It all feels so right when no one's there to watch, me slouched on the couch in front of the ol' idiot box, chomping down on greasy, salty chips, wiping my fingers liberally on the crinkled shorts I've been wearing for three days straight, scratching when and where I need to, staring into the bluish glow until my eyes cross, not noticing how not a single thing on four hundred channels is able to hold my interest. It feels so OK.

Then some sort of acquaintance -- whom I hold in light but sufficient esteem so that his judgment matters, and who is also a former object of surreptitious affection -- comes cruising back from a couple of weeks at his cottage on the east, east coast and asks how I've been holding on since his absence.

Huh. I collected my load of lemony-fresh laundry yesterday and the numbers just aren't coming up right. The tally:

While we were at IKEA (yes, snicker and sneer to your little black heart's content, but despite their Swedish origins, they offer a nice variety of affordable furniture and at least on the nine Swedes we inspected, do not have webbed toes, contrary to popular belief), my friends and I enthusiastically fondled -- indeed, one could have argued we were in fact molesting -- a number of down-filled duvets. As our fingers caressed the soft, giving covers, I was sure that nearby mothers were covering their children's ears to our murmurs and moans of approval. It was strictly a PG affair (which was teetering on a PG-13 as the four of us piled onto a rather lovely and comfortable day bed together and giggled lots).  

Toasty in the winter and light in the summer, one of life's underrated luxuries is a quality duvet. Before bunkering down for zzz's, I love the pre-slumber task of shifting and tucking duvet snugly around my body, the feathers and crisp cotton rustling loudly, as I ensure every square centimetre is safeguarded from the brisk night air. It's much like a lover's embrace, except it doesn't get sticky and sweaty after ten minutes (a favourable circumstance, I concede, depending on the situation preceding it ...), doesn't mind the occasional cold feet, and doesn't snore.

And as practical as my polyester-cotton slipcover is, I -- as I do many other things -- prefer my duvets naked, for that unbeatably close, intimate feel.

I love you, duvet darling. Let's to bed.

The dream is over.

Regarding "Salty Egg Superman", or Ultraman, she says that's what they called him in Hong Kong, ever since she as a teenager encountered the slender hero. I was inwardly disappointed by the lack of luridness in her explanation; she assumes it's the shape of his egg-like head, and as I surmised, his pupil-less eyes -- his entire being is just supremely eggy.

Presumably to distinguish themselves, the people of Hong Kong went with something particularly indigenous, hence the salty egg. Because we love our salt.

If one is speaking with friends at 1 AM, Wednesday -- much more accurately, then, Thursday, as even explicitly stated in the conversation  -- and the suggestion is for the outing to take place "tomorrow", then logically is not the outing to occur on Friday?   

People.    

Now I get to spend both days -- and probably the rest of the goddamn summer, as one of those vital friends is departing on vacation -- completely alone (yes, my social pyramid is exactly that frail). A season wasted, wasted ...  

Ultraman. He's a Japanese superhero with a sleek silver and red suit -- very 1940s-birth-of-science-fiction style. He looks like a rocketeer. He has a matching surfboard. He is, in a hyphenated word, uber-cool. Or. Ultra cool. Yes!  

My mother calls him "Salty Egg Superman."

I assume this is the conventional Cantonese name for this cute little man, because I don't think my mother is the type to be really iconoclastic with this sort of thing. 

Why salty eggs, I don't know. It took some ponderin', but I concluded it could be the shape of his eyes, which are sort of like giant ostrich eggs, but then I don't understand the inclusion of excess salt. I would guess that salt in the eyes would sting very, very badly and make fighting supervillains difficult. Or perhaps it doesn't hurt, since your eyes would actually be made of salt and therefore more salt would strengthen your vision...

What the hell am I doing?

I have been suffering lately from an acute fear of becoming twenty years old.

Which is very strange, since I only turned nineteen ... now ... but it seems that I have been thinking about the big two-oh (you people twenty and one twelfth and older can stop sobbing now) for so long now that it feels though I am already atop it, instead of having yet another year to apprehensively watch its approach, be momentarily distracted, and have it leap over and sink its insidious age claws into my boney shoulders.

I think, if I was as mousy a social misfit now as I was a few years ago, leaving my teens behind would not be a significant change. At this moment, however, the ages from thirteen to nineteen represent to me a time of my life when I am allowed -- indeed, expected -- to be uncouth, tactless, awkward, stupid, inarticulate, ignorant, and otherwise offensive for the fact that I think highly enough of my uninformed and unoriginal opinions to actually express them to other human beings for nutritional consumption. Those qualities -- performed at an obnoxiously loud volume -- collectively make up my idea of "teenager." For a time, I revelled in this lack of responsibility.

After having endured the first quartern of my life, I do believe that I will be expected to show something for it. Say ... intelligence. Knowledge. Taste. Wit. Composure. Social grace. The ability to suppress chronic girlish giggling (a sore affliction of mine). A non-seasonal job.

Granted, I am probably grossly overromanticizing adulthood. I'm sure it is all too easy for many post-teens to stumble into cracks of indignity ... suffering demeaning work normally associated with dopey, low-skilled high-schoolers ... being unable to define 19th-century laissez-faire liberalism on cue (how embarrassing!) ...  

I have also lived much of life building myself up by exceeding expectations. There is of course a flaw with this strategy, as it relies upon relativity. An Average Effort can seem Excellent if all others are Shit; similarly, however, an Excellent Effort can seem Average if all others are also Excellent. Luckily, expectations for and the output of the average teenager are both so ridiculously low that exceeding them had been very, very easy.

Now with adulthood on the horizon, doubtlessly these standards will be finally raised to a realistic level, rudely jerking me out of the fog I have been living in for the past nineteen years, and I will be found out for the fraud I am. Gnaw, gnaw, gnaw.  

Happy birthday, ol' girl.

Is there anything more Gothic-Wrath-of-Old-Testament-God than Sergei Prokofiev's "The Montagues and Capulets" from Romeo and Juliet (Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries" being just a tad too John Williams in comparison)? It's good listenin' for the iron-fisted fascist within.