Rituals

I've always been stubborn about calling myself sick. Physically, as in malady/illness/horrendous virus. Probably because my mom would always overreact and keep me from school for a week and force ten different types of medicine down my throat and make me eat the most bland soups and foods.

It's the dust and fumes headed at me from every direction constantly though. That plus the intense food leaves a mess inside.

Maybe it was a sign of weakness. That admitting I'm sick implies some sort of physical deficit that leaves me in a susceptible and powerless state beyond the control of my undoubtedly otherwise formidable mental capacities.

After the long and tiring ceremony ritual thing they made us eat these things--Manar's right, some things just escape easy translation, I guess they're like holy food? Purportedly.

Besides, it's an utterly contemptible idea to catch cold in temperatures several Fahrenheit integer multiples more than that which is truly bitter.

The priest made me recite/repeat these lines for like three hours. It felt like, you know those games, I know for a fact this was in the first Harry Potter game, where--probably more common and easy in Wii or DS games--where you try and trace your pointer around a shape to a close enough precision in order to go on--iPhone too, I guess. So I was repeating his words in I don't even know what language, probably Sanskrit or something crazy, and barely maintaining the inflections and syllables of the original speech, 30% at most, and I felt like I was tracing my wand around the spell for Incendio and sometimes getting it close to the actual shape but other times deviating completely off the screen.

But my taste buds become zombies when I'm sick.

I don't get why they all have such elaborate plans for dead people. Especially a year and then some after. If I died I would certainly hope that that would be enough time to get to heaven or hell or infinite unconsciousness.

Afterwards when we were eating the things, which was basically normal Indian food, I couldn't really taste the POWER OF GOD in it, I realized something embarrassing. I can't eat rice, or most things really, with my hands. I tried gathering the rice pieces in my hand and stuffing it in my mouth, but my thumb kept getting in the way, so I tried just holding it w/o thumb but then it kept spilling everywhere, unbound. I could even do it when I was three years old. All those years of "Western" stuff and forks and spoons really spoiled me. Chopsticks, even.

I could practically hear my dad laughing at my incompetence and utter failure at being Indian and saying I deserved it, which, frankly, I kind of did.