Continuing my escape from the gloomy reality of a declining city and an unceasing pandemic. The public library was closed again, so I couldn’t continue my reading of the Midnight Diner comic series. I switched to spending more time in experimenting with real culinary arts. My theme in the past week was making all-day breakfasts and I successfully fried my first sunny-side up! Plan to experiment with making pasta this week.
Picked up cartooning again in the studio after more than a month of break from the intense Inktober event back in Oct. Target to catch up and complete Inktober 52 (one ink art per week) before the end of year. The cartoons can be found here.
Art (culinary or not) is really good in killing time and helping me escape temporarily from reality, but I do feel guilty at times for letting time just slip away so easily. When the ex-university professor Chan Kin-man (陳健民）visited Jimmy Lai, the media tycoon who is now being prosecuted and detained, he encouraged him not to waste time counting down to the day he’ll be free again but rather learn to seize the day to do good. He was speaking from his own experience of being jailed for the peaceful Occupy Central movement in 2014. I’m reminded of my highschool’s Latin motto – Carpe Diem.
My dad celebrated his 80th bday on Thursday. The originally planned big celebration had to be postponed due to the pandemic, but our whole family did manage to meet briefly to eat a bday cake together. I had a nightmare following the family meetup. In the dream, we were in a remote farming village and I was introducing to my parents my UW classmate(s) from Taiwan and they were kinda proud of the ethnic diversity I was exposed to through my university education. Suddenly, I saw 3 black bombs flying on top of my head and about to land nearby. The dream ended with me yelling and searching for my elderly father.
I think I’m stressed, not from work, but for letting time slip away and not accomplishing anything meaningful. I tried to de-stress by indulging in Art but ended up feeling I’m wasting time and back to feeling stressed again. A funny predicament that I didn’t realize existed until I wrote this post ?.
