Raising Rockstar

You say “Potato…”.

Once upon a time, two different guys got kicked out of their bands…

In 1983, a guitarist was asked to leave his band abruptly, undramatically. Bewildered and well, furious, he vowed revenge. He. Would. Absolutely Kick Their Butts By Forming A Way Awesome-er Band And Make His Original Band Regret Ever Dumping Him.

He wrote songs, he practiced, practiced, practiced, and he hired new bandmates who were awesome musicians.

Within just a few years, his new band signed a record deal, their first album proceeded to go gold, and they sold over 25 million albums. This guitarist is apparently (I say apparently because I don’t know heavy-metal) considered one of the most brilliant and influential musicians of his genre. His name is David Mustaine, his new band Megadeth.

The band he was originally kicked out of however was Metallica. They sold over 180 million albums.

So, Boo Hoo. He failed. (No one else thinks so, but he apparently thinks so.)

The other guy who got kicked out of a band… was kicked out because he didn’t fit in. Among others, he was the only one not doing drugs. 

So the rest of the band got together and asked their manager to fire him. 3 days later they replaced him and did their first recording, and went on to sell 800 million albums. The band was The Beatles.

Paul McCartney would come right out and say it: “He wasn’t quite like the rest of us.” “We were… wacky… He was… sensible…”

Can you imagine being kicked out of The Beatles for being “sensible”? For not doing drugs?

NOW what am I supposed to tell my kids?

So basically one guy was famous and successful… and still thought he wasn’t. Another guy then got kicked out of arguably the most successful band ever, and never “made it back”.
Guess which one would come to describe getting kicked out as the best thing that ever happened to him?

Pete Best initially experienced “failure” NOT from actually not being good enough, or even from doing anything “wrong”. At one point some people (including female fans) thought he was the best-looking Beatle. After getting kicked out, he then also had to “survive” Beatlemania. The idol-status of all those people who did “that” to him. But he would go on to find a steady job as a civil servant, get married for the next 50 years, have 2 daughters and 4 grandkids, and his own band named after him, which he would still do public performances with, just for fun. Just… not for wild fame and fortune and a crazed fan shooting him.

“Wacky’s” great for…. entertainment? This is the whole problem with entertainment and reality tv and what-not – what’s “bad” will so very often be more alluring than what’s “good” (so instead of watching The Kardashians, let’s have a gadzillion animals at home and watch what else kids are making on Youtube these days!)

Caveat:

Also, Rockstar likes to play this to irritate me:

PFUDOR = Pink Fluffy Unicorns Dancing On Rainbows = IWTHMOTHWSJTMIS = I Want To Hit Myself Over The Head With Something Just To Make It Stop :D. There is one version that plays just the unicorn on the rainbow for ONE HOUR. (See kids, you don’t need to do drugs to annoy your parents!)

See, I don’t believe the Beatles necessarily needed drugs to perform. I think somewhere in their personality along with the wild talent lay a susceptibility to using heavily (lotsa articles about the alcoholics who qualify for Mensa), and I guess I’m just opening the door to getting hammered for laying keyboard to the Beatles, except the alternative – to see probably the greatest band of all time as achieving what they did with heavy drug usage going hand in hand – is worse, isn’t it? There are whole books written about the presence of drugs throughout the Beatles’ career, a list of songs inspired by drug trips (personally, I always loved Yellow Submarine but how is “We All Lived In A Yellow Submarine” that different from “Pink Fluffy Unicorns Dancing On Rainbows,” which I’m pretty sure is something a bunch of kids came up with while watching Canadian Youtuber Andrew Huang(he credits one of his viewers with first inspiring him to do Unicorns))

What if the real reason such a gifted group of performers as the Beatles couldn’t stop with the drugs was because of a correlation between susceptibility to an addiction, and pure creative talent? (That, and the fact theirs was the era of free love, anti-war and yup, drugs, in the ’60s.) Nowadays we know differently, don’t we? Plus, nowadays we have Youtube (with… the parental controls on, of course.)

Not to mention, what if the need for drugs was just an excuse? See Mark Manson, author of The Book I’m Still A Little Chicken To Name, practically reviles the pursuit of pleasure: “Pleasure is a false god… …The easiest to obtain, the easiest to lose…” “Ask any addict (or adulterer) how they feel about the pursuit of pleasure…” 

At which point I finally feel halfway safe enough to say what book that was from:

The Subtle Art Of Not Giving A F*ck by former banker-turned-blogger Mark Manson.

I decided to horribly plagiarise paraphrase the band stories in this book because “over 1 million copies sold” be damned, the title alone might just make some of us parents cover the kids’ eyes, “Ah Boy Ah, Don’t Look This Way Ah. Got F Word Ahhh..” and unless you actually read it with a pinch of salt, some can come off as a little… too irreverent. (Hard enough already getting all that ‘tude from the kids today, without an internationally best-selling book title that appears to advocate “Not Giving A F*ck”). It would be an uprising of F* words and ‘tude to match, from which society might never recover! Today it’s reading this book about NGAF*, tomorrow issa Life Of Crime 😀 Problem is, while Manson does clarify that he doesn’t mean to not care about anything, you do have to read it through. And the colourful language and examples are way more attention grabbing.

Now, I don’t have actual tweens yet, (do an almost-10yr old who can Major Eye-roll me pretty good (of course in school and at home he’d get in trouble if it got too far, but kids are not total robots, right…) and a contender for Hong Kong’s Biggest Tween-Wannabe* who has just passed her fifth birthday count?) And SO. I shalt falleth on the swordeth and readeth the #1 International Bestseller with the most compelling and bad*ss title because well maybe I could use a Life Of Crime 😀

For real though, I was initially a little misled by the title, and I only looked further into it after Bored Panda re-posted this picture off the Daily Mail awhile ago, along with a collection of others, with a comment that was in essence:

As in, old couple flips a car, poses for pic even as rescuer climbs in to get Grandma out. I assume this old couple read the memo about not deliberately flipping cars, but as my former Taiwanese RMs (bank relationship managers/Sales) liked to remind me, “As-ident Happen No-bah-dy Hurt Is Best Of Unlucky.” If they umm, “gave more of a F-” they might’ve had heart attacks from flipping a car even if no one was otherwise hurt…

Separately, that was how the internet was won one day by the elderly 😀

ps: *Hamster Ninja already asked why grownups or Youtube or on tv people get to use the F-word but little kids don’t. Since I couldn’t block out every single F-word there is (though we do try), I told her context is everything – whenever she’s heard it it’s been when someone caught their fingers in the door or got hit with something – BUT not in proper school or polite conversations.  

Happy Halloween! Try not to eat too much candy! (Or, if you do, at least try to make the next Fluffy Pink Unicorn Video out of it!)

(We were Metatton EX and Sans from Undertale, and Wonder Woman this year. Rockstar wanted company; Hamster Ninja just wanted to get to wear whatever SHE wanted.) Mine’s just duct tape, felt and glossy cardboard held together with stick-on velcro – just for the night – but Rockstar’ll be wearing that tailored Baleno hoodie for awhile…

Know that widely-circulated myth about goldfish (or really, fish) having 3-second memories? Researchers actually debunked it years ago. Well but Disney says Dory fish can be forgetful, so Brutus must be a forgetful fish. Oh wait Disney also put an octopus behind the wheel of a truck but of course no one would believe an octopus can drive

Anyway, Bored Panda posted about this Goldfish Who Refused To Die (won from a fair – not unlike the ones we’ve got now – then living in a tank that hadn’t been cleaned in 1.5 years) who prompted some good samaritan to redo the entire thing complete with all the aquarium attachments:

   

…and since we’d gotten 8 goldfish in two visits to Tai Tong Ecopark in similar fashion, I thought to mention that the stall lady had managed our expectations that these things would probably only live a week…

It’s going on 3 weeks and we still have 6 – one died right after we brought everyone home from the park, but “only” the second one died last night.

Tai Tong Ecopark, we want our money back. The fish we got from you are still alive. 

So we now live with a Border Collie on meds twice a day (therefore also her disposable baby bedmats because the meds make her drink a lot of water), a hamster, two kids who produce a mountain of junk modelling and Legos, and 6 goldfish. We recently added two suckermouth catfish to eat the fast-growing algae in the tanks, which get quite a lot of sunlight outdoors, and then two guppies to replace the dead goldfish (go figure)

The apartment was just too cluttered so we put the fish in large flower vases from the supermarket, out on the balcony. A previous helper often lost our lobsters when the top of our old tank wasn’t secure after she changed the water – lobsters have a habit of clambering about, and the water filter and air tubes were always fair game. So we’d return them, claws waving and stabbing maniacally about as you picked them up from under the furniture, to the tank. However, if you don’t find them before their gills dry out, they die.

This time round we thought anything in a tank might have a better chance outside in large enough water containers to not need plug-in aerations, and Hamster Ninja and I change the water ourselves. It was a commitment she made in order to get to bring the fish home and get to set up “tank” again. Rockstar should appreciate that his little sister, perpetually noisy as she is, has endless energy to mother all manner of creatures in our home, including his. 

Now all I need to do is fill large covered Tupperware with filtered tap water and leave it outside. In the course of her messing with the hamster and checking on her fish after school, Hamster Ninja then scoops out the old water every few days right into the balcony drain hole next to the vases tanks, and replaces it with water from the Tupperware. Extra free labour entertainment for her, since she’s always looking for something else to do with the animals (she watches little tv). She says the goldfish now peck at her fingers (I think they’re either attracted to the salty sweat on her skin after school, or fish are stupid :D)

By now they’ve survived the last typhoon 8 outdoors, we seem to have way less critter casualties with Hamster Ninja doing it, leading me to Yet Another Caffeine-Fueled Epiphany: If you have to train your helper and keep reminding, reminding, reminding her to be careful, why not spend all that energy on your little kid instead? At the end of the day, the time invested is about the same, and you come away with the benefits your own child will have, from learning to take care of other living things.

Caveat: Your child with give you reproachful looks when you flush the dead fish down the toilet.

What? We knew the first one for like, a day. It was raining. I saved the dead bloated thing in a bowl for her to examine very carefully and then I got THE LOOK when I put it in the toilet. I am NOT digging up the Waterfront Dog Park for funeral services for every dead goldfish that comes through our home so I flushed the second goldfish before she woke up BUAHAHAHAHAHA.

We uh, knew Blackie for almost 3 weeks. I was LAZY. I know. But I will get better at writing Fish Eulogies.

Next animal – Sophie the Russian Dwarf Hamster:

This modern, formerly-gorgeous, very-educational-to-build plastic thing is an absolute pain to clean, and it took up so much space (picture above is after we already took apart the extensions that span two desks). So this Youtuber must have a gadzillion housekeepers, or at least a gadzillion cage parts. We only have a large trashbag-full. But we can all live vicariously through other people’s Youtubes :D:

Also, the stuff we had, both Gemma and Sophie quickly outgrew and then you’d see their eyes totally bug out when they moved from room to room. Don’t buy the hamster stuff marked “for Dwarf hamsters”. Even if you have a Dwarf hamster. The tunnels are really, really small and your dwarf will struggle even if it isn’t fat, and just stuffs its pouches.

So we got wire cutters and a bunch of cheap, small cages.

3 little wire cages piled up, and choice parts from previous cages. This little studio home also boasts a Mezzanine floor (in light blue), so it’s 3.5 levels that also house a sand pit for digging, traditional running wheel, two climbing tunnels, couple food stations and nap burrows, a Sylvanian families light-up fireplace and a bathroom sink with mirror.

The bathroom dresser is especially important – Sophie uses it as a step up onto the Mez floor. My personal favourite however is that by unhooking two little clips the entire wire portion comes off and I can shake the entire bottom tray into the trash – the wires make the cage much cleaner because only the bottom floor ever gets wet or dirty. Total cleaning time every 2-3 weeks is now down to 5 mins. (Nope, our helper has never touched the hamster cages in the 1.5 years we’ve been having hamster. Everyone is much happier this way, and no animals get hurt.)

*Pavlov Effect actually works on fish too – researchers found they could train fish to swim back towards familiar sounds months after they had been released back to sea, especially if say, you played the same sound when feeding them while they were still juveniles.

While that has implications for fish farming (you can theoretically raise fish directly in their natural habitat and still be able to farm them), it’s also a nod to erm, animal “training” in general – if you appeal to an animal species’ built-in defence mechanisms or whatever it is they evolve in order to find food/ not go extinct for reasons other than starvation, you’ll find most living things can be “trained”… 

 

“…We want to encourage… children (to) try their best…”

 

Huge event, with pages and pages of carefully organised heats, and both serious swim rounds and easier or “fun” rounds, totalling a whopping 4 hours in that blazing sun. Lotsa prior warnings from the school, that it was going to be super hot and sunny, and boy it really was. 

“…There’s some children who never thought they could win a swimming event and here they’ve won some…”

 

Rockstar had 2 scheduled events (and swimming is by no means his thing.) Ok, I feel like a fluffy swim story is in order – my beloved Brisbane former boss used to describe to us in the dealing room how in Australian competitive swimming, they pick the kids for serious training quite early, and at least partly based on size/height. Somewhat incongruously, given our surroundings, he would talk about sheer arm span and hand size and what-not… and how those chosen kids trained and trained dawn til dusk from young and it was their whole life and later on their whole career… and I might be tempted to say Well My Kid Used To Be In The Lowest 5th Percentile For Size So Bye-Bye Competitive Swimming 😀 (though by now it’s closer to 30th Percentile), but there were some pint-size “bullets” from his school torpedo-ing about the pool that day, it wasn’t just the (very) tall kids who were strong swimmers (though some really were that amazing)..

And then my former boss would talk about how when he travelled in and out of Aussieland he’d drop that his (now former) son inlaw Kieren Perkins was coming to pick him up at the airport, and watch the Oh Great, Another Fruitcake flicker of irritation cross the face of the immigration officers checking his luggage…… until they looked up and saw Mr Perkins waiting at the Arrivals gate.

(Yes, most of us met him, he used to come into dwarf the little dealing room, and introductions were just art, in their meh-ness:

Boss: Hi — meet my son-inlaw. <pause> His name is Kieren Perkins.

Local RM: Oh, hello. You must find Hong Kong quite different. Have you been to Yat Tung Heen? You must try their dim sum.

Boss: He’s a competitive swimmer you know. He’s swum in the Olympics.

Local RM: <looks the towering Mr Perkins up and down again> Oh yeah, can see that. You look like a swimmer. Well hope you enjoy your stay <wanders off>)

😀 Anyway. As for school swim meet, you should see the serious swimmers, some of those kids in the big events like 200m Butterfly/ Crawl/Backstroke/Breaststroke are really, really good. Like, Hang-On-That’s-Not-A-Grownup-Charging-Up-And-Down-The-Pool It’s A Little Kid -good. I asked another parent if their child trains and swims competitively and they were, “What? No, just.. <10 year old girl in question is bearing down the length of the pool in a brisk butterfly stroke> for fun..” Um, ok. 😀

Everyone got to “compete,” and most of ’em in several events (I should amend that to say some kids sat out some of the events they were listed on), just as though they were all strong swimmers.

There was so much effort put into organising this thing, with each child’s name listed in each lane, volunteers pairing up to time them, and two “head timekeepers” doubling up to help check the times kept by the volunteers. Many of the kids were also moving between swimming in an event, picking up times scores and running them to the teachers, and cheering their friends and houses on.

There were also the “fun” races, where you have to get a beach ball across, or move with boards and noodles…

..and moving across the pool when attached to two other kids and their noodles 😀

Something I found, about the same time I discovered there was such a thing as “sailing” after switching CNBC on one Sunday morning  😛

They’ve been working on this for a few years, the following Youtubes are from when they first got their boats (some from eBay*!) and then did some of their own refurbishments as part of school work in 2015, saying for some of these kids it would help keep them away from “crime and unsocial behaviour”..)

Several years later, just 775 views at press time… I especially liked when they said “if you work hard at something, at the end, there are great rewards”

This one, posted not by the school but by Halcyon Yachts also from 2015 with the beautifully meh introductory comment, “Greig City Academy, an inner city state school in London, have bought an old race boat” 😀

…and here’s the prestigious Rolex Fastnet race they just competed in 2 years later (minute 11), placing 144th out of 368 entries…

 “They started from nothing… A group of teenaged students led by their Geography teacher took on sailing’s biggest offshore event, the Rolex Fastnet Race… Until 3 years ago, none had any idea about sailing, let alone racing 600 miles offshore… and why should they, the Greig City Academy is an inner London school in a deprived area…there couldn’t be fewer links to the sea…and even fewer to sailing…”

Movie rights, anyone? (Haha they’re probably already in talks… super funding opportunity for this inner-city school 🙂 )

ps: This article really struck me, because it occurred to me how hard it must have been for some of these kids to reach their goal – yet they managed anyway. Some of my mum’s students used to be so exhausted in class – not from tuition or ECAs, but from helping their parents in night market stalls, or waiting tables or raising younger siblings… 

My mum taught (English) in upper secondary public schools her entire ~40 years of work life, and some of the schools were in the toughest neighbourhoods (by “tough” I mean “drove-her-new-car-to-school-and-it-got-carved-up-before-lunch-because-no-one-knew-yet-that-it-was-hers tough”) and yes that was the apology she got, along with offers to beat the perpetrators up… 

Kids went to what is predominantly a petting zoo for them, over the national holiday…

Open 9-6pm, last entry at 5pm..

(These horses are so used to being given treats they keep gently stamping their hooves for more carrots)

“All she wants for Christmas……”

 

(Some attractions are quite crowded, but not so much the animal ones, strangely.. and all around, well-labelled flora and fauna…)

This one time when Hamster Ninja went “Daddy can I have one?” she meant….. ……………………………………………………

(In other words, Daddy Can I Have One City :D)

We used to max out our leave for weeks in Perth, Melbourne, Adelaide, Sydney, Canberra, and drive out to many Aussie petting zoos and wine valleys with the kids; I’d say this large Petting Zoo Where No One Pets The Animals out in Yuen Long is at least comparable, but with one key difference – no little kids following the little kids (:D sorry) about and not much risk of stepping on animal poop most of the time because much fewer animals are roaming freely… In fact, I think the stalls don’t smell that much (those are animals after all) but I overhear at least a few complaints from local visitors, about the animals’ smell…

OK – this one, we’ve never seen in Aussieland 😀

This is what they call “net fishing” – and initially we’re kinda dubious about all the little kids AND their parents crowding around this teeny little paddling pool with goldfish in it. There are a few other tubs around, all with goldfish in them, but you can’t erm, “net fish” anywhere else but in this pool…

As a result, both kids go through many, many, many nets, before……..

They spent more than an hour in the heat fishing for them things, and easily the first 20-30 mins they turned up absolutely nothing. Couldn’t catch even one goldfish. We initially even wondered how the little local kids before us managed to get 2 or 3 fish to exchange for prizes. It takes awhile to learn to move the “nets” slowly, because otherwise the fish break through the paper quite easily…

In the end it was very rewarding, the kids felt so rewarded for their perseverance and we had a hard time getting the kids to leave, but it took a lot of patience, be warned 🙂

Epilogue:

Well of course we have to validate the Fish Ninja effort 🙂 So we went to the supermarket for goldfish supplies… Naturally the fish also came with 😀

Next holiday we went back, to this haul:

 

(They pretty much empty the paddling pool, put everyone back in after, and then catch them all over again, with the exception of Hamster Ninja also offering her goldfish-catching services to various random other little kids)

 

The Chinese Department at Kennedy School organises a (completely-voluntary-participation, resulting-in-Rockstar-never-having-participated haha) recycled material lantern-making competition every Mid-Autumn Festival, and this year I happened to be in school when the lanterns were still up just after the kids had been voting for them (kids get 3 votes each, for the numbered entries) – or, put another way:

(Like, obviously someone has to actually consume that much of the product before they can use it to make the lantern right… what better endorsement than a satisfied customer 🙂 )

When the kids’ school says, “Let’s make lanterns out of recycled materials to celebrate Mid-Autumn Lantern Festival”…

…this is what happens.

Talk about serious enthusiasm…

Happy Early Mid-Autumn Festival!!!

ps: Oh right – this was Hamster Ninja’s –

 

 

 

Dog And Her Pet Human Part II: So remember when Hamster Ninja promised JD a pillow off her bed if she made it home from the animal emergency centre?

That one’s still going – only, HN brings the pillow along for JD when walking the dog now…

The pillow follows the child following the dog everywhere, so the travelling circus accumulates more and more stuff everywhere they go…

“I don’t feel like I’m the grownup. I feel like I’m the 15-year old down the street, trying to escape, get out of class, smoke weed…” – Macklemore

…Because I seem to be on a roll with the #blessings-that-look-like-something-else; roll or rut, you decide 😛

During the second banking merger I experienced in my former work life (Dryden-Meespierson by Fortisbank), the name of a very senior boss in the upper echelons of the acquiring institution began to make its way into conversations among our more immediate bosses. Firmly based in the Netherlands at the time if I recall correctly, most people in Asia didn’t know that much about him.

The story that got everyone’s attention however, had to do more with his perceived parenting style – which then largely formed people’s impression of his personality, thereby earning him a revered and fearsome reputation as a boss: Already having several biological children of his own, he had then chosen to adopt an HIV+ child to come live with his family. One of our bosses met him and after a long dinner late one night had finally asked him why he did it. Super Big Boss had then launched into a description that included all the precautions they had to take at home, regarding open wounds and bodily fluids, trips to the hospital for blood transfusions, medications. He had wanted his biological children to learn something, from living with an HIV+ sibling. 

 

Ok, and now to Ryan Lewis of Hip-hop duo Macklemore & Ryan Lewis. Ryan Lewis grew up with a mum who became HIV+ due to a blood transfusion during the birth of her first child (Ryan is the youngest.) This was a year before testing was mandatory for blood given during transfusions, and she didn’t find out she had been infected til after all the children were already born.

Ryan Lewis has said “it” had a profound effect on him: ‘I think it really just opened up the door, as a kid, to life experiences that most of my friends didn’t know anything about.’ Growing up firmly middle-classed in a conservative Christian family, his parents told him his mum had AIDS when he was 6 years old. His parents are both social workers. That giant tattoo on his forearm is an AIDS ribbon.

‘This was an era when people were really shunned for having HIV,’ his mum, Julie Lewis, says. When she was diagnosed with HIV, she was 32 years old and had 3 young children – 2, 4 and 6 years old. She was given a few years to live.It’s called the 30/30 project because 30 years later she’s still here.

I found all that out later.

Here’s why I was writing about him to begin with:

Ryan Lewis was 18 years old when he met Ben Haggerty, and they started to work together 3 years later, after finishing college (Lewis majored in Comparative History of Ideas, examining the interplay of cultural, historical and political contexts – which I assume is why some of their other songs were released with a rough correlation to legislation being passed). “Thriftshop” was the first single since 1994 to hit No.1 on the Hot 100 charts without the backing of a major label. Ryan Lewis then was… 25 years old. (He is now 29.)

They eschew branded goods and make it look really cool turning second hand thrift store stuff into your own look (I like when he impresses the “sneakerheads” with his dance moves…

…while wearing those white velcro school shoes we’ve all worn to public school haha) I’m not embedding the video because of the language (my limit is soft-swearing*), so instead here’s a few more screen shots:

…inspiring also signs and memes on rebloggy and memegenerator…

Found the Sesame Street one (sadly the real one with the bad language sounds better):

Ok here’s a “clean” one, Ben Haggerty surprising his grandma on her 100th, in a nod to reality tv not unlike Maroon 5s “Sugar” video where they ambush-perform at random weddings across town, and use that as music video footage:

Note however that at the start Surprised Grandma asks, “What d’you want to do, go for a drink? Oh, you don’t drink, just me. I took up your habits..” Macklemore picked up and struggled with addiction in High School. At one point his parents transferred schools, but it didn’t help. Some interviews put him at 13 years old when he first raided his parents’ liquor cabinet (12 shots, his first time). He eventually checked himself into rehab in his 20s on his dad’s urging, only to relapse after the success of the first few hits. (“Glorious,” above, is more recent.)

Now, to my next point about Ryan Lewis. His much more famous partner Macklemore is 5 years older (remember they met when Lewis was just 18), and is widely seen as the face of the duo. Jimmy Fallon even did a segment, “Who Is Ryan Lewis?”

(Then prompting articles confirming Lewis actually does everything else, from producing, managing the recording process and mixing the music, to directing the music videos.) Note he appears so secure, very non-plussed, in the fact he’s the by far lesser-known half of a successful hip-hop duo that no one seems to know his contribution to – and he’s fine with that. (Hello-o, Sesame Street -You replaced Lewis with Oscar the Grouch to do the kid-friendly version of Thriftshop with Macklemore – really??) So I started Googling Lewis.

Addiction features strongly in Macklemore’s life, and he’s a rockstar, a real hip-hop celebrity, but if you watch some of the interviews, you’ll find Macklemore saying things like “If I (don’t think about people other than myself), inevitably I will relapse, and Ryan will leave me and go make an album with someone who is probably not as talented but more consistent as a person..” He’s also credited spiritualism with helping him stay sober.

How did this duo succeed, and how does Lewis stay so grounded? Raw, wild talent….. and Refiner’s Fire.

ps: Ok, rant time, feel free to leave now 🙂 Addiction or excess are things that I grew up feeling very strongly about. I mean, I spent more than a decade in a dealing room (alcohol! cussing!), and my dad being especially fussed about alcohol prompted me to always have some in my dorm room fridge (me badass! :D) BUT in reality I’ve never been drunk in my life.

When I first started work I spent several weekends at Boat Quay “learning to drink and order stuff” so I wouldn’t embarrass myself or get drunk at work events.. but Dad, that time I fell down the stairs was because I was in 3-inch platforms, not because I was drunk… Your asking me that in jest inspired me to buy the stuff and put it in my fridge! Imma rebel! <fist pump> Still, thank you for believing I could actually pull off feet killers hooker heels instruments of foot death weapons of mass podiatric health destruction 😀

For real though, I once read a commentary by a young woman recovering from substance abuse, and she said someone who has never known the lure of a cigarette cannot understand the craving of an addiction. Those words scared me into never taking up smoking or getting drunk. Much harder to stop than to never start. Anyway, if you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to smoke or try recreational drugs, you should also wonder what addiction feels like:

 

Hamster Ninja got a real kick out of finding QQ, an 8 week old Lab puppy, in the stroller next to our table one day when we were ordering Chinese takeout… Hailing from a long line of working dogs, QQ is being fostered until she turns 15 months, when her guide dog training will commence. For now however, she’s replete from a full morning running about in this heat and sinks repeatedly, unconscious, into the depths of her comfortable stroller (which would explain why this is the first puppy we’ve seen in one of these strollers, usually we find old or sick dogs in them).

How will her foster caregiver deal with having to give her up when duty calls?

“She’s already my second foster animal; I’m going to be doing this for awhile…”

Just so…

 

 

I don’t think I acknowledged how incredibly fortunate we’ve been in the last few weeks… and last night was no exception..

Hang on, lemme tell you how she got that.

Hamster Ninja flew completely beyond a bouncing castle’s padded walls and landed outside the enclosure on bare concrete (yes like in the photo). It was easily a 5-foot fall from over the wall, the proprietor would shakily explain to the nurses. They had not expected any kid to fly over the wall, and so they hadn’t laid the soft mats at the back, just 10, 20 feet deep in the front and along the sides. Watching from the ropes, I suddenly see HN appear over the top of the wall, landing a moment later on the floor below and screaming her lungs out. By the time I run round to the front, push through, yell at the attendant to let me in, and run back to where she fell, she’s gone. It takes us several minutes to find her, tearily sliding out from another castle. Her friend’s mum has called the police and mall management, but I don’t wait for anyone to arrive, I just leave my number and we go straight to the nearest A&E.

I’m not squeamish about broken limbs and what-not, but I’m very concerned about head traumas. A secondary school friend long ago abruptly lost his dad during a squash match when the older man slipped on the court. Just like that. My uncle who works in the medical field came home one day to my cousin blading (slowly) round the house without a helmet and really lost it. Earlier that day he had seen a boy who had not worn a helmet, and then fallen off his bicycle. The inside of his head, my uncle said, had looked like when you drop a watermelon on the pavement.

People use “Hashtag Blessed” for the most beautiful things, for awesome vacations, for prizes, for all manner of “good stuff” that happens to them. Yesterday evening, that packed, bare bones (but very “chaotically efficient,” if there’s such a way of putting it), extremely busy A&E room, with the smells and the noise and the… walls…. that is our Hashtag Blessed.

At reception, I’m frantically telling the staff who appear non-plussed but turn out to move quite fast (in retrospect I think they always appear non-plussed because of the constant traffic of injured going through the crowded hospital – there’s a sign that reads something like Waiting Time Will Be Increased If Resuscitation Is In Progress) how HN fell out of the bouncing castle.

Nurses: Any dizziness?

HN: No.

Nurses: Any vomiting?

HN: No.

Nurses: Is that your mother standing over there?

HN: <blinks>

Me: Ay – hit your head already cannot remember me issit? 

All around us, seriously injured people perpetually coming in on stretchers. The ambulances empty, then go back out. There’s also been a car accident, traffic police start moving between the seated people, with clipboards. And so I ask if, since HN is stable, I should bring her to a less crowded clinic for the more extensive check.

When I asked at reception, they then wouldn’t take payment of the HKD 180 entrance charge, and tell me to check with the nurse re paying or moving HN.

Nurses: <pause> Are you a tourist? (I shake my head No, but this is our first urgent A&E visit; I think if you haven’t got the HKID yet then the cost is HKD 1230 thereabouts) Well we can’t stop you if you want to leave, but I can tell you you won’t wait long because (HN)s going to be put in the urgent queue. Fall and head trauma from that height..

They’re right. Not too long later, we’re called to a cubicle, where a masked doctor briskly looks her over.

“…She fell… completely out of a bouncing castle from a height of 5 feet, and hit her head on the hard concrete floor.”

“That must really be important information, you’ve said that three times.”

Rockstar blinks, and we exchange a look of appreciation. Sarcastic Doctor! At the perfect moment, it diffuses some of our anxiety. Where’s his cape?

Doctor (to HN): See that purple line? (HN nods) I want you to take your mum down that line to the X-ray station, can you do that? (She does, and so they know she can both see the purple line and walk on it.)

This leads us eventually to the room where HN is given a CT scan.

The wait after the check and scan (after they’ve seen HN and verified she’s not in immediate danger) is much longer. Truth be told not a few friends who have come to this hospital with less urgent needs have all mentioned the wait is long. There are many, many people who need medical attention. You can spot some of the “regulars”, including several blonde-and-blue-eyeds – they’ve brought earphones, laptops… A couple of… Indonesians? Philippinos? Have brought full meals in tupperware.

Kings arrives after his work event, in time for us to be called back to Sarcastic Doctor’s station, where he delivers the best line in the world: She’s alright. Ok, Bye bye.

After thanking him profusely (honestly, he barely blinks behind the mask, he must be so swamped and preoccupied, goodness knows how many patients he urgently has to see in a night) we try to figure out where and what to pay. I get a couple blank looks over masks, before returning to the reception counter.

“We also had a CT scan”
“(slight raised eyebrows) That’s…. included in the HKD 180″

The bouncing castle proprietor apologises, explains again about not laying mats at the back because they never thought kids would be falling out of there, tries to pay for our consultation. Of course Kings declines, but more than that, what stayed with me was that when we went to the counter and I was describing HN’s fall “from a height of 4ft thereabouts,” the proprietor, worried as he must have been about whether we were going to make a serious complaint – certainly mall management had begun to swarm and take pictures as we were leaving, including politely stopping HN on the way out to the A&E for a picture – had put the height she had fallen from without a soft mat as higher, 5 feet (not say, lower). He had not tried to downplay HN’s injury risk, and we respect him for that.

So all’s well that ends well. And HN’s face in this quick snap I took while we were waiting briefly to enter the X-Ray room says it all: