tantastik dot org

I’ve survived my first week in Toronto and it has been met with veritable stress and calamity. I’ve reconnected with my parents and my room is as it was, as are the dust mites. They had a little party for me last night, all bunched up in their little dust bunny clouds. So far, I haven’t seen any of my friends yet, and I’m certain half of them don’t even know I’m still alive, let alone back in town.

There seems to be a lack of office supplies here, and I’ve resorted to using my neighbour’s gym bag as a garbage can, and his face as my notepad. He doesn’t seem to mind as much as I thought he would. Across the room from me sit the other developers — mostly php developers. They’re all quite similar to the interface designers and I’ve socialized briefly with them, if only to show them my stupidly awesome wolf shirt.

I realized last night how many people I don’t know anymore. After two years, seldom do people remember what fun it was to take your shirt off at a bar for their birthday. Rarely does that novelty ever give a lasting impression. At least, not a positive one.

Last night, I ended up having dinner by myself at Kim Jung Il’s Kitchen of Pho, nestled amidst the cookie-cutter houses of suburban Mississauga. The dimly lit neon signs decorating the restaurant entrance gave me the uneasy feeling that I was somehow stuck in a B-movie. I stared out the window, half-expecting to see a giant angry red tomato with sharp fangs, come rolling down the empty, wide 10-lane residential streets. The other patrons of the establishment seemed too calm at the prospect of this inevitablity. I quietly ate my dinner and left.

I’ll probably last 6-months living with my parents again, then I’ll have to move somewhere on my own. Being close to my parents is important to them, but being in the next room with only a thin slab of drywall between, might present awkward situations.

Living in a world surrounded by brick walls and moving boxes, I’ve found little time to affect my concerns for a fulfilling life. I left Toronto some time ago to find new direction, leading me some 3,000 kms away. I’ve met with varying degrees of success while keeping my sensibilities and values in check (though I have since parted with my earlier notions of rabid optimism).

Like a new car owner, I enjoyed the “new life” smell and wanted it to last forever. I followed the scent of promise and beat my path until I was at the end. To my own surprise, at the end of the journey, I discovered that what layed at my feet was nothing so very different then what I had left behind.

And now, having come full circle, it is likely that I will be facing a shadowy countenance of my former life back in Toronto; something barely recognizable and seemingly unreal to me.

Soon, I’ll sit again amongst fellow commuters, spending countless hours on the bullet train bound for downtown, all the while secretly conspiring of ways to avoid the cement garden. I remember it all now: the urban soldier’s march to the commuter train where the stomp and trample of heels are muted by the deafening volume of our own daydreams.

Strangely enough, I look forward to it.

Living at home has brought to mind a few things; certainly things that I have too soon forgotten, since the last time I lived at home, but nonetheless, I need to document these in case, I ever, in all my infinite wisdom, decide that living at home “seems like a good idea” ever, ever again.

There are questions you need to ask yourself from time to time, in times of trouble, or in times when your mom walks in on you making kissy-face noises on the phone, or just in times of pure unadulterated chaos when the fire alarm goes off and for the love of God, it just won’t stop. Don’t find yourself in these situations and not know what to do.

ITEM 1. When your mom says, “Yes of course I know how to make spaghetti” the first thing that should come to your mind is, “Did I manage to hide all the cans of tomato soup?”

Perhaps more wistfully than anything, I always end up buying all these jars of Prego™ just hoping for the off-chance that maybe one day she might use that instead of a can of Campbell’s® Tomato Soup to make the sauce. Dare to dream.

ITEM 2. When paper towels go on sale for 45 cents, it can only mean one thing: It is time to rid the world of it’s supply of paper towels. No matter how daunting that task may be, we will single-handedly do our best to own up as many rolls of paper towels as humanly possible, and as luck has it, they’re all Equality™ brand.

Never mind the fact that Equality is synonomous for sand paper, the damn thing is on sale for fourty five freakin’ cents and tomorrow it might go up to 99 cents and then what will we do? What, pray tell, WILL we do? Nothing. There is nothing we can do. We must buy it now, and buy it good. Drop those chopsticks, we’re going to Food Basics.

In order to defeat their clearly unreasonable, 2 packages per family limit, we need reinforcements. Call your brother, get the van; call grandma, call your sister, and your aunts and your uncles and your cousins, call them all in.

Like a pack of hill-billies, we’ll load up in the jalopy, and scoot on down to the nearest Food Basics just to load up on paper towels. Two packs per person. And remember, we don’t know each other. Never mind that we’re a clan of 20 Asian people.

ITEM 3. When instructing your father that your pizza takes 45 min to cook, you should allot enough buffer time for Panicking Father Who Does Not Speak English time, otherwise, you’ll end up with a half-cooked pizza or very unhappy firemen. If you say, “This pizza needs to be cooked at 425 degrees F for 45 min”, he will instinctly, shut off the oven at exactly 22 min, and panic, and his reason to you is: “I didn’t know if it would shut off later when I really needed it to.” 

That’s like stopping 5 miles short of the traffic light, because your car might not stop at the moment that you really need it to. That’s like jumping off the plane in Boston because you’re not sure if it’s going to really land in Chicago when you really need it to. 

Then he tells me what he saw, in his mind’s eye, if the oven didn’t turn off in 45 min: yards of flames shooting from the oven, pepperonis flying out like ninja stars and plumes of black smoke enshrouding the apartment. This is his vision, and you can’t fuck with it. How about the deep, resonant voice of a Frenchmen laughing out hysterically from the gaping mouth of the oven? Was that in his vision? We’ll never know.

Consequently, instead of walking home and being met with the faint musk of pepperoni and cheese, and a crispy dough aroma raising up into your nose, lifting you off your feet, your pizza turns out to be one big white doughy mess sitting there in the cool darkness of the otherwise bare oven for at least 23 minutes now.  In general, “Panicking Father” time usually requires at least 15 min buffer.

ITEM 4. When the building’s fire alarm goes off at 4AM as it is wont to do, the following procedures should be taken: Lock your father in his room. No, scratch that. Sedate your father, then lock him in his room. His panicky ways will surely lead to his and your own demise. Things that are good sedatives are Benadryl caplets – he’ll sleep and be hive-free. Drugging your own father with anti-histamines is not a crime; I’ve checked. 

If you fail to do this, he will run up and down the hallway screaming that you need to do something about this. But instead, you remain very still hoping that maybe he won’t see you lying in bed, half-asleep and doing your very best to ignore a) the blaring air horns piped through the building’s PA system and b) your father’s heightened voice now talking rapidly on the phone to your sister telling her that he thinks you’re dead (due to your unresponsive nature) and that there’s some strange noise coming out of the ceiling that just won’t stop. Sleeping through a fire alarm is tough, but if you put your mind to it, it can be done.

Fire alarms are #2 on the list of Things That Make My Father Panic. Burnt pizza is #6.

There’s more but I’m afraid I would just depress you, and you’re probably depressed enough as it is. 

You read these and you think, this boy does not love his parents enough, and I can only ask you people one thing: do you like eating spaghetti with tomato soup? No? I didn’t think so. And if that isn’t a priority in your life, I don’t know what else to say to you.

Appendix A: Things That Make My Father Panic

10. Planes that might not land in Chicago as intended.

9. Failing car brakes

8. GO Buses that go awry (i.e. not to Cooksville).

7. Missing his television show (Monday Night RAW)

6. An oven that has been left on for more then 25 minutes.

5. Missing a bowel movement (see #3)

4. Losing his wallet

3. Running out of orange juice

2. Loud air-horn type fire alarms

1. My mother