Cream, perfection.

Blithely unaware that one pint equals two cups (which is a lot of cream, let me tell you) I made ice cream on Sunday. A whole tubful of terrible. I was only experimenting, so I used the vanilla essence that I got from A&P supermarket behind my building, cheap and probably synthetically derived from ethanol. It's been stewing in its vapours in my kitchen cupboard for about three years, in a little brown bottle next to two equally-unused bottles of celery seed and dill weed. Impulse buys, all.

The result tasted like the Magnolia ice cream that I used to buy from the Putrajaya Carrefour. It is yellow. Every time I have a scoop, my mouth comes away covered in a thin film of grease that feels and smells fatty. I don't know the exact science behind it, but it's as if I churned the milk and cream too much in the direction of butter. And, the thing with this chemical process called "making food" is that whatever you do, you can't undo it. "You can't unbake a cake," is the Brazilian saying. You can't unchurn churned milk.

This leads me to think that, life is like the chemical process. If you want to create anything of use, you must aim for perfection. But if you only want to experiment, you can aim a little lower, or at nothing in particular, even. Then you tell yourself and anyone else who might be watching, "I'm experimenting," and whatever comes of it, promise yourself you won't be disappointed or hurt.