Whiskey Sour and Good Music

"Down on Lexington they're wearing

New shoes stuck to aging feet

And close their eyes and open

And they'll recognize the aging street

And think about how things were right

When they were young and veins were tight

And if you are the ghost of Christmas Past

Then wont you stay the night?"

Ne Me Quitte Pas (2002) by Regina Spektor

I had my first Whiskey Sour several years ago when a good friend of mine took me to a bar which he thought made it the way it's supposed to be made, and I can't say I was terribly impressed with what was presented to me that night. Now that I'm making them myself, the Whiskey Sour had a became a personal after-dinner staple of mine. To a shaker filled with ice, I pour in one-and-a-half shot of Maker's Mark bourbon whiskey, a single shot of freshly squeezed lemon juice, and a half shot of simple syrup (which you can make at home by mixing equal parts water and sugar). Then, I gave it a good 15 seconds of vigorous shaking before straining it into a rocks glass filled with new, crisp ice.

Some people like a little egg white to go with it, but euuughhh.

This is a boldly flavoured cocktail. The tartness of fresh lemon juice blends quite well with the sweetness of the bourbon (a balance you may not be able to achieve with say, a scotch). For garnish, I usually float an orange wheel on top - and if I don't have any oranges at hand, I would still sling a teeny-tiny splash of orange juice in the mix anyway. I find that it goes a long way in taking the edge off.

About me? I'm okay, I guess. I have reached a kind of plateau of misery and there are just miles and miles of monotonous emotional wasteland stretching out in every horizon. The highlight of my week was pretty much the moment when I heard The National's rendition of The Rains of Castamere at the end of the Blackwater episode of Game of Thrones. It was every bit as chilling as I imagined it when it played during its iconic moment in the third book of A Song of Ice and Fire.

Oh, Regina Spektor's new album, What We Saw from the Cheap Seats, also debuted last week and let me tell you: it did not disappoint one bit. My immediate favourite track from it was How which (like One More Time With Feeling from her 2009 album) has that familiar iconic flavour which made me think that I must have heard it a long time ago, but I couldn't have. Maybe it's the simplicity of the arrangement. Maybe it's the old-fashioned romance and naiveté shining through in its lyrics. Or maybe, it's just the heartbreaking sincerity in Ms Spektor's beautiful voice.

"Oh baby, how can I begin again?

How can I try to love someone new?

Someone who isn't you?

How can our love be true

When I'm not, ooh, I'm not oh-ver you?"

Call Them Brothers, which she sang in haunting duet with Jack Dishel of Only Son, was another track I have on loop in my playlist. There's also Patron Saint, a deceptively jaunty song which I like very much and in it, she laments the fact that true love exists. I tend to agree. After all, only hopeless romantics who believe it exists would try to look for it, right?

Today, my posting in Neurology ends. Tomorrow will be my first day in Cardiology in an entirely different hospital. I feel nothing.



Asking how,
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Wallbanging

"Black clouds are behind me

I now can see ahead

Often I wonder why I try

Hoping for an end

Sorrow weighs my shoulders down

And trouble haunts my mind

But I know the present will not last

And tomorrow will be kinder"

Tomorrow Will Be Kinder (2012) by The Secret Sisters

Today, I squeezed two navel oranges dry and produced about 150 mililitres of fresh juice. To that, I slung in a 50 mililitres shot of vodka and floated a half shot of Galliano on top of it. The resulting Harvey Wallbanger tasted almost like it's actually good for me. Fresh juice is surprisingly a lot milder compared to store-bought OJ's, but it's probably because I'm using navels. After a night in the belly of the on-call whale, it was positively rejuvenating.
 

My homemade Harvey Wallbanger.

One of my bosses like to brag at me twice daily that back when she was a house officer, she used to come to work at 5:00 AM to review all the patients under her care and laboured to ensure that all the blood-works' formal reports are ready by the time the specialists turn up leisurely at 8 o'clock. It's all that good ol' days jazz when folks are more honest, work harder and music isn't the ungodly din the young 'uns listen to these days. I am always sorely tempted to remind her that children in Victorian Britain used to work 16 hours a day crawling through tunnels in coal mines too narrow for adults and ask her if I can stick a pickaxe in her kids' tiny hands before shoving them down a hole somewhere. Just because something was done in a certain way in the past doesn't necessarily mean it's not a fucking stupid idea.

Senior doctors also like to talk about how house officers are being too pampered these days because the on-call system is in the process of being abolished in Malaysia - completely ignoring the fact that I, and my colleagues, are still doing calls in much the same way they did. They talk about it like it's a good thing, forgetting the fact that the soul-breaking work hours of doctors were invented by a junkie surgeon who kept himself going using cocaine and decided that everyone else should follow suit. But to avoid anyone from accusing me of poisoning the well, there is actually good evidence in the scientific literature which shows that sleep deprivation can significantly increase the number of medical errors executed by a doctor and if my supervisors honestly give a soaring coitus about the wellbeing of our patients, they'd be championing the reduction in work hours.

There's a recent half-assed institution of a policy to allow house officers to go home at 8:00 AM the next day after an overnight call but in the two weeks in which it was in effect, I was only allowed to go home at noontime, earliest.

Last Friday was one of those post-call mornings where I spent it accompanying a patient to the radiology department to get a computerised tomographic angiogram of both her legs, which were rotting to bits. The old girl was quite far along down the path of dementia and had been confined to a bed of some kind or other for more than a year. Her knees had stiffened so much from arthritis and infection that the mere act of touching them would send her screaming in pain and weeping like a year old child. The specialist whose team I work for once saw her in one of these moments and remarked, almost to himself:

"Pitiful."

With the help of some sedatives, I managed to straightened her legs enough for the scan without her remembering it clearly enough to hate me later. After that, I volunteered to escort her to a private hospital where she usually undergoes haemodialysis because her kidneys had failed. Transfering her from a gurney to a chair there also sent her into bloodcurdling howls of agony, and after that was done, I was just glad that I could finally ride the ambulance back, head home, and rest.

Just as I was saying goodbye to her, she suddenly looked up to me and in one of those rare flashes of lucidity, she said:

"Thank you, doctor."

Four days later, that still haunts me. I left work today at 2:30 PM after another night's call. When I said goodbye to her before I left the hospital, she was waiting to get both her legs amputated.

She doesn't know that.

Feeling that he had somehow failed at something,

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The Best Long Island Iced Tea I Ever Had

"Don't make me sad, don't make me cry

Sometimes love is not enough and the road gets tough

I don't know why

Keep making me laugh,

Let's go get high

The road is long, we carry on

Try to have fun in the meantime"

Born to Die (2011) by Lana Del Rey

This evening, I poured a Long Island Iced Tea in me followed by a Martini, a Whiskey Sour and a Black Russian. For the first time in months, I am liquored enough to obliterate my ability to walk in a straight line and I couldn't think of a better opportunity to write about my latest pastime.

Now that I am bereft of a girlfriend, I finally took up mixing cocktails - a pursuit that I had been meaning to pursue ever since I had my first Piña Colada five years ago in a bar in India because of that "if you like Piña Coladas" song (you know the one). Since then, I had been trying to find a bar which could competently serve my favourite drinks without botching them beyond recognition, and I was met with disappointment at every turn. I once caught, to my horror, a barkeep throwing a splash of orange juice in my Martini. I am now convinced that in order to have a reliably decent drink most of the time, I had to supervise my bartenders or make it myself.

About a month ago, I decided to start building up a personal mini bar and one of the initial challenges I faced was finding a reliable and reasonably priced supply of decent liquors and liqueurs, and I finally found one in Kuching situated along Jalan Tun Jugah who would frequently slip me duty-free booze. The proprietors would even fill orders of certain liquor brands for me that no one else in the city appreciates.

Purchasing mixers posed another challenge but I could gather most of the things I need from the Ta Kiong supermarket at The Spring which hawks a decent amount of imported products. I was very pleasantly surprised when I stumbled across shelf stacked with bottles of Rose's Lime Juice Cordial there - enabling me to churn out Gimlets whenever I feel like having one. Aside from that, I've taken to stocking my fridge with oranges, lemons and an obscene amount of limes because having freshly squeezed juices on hand really does make all the difference. Now, I'm on the lookout for fresh mint leaves and sprigs, and I'm already looking into the feasibility of growing a plant myself.

On Saturday, after consulting with my supplier of booze, I finally located a shop where I could pick up a cobbler shaker and a jigger,

A smallish 350mls cobbler shaker with a 25mls/50mls jigger.

In the beginning, I was using my Starbucks tumbler as a makeshift shaker and used plastic custard dessert cups as my jigger. I expect that by the time my next payday arrives, I would be purchasing a blender. I'm already googling how-to instructions on buying one.

Today, I attempted my first Long Island Iced Tea - one of my perennial favourites - from scratch. First off, I have to get my hands on some sour mix, and I was obliged to make my own by dissolving a cup of sugar in a cup of hot water, and then adding a cup of lemon juice and a cup of lime juice (both freshly squeezed using a plastic citrus juicer I stumbled across at the store) to it. Then, to a glass half-filled with ice, I added equal measures of gin, tequila, triple sec, vodka, and white rum before dousing the mix with a double dose of my freshly prepared sour mix, which is denser than the spirits and would perfuse downwards to the bottom of the glass. Finally, I threw in a splash of cola to give it that trademark iced tea appearance,

My homemade Long Island Iced Tea. Gorgeous, ain't it?

 It was sooo fucking good. I'd go as far as to pronounce it the best Long Island Iced Tea I ever had in my life (and I had too many). The weird thing about Long Island Iced Teas is that the taste of liquor in them are somehow inexplicably subdued and smooth in spite of the fact that they are actually quite high in proof, and I could be knocking back half a dozen of these while my liver sneakily drowns without my notice.

Over the past month, through the guidance of cocktail sites and instructional YouTube videos, I had successfully concocted Piña Coladas, Staten Island Ferries, White Russians, Black Russians, Screwdrivers, Harvey Wallbangers, Creamsicles, Gimlets, White Ladies (not the local Kuching non-alcoholic dessert drink), Midori Splices, Japanese Slippers, Moscow Mules, Cosmopolitans, Grasshoppers (both the regular and the flying variant), Martinis, Whiskey Sours, Cuba Libres and many, many more that I enjoyed far too much to remember.

Tomorrow, I'm attempting yet another popular and thoroughly recognisable drink, the Margarita. I've already stolen a handful of salt sachets from McDonald's for it.

Amateur mixologist,

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