniture saturated with moist, because every time my hand glides by the surface I can sense a abstruse, veiled friction that is once troublesome, and now bittersweet. No, that might not be moist at all, it could be dirty accumulated over the years of standing roadside, or mould that died out long time ago and then since ossified, or dried oil and remnants of wonton soup drooped unto the table by the customers - I have a sensible difficulty in recalling the detail, however, I do not, at all, have difficulty in bringing up emotion of the past, or in a more precise manner, current emotion construed according to a relatable conjecture about the past. I used to like the chili sauce on the table - she prepared it to cater to different customers because they all have different requirements regarding the spiciness of the soup, and that people from that neighborhood are generally parsimonious with money, and by forging the feeling of unlimited chili sauce supply, they would have the conviction that this afternoon indulgence is worth the money.
For a long time, when I went back from school, I can see her busy, either with filling bowls with wontons, or with emptying them for later use. Sometimes to me it's a moment, or a variety of moments snapshotted, and for having been there, they feel like eternity. But after I have graduated from that school, into middle school or high school which I cannot tell, she was said to have moved away, to Hangzhou, the capital of the nearby province, for a proper, decent wonton shop that, in no way, materially resembled the wonton stand she had. And she left without telling me of the decision, like the owners of another wonton shop, the heartless couple near my paternal family, closed down their business simply because they didn't make money off of it - utterly preposterous because I have always had money for that specific purpose and I always made those purchases in bulk. But she's gone, to Hangzhou, not far away but still nonetheless feels like Frankfurt to me, leaving behind a heritage currently run by her daughter, who is said to be moving out soon. I didn't pay much attention to them because I was focusing on growing up, chasing after girls, and devising my vision of the future.
Since then, I have never met them; neither have they met me.
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PayPal is having trouble with me. They reversed all 11 payments I have received because "It's simply too risky to deal with you", and after several powerless yet stern attempts of communication, I'm resorting to the rule of law. I threatened in a letter addressed to them that I'll file a complaint at the Luxembourg Financial Ombudsman - I indeed tried, only to be confronted by the fact that the Ombudsman usually just forwards the complaint to PayPal and seldom cares to read their reply. I am, reasonably, still incensed to the point where I am no longer angry or rational - I sought to find a lawyer to cause some genuine trouble to PayPal regardless of whether I'll be able to pay the price of such litigation. And of course, I didn't. Because not only I'm lazy to work on anything on Saturdays, but also I'm always verbally eloquent and physically timid. I'll go in a future point.
So instead of proceeding in legal affair with PayPal, my day is mostly spent doing mundane things that I don't remember - I woke up at 1 PM and got up at 2 PM, after that I spent 3 hours surfing the Internet trying to find a game on G2A cheap enough to be interesting. I also crafted a level 5 Arma III badge and argued with my girlfriend on whether it's right for her to sit on my lap and on if she should go down for dinner. During the hours before dinner, my roommate Husain also cooked some Italian spaghetti which according to him "would certainly make an Italian suicide if he really gets to see this". It turned out, after all, really good. I said that not out of courtesy, but with sincerity. Although what makes the otherwise terrible spaghetti delicious I'm not sure - be that everything with powdered black pepper and extra hot Indian chili is tasty, or that we were fervently hungry, or that the food appears better because of the relative low expectation we had after he made the above claim. The point is that those few hours were spent with an aimlessness made peculiar by how little everybody has cared. And then there was dinner with fried chicken covered in cereal as opposed to bread crumbs, and anime session proposed by Alin involving the three of us eating Romanian Snail with Milk and watching Japanese anime - we actually watched two, the first about a middle school pianist who cannot hear himself playing and the second on high school kids sharing bathtub and dressing in homosexual love-making magic-bursting costumes - all very entertaining indeed.
