Chopsticks Olympics

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.