Independence

*msn: 31st August, 48 years later.

[While it may be more appropriate perhaps to write this in Bahasa Malaysia, I am after all a unilinguist…writing in the only way I know how.]

There are many dreams I have for my country, most of which many may have voiced. But a dream is a dream is a hope and it doesn’t matter how many times you wish it.

I dream of a Malaysia, where the words “Proud to be Malaysian” really means proud to be Malaysian.

Where racial harmony really just means harmony, without the necessity for the “racial” qualification.

Where the government really is “of the people, by the people, for the people”.

Where the people is the people not one kind of people and another.

Where fines = fines not bribes.

Where Malaysian doesn’t just mean “from Malaysia”.

Where we don’t need the Petronas/Telekom/MAS ads to remind us of how it should be, because it already is.

Where public property means our property, not “not-mine-don’t-care” property.

Where people don’t just come to visit, but to stay.

Where people don’t dream of leaving, but of living here forever.

Where we can say what we want when we want, but also know what to say and when to say it.

Where dreams really do come true.

I could go on forever, but I guess what I really mean to say is this:

That I dream of a day when I can say to any Malaysian anywhere in the world, “I love my country”, and have them reply, not “Why?” but “Me too”.

Me too, everyone. Selamat Hari Merdeka.

Today

*msn: The Unbearable Lameness of You

Today was a day of blusteriness, and a bad day to go out without a windproof jacket.

Today I leaned on thick air.

Today I felt almost Gorgon, as my hair turned into millions of tiny, stinging whips.

Today I cursed eye-length bangs.

Today I tried to walk while closing my eyes against the mote-filled gusts.

Today I failed and kept them open to watch errant wisps of cloud, like the floaty offspring of cotton bundles, whirl and whee(!!) their way across the sky.

Today flags and banners smacked and thwacked in their snapping bid for freedom, or in faint and ancient longing for masts and the highest seas.

Today my eyes felt pitted and roughened raw, with corners grit-stuffed and smarting.

Today was quite possibly the worst of days to carry large, stretched plastic bags, unwieldy yet un-weighty.

Today was a brightly-sunny, fiercely-windy day.

And it was fun.

Phobias Two

*msn: Everything’s eventual

Some days I worry, I really really worry, that I’m really just insane, that nothing I see, that no one I know, or “know”, is really there.

Crazy people, they say, live in a world of their own, peopled with strange ghosts from their past, or fantastical wisps of their imagination. Travel the world in a bed with crispy taut white sheets. Dance away the time in straps, in a dream-soft white room, within hard-white greying walls, in a forgetting and forgotten bubble of time and place.

They’re living a life that isn’t really one at all, but they don’t know it.

Some days I can almost, in a on-the-tip-of-your-tongue kind of way, feel myself sitting in a corner of all that whiteness, laughing, smirking, crying, singing, talking, feeling, all alone.

Madness, it seems, is seeing the world in a way that others don’t.

But then, if you think about it, we all see the world in a way that others don’t. Even the smallest and simplest of things isn’t safe – if I asked you to think of the colour purple, if I asked a thousand other people, and if I could see them all, I might get a thousand and one different shades. If I was happy and you were happy and everyone else was happy it doesn’t mean we all feel the same.

Crazy people, they say, live in a world of their own, but so do all of us. Perhaps it’s just that our worlds are smaller, maybe, less different, perhaps.

But where, then, does individuality end and insanity begin? And how many million lines between the two would I have to draw before the world agreed?

It is disheartening to think that, to someone out there, I might be the very definition of certifiably insane.

Then again, it is decidedly heartening to know I’m probably not alone.

Old dogs

*msn: Sinning is swimmingly sinfulicious.

Just now, at dinner:

Television: (advertisement)…this functional car…

Boyfriend: Hahahaha..dysfunctional car..hahahahaha..

Me: Oh my God, did you notice??

Boyfriend: What?? What??

Me: (hushed, deadly serious tone) You…made your first word joke.

Boyfriend: *pauses* Oh shit.

Glee and new tricks are wonderful things.

Brief blurbs on brevity

*msn: Shooting up the melancholia – overdosing on the pain

Some days I miss the books I read when I was young – Dickens, Bronte (all of them), Doyle and Poe; especially when I read the books I read now that I’m not all that young anymore.

It seems to me that there are a whole lot less words nowadays, with prose so short and terse it seems the whole point is to get the point across, and nothing more. With words once ugly and discordant now written for the newness and the jarringly trendiness of them all.

Which is not to say that clean and simple words can’t be beautiful, but simply that they not always are these days.

Language written like sung silk slipping off leaves and sheaves of paper become rarer by the day.

Stories spun of old and tired plots, of Guy Meets Girl and Girl Meets Guy, of cliched angst and chic chick lit are common as carbon, with diamonds few and thinly spread.

Why the brevity? Why the coarseness of instant literary gratification? Why the hurriedness of e-mails and the complete reluctance to type out words in full?

Science and medicine have made our lives all the longer, but the words with which we fill it seem to diminish both in size and quality by the day.

Some people don’t fill it with words at all, more’s the pity.

Book-based movies and summaries abound, and the original print-captured songs die a silent death. (Of silence. Haha.)

This makes me sad, and mad, but, mostly, I regret forgetting such old friends in favour of the quick and snappy acquaintances I forget soon after parting.

This also scares me, especially when I think of how it will be a hundred years from now.

What words will we lose next? What little ways in which to say the things we want to say would go? And then how would we say them?

Orwell’s frightening premonition of Newspeak rings a distant, hollow, war drum song.

Words on plays on words and other words

*msn: Verbal diarrhea is a GOOD THING, damnit.

Have you ever stared so much at a word, for so long, that suddenly it ceases to make an sense and starts to look like nothing more than jumbled-up letters?

Try it:

WORD

WORDWORDWORDWORDWORDWORDWORDWORDWORDWORD

WORD

And it is infinitely annoying to, for a second, think you’ve finally discovered your very first Googlewhack, only to realize you’ve actually just made the same typo as just one other person in the world.

I also find it kinda icky to see sculptures of snowmen skiing, since they are made OF snow and hence it is much like people sledding on hills of blood and bones.

Ugh.

Sleep beckons. The failure of “kaleidoscopical precclampsia” to break the monotony of constantly unfruitful googlewhacking attempts may haunt me forever.

Just a note: I read in a blog some time ago that a professor of linguistics (or some similarly-qualified being) said that a love for the use of parentheses and adverbs was always symptomatic of an undeniably, and ultimately, bad writer.

Is it ironic that I had both in that sentence and didn’t realize it till I’d finished typing it?

I don’t suppose the fact that I like to simply make up words helps either.

Oh boo. :o(

Another note (and then I’m done, I promise): Is it odd that I feel better that my mum has stopped nagging me to find a “real” job than about, you know, the job itself?

Hmm.

I wonder just how many of these questions are actually going to be answered.

[post is back-posted due to technical difficulties. :oP]

Biased favourites

*msn: Kindred = ‘Kin’ + wrongly spelt ‘dread’? hmm.

I think the question “What is your favourite vegetable?” is biased as it (usually) only takes into account the sense of taste and nothing else.

This, I believe, is decidedly unfair of me, especially in the case of capsicums.

There is much to love about capsicums. The crispy crunchy sound they make when cut, the fresh, peppery smell they leave, momentarily, in the air, their delightfully clean-looking spongy insides, their myriad, rattly seeds like tiny seed pearls in a shell, their loudly-coloured, waxen bulbous outsides, smoothly gnarled, their dried and twisty stems…

But I hate their taste, and therefore “capsicums” are never an answer to the question posed above, and are denied a tiny chance for immortality.

Well hopefully this makes up for it.

The things that come to mind when slicing Subway peppers…

Spreading even more joy

*msn: (see below)

In a much more light-hearted frame of mind (heart and mind? interesting);

http://web.pitas.com/ficbitches/woodandstone.html

It's a review of a Lord of the Rings fan fiction story, which is good because all the juicy bits have been extracted so you don't have to read the whole thing, and you get snappy comments to boot!

Enjoy, people, enjoy.

Of friends and friendships

*msn: It is, I think, conceptually impossible to think about nothing

Confession – I was a very sad little girl.

(I say was, and you shall agree, or I will be even sadder.)

I vaguely remember an incident which took place at one of those parents’ friends’ parties, the kind where everyone brings their children and puts them all around the same table and expects them to “bond” just because they’re children.

(Incidentally, I wonder what my mum would do if I brought her along to my friends’ parties and chucked her at their parents saying “Go! Have fun with Karen’s mum! Don’t come and disturb Daughter okay? Good girl!”.

Even more incidentally, I wonder what my friends would do.)

Anyway.

We were playing Follow The Leader, when suddenly the bossiest girl in the group (well she was 5 years older than the rest of us) decided I would be said Leader.

I was only 4, I think, or 5, and leadership was a foreign, and frankly terrifying prospect. Not to mention the feeling of 7 pairs of eyes staring at you, with hard bright-eyed stares, mimicking (seemingly mocking) your every move.

I (and this is quite shameful, really) cried and ran to Mummy. Obviously this was the pinnacle of Things Just Not Done, as it resulted in everyone else getting told off for “scaring the poor little girl”. (Don’t you snicker, you.)

Unfortunately, the party was only halfway through, and so I spent the remaining hour completely ostracized by the other children for being a Baby.

Nothing else has ever been quite so lonely.

In desperation I tried to weasel my way back into the group, but received nothing but pointed back-turnings and complete and utter disregard.

And then, (and this, more than anything, gives me that shuddery, go-away feeling you get when you remember something particularly bad) I spotted in the flowerbeds, hundreds of tiny multi-coloured bead-like particles, at which I triumphantly declared,

“If you all don’t friend me, I won’t give you any colourful stones!!!”

and then settled back to bask in my newfound glory.

Bossy Girl then gave me the most crushingly disdainful look I’d ever seen, adult or child, and said, scathingly,

“Stones? Why would we want YOUR stones? And anyway, they’re not even stones, they’re (wait for it) fertilizer.”

Everyone then turned away, never to look back again.

And that was it. I believe all my self-confidence issues and my desperate need to be liked stemmed from that very day.

And then along the way, I realized; I’m not alone.

Children try to ‘buy’ friends all the time. Giving stickers, gifts, showing off toys, cars (for the rich), and (for the truly vulgar) simply flashing the cash they carry around with them.

All very reprehensible, I’m sure, but then, when you come right down to it, isn’t any form of making friends a version of the above?

We make jokes -> people laugh -> people like.

We listen to problems -> people happy -> people like.

We give birthday gifts -> people get -> people like.

I wonder if it’s possible to make friends without trying to. To have conversations and not say all the things you know you’re obliged to say, like “How are you?”, to talk and not talk as and when you feel like it. To have people care about you because they want to, and yet not care if they do, but also care about them because you want to, and have them not care if you do.

Ugh.

I’m quite lost now, really. All I was trying to say was; are our crude attempts to ‘purchase friends’ in youth all that different from our sophisticated methods of ‘making friends’ now?

To my friends, should they be doubting now, I care about you, really. But I confess, I DO care about whether you care too. Yes, I’m needy. Love me!! Or you just might find a tub of fertilizer on your doorstep…

Phobias One

*msn: Call me Ishmael.

There are times when I am afraid to continue reading, be it novels, stories, columns, articles, blogs, or random jottings on notepaper, quickly discarded and unexpectedly discovered.

This is because of the people who write either with such mind-bending clarity, the kind who put, so easily, into words the little (or large) feelings that up till now only manifested themselves in certain chills or tingles of the person, or whose words spill off the page and slosh and swirl around like corporeal music, language to be enjoyed for the sake of itself, or, and this is the frightening-est of all, both.

You see, I am afraid, that buoyed on the twin seas of such Rhyme and Reason, I will never be able to write ever again with a truly original thought or turn of phrase, because such beauty never really leaves the realm of memory, and in all possibility will permeate throughout my brain, finally manifesting itself on paper (or screen) in response to clamorous pleadings of my woefully uninspired imagination.

So the choice is this: to remain brackish water of an isolated, unknown swamp, or a sweet and sparkling beverage mass-produced and mass-appealed, designed to imitate the finest, lightest, rarest of champagnes?

Days Of My Life

*msn: SNAFUs and the art of sandwich-making

A Day in the World of Subway with Pay

Yes. Yes it has. The day has come. I have entered the working and earning world.

And that, tragically, is the one and only positive thing I have to say about it.

It all began on a sunny Thursday morning when I was awakened by a particularly insistent (yet tuneful!) beeping. In my sleep-addled state of mind, I inexplicably took it to be my washing machine and stumbled, sticky-eyed, to the toilet to pat it soothingly and press whatever buttons it wanted pushed.

Only it wasn’t on, and the beeping was. Still on, I mean.

Oh! The phone! (This thought-sequence may project a somewhat bleak picture of my life, with all sorts of conclusions draw-able from the fact that being awakened by a mobile ringtone sends me to the washing machine.)

Oh! My housemate!

OH [insert your favourite expletives here, because I certainly did] IT’S 11:30!!

My shift, you see, began at 11.

My sense of timing, in addition to my memory, has never failed to astound me. Not only was it the first day on the job, but the evening before I had marched up to my boss to show off my new black shoes purchased specially for working purposes and to request, nay, demand, additional hours be put on my schedule as I desperately needed the money.

I cringe even now.

Five minutes and a mad dash down the street later, visor and apron askew, bereft of house keys (“I’ll think about it tomorrow!” Or at the end of my shift, whichever.) and insane unwashed hair waving about in all its glory, I arrived at Subway.

Where, if your credulity is still intact, the following occurred:

1. Not more than ten minutes after profuse apologizing and various attempts to develop a ‘responsible-dependable’ look, I got a customer’s order wrong.

2. In an effort to look, you know, pro-active and efficient, I decided to collect ALL the rubbish and trays at the same time. Including the ones outside. Where it is very windy. While carrying mounds of crumpled paper from the inside. Which were very light and easily blown away. Which *were* blown away. Which I then had to run after in a most ungainly manner. Which meant that it took me twice the amount of time it would have had I just done first the inside then the outside. My boss, of course, saw the whole thing.

3. I looked up from making a sub only to realize that Dream Italian God (also known as Previous Business Finance PASS Session Leader) had walked through the door. For an entire semester, my friend and I had swooned over him in our hour-long, weekly classes. At the (very, very sad) end of the semester, I recall filling in, under ‘Comments’, on a tutor evaluation form, remarks to the effect of the following:

“[Dream Italian God’s name] is extremely good-looking and a wonderful tutor. If more like him were pressed into service, I believe it is safe to say that tutorial attendance would cease to be a problem forever.”

It is with great sadness that I must admit that, in spite of my determined attempts to catch his eye, while attempting to look aloof and unattainably attractive at the same time, he paid no more attention to me than to give me increasingly wary glances out of the corner of his eye, and a firm statement of “Takeaway!” at the end of the entire process.

4. I almost impaled a customer on the end of a mop. I believe “Enough said” more than covers it.

The following day I set the alarm for 9 a.m. for an 11 a.m. shift. Better sleep-deprived than sorry.

Words of the Day

‘Revolting’ – is a word that, to me, looks and sounds exactly like its meaning.

‘Grotesque’ – is another.

‘Pulchritude’ – is not.

Market Day!

(Sounds like the title of an Enid Blyton chapter.)

Today, after numerous so-called ‘hints’ (“I WANT a Tamagotchi and you can get one in Victoria Market for seven dollars!”) and fuelled by the desire for peace, Boyfriend bought me an imitation Tamagotchi.

Which I loved, up till the point when I pulled the tab to bring it to life and opened the manual.

The first paragraph of the latter reads (all capitals and spelling entirely the original author’s own):

“a. open to stir to insulate the slice before machine, and be the Bonding Option to show the person with the pet, can press Select The pet of the feeding that choice need: Person or dinosaur, press the Decide Key the confirmation the empress to enter respectively Into the feeding mode for pick outing of, be the Bonding Option to show someone, then and directly press the Decide Key Enter the game mode.”

Fascinatingly enough, a few paragraphs later, this line jumps out at me:

“The pet’s childhood Child bearingAfter choice need pet that keep, press the Delide Key to enter the feeding mode the meeting according to Pet for choosing of its breed the way but decision its is still viviparous for egg.”

Viviparous? Incomprehensible instructions, to be sure, but how very scientific. Also note that Decide Key has now morphed into Delide Key. (Further on it becomes DECIDE key – as if the author suddenly realized he’d been wrong for quite a while and tried to cover it up by shouting the correct one really loudly and hoping people wouldn’t remember.)

Also imagine my surprise (nasty) when, after a few random stabs at the buttons, this appeared:

I am sorely disappointed. As a friend remarked, if I had wanted a human to take care of, I had Boyfriend.

(This really struck home later when I realized that my wonderful new pet refused to do anything but eat or sleep and only liked eating snacks. And when I turned around to show Boyfriend how she looked when she was sleeping only to find him curled up in bed as well.)

I am most displeased. (To Boyfriend: But still very grateful!!)

Word-watching

Sauntering down Gertrude Street one day, I spotted the only true source of glee I’ve had all week.

And chuckled to myself all the way home.

End of Days

To bed! To bed!

Perspective is simply just another point of view

*msn: Reason shall prevail? Perhaps, but whose…?

Deep impact (from Deep Impact)

Last night (or was it the night before?) Tommyknockers…

Right.

Last night, I was watching Deep Impact and this occurred to me. That I am this tiny, minute speck on a relatively minuscule planet in the middle of a not extraordinary galaxy, playing a somewhat unimportant role in The Universe. (whose vastness renders it both extremely essential and yet somehow unusually forgettable – it is easy to take something for granted when it’s always been there and is likely to always be. At least in my lifetime anyway, I mean, I know it’s shrinking and all…but I digress.)

And for a while I just sat there, wallowing in my sudden sense of infinite insignificance.

Oh, the unbearable littleness of being!

Then I realized something else, and began to bask in the glow of newfound irresponsibility.

I am tiny, I am infinitesimal, and everything I do makes practically no impact on a greater scale.

In fact, the only thing really affected by what I do is me. (myself and I.)

So if I try and succeed, I am happy, if I try and fail, I am sad, if I never try at all, I am regretful. And throughout it all, Life (and The Universe) Goes On.

Therefore ‘try’ is, by logic, the only step which has the possibility of resulting in a positive outcome, and hence the only way to go.

This…intrigues me. Greatly.

Just around the corner

On Saturday, Boyfriend and I, inspired by Latourex, went on a Left-Right Tour of our own.

Basically we stepped out of our apartments, walked to the nearest intersection, turned left, walked till we reached the next and turned right, and then left again at the intersection after that…you get my drift.

And snap-happy me took pictures of the right-angled road signs at each intersection we crossed, and of interesting things along the way.

Now. I would post the pictures up, but 95 shots takes just a little too much time. Maybe I’ll go start an album or something.

Interestingly, as we started out at about 4 and only got back after sundown, the gradual darkening of the sky can be observed from the pictures taken.

Unfortunately, there is a gap between a still slightly-bright evening and a decidedly dark sky; I had stopped at a shop and tested a particularly strong-smelling hand cream, and didn’t want to touch my camera until it had worn off. (It probably didn’t help that around the same time, Boyfriend and I went into this oldish-looking supermarket and stayed there for about an hour simply because the atmosphere reminded us of “the old Giant”.)

Strange what unexpected nostalgia can do to you, especially when far from home and feeling it.

(It must be noted here that we cheated slightly, and did not stop the tour when we encountered a large, uncrossable obstacle – such as an ocean, or a particularly large drain – but when we, after traversing mostly suburban areas, reached a large main road, lined with shops and paved with tram-tracks. Boyfriend then sternly informed me that there would be no more turnings from then on as we had “reached civilization”, obviously the only proper goal for explorers. Pooh.

Oh, and we took a tram home. Ha.)

Next weekend

The *gasp* Right-Left Tour begins! (although this is in the direction of the city, and will likely last about all of 15 minutes before we, again, “reach civilization”. Ah well.)