My First Visit to a QB Premium!

After about 10 months of not bothering with my hair or stepping into any salon (since November 2024), I decided that it was time for minimally a trim. It was a 7.30am start that morning, but I had time to stop by the gym. As I finished up my workout, a thought popped into my head.

There's a QB Premium at Gucco Tower that has three stylists, and they seemed really experienced, fast and efficient. If I just want a quick cut, that's simply 15 minutes. 20 minutes tops. That would suffice. My hair is long enough for any average stylist to trim and not mess up. I don't know why I keep thinking of QB Premium as a barbershop for men. Hahahah. The husband goes to them too.

There was barely any queue. The guy in front of me was quickly attended to, and in about five minutes, it was my turn. I didn't bother to pay $2 to choose a stylist. I don't know any of them. Choosing one is the same as not choosing. When my turn came, the stylist that attended to me seemed really practiced. I was watching all of them as I waited. So many people come through daily at this outlet. Practice makes perfect indeed. 

He took two inches off of my ragged ends. Roots and scalp obviously felt lighter, and it was overall neater. $24! I was done in 20 minutes! This would do wonderfully. I was extremely pleased with the sudden idea. 

I didn't have to fuss about making a trip to a specific hair salon. I simply went in the hour that I was free in the middle of the day. I didn't have to sit for three hours at a fancy salon for a trim, cut, and a hair treatment. I cannot be bothered to walk into a salon to have to do small talk or be sold products and services that I don't want.  

Of Childhood Days and Those Long Gone

I had to laugh at the story when it began with a dissection class in elementary school. A frog. This is 'Ritu' by Akhil Sharma, published in The New Yorker on August 28, 2025. 

Ritu was the unnamed narrator's classmate and lab partner. But this story isn't about Ritu, or even about the narrator. It's about the compartmentalization of childhood memories, and how we deal with the knowledge of deaths as children. Do we carry the people long dead with us into adulthood? Does it affect us? 

It was only much later that readers would realize the narrator only remembered Ritu in this manner. He didn't know much about her, yet he knew everything about her family. The narrator said that Ritu had the highest grades in biology, she "had no accent and sat with the whites during lunch". 

She also dated a white boy, Jason in high school, and got into Princeton University. Jason went to the University of Michigan. But her parents told her that she could not marry him unless he went to Princeton or Harvard or Yale. She hung herself in her parents' basement. What is shocking is that Ritu's father, Mr Shah, is depicted as deeply traditional in this story, to the extent that he would say out loud that he would beat his daughter or cut her up to feed the dogs if Jason continued to date her. The father is threatening to harm his own daughter, not even to beat the boy. 

A 1807 William Wordsworth poem is mentioned — 'I Wandered Lonely As A Cloud'. It appeared that before Ritu took her own life, she sent this poem in a letter over Christmas to her friend. She felt every line and emotion of this poem keenly. But no, this poem isn't about suicide. 

The then young boys — the narrator and Jason had visited Ritu's parents shortly after her death and tried to comfort them in the way only young children would try, by trying to explain to the poem to Ritu's parents. In their young minds, they were trying to comfort the parents by explaining what Ritu had done, when they didn't understand it themselves. A tad clumsy, but the boys had no malicious intent. But they quickly left because Mr Shah wasn't friendly and assumed they also made crank calls to the family.  

In the years after, I would suddenly remember that visit to Ritu’s house, and shame would come in a hot flash. At first, I was embarrassed only about having been scolded by Mr. Shah. Later, I felt mortified at what I had done—gone into the home of people who had just lost a child and begun making up some weird interpretation of a poem I didn’t understand.

The unnamed narrator and Jason are friends. While they didn't remain in contact through the years as adults, they caught one day when they ran into each other. They were all leading different lives from school, away from childhood memories in Woodbridge. To the narrator's slight shock, Jason seems to have put Ritu and their young relationship behind.

While Jason has left Woodbridge and now works in real estate in Los Angeles, the narrator. The narrator still visits his childhood home because his parents still live there. But many houses around the area, including Ritu's, had been demolished. 

I wouldn't be going into why Ritu died by suicide or what type of parents Mr and Mrs Shah are, and the whole rigmarole about family expectations and pressures. It is fairly obvious. It's sad though, that a young girl couldn't see any way out besides suicide. Apparently rebelling against her parents' wishes isn't an option.

I recently ran into Jason. It was in the meatpacking district of New York. He recognized me. “I have a memory for faces,” he explained. We went into a café and sat down together. Jason was working for a real-estate company in Los Angeles. I told him about myself, then asked if he remembered when we had gone to Ritu’s parents’ house. He said that he didn’t, that there had been so much noise in his head at that time that he didn’t remember much. I asked if he ever thought about her now. “Not really.” He asked if I did, and I said yes, and then he asked, “Why?” I shrugged.

My parents still live in Woodbridge, so I go there regularly. The house where Ritu lived is gone, and so are the houses around it; there is a cul-de-sac there now. When I pass that cul-de-sac, I wonder whether anyone else thinks of Ritu, of how she used to climb out her window at night to go for walks with her boyfriend, how neatly she dissected her frog, how the organs she put to the side looked like jewels or parts of a flower.

Kinmedai (金目鯛) & Sanma ( 秋刀魚) at Kizuna Tonight

The estate's annoying and obsolete intercom systems are finally being replaced. My block was scheduled for this whole week. The external public intercom units are literally next to my kitchen window and share the same wall. The drilling into concrete to remove and replace the external units was a tad insane, and took two days to do so, drilling an hour in the morning, and an hour in the afternoon.

The internal intercom unit was easier. It was only an hour’s work, but it still required drilling into the non-concrete wall to attach six screws to a metal mount. With walls this thin, we're also bothered by the drilling sounds from my neighbors' units, especially the immediate ones next door, upstairs and across. 

Dog wasn't pleased. She was frigjtened. I already tried to take her along and disappear out of the flat as much as possible to remove her from the noise, but she still heard some in the afternoon when we came home.

After all that crazy cleaning from the concrete/paint dust and all, I decided to reward myself with a dinner at Kizuna. Bit of munchies and highballs. Now, Kizuna does bother to trot out specials every month or so, just to keep the menu fresh. This weekend, they offered three choices of WHOLE FISH done in a few ways— grilled, sushi and sashimi. They had kinmedai (金目鯛), Iwashi/Japanese sardine (鰯) and sanma ( 秋刀魚).  I immediately put in a pre-order for kinmedai and sanma.

The chefs at Kizuna aren't trained sushi chefs. This isn't a sushi-ya either, so please refrain from judging it as pure sushi or look at knife skills too closely. All I want is for my fish to be filleted well and not to hold any bones. Kizuna is an earnest little izakaya that presents food in its Singaporean interpretation. Totally works for me.

The fish chosen for tonight weren't that big, but it made for sizeable bites for two humans. The kinmedai was done beautifully. It came as sushi, aburi-sashimi and the head was lightly fried. LOVELY. My favorite of the night went to the sanma. I love shiny fish, but I didn't mind the flavors tonight. To my surprise, as far as an izakaya goes, they cured it well; the vinegar wasn't too tart and it was rather tasty as sushi.

We had space and also ordered handrolls. Opted for the temaki of flounder-fin/engawa, and yellowtail, and one unagi for the husband. I do like the little sauces and furikake and little dollop of caviar they added to the temaki. Handrolls are meant to be fun!

The dog was super pleased to be out and away from all the drilling. She's noise-phobic and is utterly frightened by it. She's so bothered by the drilling at home that the clang of the metal shutters closing in the adjacent shops tonight didn't faze her. I didn't over-drink. I wisely kept to two glasses of highballs. That was perfect.