All by myself

Today is the first day since Monday that I haven't had kk for online company, and boy, is it weird.

kk is an old and dear friend from university who now lives in Tokyo. Ever since I graduated, we have not ever been in the same city, or even the same timezone, for more than two weeks at a stretch. So to keep in touch, we've had to rely on emails and phone calls and meetings-for-coffee whenever she was in town.

It was only last year that we got around to trading IM details. And then she had this pesky habit of being invisible even when she was online.

All of this week (except today), kk has been online and visible. And oh my god, it's just like being in college again.

I should remind you, if you haven't read one of my earlier entries, that kk is the friend with whom I nearly formed a procrastination club in college. We got as far as having a name for it, PSS, though I can't remember now what the middle 'S' stood for. But we never got round to forming the actual club --- of course.

Now that our work days practically overlap with each other, and we're almost always online, well, let's just say that work hasn't been this much fun in a while. Having a friend there, all day long, is like having an invisible friend or daemon (TM Philip Pullman) with you in the office: someone you can wail at when things aren't going your way, to bitch with when strange shenanigans are afoot in the office, someone who can share your excitement over some silly webpage you've just found, who appreciates your silly humour and is well able to counter it with silly humour of their own, and who has no qualms about typing everything in caps and hitting the 'return' key after each word so that you get an incessant stream of IM messages calculated to wake you up from your post-lunch stupor.

Speaking of lunch, I learned this week that lunch is, colloquially, 'ranchi', at least in Tokyo. So then I had to tell kk all about the new stall at Maxwell Hawker Centre that sells puffs and muffins: it's called Runchy.

As far as lunch-centred conversations go, I think kk's on the losing end of the conversation because I keep reciting all the Singapore food she misses (chicken rice Monday, Thai food Tuesday, nasi lemak Wednesday and bak kut teh Thursday) and all she can tell me in return is that she had a tuna and avocado sandwich. Line them up however you will, but I don't think tuna and avocado quite cuts it in the grand hierarchy of gastronomical epiphanies.

kk is taking a long weekend away from work, so no invisible friend for me today. I'll tell her about my dim sum lunch on Monday.

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