deep insightful teppanyaki and an afterthought rant

Itemized post.

1. Finished watching Love, Actually. It was fantastic, right down to Hugh Grant as the Prime Minister, and (coincidentally, Hugh Grant’s cousin) Thomas Sangster acting as Sam, some guy’s kid. The only thing I found wrong with the movie was the overrun of characters- I can’t remember the names of most of them): but I guess that’s not the point, in fact, the very charm of the movie lies in the very very loosely connected events, involving Brits with sexy accents and all that.

All right, all right, I admit it, yes, I am so totally in love with Thomas Sangster. In Love, Actually his character’s supposed to be around 10 years old, but I jsut found out that he’s now 17- so that would make him 13 when they made Love, Actually. He really does look 10 in the movie though, awfully cute and everything. And he learned how to play the drums. Strangely I can’t find any recent pictures of him except this one http://www.teenidols4you.com/picture.html?g=Actors&pe=Thomas_Sangster&foto=554&act=70&mv=4&pic=111151, in which he is older looking than in most of his screencaps from his various roles (and, teen idols 4 you? really catchy name, that one). Whatever- his blond/brown hair is so adorable and he’s always got it scruffy and messed up, but not spiked, and ahhh he’s just so cute :D

2. fancyshmancy teppanyaki (rhymes!) at plaza sing b2 today, at this (relatively) new place called sakae teppanyaki. It’s pretty awesome, I ordered the beef set and it wasn’t that usual thin thin beef you get that’s supposedly Japanese, but tastes rather like the ones you cook at Seoul Garden (i mean how they taste after they’re cooked, obviously). The beef was nice and steaklike, in easy-to-handle cubes. And yes, well, I am absolutely hopeless at handling any cutlery at all, so cubes are definitely a plus. The chef actually asked me how well I wanted my beef to be done! :D and I said- or rather my mom said- medium rare to well done, that is, somewhere in the middle.

apparently medium rare is cooked on the outside but still has blood on the inside, and my real dad likes it that way. barbaric, I say. my stepdad didn’t even want to try the beef. he doesn’t really eat beef. but it was really good! and they had foie gras and everything, and I was wondering “what the hell, foie gras in jap teppanyaki? get out of here man” but it was really really good! like the stuff I used to have during lunch buffet when the Westin Stamford was still the Westin Stamford, and when my mom was still paying off bills on time and we were rich and stuff. I mean, the foie gras at the Westin Stamford is like all fanciered up, with thick slices of toasted bread and ala orange sauce or marmalade or whatever it is, but the one at sakae teppan is good too. just less fancy. only foie gras is fancy in itself, so, i’ll jsut stop rambling now.

yeah and their chawanmushi was even cooked on the teppanyaki stove, inside this really cute onion cup! like seriously, the cup was like made of bowlshaped onion slices. very very cool indeed. my beef set was 19.90, but it was very very worth it, because there was also mushrooms and everything (not just your normal mushrooms, but with fancy ones in, like in pasta restaurants, and I don’t mean pasta mania), and stuff. Yeah. and foie gras is duck liver, and it’s usually pretty ex.

so basically it’s more of french teppanyaki than actual really japanese food. >< i guess it jsut depends on how our preconceived notions (*deep insightful stuff*, this) of jap food are. anyway i noticed something! the sakae logo has one of the characters of my chinese name inside :D (btw though my chinese name is unfortunately yang rong rong, it does not mean “furry sheep”. really, it does not)

3. I forgot what the third thing was. Maybe it’s that I GOT A NEW IPOD HURRAH I LOVE MY DADDY. :D really as in, not jsut becuase he bought me the ipod. 80gb, classic, black. :D shiny and the moment I touched it i put a fingerprint there, rawr. Beginning to feel a bit like Kester, religiously polishing it. oh and i dropped it too): but only a very short distance, like from my hand to the tabletop. not used to such a heavy ipod.

but it’s kinda sad because i had this great internal debate with myself about creative or ipod? because my dad really really didn’t even need to OFFER to buy me a new one): so i thought for a long time about it. first i thought about whether i should get the nano or the classic, because the new nano is so ugly, and besides, wiht the classic you get like 10 times with a lot less than 10 times the price.

then i went deeper and i thought about how much money my dad earns, and what it means when like, every time he comes to see me, he spends an awful lot of money on me. i felt really bad about that. like, some sort of superficial guilt trip relationship. and i love him a lot more than i do my mom, or my stepdad, even though he didn’t “raise you for 12 years or spend my money on you” (my being my mom’s, and you being me, even though technically my dad gave her even more alimony and child support than was stipulated on the divorce settlement), he listens to me and accepts my opinion even if he doesn’t agree with it. my mom and stepdad try to shove their fucking opinions down my throat- and frankly, my mom is the biggest hypocrite i’ve ever come across in my entire life. plus, she even labels hypocrites as hypocrites. even my stepdad isn’t so bad- he just hates me and never once has agreed with anything i say to him, especially if it’s about my mom. like, the other day, my mom ranted about how the neighbour was trying to get her to move my sister’s things out of the corridor and to the parking lot, where there’s a space for kids’ toys and bikes, and how the neighbour never really considered my mom’s needs, only her own (my mom’s needs are supposedly that she’s so busy with the housework and my sister, that she has very little actual outdoor playtime to give my sis. therefore she needs my sis’s toys up on the corridor. my neighbour’s need, which is more space, is apparently unequivalent to this. even though my neighbour is staying with her old parents, which use walking thingies. my mom said that since they have potted plants on the floor too, why don’t they move the plants onto the ledge and create more space?). so after listening through this painfully long spiel, i got asked this question: “so do you agree with me or the neighbour?” frankly, i didn’t agree with anyone, so i hemmed and hawed and said that I didn’t agree with anyone. so, my mom said, “you never support me. i raised you for so many years, and in issues like this you always want to take the enemy’s side. you can never see that i actually have feelings too, and you’re always nicer to strangers but not to me.” well, yes, i am nicer to strangers, but i think i’m a pretty realistic person. A ton more so than she is, at least.

SO anyway, my dad is pretty nice to me, and I was thinking that I’d tell him to get a Creative because it does the same job and is tons cheaper- but in the end status symbol syndrome won and I got an ipod. Sigh. veyr like the crumpler bag thing: you know it’s pointless and everyone has it, so you shouldn’t get one because everyone already has it, and it’s ridiculously ripoff. but because everyone has it, you should have it too, and the very fact that it’s ridiculously ripoff would show you’re ridiculously rich (less so than Victoria Ting, though, who bought a $1,600 coach bag- on discount- and brings it to school).

And as a last note, I hate my sister too. She has the worst temper management and security issues- like my mom, really, and every time I even talk to my mom she pushes me or slaps me and says, “Nooooo, jiejie! Nooooo!” and harrumphs and sulks. Whatever, man. I’d go to my room anyway, after I come back. And the other day, my mom was lecturing me, and my sister said “Go slap yourself,” and I glared at her, but my mom only said, “yes, she should do that, because she’s being very naughty.” and then my sis said, “get out of the house! i dont want to see you ever again,” and my mom nodded her head and told me to get out. Which I didn’t. I have no money, nowhere to stay, so why would I? Plus, this was over something very very trivial: when I came home from buying the iPod with my dad, all psyched out and ready to sync it in, I closed the door behind me, because the door’s kinda iffy these days, and sometimes stays ajar after you let it go. So I went to my room, and the door gave this extra “click” sound, and my mom, paranoid, yelled at me to go and check it (she’s afraid cockroaches or insects will come in). So I went, and told her, as I went, that I had shut it when I’d come in. So then she went into this big scolding about how I don’t respect her house rules. So I’d had enough, and told her that she wa sunreasonable and paranoid. Bad move, obv, she threatened to throw me out, and I jsut stood there, looking down at her, and thinking “my god, what a pathetic excuse for a woman.” She said she could see what I was thinking on my face- well, she can’t, and she never will. She said something like “you probably have a thousand excuses and tlakback, but I don’t want to hear it.” Yeah so anyway- my sister told me to go kill myself just now, and this was in the truck my stepdad uses for work, coming back from the teppan dinner. She was like pmsing because of not enough sleep- so I told her to shut up and stop overreacting. My mom then told me to shut up, and then remarked snidely to stepdad that I was pmsing and to ignore me.

Excuse me, I may take bullshit from my mom, but if my sister gave me bullshit and we were alone, I’d usually smack her gently on her diapered butt and tell her not to be so rude, and to shut up, and my sister usually mutters under her breath about how stupid I am until I bribe her with something. And when my sister continued with the usual “i dont want to see you again” thing, I rolled my eyes, ignored her, while my mom snickered and laughed. When I confronted her about my sister’s completely fucked up attitude towards me (which is obviously whose fault? really i have no idea), she just said “aiya you know it’s becuase she needs to sleep. jsut wait til tomorrow”

I’m not going to spend my life taking bullshit from adults. And I tihnk I’ll have to remind myself periodically not to be a shitty adult because it seems childhood sticks to a certain timeframe, and then peels off after a while. Better disillusioned than a complete fuckup, I say.

Ok basically I was in an okay mood before writing this post but I’m in a worse mood now. ): It’s okay though, I jsut have to add on a new category and hit the sack, and it’ll all go away tomrrow. Sorry about the long rant, people who bothered to read through all of it.

~ by sydney on November 5, 2007.