As my wretched illness continues I’m considering adopting a Howard Hughes-like existence. I will drop my used tissue in piles, wander around my apartment naked (actually I already do that), and allow no one into my physical presence. It turns out that the fever and strep throat were merely a mild case of hysterical hypochondria – I’m allowed; I’ve had a rough few months – although the congestion is very real. I am waiting for my head to explode.

Mercilessly, it didn’t explode yesterday when I was invaded by parents and various other family members in towns from various cities spread across a couple of countries – a mini diaspora. Instead, I hacked and sneezed mucous all over them as we ate our non-Easter dinner. While the Christians were dressing up as bunnies, eating chocolate, and crying over crosses (or are they happy about the crosses? – meaning no disrespect, but I can never tell which one it is), we went for dim sum and ate all sorts of things we’re not supposed to. The Chinese and the Jews have polar opposite views of food.



I ate shrimp and cuttlefish in various forms (bad Jew!) – I cannot live without my monthly dose of curried cuttlefish. I ate pork mashed up, rolled up on rice, barbecued as sausage, mixed with beef (bad, bad Jew!). No dairy product in site, though. Two of my cousins ate the only thing that didn’t completely break kosher: barbecued chicken feet. I wasn’t brave enough to try, however. It looked too much like barbecued zombie child hand (although to the best of my knowledge, I’ve never seen zombie child hand, barbecued or otherwise).

I did my best not to transmit my plague to my family by way of germ-laden chopsticks, but I’m not altogether certain how successful I was.

Not that I keep kosher anyways. I do, however, have a brisket marinating at the bottom of my fridge that, if I’ve done it right, will turn into corned beef in about a month. Either that, or it’ll just be rotting animal carcass at the bottom of my fridge … or zombie cow come back to haunt me for eating curried cuttlefish and sticky rice with pork.