Category Archives: General

Self

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One evening, after a wedding, I ended up in Bangsar. And then I remembered my Bangsar-hangin’ friend who is now one of the sauciest bloggers around. I called her. “Dey! You in Bangsar aaa?“No no I’m in Brickfields, I might head to Bangsar later!”

And so I wandered around Bangsar Village II taking a slow walk in what was the former Hankyu Jaya. Ah, what memories of many Transformers pored at there! Toys R Us Express was there. I’ve held off buying Transformers for a relatively long time already and am considering selling some of them, MISBs and all.

I ended up in MPH, and picked up a book with a most enticing cover – wow! I sat cross-legged on the floor until 10pm, reading a most engrossing book.

I normally don’t read, so getting past 188 pages was an accomplishment. 188 out of 344.

Before leaving, I flipped to the end and noted the price. I also saw the book’s category printed on the back – Self Help.

Tadaa, a punchline!

I related this story to another friend.

She-who-recently-turned-24: Does it have a yellow cover?
Me-who-recently-turned-25: Yes it does…
She-who-recently-turned-24: Oooh, my mom got me that for my birthday a few years ago! Never got to read it. But my ex-boyfriend took it and never returned it.

I know the ex, and it certainly doesn’t seem like he read the book. 😉

I guess I’d only read books that are life-changing. Saw Jim Carrey’s latest movie, Yes Man? Life-changing! Of all seriousness, I do believe that there is opportunity out there. You meet all sorts of people who will be relevant and instrumental to your life later. Lawyers. Make-up artists. Painters. Photographers. Event managers. Yo-yo players. Clowns. Emcees. Stand-up comedians. Guitarists. Drummers. Violinists. Bassists. Record-shop owners. Camera-shop employees. Personal trainers. Psychologists. Magicians. Teachers. Editors. Writers. Receptionists. Cooks. Bakers. Waitresses. Security personnel. Dentists. Students.

If you’ve influenced or helped me out in a big way and your occupation is not in the list, comment here!

I Saw Death

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It came for some pussy.

Yesterday night I headed to a nearby mamak. I saw a tiny ginger baby cat, slightly scrawny, but with its ears pointing out in triangles, cross the road to some motorbikes parked there.

A father and son got on one of the motorbikes. It stood behind the exhaust, curious. The father turned around, and he spotted it. He avoided it as he rolled his motorbike out. It had no sense of danger or alertness as it stood there looking curiously.

A man was about to cross the road, when he walked into it, pushing it. It fell and lay there, probably distraught. I have no idea what kind of scale would a human foot’s walking impact would be. I didn’t hear it meow.

A Proton Wira approached. I flinched and turned away! I could not bear to look. I don’t even know if the car stopped or not… but when I turned to look, I saw it lying there and it was in a different position than it was before. Not a good one.

As if fate could not get any worse, a lorry approached.

The next time I turned… I saw something out of Happy Tree Friends.

I obviously didn’t take a picture but the image was stuck in my head, like it was my brain’s wallpaper.

I wondered how the young survive by themselves. Or do they? How do they learn what danger is? How do they know how to become street smart? How do they know of impending doom?

I didn’t even hear it. I don’t know if it was in shock from being walked into.

And then I thought of children. Human children. If they start crying… they stay immobilized in that one place. Even if they were crossing the road and they dropped ice-cream… they’d probably cry there and stand in one place!

At that point I felt annoyed at adults who do that. As in, if they’re in trouble, they get immobilized. They get stuck. They don’t get out of the dangerous situation.

I felt annoyed at Hong Kong dramas. Elderly husband and wife quarrel. Husband crosses road. A van approaches. Wife sees this, runs to his body, and cries. That’s fine really but moving the body out of danger should be in the sequence somewhere!

I felt annoyed that I have friends who are silly like that. Who get themselves deeper in shit. If you have such a friend, tell him or her off.

I wonder if Death was following me. Or, in some twisted Sixth Sense way, I was Death. Well I wouldn’t mind if Death came as Angelina Jolie (no, not Jennifer Aniston). Please don’t take my dad (though, he really does bear a striking malevolent resemblance to Anthony Hopkins.) Yeah that was a Meet Joe Black reference.

The next morning, I wanted to take a cab. It was raining. I saw a gray patch on the curb, just as I was about to open the door. Took a while to realize that it was a dead rat… with all its hair gone. I would not have recognized it it not for a solitary fly on it.

I told the cabbie my destination.

“My meter is dead.” The elderly cab driver told me.

“Okay, then it’s usually RM3 anyway.”

“No, where can, RM4 lah.”

RM4? CHOI!!! That’s an unlucky number! 4 means death in Cantonese!

No thanks, I told him.

Was the elderly cabbie Death? If so… Was Death trying to cheat me? Instead of me cheating Death?

Then I remembered who else Death could’ve brushed. My paternal grandmother is in the hospital because she got another stroke. I hope she gets well. I hope she wayyy outlives her husband who passed away in the 90’s in his 80’s. I miss him. I deeply regret that his last healthy years were spent bringing me to the KFC in Central Market. He was old and he wanted something strong in flavor; his sense of taste was diminishing already.

So I walked to my RM3 destination, puddles and motorbikes whizzing by. At that point I just had this premonition of limited mortality.

I reached the station anyway. I looked at the life line of my palms, in case it would animatedly erase away like what happened to Marty McFly in Back To The Future (in the movie, it was him disappearing from a picture). What a memorable scene, that was!

The last time I felt like this, I wrote an unofficial will. The feeling is very… inspiring.

Ze Karma Sutra

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Once you�ve been tagged, you have to write a note with 16 random things, shortcomings, facts, habits or goals about you. At the end choose 16 people to be tagged, listing their names and why you chose them. You have to tag the person who tagged you.

Ze Great (Random) 16 According to Ze Great Albert
1. I have a wah pedal but no electric guitar
2. I can sing 3 solos or riffs from whatever favorite music I list on Facebook (that’s how I quantify if they’re favorite enough or not)
3. I have athletic legs but nobody knows this because I wear long trousers all the time
4. My secret to long, wavy, lustrous hair is to reduce on oil-cleaning substances like shampoo
5. I programmed my own blog system which is in use now, as well as the first incarnation of the Xfresh blog, based on it
6. I was doing AJAX before it was called AJAX and before there was Firefox
7. Gmail never works for me, it tends to fail to load
8. Firefox before 2.0 never worked for me either
9. MSN Messenger stopped working for me and it lags like nothing I’ve ever seen before
10. I practically don’t use the F-word
11. I still have not figured out the right ratio of coffee to creamer to sugar
12. Some people think I’m an artist or deejay
13. The artist bit is true somewhat, I tended to doodle a lot in school and some meetings
14. I miss my old office where we could see chicks walk in and out of the elevator in front of us everyday
15. I don’t watch any contemporary series e.g. Heroes or Lost
16. I often don’t follow the format… for example here, I didn’t tag anybody! I’m even kind enough not to tag Jolin back!

Well-Heeled?

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It was a dark night as I waited for my bus. It was not stormy.

A taxi stopped at the taxi stand nearby. I then heard something fall onto the road in front of it. At first I thought it dropped from a passing lorry, but upon squinting, I recognized it as one half of a pair of heels!

The other half of the pair of heels flew out the left passenger door. A skinny Malay guy got out. He had this look that said that he was fed up.

The taxi drove off, taking care not to run over the black stiletto that was on the road in front of it.

I looked in the taxi, and there was a lady in the back on the left, obviously fuming.

The guy then picked up the stiletto that he had earlier tossed in front of the taxi as well as the one on the side, and he walked off to the LRT station.

Now here’s the fun part. What do you think happened before the guy threw out her heels in rage?

What do you think will happen, since he kept the heels instead of leaving them behind?

Playaz Is A Club

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Brian wins the prize! He guessed the trashcan right; Playaz in Desa Sri Hartamas.


I swear I had a picture of him looking funny while squinting through his camera with his right eye, but I think I deleted it.

He is the man. Right after this picture I took of him, where he bought a Tamron 17-50mm F2.8 and Tamron 90mm F2.8 Macro and Nikon MB-D80 battery grip, he went out to conquer the photography world! And before that he couldn’t identify that he had a Nikkor 50mm F1.8D and a broken Nikkor 18-135mm F3.5-5.6. He was also the snarkiest Americanized dude over at the Xfresh forums back when it was in English and still existed. Yeah. If anybody knew what a longcat was, it was him, first.

Okaylah consolation prize goes to a longcat who identified that Playaz was above Bestari. Meow!

Tile

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I eagerly awaited my ride in the center of town – Chow Kit.

As I paced back and forth, trying not to look the inhabitants of the road in the eye, I counted the tiles. The tiles were rough, pitted, and had texture. They seem to keep a record of everything that came into contact.

Everything, signed in black.

I could tell that the solid black patches were chewing gum, having served its purpose, spat down to the ground.

The black splashes were drinks that had lost all of its reflectiveness and fluidity. Its color seeped into the tiles, into the pavement, into the bed, the muscle tissue of Kuala Lumpur. Bandung, tebu, soya, orange, tea, oil, phlegm, urine, blood. It did not matter what, for every single stain on the tiling was black.

I kept a steady pace and a wary look. A slight hunch at the neck, to look primordial, to look out, to look alert. I could not help but feel like a pirate, walking the dingy slums of a port. Others sat, their weary buttocks embracing the blackened tiles.

For amusement, the sitters would squash cockroaches that came their way. It did not bother their shoes; the cockroaches don’t squirt juice. And yet, you could see a lack of enthusiasm, like it was formerly a great time-killer to look out for cockroaches to chase and step on.

Some took to more arcane challenges. A Ramli burger wrapper was found in a tree, much much taller than the average inhabitant of Chow Kit. How it got there, was just as much a mystery to me as the black patches were. I could not tell its age, but it was still pink and bright as the day it was packaged.

Perhaps, just perhaps, the kind soul who bought the burger and the wrapper with it, decided to spare it a certain discolored death on the tiles of Chow Kit. That indeed, was the work of a noble heart.

M.E.B.

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I was in a magazine store when I saw the CLEO Most Eligible Bachelor 2008 edition.

As always, I made it a point to flip through and count how many dudes I knew (and multiply by 2% to get the percentage.) I knew less this round, maybe 12-16%. Just like the years before, the guys in here were relatively popular in their circles, some minor celebrities, some not-famous-at-all colleagues. Such that, I figured that I would eventually become a Most Eligible Bachelor myself, with the scene being as small as it is.

However, when I flipped through the pages, I became increasingly disturbed. Every guy in there looked more and more… beyond metrosexual. It was as if they had a facial and had their eyebrows plucked and drawn in a most androgynous manner.

A lot of them looked like Edwin Sumun!

(Not that I have anything against him, he’s hilarious and a riot on stage, but you do not flip through a magazine and expect to see Edwins of different colors and shapes.)

One particular dude who looked extra clean was Adam Lobo of Dragon Red! He looked like he shaved his beard and added foundation to his forehead. I called him up.

Me: DEIII Mr. Adam a most eligible bachelor! What happened man you sold out ah?
Adam: Haha nolah one day I got called up. Dunno why also, I told them that I look like I can eat children. But they still asked me to come anyway so I went.
Me: Did they make you shave and pluck your eyebrows or something? Do you really look like that now?
Adam: Aisey nolah they Photoshopped lah. It’s all Photoshop I didn’t look like that.

So there you have it from the cornroll-haired rocker. It’s Photoshop.

That explains why some of the bachelors have UNNATURALLY HUGE eyes, too.

So hey you Bachelor Photoshopper out there, stop mucking around with them eyes! Girls like men with squinty eyes too! (I have big eyes, but I feel sympathetic to my squinty-eyed friends.)

Now, given that bachelors get an enthusiastic facial that makes them far beyond fashionably metrosexual (if you know what I mean), I don’t think I secretly wish to happen to be a Most Eligible Bachelor anymore. 🙁

So what if I attempted to Photoshop myself to look like one of them?

Yeah, all Photoshopped in except my good looks. And the peacock is back! (Thanks Nic for taking this picture with his Sony Carl Zeiss 135mm F1.8.)

Crash Bang

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I was in a Metrobus a few nights before the elections. It was a typical Ampang jam. Motorbikes could be seen whizzing past with their BN flags hanging out.

One such flag hit the mirror and smashed it. The bus driver honked repeatedly in rage!

He then honked each time he stopped at a bus stop, to get passengers.

I could imagine his rage. If I was him, I would drive down to the ceramah, honk at everybody until he reached the front, and holler out;

“Bendera BN pecah cermin ini! Siapa bayar? Siapa bayar?”

I registered to be a voter sometime in October 2007. When they announced that one could check if one’s name was on the electoral roll online, I checked. Nope, I wasn’t there. Checked again. Nope, still nothing.

Despite this, I decided to try my luck on Election Day. I went to my old primary school, just across one junction from my grandmother’s house. Checked again.

Nope, I registered too late.

I walked around my old school to see what had changed. Many rooms had become storerooms and messes. The toilets were still in slipshod condition… and two toilets on the top floor had become junkyards. No wonder I was terrified of these back then.

The school seemed amazingly small now. I felt like a giant!

The voters, I saw, were mostly of the older generation. Where were the chicks? Do they not care about the future? (Or was it just Saturday-morning-after-a-Friday-night?)

At least, these voters shared my vote. I didn’t even know he was the new vice-president of MCA until he lost his seat!

Who knows what there is to be dissatisfied about? I don’t like the mosquitos, or the crime rate (drive to SS2, get a broken window). Still, it’s nice to know that the system worked.

Maybe, it was this campaign poster that backfired.

Yes, it does look like there is a red packet with money inside, being exchanged! Not under the table mind you, openly given over the table.

(It’s actually a passport being handed to the lady, at the immigration department.)

And only one choice is an ironic statement, because choice implies more than one choice. Maybe “best choice” would sound less pushy.

That said, welcome! Both the place I currently live in, and the place I was registered at, have new faces.