STILL LIFE WITH A PLATE

Two of my Facebook friends, whom I actually also know in real life, vie for the title of most scrumptious food picture poster. Which is very irritating.
They both eat very well, and I like their food.
But I do not eat like that.

They both eat with someone else. One is married to a lovely companion, the other goes out late in the evening with buxom drag queens.

I eat by myself. On my days off I go to places in Chinatown and either listen-in on other people's lives -- as a Cantonese-speaking kwailo I can do that -- or I just observe people. Ninety nine point oompty percent of the time it's alone. My apartment-mate does not eat at the same time as I do, we cook separate meals, and tend to occupy the common areas at different hours. We share comestibles (cheese, cookies, icecream, bacon, eggs, etcetera), but by any measure that is not the same as eating together.

It makes me envious that someone so shy as my apartment mate should actually eat as socially as she does, whereas the social person (which is me, I am a veritable butterfly dammit) eats by himself virtually all the time.

She has events with relatives, co-workers, and her boyfriend. Plus old schoolmates, and friends from former jobs.
The full gamut, in fact.


If it weren't for the cheap lunch counters, tea restaurants, dim sum places, bakeries, coffeeshops, and roast meat restaurants, in Chinatown, I would probably go crazy.



I think tomorrow I shall head out in the middle of the afternoon and have either roast duck, or baked Portuguese chicken rice. Either siu-mei at the place with all the windows, or a chachanteng classic while watching the passers-by on the street.

Then I'll go find an awning or abandoned doorway where I might shelter from the rain while smoking a pipe afterwards.


You humans look delicious when wet.




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