It’s been pretty useless for me to write anything the past three weeks. The first week back from The Cow saw me laid out with flu — not the nasty skin-eating, turn you inside-out type, but the kind that makes you sadistically crawl into your Chinese-populated office (full of people who have just returned from visititing the homeland), so they can shriek about SARS and prod you out of the office with bamboo poles. From the reception I received, you would’ve thought I was an unpredictable, charmless walrus with rabies and bad body odor.

Mom had no sense of humor when it came to mealtimes. The little dead moles we occasionally brought to the table had hair, and look how upset she used to get about that. Imagine if my sister had shown up without any.