No Ruz eggs given to me by my aunt.

They sit in a glass jar all year long

in my living room, guarded by an equally colorful

porcelain hen and a wooden rooster .

My aunt, Tita Rory, used to work for an elderly Persian man. She learned about No Ruz from his family. It is a celebration of the spring equinox, a very old tradition, older than Christianity or Islam.  It originated with Zoroastrianism. In West LA, where many Persians (Iranians) live, this is still being kept alive. They decorate their houses with painted  eggs and other symbolic stuff.  For the past three years my aunt has been perfecting the art of egg painting. When the holiday comes around she sells her eggs at a market for 10-12 dollars each. This earns her an income of around a thousand. Not bad, huh!

March 20 is the official first day of spring on my calendar. No Ruz means new life. The death of winter. Life begins anew. That’s why they have eggs. They also have fish and other fertility symbols. Ever eaten a bihod, that  long whitish/yellowish thing that you sometimes find inside a fish stomach? Like it?  Eeiow! That sandy texture in your mouth are hundreds and hundreds of minute eggs. You can never be more fertile than a fish.

I wonder if they have bunnies.  I wouldn’t be so surprised if they do.  Bunnies can be fertility symbols, too. They’re very  prolific.  Ever watched Basic Instinct? Michael Douglas had a line there that went, “We fuck like rabbits.” If there are bunnies in No Ruz, then it’s Easter celebrated at an earlier date and  under a different religion.

No Ruz: celebrated in spring, death of winter, rebirth of life, fertility, eggs, fish

Easter: celebrated in spring, death of Jesus, resurrection, rebirth, eggs, bunnies

See the parallel concepts? FREAKY!!!!!! Sometimes I wonder (with fear in my heart) if the religion I have isn’t just a revamped version of something much more earthy and ancient. What a laugh it would be if it were. Here we are — christians who think that we posses the TRUTH. One seed of doubt can lead you down the path of skepticism. Is Jesus real? Is there a God? You don’t want to go there.  Happy Persian New Year, everyone!

A killer and two dead bodies.  That was how my bad dream started.

I was looking into the room of a  killer. His name was Paul. He was reclining on a bed whose mattress couldn’t stay flat because of the dead body under it.  Its head was turned towards me and its lifeless eyes were staring straight at me.  Then there was a large sack from which Paul  pulled out a severed head with a small piece of skin still attached to its neck.  He tore up that skin like a piece of paper.  That was when I started running , asking for help. The killer knew that I had seen him and was after me.  Oh, the terror I felt! When I managed to shake him off my trail I went back to his room to gather evidence against him.  I was pulling out the bed sheets when he came back.  Fear froze me. I was sure that it was the end of me.  Then someone came out of nowhere and stabbed him in the heart.  Phhew! What a big relief! I woke up.

This kind of dream stands out among others.  It doesn’t recede right away into the subconscious. The intense emotions it pulls out of you makes it quite hard to forget. The images hound you for days as if screaming for your attention.

And so it was that after five days of mulling over it, I opened my rarely-used  dream dictionary, “20,000 Dreams” by Mary Summer Rain, published by Thunder Bay Press.  Though I am  skeptical of this author and her book’s pronouncements, I figured that having a psychological/rational explanation is better than being constantly creeped out by the gory images flitting in and out of my consciousness.

I learned that when you dream of death, there is a certain aspect in your life that is dead.  It could be your faith, hope, relationship …. anything. A killer is a “fatally negative facet in one’s life”. A decapitated body is something over which you are “losing your head”, something that extremely bothers you. Stabbing  represents “unexpected retaliation or an attempt at something.”

Sigh! I suppose something inside me is telling me that it’s time to reflect on my life.    Was it Oprah who said that “the unexamined life is not worth living.”? She’s right, you know.  Masunod nga ang kanyang advice.

The Case of the Live Maggots — this would be the title of the book if super teenage amateur detective, Nancy Drew, were the one solving the mystery that happened at a Northern California Goldilocks branch.

I wonder how the bakeshop/restaurant chain is faring after their customers reported them to the Department of Health. They also appeared on TV, warning people about the food being served at the restaurnt.  That could be a big blow to their business.

A month ago Balitang America on TFC oh-so-gingerly reported(Goldilocks is a major advertiser) that a Filipino family and  their foreign guest had an upsetting experience when they had lunch at a Goldilocks branch in Northern Callifornia.  After having finished  their chicken adobo, they discovered, to their horror, that there were live maggots wriggling in the remaining sauce of the dish.  Using a cameraphone, they took a video of it as evidence and brought the matter to the attention of health authorities.  Thankfully, they only had mild nausea and vomitting. None of them was hospitalized for food poisoning.

I don’t like the food chain, for reasons that deserve to be discussed in a whole new post, but I agree with their representative when he said, “I can’t understand how there can be live maggots in our food.”

Maggots are fly larvae that grow in rotten meat.  What puzzles me is — why are the maggots alive?  If, for the sake of argument, Goldilocks used rotten and maggot-infested chicken for their adobo, wouldn’t the critters die in the heat of the cooking process?  I don’t  think they have the ability to withstand high temperatures. If there were maggots in the meat, then what the customers would see are dead ones.  They shouldn’t be slithering and having a good time all over the platter.  If the meat is so spoiled that there’d be worms growing in it, I’m sure there’d also be all kinds of sickness-causing bacteria in it, bacteria that could cause food poisoning. What baffles me is that how come the people  who ate it didn’t get sick at all?

Something doesn’t seem right here.  This case calls for the sleuthing skills of perpetual-eighteen-year-old, Nancy Drew.

“Role model? Definitely. Genius? Oh, yeah.

Goddess?Probably.”

I think that the administrators of Goldilocks would profit from reading the book above. Nancy Drew’s Guide to Life is written by Jennifer Worick, published by Running Press. The book is very tiny, about 2 3/4 by 3 1/2 inches, but it is packed with useful info taken from the first 56  mysteries that have been published.  In addition to sleuthing tips, they can  also consult it for advice on being a lady, the delicate art of etiquette, survival strategies, and dating. Who knows… they just might pick up a trick or two that might help them get to the bottom of this hullabaloo.

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