Episode 19: Chelsea Sicat

April 4, 2018

Ever since I was a kid, I’ve been dragged to the grocery store with my mom… and these are never “just picking up a couple of things” trips, either. (I know how to pick the best fruit because she’s always so particular. Also, you’ve always gotta pick groceries from the back of the shelf ‘cause it’s fresher, you know?) So this one time, I’m in Flushing with my mom at a fish market. She’s already not happy when we get there; it was around the holidays and she was in a rush to get home and start cooking the usual holiday feast. (My mom grew up in the Philippines with nine siblings so she’s really accustomed to having a lot of food at home. Every time I go home or she visits me, she gets me so much food, forgetting that I’m only person that’s maybe a hundred pounds soaking wet. If anyone ever sees me around carrying a bag of snacks, by the way, it’s ‘cause of my mom.)

Anyway, we’re at the market. She picks her produce and I’m given a basket of veggies to “guard” -- because, you know, what are the chances that someone’s going to come along and think, “Wow, this basket has exactly everything I need!” She goes to the seafood section to pick out fish and there’s this lady with plastic bag gloves who’s also trying to pick fish next to her. Out of nowhere, this lady grabs a fish with both hands, turns sharply and directly smacks my mom’s bare arm with it -- obviously by accident, but man, my mom was not happy. I remember just barely holding back laughter as my mom started shouting “watch where you’re slapping that fish!” which on its own is a hilarious statement to begin with. Who gets slapped with a fish?!

Another time, my mom was picking out live crabs at a seafood market. She was using tongs to pick them up and “weigh them” and see which ones are heavier. Apparently, the female crabs with roe are extra meaty and that’s the good stuff so you want the heavier crabs. Total pseudo-science, I know. Once again, there’s a guy working there telling her she can’t pick her own crabs and of course, she ignores him. Things escalate and this guy starts shouting at her in Cantonese, which my mom doesn’t speak because she’s only a quarter Chinese. Well, that doesn’t stop either of them and eventually the guy tries to grab the tongs from her hands. This sets her off and she starts shouting back whatever the man had been saying to her -- without knowing a lick of Cantonese. The employee looked absolutely bewildered, probably because he was trying to figure out what she was even saying, and while he was puzzling out what dialect she had just shouted at him she got her crabs and paid. At the time, I was so mortified and I was rushing to get out of there, but in retrospect, it was a pretty solid distraction tactic.

(At this point, you’re probably wondering where I am in this story. As always, I was off to side, guarding the vegetables. That’s basically my role in these tales.)

I think everyone goes through a phase where their parents are their greatest adversaries and most potent source of embarrassment but then at some point in college, it just shifts to “Ugh, I guess you’re my best friend now!” I used to be so easily embarrassed but my mom has definitely changed that about me. If anything, I embrace those moments more because of her. Speaking of embarrassing moments, I was always awkward and clumsy as a kid; my depth perception was (is) just awful. Anything and everything terrible would resultfrom that but I would just try to laugh it off. I got hit by a dodgeball in the face and still have a battle scar on my nose from it. My classmates called me Stitch for a week after. Even just recently, I was in White Plains walking to the library and the wind was so strong it was hurting my eyes. Genius me decided to walk backwards to avoid the wind and I guess I didn’t know where the pavement was since I ended up flipped over, upside down in the fountain, laughing my butt off. My working theory is that my left eye is really bad and the right one is only slightly bad so the disparity has caused all of these clumsy moments. I still can’t catch anything to this day.

I guess where I’m trying to go with this whole thing is that anytime anything bad ever happens, I try to make it funny. I really like to make people laugh; I guess you could call it a defense mechanism. My stories always seem so ridiculous but I love telling them. I really do think it’s better than looking back and being negative. It’s too easy to just go, “That really sucked and I was so embarrassed.” But it’s much more fun to spin it into something humorful and outrageous. Not gonna lie -- my litmus test for talking to people is seeing how they react to my stories. I’m not really looking for judgement, just laughs!

What are your 5 Most Recently Played Artists on Spotify?
I try to share a couple songs every day on Instagram story, and I’m so happy when people check them out! The Strokes; Rebekah- an English techno dj, such a cool sound; Jimi Hendrix; Nine Inch Nails; The Kinks

If you could have any superpower, which one would you chose?
Oh man, it’s not a superpower but: really good depth perception, or even average. Hand eye coordination would be awesome. I would totally be more sporty if I had better reflexes/depth perception/hand eye coordination. Most of my trepidation when it comes to sports comes from knowing that I have terrible spatial perception.

Pick something or someone from NYMC to give a shout out to!
Kristen Wong - she’s hilarious and we laugh at everything. She laughs at all my jokes and that’s the way to my heart. (Kidding.) Stress is inevitable in med school but we still find ways to make it humorful, and I find that really refreshing.

If someone wanted to talk to you, they should led with….
“Oh, I heard this song I think you might like!” I love new music.