Sinae (she/her) is an illustrator living in London, who does full time design work at a skin-care company and this is her food of the week. For more, visit @carrotate
Sinae also runs Fortified with Kate.
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Be brave and drink the cinnamon tea. J says as I reach for a tea on the top of the fridge and he sees me nipping out a single sachet of peppermint. He probably doesn’t think peppermint is cool enough of a kind of tea for the Thursday evening. We let drinks tell something about ourselves. Late summer, I ask them what they want as a way to suggesting that I am getting the drinks for us. They want hot chocolate and I ask if they’d take oat milk with that because we are in E5 (we had joked about me being an East London hipster) and they agree on the oat milk alt on this occasion. I come to the table with their hot chocolate and my choice of drink. They want me to open the lid up to see. ‘A Massive Bowl of Black Coffee’, they say. I am conscious if this is also an East London hipster thing. They seem to have made their mind about me being it and my choice of drinks dutifully meet their expectations of the social scripts of East London Hipsters. I doubt if they would change their mind about me if they discover I drink peppermint tea on Thursday evening.
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This week, my manager is out of office so I attend all the review meetings. I am a naturally shy person. I am like a foil blocking machine. It takes time to heat up but once heat up, ready to imprint. My bum is barely static. From here to there.
I am sitting with the horror of hearing my own voice filling the room of silence – the Hmmm, Urm, I think are very useful to signal I am about to say something, queue up for the voicing.
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Green sauce with rice and some curry leftover heated up in the microwave in the communal kitchen at work. Y and K are curious about how the dinner went last night. I waited for the lunch time whole morning, K says. I leak some and decide to retain some for myself. In the afternoon, Y is opening up a bag of maltesers for everyone and I am the only one who welcomes it.
Mmmm, exactly what I needed. The cycle is lighter and Xmas lights are beautiful. I drop by a pub in dalston for journaling and come home, cook noodles.
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