Textrovert

Too low vocabulary to say what you mean? No such thing. We can make up words.

The idea to create word from scratch may not sound like our traditional way of learning English - but the power of new words should not be discounted.

I was in for a big surprise when my daughter told me yesterday how the teacher gave them a lesson to craft DIY words. Her class has come up with new words. They are interesting. So interesting, in fact, that I decide to jot down here.

It isn't too difficult to imagine how one can be nervousxcited before joining a summer camp. And I'm sure you know what is meant by impendoom when you sit for an examination unprepared.

One of the most inspiring examples of neologisms from her class, if I am to vote, is the term textrovert. What could be better word than this one to describe those who keep texting instead of face-to-face conversation?

Game

Imagine paying to enter a café with uncomfortable chairs and without Wi-Fi. Why would people line up in the Toronto cold for a table in such unusual café named Snakes & Lattes?

There's nothing special about their food and drinks. The Snakes & Lattes café attracts guests by their board games.

Board games are almost laughably simple, yet endlessly fascinating: half mentally entertaining, half socially interactive experience. Go there and you'll be able to select any game out of the café's roughly 1000 items.

The Canadian journalist David Sax once quipped, "Table gaming creates a unique space apart from the digital world," You can never compare the fun of Scrabble with digital one like World of Warcraft. Think about the more realistic sting of defeat when you sit across from your smiling conqueror. Or the other way round.

Humans want few things more than to connect. And nothing connects people like the genuine feelings of thrill and reward when we play face to face. That brings me to a recent family holiday with good friends of mine, when we had a naughty card game Cheating Moth. The rule of the game allows us to cheat. In brief, we hold our cards above the table and are allowed to cheat one card at a time. 

To be successful, we have to be proper and yet creative. Say, drop a card on the floor or throw it over our shoulder. Or else, put a card up our sleeve. Whatever tricks as long as we aren't caught by the player who holds the Guard Bug card. On another note, we can't be too enthusiastic about cheating away the cards and need to be attentive. Whenever a player plays a Mosquito card, all other players must slap the hand down upon the card. Whoever slaps the card last will end up drawing one card from all the others. And there's more than juggling balls with cheating and Mosquito card. The rules about Cockroach card and Ant card are going to blow your mind.

Funnily enough, cheating, slapping, racing and shouting are the perfect ingredients for a delightful game.

Outward Bound

Outward Bound School is not a school, strictly speaking, but an adventure program, a chance to learn perseverance, or a life lesson. 

When I and my wife mention the Outward Bound sea diploma course we’d taken 27 years ago, it is impossible not to speak with fond memories. My heart still speeds up – and contracts with fluttering – when I think of the expedition from Sai Kung to the South China Sea and back to Lantau. That was when we just graduated from medical school, before embracing the year of internship. An ideal reason to get ourselves prepared physically and mentally.

We had not recently thought much about the Outward Bound course until my daughter is going to join their course next week. Our family are all excited, in ways no less than we were 27 years ago. To this day some of the Outward Bound challenging activities are unsurpassed – and are likely to remain so. We were antsy. Of course no Outward Bound students expect an extravagant trip. More of a jolt is the pre-course information that there will be no shower for the hiking and sea kayaking trip until the last day of the whole week.

"Okay," I said, wide-eyed, realizing the once-in-a-lifetime experience for my daughter next week.

Accomodation

The great thing about budget travel is minimalist travel style, including bare-bones, smelly backpacker lodging. 

I still remember my Youth Hostel Association membership card which worked like magical phrase "open sesame" during my university days. That worked well from Vancouver to Lake Louise, and Interlaken to Luzern. When I was a student, I could not afford hotel and, obviously, didn't have Airbnb. What I needed was pretty basic at that time: dorm beds, linen and kitchen. Most are lacking in ambience, but who cared? I would only be there for 12 hours, and eight of them I would be asleep.

I don't mean to create a false sense of nostalgia for the too-far-gone pre-Wi-Fi times, but we didn't really need signal thirty years ago. Indeed, if we were lucky, we might come across a small computer in the hostel, offering us free-of-charge five-minute slow dial-up modem connection. When I say slow, I mean ten times slower than whatever Wi-Fi signal you can snag from any nearby Starbucks nowadays.

Now that I can afford a better choice of accomodation, I haven't stayed in youth hostel for years. Not until this weekend, when our family chose to stay overnight next to the Lantau Trail. We didn't have other choices, honestly, if we wanted a location within a five minutes' stroll from the start of the Lantau Peak climb. Consider two contrasting takes on the accomodation within this same week for our family: one with just enough space for only two double bunk beds (without counting public washrooms), and another with almost 800 square feet size and one king bed. I am impressed by the way our brains can accomodate that quickly, from one way to another, as a true wayfarer from luxury holiday to minimalist's travel.

Wong Chuk Hang

To those of us who often attend fellowship conferment ceremonies at the Hong Kong Academy of Medicine, mention the place Wong Chuk Hang and we will associate that with formal dress code. When I say often, I mean seven times in one month. Yes, it’s that many.

To break the seemingly fixed rule, I booked a hotel located at Wong Chuk Hang during my daughter’s recent term break. That’s how I had chance to have casual wear and run along the Aberdeen Harbour. Venturing to the south of Hong Kong Island on a quiet Wednesday, we got chance to enjoy the long beach at Repulse Bay. 

It was truly unique experience, both magical and revival at the same time.

Irrational

As we navigate the pandemic, everything is new. We don't know what's under each rock. We don't know the path ahead. This, I believe, is why we are panic-stricken.

But as we get along, and the patterns become more obvious, we find the storyline predictable.

I guess that's the reason I borrowed Geraldine Brooks’s novel Year of Wonders. A story of the plague year, 1666, when we heard about how breathing would cease. More times than not, the patient's throat would give a wet gurgle, straining for air, and chest would rise and fall in a series of swift, shallow pants. After a moment or two, these would slow and diminish, until breathing stopped.

I read about the villagers' decision to quarantine themselves within Eyam, a village in the rugged mountain spine of England. And how the rector exhausted to dig graves. Day and night. How nobody was troubling with coffins, and how families simply carried their loved ones to their graves, or if they were not strong enough, dragged them with a blanket slung beneath the armpits of the corpse. And their great difficulty in poring through the book to find the repertoire of herbs: nettle for the blood, starwort and violet leaves for the lungs, silverweed to cool a fever, cress for the stomach. I felt every bit as similar as what was happening now and then, more than 300 years ago. Think of the way panic leads to a wealth of irrational remedies, from frantic attempts to resist contagion of plague, all the way to absurd judgment of who is right and who is wrong. Imagine the way to tell whether someone is a witch: throw her into water, and if she floats, she's a witch. If she sinks, she isn't.

All manners of falsehood. That was utterly nonsense. Okay, thank God, that was 1666. But I'm not sure we are anything better today.

FUO

The word uncertainty is loaded with negative connotations. Or much in the way that American psychologist Virginia Satir would say, "People prefer the certainty of misery to the misery of uncertainty."

One reason the word uncertainty lands on my head is a mysterious patient of mine. A colleague of mine, and a nice guy who had attended the same high school as mine. He had been having a condition called FUO. To say your patient had a FUO is like saying you bumped into a UFO. Mysterious, yes, alarming, maybe, but never easy to settle. The name FUO may not ring any bells, but if you study medicine you know the acronym stands for "fever of unknown origin." 

Physicians like me are indulged in solving the puzzle of FUO, but it's sometimes hard to crack the code. A caveat is warranted here: you simply have to unlock one bad thing after another, one by one, bit by bit. The FUO patient could have typhoid fever, malaria, cat scratch disease, cancer, AIDS, and all sorts of difficult-to-pronounce autoinflammatory diseases. The list of scans and of blood tests can be unbearably long. So much so that your patient might wonder if the weight loss can simply be a result of too much tests. When Jedidiah Jenkins suffered from FUO, he went to the hospital ten times and "had enough blood drawn to deflate a whale."

His doctor, like me, couldn't figure out what was wrong with him. I remember Jedidiah Jenkins quoting his doctor who said, "Believe it or not, this happens all the time. People get better, and we never find out what happened." For me, that captures what I believe I have to tell my patient. That's exactly where I am after tonnes of blood test, after removing a small piece of his kidney for examinaiton under a microscope, after ordering antibiotics and steroids.

It pains you to tell a patient you didn't find out what happened, but this happens. A lot.