Episode 48. Unseasoned Tastemaker (Dr. Jedidiah's Diary)

Dr. Jedidiah’s Diary

Dr. Jedidiah is a psychiatrist who loves traveling, meeting new people, and exploring different cultures. As a single father who lost his wife to drug overdose 10 years ago, he has not been his old perky self for the last decade. During those hard years, he has met hundreds of, thousands of people from various walks of life around all over the world. Meeting new people and listening to their stories outside his office have given him different feelings from the ones through the formal encounter groups or support groups for therapy. These people he has accidentally come across were the paths through which Dr. Jedidiah could look back on his own life, being truly honest with himself. Here is Dr. Jedidiah’s monologue that has left him with some food for thoughts in life….or a fodder to justify his own mistakes in the past.

 

Episode 48. Unseasoned Tastemaker

Jacob was one of the youngest patients I had seen in my office. He was only 16 years old, but looked very mature in every way. Organized, poised, thoughtful, and very polite. He was taken to my office by his mother who was the very one that needed to sit on the “psychiatrist’s couch”. The first thing that Jacob said when he stepped into my office made me laugh -though I had to swallow my laughing to look professional in front of them. “Am I suppose to lie on this couch and close my eyes, waiting to be hypnotized?” Before I say “no” to his question, a worn-out notebook in his hands caught my eyes. On the cover of his notebook was written “World of Tastes – Ex Libris Jacob Sheen”. Quite unlike his mother’s intension to fix her son’s problems, Jacob looked strongly determined to use these couch sessions in my office for the purpose of proving to his mom that he was not insane.

 

According to Jacob’s mom, he often skipped school and spent most of his days in the kitchen and grocery stores. She had been unaware of her son’s daily routines until the day when Jacob sat down with her to seriously talk about his plans to drop out of school. He showed his mom the dog-eared notebook of his own culinary world and said he wanted to start exploring and experimenting with tastes on earth. Jacob’s mom felt it was like he had launched a preemptive attack before she got a phone call from his school counselor about his frequent absence from classes. All she could say to her son was a flat “NO” to his addleheaded plans, saying that a high school dropout would end up becoming a loser in this society. Jacob was hurt by his mother’s scathing words, but bit his tongue and kept delving for the world of taste and culinary art in his own way. His notebook was full of information about herbs, seasonings, combinations of tastes and ingredients, international food pairings, the availability of exotic foods in town, locations of all nearby whole food markets, and so on. To my eyes, Jacob was not an insane high school dropout, but rather a young man with perfervid imagination and love for food creation.

 

Even after I told Jacob’s mom straight up several times to forget about fixing her son’s nonexistent problems, she was stubbornly asking me to treat her son. I asked her what it’d be like if her son was forced to stay in school and constantly told to keep it tight against his own dream? She said it would not matter whether or not it was in his plan to stay in school as long as he graduated from high school and college. To Jacob’s mom, her son’s dream was too small and petty to be recognized. She thought being outside the school boundary in Jacob’s age would just be viewed no more than a norm-smashing life. Norm-smashing?!! From whose point of view would that be? Who decides the fixed idea of “norm” and “deviation”? What could be the demarcation between “right” and “wrong” or “good” and “bad”?

 

Through months and months of talks and discussions, Jacob’s mom was convinced that he would certainly make a wonderful chef with all his passion and genuine intrinsic motivation. He promised his mother to do his best if he was allowed to enter the culinary school he’d been keeping his eye on. I was more than sure that someday, I’d run into a shiny cook book Ex Libris Jacob Sheen in a bookstore, and then I’d find myself heading out to a whole food market for some exotic ingredients to bake Jacob’s ambrosial pie.

 

Expressions

    1.   psychiatrist’s couch: It is also called a “psychoanalyst’s couch”, which was first introduced as a Victorian day-bed - reportedly given as a gift to Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud by a grateful female patient, Madame Benvenisti, in around 1890.

 

    2.   Ex Libris ….: Used as an inscription on a bookplate to show the name of the book's owner.

e.g., Ex Libris Jean Lee

 

    3.   to launch a preemptive attack: to start an attack initiated on the basis of incontrovertible evidence that an enemy attack is imminent

    

    4.  scathing: bitterly denunciatory; harshly critical; painful

 

    5.  perfervid: impassioned/ extremely eager or zealous

 

    6.  to keep it tight: slang for “do not be dilly-dally/ sloppy/ loose”

 

    7.  ambrosial: succulently sweet or fragrant; balmy, divine