I’ve had a string of bad days work and otherwise. There were hours where I couldn’t make heads or tails of what I was supposed to be doing. But there were breaks, thankfully, and one of the breaks was spent having lunch with my father.
Good thing my father’s the quiet sort, and to most other observers, inscrutably so. You can almost hear his brain ticking, but ticking about what, you don’t know.
I reckon the ticking these days is mostly about trying to figure out how to control his fine motor movements. I was mesmerised again by his determined use of chopsticks to pick up peanuts from a plate while we lunched at a Chinese restaurant near the office we share. He zig-zagged the chopsticks towards the plate, hovering over the plate for about half a minute before catching a peanut. Then he shuffled the other peanuts on the plate while trying to get the chopsticks to grip the one peanut. After another half minute, the payload secured, he zig-zagged the chopsticks and peanut towards himself, and juuuuust as the peanut was about to get to his mouth, his grip loosened and the peanut dropped onto the floor. And then he started all over again.
Thankfully, the food we ordered arrived soon after, so he only had two attempts at the peanut picking chopsticks Olympics.
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