The Resilience of Durum Wheat.

Once upon a time, I did something stupid that took a huge chunk of my weekly finances. Faced with the reality of surviving on 13 dollars a week, I pondered about poverty and starvation of middle class university students. My choices were clear: maggi mee or skipping meals. There was no way that I could possibly skip meals lest you want to see a very cranky girl lashing out at unsuspecting strangers. I could take my chances with instant noodles. They come in so many different flavours of carcinogens now. Who could resist?

Instead, I cooked my food - y’know the proper way. Martha Stewart would have been proud. I dug into the sunk cost goods in the kitchen - PASTA! - invested in a bottle of pasta sauce and pilfered celeries and carrots from the fridge. You have to understand, we hardly ever cook at home. Our fridge is a casket of oranges, apples and carrots for juice and nothing else. Ah, and the parents, they must not know about my dire financial situation. Even the cooking had to be a secret. Naturally my diet became vegetarian because vegetables were cheap and I would have risked poisoning myself with salmonella if I attempted to cook meat.

A week goes by and I am a living breathing testament that I am able to cook food! IT WAS EDIBLE TOO! Do you realise the huge implication of this? I can do this adulthood business.*GASP* I CAN EVEN FEED CHILDREN!

It’s been two weeks and I haven’t been able to stop. I like the feeling of knowing what I put inside my mouth. I know that brocolli costs 4 dollars a kilogram and I know how to debone a chicken leg.  I learned how to make pasta pomodoro from scratch with fresh tomatoes. There are two bags of prawns inside my fridge: one soaking in garlic, onion and sesame oil concoction and the other in a simple rosemary rub.

Oh I know. I am pretty darn awesome.

Rebellious & Purling it.

An elephant nestled underneath my shoulder blades. It was big and blue with ACCOUNTING written in big and bold letters. My head was throbbing. I had to sit. That was when I met the coolest stranger ever. I squeezed past the girl to fill the window seat next to her. Her hair’s all slicked up in a smart little bob, clad in a little black vest and a white t-shirt underneath. Standard fare, really. The kind of look you’d see on every other girl on a crowded Saturday evening. But she was cool. She was cool because she was KNITTING! Seriously how cool is that? She was knitting a scarf in the warmest shade of grey. It was hypnotic really. I could tell that other commuters were looking at her needles, clicking away weaving in an out, mesmerized by the sheer defiance of KNITTING in Singapore. Now normally i would turn to her and tell her how cool it is and ask a bajillion questions about where to get good wool. But I didn’t. The needles were too mesmerising. I was scared that if I talked to her she’d stop knitting, become extremely uncomfortable and we’d have to spend the next excruciating half hour making small talk about wool. She’d never knit in public ever again and no one else would be able to see a person this cool knitting and IT WOULD ALL BE MY FAULT!

She was just too cool.