Starving Quietly

I suppose there are as few examples of the close connection between body and soul as the hunger pangs of an expat who can’t get the food he/she is used to. I cannot forget the way a former classmate of mine from California, USA would talk so earnestly about how grateful he was to have discovered a source for applesauce. “Apple sauce?” I was thinking at the time.

Now it’s my turn. I’m dying for bulalo, sinigang, petchay, kare-kare, pork chops, chunky beef stew, stuffed and roasted milkfish, bagoong, dinuguan (blood pudding), menudo, giniling, oh a slew of other unacquirables here. It’s particularly bad when the meal hours come and the only things edible are the foods that the people here have. Indomie, mie instan, mihun, mie basa, mie kuning, sohum mie, bakmi, cwiemie, mie goreng, mie bakso, mie ayam bakso, ayam bakso mie, bakso mie ayam, mie bakso ayam, mie rubus, rebus mie, mie dan kuah, mie tampah kuah, mie thrown at the wall, mie on the plate, mie on the side of the plate, mie under the table, mie and you, you and mie. That. Works for them, but it's killing mie. I mean, me.

I come away from the table stuffed to the gills but positively starving in my mind. I recall the parakeet squabs I had when I used to keep parakeets. The barely fledged baby birds would find themselves kicked out of the nest and sitting at the bottom of the cage, right on the birdseed dish. While the mature birds had enough sense not to sit on the seed, not so the bugleys (I called them bugleys from bird + ugly). The other thing that bugleys hadn’t yet figured was how to eat the bird seed. Hungry but no longer fed by their parents, they’d have the general idea of eating the birdseed like all the other birds were doing. What they didn’t quite know yet was that they were supposed to hull the seeds first. Often, the result was a sorry-assed looking bugley with a drum-tight crop, bursting with un-hulled birdseed. Starving, of course! Yep, that’s what I feel like these days.

I am losing weight. This is a good thing, yes? But I’m starving. That’s mie. (Whimper)