The United Altered States of Maryam

All the boxes are packed, I'm ready to move

2009-12-02T14:22:00.002+10:00

I've turned into a box. That's right, A BOX.To mark my transformation into a box, please visit me at my new blog:

For the sake of Nostalgia and Sentimentality, this blog will be kept and preserved like a shark in formaldehyde by Damien Hirst. You know the piece. The one called "The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living".

But I'm just a box. What do I know about living and dying? I know flat-packed IKEA furniture and like, brown paper packages tied up with string.

So yes, from now on, this blog will not be updated. You can receive updates from a box at:

Box of Boxes

The Father & The Sun

2009-08-03T00:43:00.001+10:00

Part One

Back in 1979, my dad wrote a thesis on solar energy for his Masters in Environmental Science. Fast-forward to 2009, and I come home from a working trip in the jungles of Borneo to find the old man beaming, in a way that has not been seen since he hit andropause and burned most of his hard-earned retirement savings on some well-meaning, but mostly hare-brained solar-dehydrated banana snack manufacturing venture.

“My dream came true today!” he announced in greeting as I hauled my ass through the door, dragging along a backpack covered in caked-mud .

I wondered, oh, god, which dream is this? as my dad is a man of many dreams, far too many for his EPF savings to keep up with. But that’s okay, because my dad is the only retired man I know who still holds about 7 jobs.

“My dream came true today! My dream! MY DREAM! MY DREAM! MY DREAM!” my dad repeated himself, as if he was suffering from a PG-13 version of Tourettes.

Great, I thought, I’m away from home for 5 days and suddenly, all of my dad’s dreams have come true. What does that say about me?

“Noticed anything new, around the house?” he asked.

Lots of things were new around the house. The house itself is new. Sort of. We moved in about 4 months ago but thanks to a highly incompetent contractor, the house seemed doomed, like the rest of Klang Valley and many-a Malaysian mega-project, to a state of semi-completion. Still missing from the house is my mother’s planned wet kitchen and my dad’s “outdoor Balinese shower” – call me a pleb, but these are two not entirely necessary additions to a house that I will never understand. Especially the shower thing.

Why don’t you want a roof over your shower dad?! Why?!!!!!! The neighbour can see you, dad!!! THEY CAN SEE YOU!!!!! For God’s sake, Daddy, put a roof over that shower!!!!!!!!!! Or put some pants on!! And here’s an interesting fact: the unfortunate neighbour that will get a glimpse of my dad in his birthday suit, just so happens to be part of senior management at the conglomerate I work for. I can just imagine:

“So…Maryam……… I saw your father the other day…”

“Did you?”

“Yes, IN THE SHOWER!!!!!”

Awkward……

Maybe the neighbour will understand. It seems to me that all old men of a certain age are fond of the idea of being outdoors in their underwear (or worse). Take my other neighbour for example. I’m sure he realises, that from my bedroom balcony, I have a clear view of his backyard. In his backyard, he has a rather large fish pond. Every morning, as I stand around my balcony smoking, Ol’ Neighbour comes out to feed his fish in his underwear. The sight of his saggy, 100-year old ass peeking out from a thin cover of tighty-greying-whiteys burns a hole in my youthful, eye sockets. But then, I’ve probably been seen by yet another neighbour, splashing around in the pool while wearing a too-tiny swimsuit, with my wobbly, pasty, cottage-cheese thighs in full view. That’s 21^st century neighbourly spirit for you. We’ve all seen eachother’s ass and somehow manage to not acknowledge eachother’s existence.

But back to the subject of my dad’s “dream”, I checked to see if his outdoor shower had finally been built in my absence. Nope. There was still only a patch of cement on the ground and some skeletal pillars that stuck out as sorely as tits would on a man.

I did notice however, that there were several new plants in our formerly bare garden. But then, we’ve always had trees, wherever we lived, so I doubt it would be anything my dad would shout about.

And he was indeed shouting, “My DREAM came true this week! MY DREAM! I have installed solar panels in the house. SOLAR PANELS!!!!!! WE’RE SOLAR POWERED MARYAM!!!! SOLAR POWERED!!! We’re the first house in Shah Alam to have it!”

But then, Shah Alam doesn’t have much of anything. Except badminton courts, round-a-bouts, free parking and people that don’t do anything but stare at other people. The township’s real source of pride, truly, just comes from the fact that it is not Klang.

“Soon, I will be able to save 500 ringgit a month on the electricity bill! I can even sell the energy generated by my solar panels back to TNB!” my dad exclaimed while my mother muttered under her breath, don’t exaggerate. “No, I’ll show you!!!!!!!” my dad continued.

My dad proceeded to show me a little meter which read: 0.05 kwH. “That’s how much energy we’ve generated,” he said.

Eh, I don’t know much about this shit, but it doesn’t seem like a lot.

“Well, it’s been cloudy today………………” he said. “And that’s not the point. The point is… my dream came true! MY DREAM!”

I have to hand it to my dad, no matter how much he irritates me. He is so easily motivated, which is not something I can say for myself. He’s not the kind to allow a mere cloud to cast a shadow over his dream (quite literally). No wonder he’s “retired” and still has 7 jobs. What would a real retiree do with all that motivation?

“So, what do you think about my solar panels, Maryam?! My dream! My dream!”

I think I should be very thankful that my dad’s thesis back in 1979 was about solar energy instead of nuclear energy. I would’ve come home to a nuclear reactor on the roof, an IAEA inspector knocking at the door (whose entry would be denied by my mother because “the house is in a mess!”), the US poised for a possible airstrike on Shah Alam, and my dad still bouncing around, shouting “My dream has come true! My DREAM! MY DREAM!

What did Morrissey Tell You?

2009-06-23T00:19:00.005+10:00

I used to write to express myself. Now I just write to impress my boss.
The more I impress my boss, the less impressed I am with myself.

All day long, for the past year, I write things like:

When others fail to make hard choices and walk their talk, we should continue to behave with integrity and be HONOURABLE. When the world outside seems dull and gloomy, our VIBRANT spirit should continue to cheer us on. When the ground beneath us shifts and others falter in their convictions, we should prove ourselves to be UNSHAKEABLE. And when the road to success is obstructed, we should PIONEER new ways forward. And when the tide turns and a new wave of prosperity rises, we will be ahead, riding the crest of the wave once again.

Wait, a minute, are we brave albeit misguided soldiers, going off to war in our sexy Spartan skirts? Alas, no. This message is meant to go out to fat, paper-pushing office-drones who sit at their desks all day playing Zuma and Jojo's Fashion House 2 on their computers. Everyday, I throw up in my mouth a little.

My colleague says she feels sick everytime she hears our Big Boss deliver yet another speech. The bullshit! The hypocrisy! The meaninglessness of it all!!!!!

Eh honey, if you feel sick just listening it, imagine the person who has to WRITE IT. The one that actually has to reach deep within her ass and pull this shit out.

And Morrissey sang, "As I live and breathe, You have killed me, You have killed me, yes I walk around, somehow, but you have killed me, you have killed me........Piazza Cavour ...what's my life for????!!"

Gaddammit, man, YOU HAVE KILLED ME. YOU HAVE KILLED ME.

And Alexander Pope wrote in some poem of his (eh, I don't remember which one), "Heavens! Was I born for nothing but to write? Has life no joys for me? or (to be grave) Have I no friend to serve, no soul to save?"

Or at least, no rock band to play in?

And Miles Benjamin Anthony Robinson (why is his name so long?) sang, "They wheeled out my casket, they said, 'Boy, lay down your head', I said, Aw shit man, I ain't even dead yet, I won't be buried for I'm.........."

Gaddammit, YOU HAVE KILLED ME.

And Miles (Immatoolazytotypetherestofhisname) continued to sing, "Oh my friend's a real yo-yo, she's always crying and no one knows why..."

Cause YOU HAVE KILLED ME, gaddammit, YOU HAVE KILLED ME.

Dead people don't blog. Haley Joel Osment can see them. But they don't blog. So now you know why I haven't written a new entry since I got A REAL FUCKING JOB. I'm dead, man. YOU HAVE KILLED ME.

Well, not you, personally. The only reason I'm blogging now is because I took the afternoon off from work, popped about 4 painkillers, locked myself in my room and watched really bad YOU TUBE videos (swiftkaratechop, anyone?) and am feeling somewhat at peace. I started the morning with a little tantrum in my cubicle. I kicked my work PC and now my foot hurts. Also, I broke the mouse and this little flappy-plastic bit on my desk. The mouse hurts. My understanding female colleagues told me to take the afternoon off because I wasn't looking too healthy. I think they were just afraid that I might kill them.

WITH MY BARE HANDS!

AAAAAAAAAAAAARGH.

You have killed me, GADDAMMIT.

I can't promise you when the next entry will come. Probably not as long as I keep cashing in those miserable pay cheques and enjoying my UNLIMITED OUTPATIENT MEDICAL BENEFITS and ABOVE AVERAGE EMPLOYER EPF CONTRIBUTION!

But I'll tell you this, if you get me a Camcorder, I will v-log for you every fugging day until you get sick of my lopsided face! Heck, I'll even start my own YouTube channel. Just for youuuuuuuuuu....

If you're still even reading this blog.

I quit writing.

You have killed me.

Dead people go on to YOUTUBE INFAMY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

(i'm too broke to get a camcorder. they don't pay me well enough. in the meantime, you can add me as a friend on Facebook, send me HUGS, and throw Ryan Seacrest at me. And if I see you on the streets, I'll punch you in the FACE)

Much love, rainbows and sunshine

Maryam

There’s a Party in Kazakhstan (But You’re in a Cubicle)

2008-07-29T20:17:00.000+10:00

“Congra……congra-che-li……congra-tu-la-lo-li…..” the guy from Human Resource was trying to pronounce the phrase ‘Congratulatory Leave’. He was going over the ‘Executive Handbook’ with me and this Other Newbie – it was our first day as employees of the organization. “So…the rule is, once you’ve worked here for a year, then say you get married-lah, you are entitled to two days congra….congra-ra-la-to-ree….congra…aiyah, here, you can just read it in the book-lah, haw?” said the HR guy, resigning himself to the fact that he will never be able to pronounce ‘congratulatory’ to anyone’s satisfaction (or understanding).

Customary visit to HR aside, I spent the first half of my first day as a Corporate Citizen making paperclip bracelets in my tiny cubicle. I wasn’t just making your run-of-the-mill paperclip bracelet, mind you; my bracelets were rather intricate with complicated twisty bits. I call the look industrial-office-punk. My colleagues looked at me as if I was retarded. The ones that bothered to look my way, at least. Of course, ‘retarded’ was exactly what I felt like on my first day of work; like someone’s mentally disabled child who had been let loose around the office to run around in mommy’s heels and blazer while destroying company property.

My blazer, by the way, was white-in-color. When I tried it on in the store, I thought it made me look like a fine cross between Nico and Diane Keaton in Annie Hall. But somehow, I walked into my first day of work, looking like I should be balancing trays of champagne flutes and canapés. My white blazer made me look like a waiter. It was just as well since my next big decision for the day was, “Coffee or tea?” I chose to drown myself in coffee since nerves had caused me to lose sleep the night before. All of it. 0 hours sleep. By noon, I was starting to drift off to a faraway land on a plush, velvet carriage driven by five purple unicorns and one deformed reindeer wearing fairy wings. Unfortunately, this was around the time my boss decided to have a one-on-one briefing with me in her office. As she spoke about my official duties as a junior executive in Public Affairs and rattled on about the company’s ‘vision’; I was having ‘visions’ of my own – mostly of the hallucinatory kind – of my army of unicorns doing jumping tricks over her head.

“Are you alright?” my boss stopped to ask me midway through her speech.

See, at this point, sleep deprivation and too many cups of strong black coffee had caused my right eyelid to twitch uncontrollably. My boss must have thought I was winking cheekily at everything she said or something.

She left me with a skyscraper-tall pile of reading materials to go over, materials peppered with terms like ‘Portfolio Prioritization Matrix’ and other corporate babble – things that can sometimes be shortened into neat little acronyms like GLIC, CSR, GRI, NEI, NOI, CPI-X, OMG, WTF, KILLMENOW.

“You’ll probably go crazy from reading all of this but it’s necessary to familiarize yourself with ---“ My boss either said “every aspect of the company’s operations” or “insanity”. If it was the latter, I could’ve assured her that I was quite familiar with it, thanks.

The reading materials worked strongly against my bid to stay awake. I kept slipping into micro-sleep before apparitions of corporate sycophants carrying whips and lashes (and one time, my old Form 3 Science teacher) would appear and shock me back into consciousness. That, and the fact that my cubicle-neighbour’s mobile rang loudly every 5 minutes. And it wasn’t just any old ring-tone. No, her ring tone was the sound of someone yelling, “There’s a party in Kazakhstan!!!!!!!!!!!”

So there I was, slowly dozing off in my cubicle when all of a sudden……….

“There’s a party in Kazakhstan!”

How can you fall asleep when there’s a party in Kazakhstan?

By 4 p.m., I was reduced to doodling pictures of domestic animals on the pad of yellow post-its that the company had so graciously provided for me. Here I go again – wasting company resources. Le Chat!!! El Perro!!! Si Kerbau!!! - I’d label the animals in a variety of languages.

“There’s a party in Kazakhstan!”

By 5 p.m, I went back to making jewelry out of office supplies. This time around, I used stapler bullets. And lots of adhesive tape. It fell apart on me anyway.

“There’s a party in Kazakhstan!”

At 6 p.m, I get a call from my friend, The Koors (don’t ask me why I call her that. I just do) “Are you done with your first day at work? How was it?”

“I’m still in the office-lah.”

“Eh, what time do you finish work?”

“Officially, 5.30 p.m. But no one has left the office yet. I don’t really want to be the first to leave,” I said.

“Hmm…… they’re probably there because they have actual work to finish. Do you have work to finish?”

“No.” I had officially run out of office supplies to waste.

“Then? Go home-lah,” Koors suggested. “What about the other new guy in your department? Has he left yet? No?!!! What’s he doing?”

I peered over my cubicle wall to check on The Other Newbie. He was carefully twisting his telephone cord into flower-shapes.

Elsewhere, in Kazakhstan, a party was going on……….

P.S.

Tuan-tuan dan puan-puan, I’d also like to take this opportunity to thank the lovely souls who have posted such kind comments and welcome me back to the blogosphere with such warmth and ego-boosting support. I know it takes a lot of strength and effort to read through 5 pages of bad grammar and punctuation. If I wasn’t so frigid, I’d give you a hug; if I was a cabinet minister, I’d give you a government contract but for now, I can only give you my heartfelt gratitude. Don’t be a stranger now ya’ hear?

You Can Always Get What You Don’t Want

2008-07-14T03:03:00.001+10:00

I always knew they would eventually get me. They were never out to get me, no, it wasn’t like I was getting my head hunted or anything. On the contrary, they would much rather get someone else, if they could, I’m sure. They can sense the reluctance, the lack of focus and motivation, the fact that everything about my temperament and personality is ill-suited to the life they have to offer. They can sense that I will only end up disgruntled and under-performing. They can sense it in me like a dog senses fear and I sense a hot dog from a mile away. But maybe that’s what they secretly thrive on. Not money, not capital, not economic growth; not team-spirit and dynamism; not excellent organizational skills or pride. No. Maybe, they secretly thrive on the crushing of souls, souls who are delusional enough to think that they are sensitive, artistic and free. Muahaha, we’ll show them, they whisper behind their steel desks and removable cubicle walls, we’ll give them a taste of it – they won’t be hooked but by The Gods of Stable Monthly Income and Medical Benefits, they will be stuck, muahahahaha muahahahah muahahahah dan ini fail yang encik mintak. I always knew that I’d end up allowing them to have me. Because that’s the story of my life so far. I always somehow end up committing to things or situations that I’m utterly unenthusiastic about.

It could be the little things.

Like being enrolled in the Science stream at school when I was pretty sure I couldn’t care less about what chemical reaction would happen if I mixed, I don’t know, uranium hydrocarbonite with Boron and stuck it on top of a Bunsen burner; when I couldn’t care less what a fucking cross section of a dicotyledonous plant looks like (they’re all smiley faces to me); when I couldn’t care less about mathematics let alone Additional Mathematics – If 2XYZ = 36 is the blab la of bla what is X? (Tak tahu, nanti saya balik saya tanya kakak saya. Tapi dia pun tak tahu. So how? Like dat lor……0 – apa jenis jawapan ni? Sila jumpa cikgu selepas kelas.) And to all 15 year olds considering entering the science stream just because “it’s encouraged by the government and YOUR MA”; I think you should know, that I still haven’t found any use for any of it. Of course, if you plan to be a doctor, engineer, nuclear physicist, CSI-dude or just really, really want to find out what X is then I’m sure you will. All the best.

It could be the little things.

Like asking the stylist to give me an “edgier, not-so-boring haircut - think Chrissie Hynde or Karen O from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs or heck, even Rhianna (what? Her ‘Umbrella’ sucks but I like the hair)” I figured I could trust the stylist. He dresses like he’s in a cool indie band with the right touch of Gay. Instead, I come out of the salon with my hair all blown-out looking, in my sister’s words, “like a Katie Holmes-Bot. Hahahahahahah”. Great. Katie Holmes might be the Bride of Xenu and new best friend to that outer-space creature called Victoria Beckham but somehow, she doesn’t satisfy my definition of ‘edgy’. The next day, my sister says, “Well, actually, you look like Ringo Starr. Hahaha.” Circa before The Beatles discovered LSD. You know the hair. The Mop do’. She was being kind. By the end of the week, what my hair really looked like was Javier Bardem in No Country for Old Men. These days, my hair pretty much resembles a mushroom. There was an annoying kid I knew in Primary School whom I used to call “Mushroom Head” on account of her dodgy haircut. Well, who’s the mushroom head now? Who da’ mushroom head now? Yes, karma’s a bitch.

It could be the little things.

Like ending up being stuck in conversation with The Ugly Friend at a party because I could barely even look The Cute One in the eye, let alone charm him with my wit and humor. Not even when The Cute One notices my new haircut and says “You look nice.” Not even when The Cute One whose sight and judgment had been affected by Vodka (that means finally, a chance for me) comes swaggering over in his skinny jeans and says “Hey, they’re playing the song we both like. Come and dance.” And I say “Okay, in a while” right after I politely finish the sentence I was saying to The Ugly Friend. And then the song is over. And Cute One’s gone off with some gorgeous Scandinavian (someone try to convince me that not all Swedish girls are insanely fit and good looking!) skank he met on the dancefloor. And I’m left to hang out for the rest of the night in The Stoner/Social-Pariah corner with The Ugly Friend who says such things as, “You know, I’m only doing my MBA over here for fun. I’m actually an actor back in the States. Got an agent and everything.” Oh really? What have you done? “Just this commercial. For a bible.” A bible commercial? “Hey, the bible’s the best selling book of all time,” he says. Yes, I’m sure the publishers have Jesus, Peter, Paul & Matthew and not you to thank for that. The Ugly Friend asked me such questions as, “Are you a tortured artist?” What the fuck? “You look like a tortured artist…what you’re wearing, makes you look like a tortured artist.” I should’ve known. I was wearing all black. Black smock dress, black ribbed wool stockings, black ballet flats, black peacoat. The look I was aiming for was Parisian Chic. I should’ve known that my aim, with all things be it bowling or sartorial statements is as good as a drunk with Parkinsons who just got off three thousand turns on the Merry-Go-Round. I wanted to look like a chic Parisian woman and I ended up looking like a broody frustrated art student. And I was classmates with a lot of the latter and knew for sure that it was exactly something I didn’t want to come across as. But I did. Because success in my life is a 7 letter word spelled backwards. I’ve achieved many things in life that I never thought I’d like to achieve. And still don’t want to. And Ugly Friend asks again, “So are you a tortured artist?” No. I’m just tortured. Period. And at the end of the night, I go home mentally kicking myself in the ass for not taking advantage of the Cute One while he was drunk. That is not to say that there was any certainty that I would’ve succeeded even if I tried (I’m aware of my limitations, thanks). And that’s just the thing isn’t it? It sucks a lot less to fail at the things you don’t care about than the ones you do.

I took an online quiz for fun that ended up being no fun. The quiz was called “How Will You Grow Old?” And it said if I continue on the path I’m currently on, I will grow old “Grumpy and Resentful”. But I’m already grumpy and resentful, Captain Obvious.

I listen to music, watch films, look at works of fine art, read books and essays by people who have attained a certain degree of success (or at least some small form of recognition) for it and I think to myself, “Well, if this is absolute crap is considered fit for public consumption then so is my crap. Heck, I can do better.” But I don’t. I don’t do. I just sit there and rant like Jack Black in High Fidelity without the triumphant performance of Let’s Get it On at the end. Because I don’t have the talent but most importantly, the balls, the guts, the mental strength and the shamelessness to go after what I really want. Because sometimes, I think I don’t really know what I really want.

You get what you know. The secret is you get what you know.

And sometimes, I think I only know the things I don’t want.

And now I’m getting yet another something I don’t particularly want.

All wrapped up in a crisp shirt and tie.

They called to say that I start work on Monday.

The people from the company I didn’t actually apply to join; they called to say that I start the job I don’t really want on Monday.

It’s a company that handles Industrial Manufacturing, Engineering and Oil & Gas. Yeah, that really sounds like me, doesn’t it?

They said be in the office. By 8.30 am. Welcome to the Corporate World

And I didn’t say no. I didn’t say, “Fuck ye and yer cocksuckin Mondays; I’m gonna live on love and poetry, man! Oh, and also rock and roll. Damn the man!” No, I said exactly what I didn’t want to say. And then I felt sick.

Of course, at this point, I have to (as usual) include some wise words from The Mother. “You don’t seem too excited about your new job. Why are you not happy about getting a job?!! You scowl when you don’t have a job, you scowl when you get a job. You know why you’re always unhappy, Maryam? Because you’re bleeding ungrateful. UNGRATEFUL, UNGRATEFUL, UNGRATEFUL!”

Hmm..That’s probably it.

Thank You.

Interview with No Vampires

2008-07-10T02:50:00.002+10:00

Earlier this year, I had a short stint as a “Marketing Executive/ Asst. Business Development Consultant” for a restaurant/lounge/club. My eldest sis however, kept telling everyone that I was “some kind of Club Promoter chick” not that there’s anything inherently bad in being a club promoter girl but it led some idiots to suspect that I was actually working as a “GRO” (I’m not condemning them, I’m just saying it’s not for me, alright?)

Me : Can you please stop telling people that I was a “Club Promoter Girl”?
Big Sis: You were, weren’t you? You promoted the club therefore you were a
club promoter.
Me : I marketed it, market ; marketing executive.
Mom : These days they call everyone an executive. Tukang cuci pun executive.
Big Sis : So when are you going to get yourself a real job?
Me : It was a real job! Just because I only had to go to work at 2pm doesn’t mean the
job was a freaking mirage, alright?
Big Sis : What exactly did you do? You weren’t a GRO, were you?
Me : NO.
Big Sis : So you were one of those promoter-girls in the little skirts?
Me : No.

I did not stand outside clubs in my mini skirt (which by the way, I’m too fat for), thigh high boots and cropped Tiger Beer tank, handing out flyers and trying to lure male passers-by to come inside and spend money. No sir, I didn’t do that. The job also did not involve me slinking around in a skanky dress, sitting on the laps of patrons, using my feminine wiles and seduction skills (which by the way, I don’t have) to get them to buy as many drinks as possible while they butcher “Endless Love” on the karaoke machine. No, my job usually involved me sitting in a corner during the day glued to my laptop, replying emails, sending emails, designing flyers, writing useless promotional blurbs and press releases which never ended up being sent to the press. Occasionally, when I had some free time and was desperate, lonely, blind, mentally impaired yet strangely confident enough, I’d flirt unsuccessfully with one of the DJs. Mostly, my party hour duties only included calling to check on the night’s scheduled DJs to see what time in this century exactly they plan to arrive. Anyway, to cut a long story slightly less-long, the novelty of the job wore off so I quit.

I have now been successfully unemployed for 2 and a half months but because my previous job didn’t count in the eyes of many; as far as these people are concerned, I’ve been unemployed since graduating uni (7 months plus). Since then, I’ve gotten a million and one suggestions on what I should work as; the most common one being, “Anything, just get your ass of the couch already!” Of course when this was first said, I was only 3 weeks unemployed – a time which I spent recuperating from knee SURGERY and the mysterious week-long fever that I developed following the surgery. Anyway have you ever had someone tell you to get off the couch while you’re practically a fucking cripple? My mother keeps going on about how Tiger Woods had the same surgery I did and how he’s already training for his next PGA tournament. Of course, TIGER FUCKING WOODS IS ONE OF THE BEST PROFESSIONAL ATHLETES the world has ever seen. That’s like telling me to leap off a building because “Well, Superman can fly.”

My eldest sis decided to rush things along by submitting my CV to her friend who was offering a job at a company which, in my sister’s own words, “would put you in a great position to net an investment banker for a husband.” (Great, fucking great, my life’s dream, apparently). Anyway, one of the first things this dude said to me was, “So, your sister tells me you were a….uh…. club promoter. What did you do? Did you have to uh………layan the customers and things?” (GARGGGHHHH!!!!!!!).

The rest of the interview sort of went like:

Interviewer: (who had previously asked to read one of my academic essays. I gave him
the one entitled ‘Adventures in Identity, Punishment & Capital in the
Age of Electronic Reproduction featuring the music of Radiohead). Hmm..
I find your essay…..interesting but to be honest, I don’t really know
much about Talking Head.
Me : Radiohead.
Interviewer: Oh, not Talking Head?
Me : No.
Interviewer: Well, I’m an 80s kind of guy. Well anyway……………..
I see that you’ve also listed ‘writing’ under your ‘interests and hobbies’
Me : (Well, what else was I going to put? Watching E! TV? Contemplating the
nothingness of things? Seeing how long I could go without a shower
before something tragic happens?) Yes, yes, I do enjoy writing.
Interviewer: Have you had any of your works published? Newspapers, magazines,
maybe?
Me : (Does this blog count?) No, not quite.
Interviewer: What about back in college and in school? Did you contribute to the school
magazine?
Me : (No, sir, I was too busy trying to get out of going to school to compete with
the kids with perfect punctuation writing profound rhymes about cold, dark
rooms or short, sweet tales about this wondrous thing that happened to
them which would inevitably end with “……it was all just a dream.”)
Uhm..no…
Interviewer : Why not?
Me : That’s an interesting question, really. (Thank you, for making me reflect
upon my under-achievements at such a young age. Please come again).

The funny thing was; the interview wasn’t for a job as a staff writer or anything like that. It had something to do with finance. So yeah, why don’t you just go ahead and ask if I can do a pirouette in ice skates at the Winter Olympics? He offered me an internship with the kind of pay that wouldn’t even cover the cost of petrol to get to work. It is my belief that internship is really just a prettier (and cheaper) word for cheap white collar-slave labor. I was also turned off by the interviewer saying that at the company, “they work hard and play hard”. I don’t know why finance people have to be so hard all the time (no, not in that way) I don’t like things being described as ‘hard’. ‘Hard’ requires effort. I want everything to be light, fluffy and effortless, like fairy dust in the wind blowing through a field of tall grass and pink clouds. (ugh, I just vomited in my mouth). Of course, I appreciate the opportunity but alas, I was living with the hope that something better would come my way. But so far, it’s just been one absurd interview after another.

Here is a bit from another interview with a panel of goons.

Interviewer 1: I see on your CV that you were active in debates and public speaking at
school and college…… Why did you do a degree in Communications?
Me : Sorry?
Interviewer 1: Why didn’t you do Law? It seems a waste that you didn’t do Law.
Me : (imagining myself in the Wild West in a cowboy hat and leather spurs with
guns hanging off my hips and saying with a cigar dangling from the
corner of my mouth, “Cause ‘roun here purrdy lady, I AAAYM THE LAW
- BANG BANG YOU’RE DEAD BITCH!”)
Interviewer 2: You mention that you like to keep up to date with current events…….
Me : (I kept up to date with current events in the past; if that counts)
Interviewer 2: Can you tell me the exact inflation rates for (something or other) these
days.
Me : (Dammit, I should’ve just said I liked long walks by the beach) To be
honest, no.
Interviewer 2 : I don’t either.
Interviewer 1: Then why did you ask?
Interviewer 2: Just wondering. Anyway, can you play softball?
Me : Yes (No, not really)
Interviewer 2: Yah, because the company has this sporting tournament every year and our
department really needs softball players.

These people also mentioned that the company encourages its employees to be “gung-ho”. When they said that, I couldn’t help imagining myself as a Rambo-type figure, machine gun belt strapped across my chest, American flag tied around my head, charging through the door of a conference room and going “Ga…ugh….ruhhhh… yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!” The vision scared me. The interview was for a trainee executive position in Human Resource. Why would I want to work in Human Resource, you ask? I don’t. My dad submitted my CV in for me without my explicit permission. He told me he just wanted a copy of my CV just “to reflect on what I’ve been doing.” I should’ve known that my dad is too much of a pro-active type (when it comes to work, at least) to simply ‘reflect’. I like to blame him for my passivity. He’s forced me into this mode of rebellion. Because it’s your obligation as a child to be the exact opposite of your parents. Otherwise, society would not evolve……. and civilizations would not crumble. Anyway, these HR people said I’d probably be better suited to “Corporate Communications” (what the fuck does Corporate Comm. really mean?). Then for two months I don’t hear from them and to tell you the truth, I felt relieved. Then suddenly, I get a call saying, “Cik Maryam, I’m ****** calling from the Public Affairs Division of ***** and last week, you had an interview with our HR department, right?” Yes, if we were stuck in a funny time warp it would’ve been last week. But in this earthly reality, we like to call it nine weeks or better known as just slightly over two months. “Well, we’d like you to come in tomorrow to have a chat with our Head of Something Something Public Something Communications and also our Executive of Something Corporate Talk Talk.” So I went to have a “chat” because there was nothing good on TV and also, I need something that would give me a paycheck, soon! Anyway Head & Executive of Something involving Communications said to give them a few weeks to something something before they get back to me. Of course in this organization, if one week = nine weeks; I’m thinking few weeks= a year before they get back to me on something that I didn’t quite catch because I was too distracted by the dodgy plaid pattern on Head of Something’s suit collar to listen.

(yeah, yeah, I’m fully aware of why people aren’t lining up outside my door to employ me).

And then there were two other interviews with two different channels under a certain broadcast media organization; both of which went too badly for me to want to mention at great length. It’s a shame seeing that among other qualifications, I watch enough hours of TV to keep 10,000 toddlers stupid. You think I’d be able to get a job working with a TV station. But no, “Too young with no experience in the media industry,” was their main issue. Okay, sure, I’ll just wait until I’m old with no experience in the media industry. And oh, one of the interviewers said to me, “What are your weaknesses?” but then cuts me off by saying, “Oh, wait, you’re probably too young to even be able to properly recognize your weaknesses.”

Dammit, lady, I was going to say “Pasta”!

(Anyway, I’m suddenly overcome by intense boredom while writing this entry. Also I sound like a really big twat.)

Distress Signal

2008-06-27T17:59:00.005+10:00

Hello? Is anyone out there?

Hello, are you there? It's me, Maryam.

writing a personal blog is a bit like looking in a mirror isn't it? No, not just looking but scrutinizing yourself; practicing your poses, pinching those saddlebags on your thighs. Writing a personal blog is like standing in front of the mirror in your underwear. A changing room mirror in a department store. With the doors wide open.

I don't mind people looking in.

I just haven't felt like looking at myself lately.

hence, the hiatus.

maybe I'll start over. maybe i'll start fresh. maybe I'll sit in a big chair and wear a shiny hat.

maybe I'm not there because I'm bloody Bob Dylan.

maybe, you're not there.

The Bitter Cold

2007-06-30T04:41:00.000+10:00

The thing about winter is that it’s really cold. No, really. Why are you laughing? It’s a valid statement. Obvious, but valid. They say, “Oh, winter in the Gold Coast is mild enough for pussies.” So I’m thinking oh, okay, so maybe some “winters” aren’t very cold. But then no, if it wasn’t bloody cold, it wouldn’t be called “winter”, would it?!!!! I’m freezing my ass off here!!! Dude, if I wanted to freeze my ass off I would’ve gone to Uni in Antarctica or something (so what if there isn’t actually a Uni in Antarctica?). Not the Gold Coast. And yet here I am, having my ass frozen off. The weatherwoman on TV says, “-- temperature 3 degrees Celsius below average…” And I’m thinking below average?! Below average?! Dude, if I wanted below average I would check my own IQ score! I want average! You would think one could easily get “average” seeing as it is the “average” but no, here I am freezing my ass off! Indeed, that’s what I thought. Sure, 3 degrees Celsius below average only means that some nights and early mornings are 2◦C or 4◦C which doesn’t sound too bad until you take the fucking wind into account. The fucking wind! Dude, if I wanted wind, I would face your ass. Instead, I’m FREEZING MY ASS OFF HERE! Now I know what they mean by “the bitter cold”. Of course I would. I’m freezing my ass off here.

And I’m standing out here in the cold, blowing wind trying to light a cigarette which won’t light in the fucking blowing wind. The fact that I can’t feel my hands doesn’t help. I haven’t had any feeling in my fingers since last Thursday. A friend thinks that all the brain chemistry altering recreational holiday activities have done some serious damage to my brain/ nerves. But I say, “because it has been cold, stupid!!! I’m freezing my ass off here!” Ok, so why not wear gloves? Have you ever tried to light a cigarette or a bong with gloves/ warm woolly mittens on? It’s difficult. And besides, who would think that they would need winter gloves in the Gold Coast?! It’s the Gold Coast! Do they put sad, shivering, cold people on their brochures? No! Bikinis, Bikinis, Bikinis. Ok, what about fingerless gloves? You do know those things are antithetical to utilitarian, right? Someone didn’t invent it because their palms were cold but their fingers were hot.

Some day, someone will name a band after me. The Maryams. Or The Maryam Disco Liberation Regime. Or Rage Against the Maryam (not related to Rage Against the Machine™.)

Ok, where was I? Previously, I had been caught out in the rain 6 separate times in two days. So standing out in just the cold, blowing right now isn’t too bad in comparison if I ignore the long arms of Hypothermia reaching out for me. And I’m coughing like a Puss That Ate the pair of Fugly Furry Boots - yesterday, I think one of my ribs came out with my phlegm. So you’re probably wondering, (or at least, I should explain since I brought it up) why is it I’m outdoors in the cold and smoking?

“Because I like it,” is D’s answer and she says it with absolutely no guilt or regard for political correctness. It’s politically incorrect now to give smoking any sort of positive representation, isn’t it? Even smokers must now publicly flagellate themselves every time they light up. And make remarks like, “Oh, it’s so bad for me, I really should quit”, “I don’t know why I do this, I don’t like it anymore and it’s bad for me” and of course, “kids, don’t do this at home. you’ll regret it. I know I do” Yes, this might be merry and true and all but it doesn’t change the fact that we like it which is what makes it not only a health issue but a political one. And a bit of a social taboo. After all, the only things worth disputing, hiding, regulating and covering up in this world are the things that people enjoy, no – sex, drugs and money?

D and I are one of the few suckers stuck taking a course in winter school at uni while everyone else is on holiday in warm, Thailand or on a snowy mountain slope somewhere snowboarding or having a European summer or in a smoky basement just traaaaavelin’ in their miiiiiinds, baaaaybeh, trrrraaaaaavelin’ without movin’. It’s not that we’re card-carrying members of the Yearn to Learn Club or anything; we just have no choice if we want to graduate some time this year. And D is getting married in September. Me, well, my fee-paying parents have had just about enough.

So we thought alright, it’s just an 8-day course. We didn’t take into account that it would be the most boring course on Earth (take my worst subjects – technology, graphic design, grammar & editing, lump it into 8 days and call it a course!) and that it would be the coldest, wettest, windiest 8 days ever. And each day started too early in the morning and went on for 7 rubbish filled hours. We had Lecturer #1 – old, crusty, battle-weary veteran journalist someone had dust out of a file cabinet somewhere- regaling us with stories about the good old days of DOS and manual printing and steam engines, about the times he was in Vietnam/ Lebanon/ Timor/ working at The Times in London and Lecturer #2 – not too young too old, fashionably sensitive but too cool to care, kinda hot if I wasn’t too cold to notice, trying to outshine the more experienced #1 with the latest in technospeak and how as a music-journalist he was once flown first class to Sydney, put up in suite at a 5-star hotel and got to party, drink lots of champagne with VIPs, celebrities and err……Jimmy Barnes. Some underground organized crime honcho who was also some band’s manager was trying to bribe Lecturer #2 into giving his band a good review. But after accepting all that, #2 went ahead and gave the band a shit review. And apparently the Honcho told him to watch his back and ooh yeah, he’s been a hunted man ever since.

And of course, Lecturer #1 had to go, “That reminds me of the time I interviewed Princess Di & Dodi Fayed’s bodyguard in Timor, you know, the guy that was the only one to survive the car crash. Everyone wanted to interview him but no one could find him. No one but me, that is. I had sources telling me he was in Timor and keep in mind that Timor was a very dangerous place at the time. And I asked him a few questions about the accident and he got mad. Keep in mind he’s a former SAS man because that’s how he became Dodi’s bodyguard, he was trained to kill. He had a gun sitting on the table between us and he threatened me ‘I better not see you here again in Timor or you’re going to get it!’”

“Well, that’s interesting,” said Lecturer #2, “Anyway, it’s important as a journalist that you know how to do everything even if it’s something that an editor or a sub or a secretary should be doing because when you work in a small paper, you have to do everything. I work in a small newsroom so I have to do EVERYTHING. Which means, if I wanted to, I can simply walk in and find employment in any news room anywhere in the world because I’m used to doing everything! I can do everything. I’m not only a journalist, I can sub-edit!”

Claps. Well, okay then, Woodward & Bernstein. See? Do you see now why people like D and I would rather walk out into the cold and increase our risk of lung cancer/ pneumonia/ hypothermia then sit indoors, in the warm relative comfort of the lecture theatre? You know, this wouldn’t be an issue if the world were more considerate to smokers. We’re bending over backwards here just so you guys don’t have to suffer the ill-effects of second hand smoking and die of lung cancer before we do.

I remember this one time, I was having a post-dinner smoke outside a remotely charming restaurant in Byron Bay and making sure that I stayed as far away from the door as possible (without you know, having to actually go too far) and just you know, trying to completely absorb all the smoke into my system so I wouldn’t be blowing out any smoke into your precious, passing non-smoking faces! This other dude was there having a pre-dinner smoke and he said to me, “Ah-ha, yet another social outcast!” Yes, smoking had made us social outcasts. Clearly the days of Grease, Rebel without a Cause and all those other Smoking-Is-Cool-Movies are over. Now you might as well be a leper in ye good olde’ days and be isolated with all the other nasty lepers in a far flung place where no one else wants to be - in the case of cold weather; it’s outdoors. “I don’t understand, why can’t they just install in those things in the ceiling which like sucks out all the smoke up into this vent and away instead of sending us outside like dogs every time we need a smoke?” continued Social Outcast Dude, “The bathroom in my parent’s house used to have that thing or something like it. I used to smoke weed with my mates in there all the time when I was 15 and my mom never smelled a thing………” Oh well, I remember thinking back then.

Yeah, everything’s well when you’re not freezing your ass off. I’m oh fucking not so well now, I’m not. I’m freezing my ass off!

“You know, very soon there will be nowhere left for us to smoke,” says D. “Not even outdoors. Do you know what happened to me the other day? I was sitting with some mates, outdoors, you know, and this chick came and asked if she could sit at the empty spot at our table and we were like yeah, whatever, free country right? She had her iPod headphones in her ears and like 10 books with her and she sat there and started studying. She looked a bit Indian… not that I have anything against Indians and Asians right, don’t get me wrong; it’s just related to the story……”

For the record, because it’s related to the story, D has big, blonde hair and light eyes.

“…So, she’s sitting there reading her book with her iPod like blasting in her ears, I know it’s loud because I’m sitting at the other end of the table and I can hear like the bass of the song. My mates and I were talking and smoking and suddenly she screamed at us ‘could you all quiet down? I’m trying to study here! And don’t fucking smoke around me!!!’ I’m like look, bitch, it’s not like my mates and I came to your table and disturbed your fucking peace. You came to us. And this is like one of the few non-smoking areas left in the universe. If you wanted some place quiet and smoke-free to study – they built a nice building for that – it’s called the library! And we’re not in it!”

And I say, Testify!

“And guess what she said? She went psycho, she was like ‘fine, so I suppose I should go back to my own country, now? Because this is YOUR table, YOUR country!!’”

Bitter, was she?

“More like crazy. My country? Is she joking?” D grumbles, “My father’s French and my mom’s Bosnian and I was born in Bosnia. I barely speak fucking English!”

Pop Politics (The French Know What They're Doing!)

2007-06-15T14:07:00.001+10:00

They say that more people are interested in voting for their Pop Idol than they are for their own president. If this is true, then to provide an analysis of a country’s political climate, culture & sensibilities, one only needs to study their respective, democratically-elected Pop Idols. Let’s try it shall we?

WHO?

CLAY AIKEN Runner up American Idol Season 2. Went on to sell more records than the winner.

JULIEN DORE

Winner Nouvelle Star 2007 @ French Idol

DAMIEN LEITH

Winner of 2006 Australian Idol. He is Irish

DANIEL LEE

Also known as Chee Hun. Winner of Malaysian Idol Season 2. And then they canceled the show

PRE-IDOL “INDIE-CLEVERNESS”

CRED

Had no friends.

Frontman of two unsigned indie bands – one playing “postmodern art rock”, the other “a Southern concept cover band” with the very clever names of Dig Up Elvis and The Jean D’Ormesson Disco Suicide. Went to art school. Plays the ukulele. Owns a guitar autographed by the Gipsy Kings.

Is a fully qualified chemist. WORLD FAMOUS IN IRELAND.

Is from Kedah. Likes the colour pink

TOM SELLECK

FACTOR (the measure of a mustache)

Jeebus, the guy doesn’t even have eyebrows!

Soft, golden fuzz like on a little peach. Cute but does not compare to the bushy, manly splendour of Tom Selleck’s

Looks the type to want to grow a goatee someday. But that would be more The Edge than the manly splendour of Tom Selleck

Dude, just look at him. Tom Selleck ain’t never been to this town!

GINGER FACTOR

If it looks ginger, smells ginger, acts ginger, it is ginger.

More dirty blond than ginger and we all love our blonds diiirrrtay. Ooh yeah.

He’s Irish – there has to be some rogue ginger gene in him somewhere!

Self-made ginger. The Ginger-est of all Gingers.

STYLE INSPIRATION

Your neighborhood peeping Tom. Tom Cruise. Anyone in a bad wig. Xenu.

Think a High Street version of the Hedi Slimane/ Pete Doherty trash-retro-dandy-rocker-look without the touch of coke whore. The closest anyone other than Pete Doherty can come to dressing like Pete Doherty without getting beat up. Add a dash of Euro chic.

Your dad. Trying to be cool.

Your aunt. Not even trying.

FLAMBOYANCE

FACTOR

Not so much flamboyant as he is fear-inducing

Wears hair barrettes. And patterned silk chiffon scarves. Draped himself over a piano. Body-slammed a piano. Covered Madonna’s Like a Virgin & Britney’s Hit Me Baby (One More Time). Sang that his name is Lolita or you can call him Lola. Felt up a fellow male contestant’s butt onstage and on national TV. Claims that his ukulele possesses magical powers. Elvis fan. Played a dancey-folky song on his ukulele about delicious, fishy female vaginas for his Idol audition. Wrote a sensitive love song called Je Vais T’enculer (I will Fuck You Up The Ass)

As flamboyant as your local chemist who once, some years ago, got really drunk at an office Christmas party and thought it’d be wild to undo his cuffs and roll up his sleeves. Got a little emotional on camera once over being called “an Ugly Bastard” and “Tic Tac Teeth” by judges.

Not so much flamboyant as it is laughable.

ODD LYRIC MOMENT

“Whatcha’ doin’ tonight
I wish I could be a fly on your wall
Are you really alone……If I was invisible
Then I could just watch you in your room… “(Ok, more creepy than odd)

“I can’t leeeve. Weeez or Weezaaaaoout yewwwww…….weeez or weeeezaaaooout yew oh-ho”

Yeah..err.. me neither.

DATA NOT AVAILABLE. You can’t expect me to pay that much attention to their songs…

SOUNDS LIKE

A sexual predator

Sex on legs with a howling, growling guide dog

Meals on Wheels

Needs a meal

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

Should he be allowed to roam freely in society? /When is he going to come out of the closet? Who cares?

Julien – le grande artiste or imposteur?

Jay-sus, he’s an ugly bastard, isn’t he?

If I buy 10 DVDs got discount ah?

POP N ROLL MOMENT

Confessed to Rolling Stone magazine that he accidentally killed a kitten when he was 16 and now fears he is being haunted by it.

Every other performance.

Naming his kids Jarvis and Jagger Ramone

Having a group of unrequited groupies called “The Pinkies” after his favorite color.

FREQUENTLY RECEIVED INSULT

“It didn’t hurt Clay Aiken to have his balls cut off” – Triumph the Comic Insult Dog for PETA

Poseur. The Americans call him the French Sanjaya but only because they’re jealous.

“You sure can sing but jesus, you’re an ugly bastard!” – Idol judge Mark something or other

They canceled the Malaysian Idol Series because of him. They didn’t want people like him winning. Ever. Again.

RESULT/ POLITICAL ANALYSIS

The public voted for Ruben Studdard to be the winner and then bought more records from Clay Aiken suggesting that the public might have a little trouble understanding the concept of voting. Result: George W. Bush is president.

The French clearly have an appreciation for the finer, beautiful things in life. They obviously know how to pick their Pop Idols but voted Sarkozy for president anyway. Just to prove a point. That they’re French and they do things differently. Because they can.

Australians just love voting for ugly bastards. Hence, John Howard.

Malaysian public decide they suck at the whole democracy/ voting thing after just two tries and in the spirit of Malaysia Boleh, decide to forget about the concept altogether. Result: Same old goats in power

To celebrate an entire nation agreeing with my opinion that Julien is bloody awesome, I’ve decided to post up videos of Julien. Because I can.

1. Here is Julien, pre-idol days with his band, Dig Up Elvis, playing the song Back Rickenbacker. I have no idea why his vocals sound like a mock imitation of Billy Corgan’s here. You can visit their MySpace Profile for more

2. Here is the music video for Fuck You Now by Julien’s other band, The Jean D’Ormesson Disco Suicide (feat. Dig Up Elvis). No, that’s not Julien in the video. You can visit their MySpace profile for more

"Fuck You Now" The Jean D'Ormesson's feat. Dig up Elvis

Add to My Profile More Videos

3. Here is Julien at the Marseille audition of Nouvelle Star. Watch out for “Funny Fishy Pussy Song” at the end.

4. Here is Julien being told that he has made it to the Nouvelle Star finals before being slobbered over by two brunettes and going home to find some friends coming out of the closet:

5. Here is Julien doing his take on Madonna’s Like a Virgin. Oh, the tease

6. Here is Julien performing (with lots of feeling Enrique Crying Face and all) Cristophe’s Les Mots Bleu. Has a touch of Michael Bolton-cheesiness to it but hey, it works.

7. In case you missed it the first time, here is where Julien did wonders with Alizee’s Moi Lolita

Nouvelle Star julien Moi Lolita
Uploaded by danielekar

8. Here is Julien performing I Put A Spell on You

PRIME8 JULIEN : I PUT A SPELL ON YOU
Uploaded by ronalda2

9. Here is Julien pushing Britney’s Hit Me Baby (One More Time) to hyper-ridiculousness.

Julien - Nouvelle Star 2007 - Baby one more time - prime 9
Uploaded by KLAHA_46

10. Here is Julien performing Dalida’s Mourir Sur Scene. So Cheesy, it’s good

Nouvelle Star Julien - Mourir sur scene
Uploaded by danielekar

10. Here Julien goes all cute with Sabine Paturel’s Les Betises

NOUVELLE STAR Julien Les betises
Uploaded by danielekar

11. Here is Julien performing Tainted Love

Julien Tainted Love
Uploaded by e-boueur

12. Here, Julien has obviously eaten the same seizure-inducing breakfast cereal favored by that dude from The Vines (remember them anyone?) (The Kinks – You Really Got Me)

Julien-nouvelle star you really got my
Uploaded by jolinar54

Here I am. There is no Julien. Bah!

Mid Year Music Hit List

2007-06-04T17:48:00.000+10:00

Yup, it’s that blessed, out-of-the-blue time of year again where I share a list of songs that have been burning a hole in my iPod lately from repeated plays………

1. The Eighth Sign of Ageing, Apparently

- Mi Par D’Udir Ancor performed by Enrico Caruso
- O Figli O Figli Miei performed by Enrico Caruso
- Una Furtiva Lagrima performed by Enrico Caruso

I recently admitted to a friend that my ideal weekend now would consist of curling up in bed with a cup of chai latte, listening to opera or watching it on SBS (Bless, your tiny budget, SBS). “OPERA?!!! OPERA??!! Dude, you are getting old,” was her response, “Funny, you of all people liking opera...” Why is that funny? Is it because I’ve shown such an affinity for trash culture? Well, opera’s kinda trashy to me, like glam rock – melodramatic, over the top, sorta wanky – what’s not to like?

2. Return of a Childhood Heroine (No, not She-Ra)

- Big Wheel by Tori Amos
- Teenage Hustling by Tori Amos
- You can bring Your Dog by Tori Amos
- Body and Soul by Tori Amos
- Code Red by Tori Amos
(all from her latest album, American Doll Posse)

I idolized this woman in my pre and early pubescent years although I have to admit, her last two studio albums prior to American Doll Posse, The Beekeeper & Scarlet’s Walk left me feeling like she had become a little pedestrian. But now she’s back in my (ears). Enjoyable songs aside, I’m really taken by the concept behind American Doll Posse. On it, Tori performs as five different female characters – all based on female characters from Greek mythology yet all essentially representing different aspects of her own personality. It’s a comment on how the world has a way of fragmenting and compartmentalizing women - from Greek Mythology to Sex and the City – you’re either a fighter or a lover; a virgin, a mother or a whore; Charlotte or Miranda; Paris or Hilary, hence you get dumbass articles like in the Gold Coast Bulletin (Feb 3-4 2007) asking young women whether they prefer to be Paris, who is meant to represent beauty or Hilary Clinton (brains). Oh and a note to Pussycat Dolls who call their brand of sexiness “female empowerment”, I’m sorry to tell you this, but that’s just skankiness – you could learn how to do it right from Tori. Still, several mainstream radio stations in the States refused to play Tori’s Big Wheel because of the lyrics “I am an M-I-L-F, don’t you forget.” Puritan cunts. No, hypocrites – they clearly have no problems playing Fergie rhyme about her lovely lady lumps and humps 178 times a day.

3. A Classic and A Persistent Issue

- A Change is Gonna Come by Sam Cooke

The sheer brilliance of the King of Soul, Sam Cooke’s 1964 song on racism hasn’t faded over the years. Unfortunately, neither has the issue. We’re lucky(?) enough for it to be more covert these days but I wouldn’t say it has faded.

3A. My, my, how Clever

- Disco Sheets by Wolf Parade

I want to clarify that I have nothing against “indie” music (although some of it is full of bull); it’s mostly the “indie” scene these days that make me want to wrinkle my nose and stick a gun up yours. Full of people enamored with their own (perceived) cleverness and (perceived) individuality but how indie is “indie” when all the “cool kids” (I use this term not without irony) are doing it now? Of course, I myself am enamored with my own (perceived) cleverness but it doesn’t mean I’m fond of other people who are; it’s kind of like how your own stink never smells as bad to you as someone else’s. Anyhow, KJ has been rabidly promoting her music-man-love-of-her-life-Canuck-of-the-Year, Spencer Krug (Kere and I like to call him The Crud) and his bands, Wolf Parade & Sunset Rubdown to anyone that will listen for some time now and well, she finally got me with this song. I think it has something to do with the element of electronic wankery. I’m a sucker for these things. I like beeps. And no KJ, I’m not a sucker for disco, I’m not a disco fan, please don’t use the word disco unless you’re referring to Saturday Night Fever or Donna Summers. Actually, I quite like Donna Summers. What? It’s Hot Stuff.

5. More Cleverness!

- Hang Me Up to Dry by Cold War Kids
- Hospital Beds by Cold War Kids
- We Used to Vacation by Cold War Kids
- Saint John by Cold War Kids
- a few new songs they played at their Brissie show (sorry, I didn’t catch the names)

More indie cleverness than you can shake a big clever stick at but these guys don’t seem so enamored with themselves and I think I might just be a fan. Went for their show at the Tivoli, Brisbane with KJ on Thursday night and for lack of a better superlative, it was fucking brilliant (note to The Walkmen: this is how you should perform live). It’s a shame I hadn’t slept for 48 hours prior to that and had two major assignments worth 50% each due in Uni the next day, one of which I hadn’t even started on. Takes the joy out of being at the show a bit, but hey, that’s not the band’s fault.

6.Enough with the Cleverness – Give me them 3-Chord Proto Punks Again!

- Down on the Street by Iggy & The Stooges
- No Fun by Iggy & The Stooges

No attempts at being clever, just raw and primal, all bullshit hence no bullshit. I think I’ve mentioned it on this blog before – I absolutely love Iggy & the Stooges, man. Every word that Iggy sings (at this phase in his career) speaks to me like nothing else can right now. Yes, “no fun to hang around, feeling that same old way, no fun to hang around, freaked out for another day” and “RRRRAWWWWRRRRRRR!!!!” pretty much sums up my life at the moment. Cheers!

7. For When It Rains

- Nickel Plated Man by Eleni Mandell
- My Twin by Eleni Mandell
- Pauline by Eleni Mandell
- Hearts a Mess by Gotye
- Seven Hours with a Backseat Driver by Gotye
- Thanks for Your Time by Gotye

I love Eleni Mandell’s sultry, alto voice. It works well with the slow-burn of Nickel Plated Man and the simple, steady (but driving?) bass of Pauline. It’s not music to shout about; it’s the kind of music that’s pleasant to listen to on a rainy Saturday afternoon, curled in an armchair, staring out the window with a hot drink in one hand, a cigarette in another and mull over whatever it is you need to mull over. Nels Cline (Wilco) and DJ Bonebrake joins in on the low-key New Orleans-style jazz of My Twin. The three songs by Gotye, from the album, Like Drawing Blood were recorded in a home studio. It’s essentially sample-based music/ audio collage – and I know what you’re thinking, sample based music + home studio usually ends up as flat as my chest not to mention repetitive and droning – kind of like hearing the sound your own head produces when you’re watching paint dry. These songs however, I’d be happy if my head produced it – songs for when a rainy Saturday afternoon transitions into a slightly chilly Saturday evening and you’re trying to slowly warm yourself up to the prospect of going out ………and then you realize you’d rather stay at home since all the clubs in the area play shit music.

8. Francophilia

- I’ll Kill Her by Soko
- Dame de Lotus by Emilie Simon

I’ll Kill Her sees Soko rallying against the chick her man dumps her for, is oddly cute despite the fact that she’s threatening homicide and oddly funny too – she sings in her cute, French accent, “All she’s got is blondeness….. She’s clever-less, she will dump your ass for a model called Brandon and you will pay for beautiful surgery…” As for Emilie Simon’s Dame de Lotus think: if Kylie had a love child with Bjork and raised the kid in France – well yeah, that’s what you get. Come to think of it, Soko’s voice sounds like Bjork’s talking voice. (Or maybe for some reason, it’s just me that’s hearing Bjork in everything right now).

9. It’s Only Glorified Karaoke, But I Like It (Francophilia 2)

- Moi Lolita performed by Julien Doré

An acquaintance once said that no self-respecting “real” music fan should be caught promoting contestants from a reality TV talent search/ glorified karaoke. Uh, if this is true then I guess I’m a self-disrespecting fake music fan since I’ve been caught (alive) promoting – Rock Star INXS’ JD, Rock Star Supernova’s Ryan Star & Josh Logan and Australian Idol’s Bobby Flynn. C'est pas ma faute; I was born that way. Now shut it you elitist tit and watch as I do it again:

Ladies & Gentlemen, all 3 of you, say hello to Julien Doré – contestant of the French version of Idol, Nouvelle Star

For lack of a more poignant phrase, I can only describe Julien’s version of Alizee’s Moi Lolita as fucking HOT, like, literally; my body temperature must have gone up by a Celsius or two which was surprising, considering the low opinion I had of the song previously. If you must know what the crappy Euro-pop original sounds like, you can go here. If you don’t, then you can hear me (well, read) rave a little bit more about Julien (not interested? I’m sure there’s a porn/Spencer Krug Appreciation Society/Supernatural site somewhere that needs visiting).. Btw, did you see the female judge giving Julien scary ‘come to mama, hubba-hubba, slurp, slurp’ looks? I don’t blame her. There’s something about a man with an actual MAN’s voice singing with feeling (one more time!) … I found myself doing the same thing during the performance…… until I realized I was essentially giving ‘come to mama’ looks to my laptop. Pfft. Man, is it just my own perception of things or are attractive guys from Continental Europe in their own category of attractive? This is not to say that they’re more attractive than other attractive dudes, they just seem to have their own idiosyncratic brand of it- the Sexxxay bitch brand of attractiveness and I mean sexy bitch with all respect. Hot is one thing, sexy bitch is another. Only sexy bitches can carry off wearing a hair barrette (oh, you heard right). Refer to Exhibit A below:

Did I mention that he can also play guitar, piano and…..the ukulele? Oh yeah, ukulele. That’s sexy. (Yah, yah, KJ, you’re going to mention Spencer and his accordion, I bet). Also, anything said in French is sexy, even if it’s “I have indigestion.”

10. Miscellaneous but Not Least (I’m Just Too Tired to Type Much More)

-Look at You by Screaming Trees
-House of the Rising Sun by the Animals
- Strange Fruit performed by Billie Holiday (and the Jeff Buckley version)
- Gotta Serve Somebody by Bob Dylan
- The Crystal Ship by The Doors
- I Put a Spell On You/ Feeling Good performed by Nina Simone
- Fight the Good Fight by Triumph (yes, one Double CheeseRock with pickles, please)
- Girl, You’ll be a Woman Soon performed by Urge Overkill
- Cowgirl in the Sand by Neil Young
- Rehab by Amy Winehouse
- Invincible by Ok Go
- What Goes Around Comes Around by Justin Timberlake (hahaha, yeah, yeah, despite the fact that I should hate the Mr.-Look-At-Me-I’m-So-Grown-Up-Now-I’m-A-Misogynist! on principle...well, I do hate him on principle but I like him on the fact that he uses a lot of beeps in his songs. I like beeps. You can go ahead and hit me over the head or you can just live with it. I have a soft spot for Britney too and I AM NOT ASHAMED)

Your Ass Looks Good in That Destiny

2007-06-02T15:39:00.000+10:00

READ HIS BUM AND TELL YOUR FUTURE – this was printed in bright pink on the cover of May’s Cleo magazine (Aussie edition). “Women’s” magazines, dear God. Do I really need to foresee my future on a guy’s bum? What is my promised “bright” future doing plastered on a guy’s bum where the sun don’t shine? Excuse me dude; get off your ass; that’s my future you’re sitting on! SCARILY ACCURATE METHODS THAT WILL UNLOCK YOUR DESTINY - THE FRUIT SOMEONE’S BUTT MOST RESEMBLES CAN REVEAL THEIR TRUE SELF! Oh, you have got to be kidding me with this scarily inane article. The only thing this article probably unlocked is the mental hospital cell of the fruitcake that wrote it. And if your butt reveals your true self, then it’s probably because you’re an ass. But alas, I did briefly look in the mirror to see what fruit my booty resembled and I couldn’t figure it out. The only fruit I had in my fridge to compare my butt to were strawberries and it isn’t on the article’s list of fruity butt shapes. So I ate the strawberries since it wasn’t going to tell me anything about my true self except for the fact that I really like strawberries……. Something I could’ve told you myself if you had only bothered to ask instead of just looking at my bum.

Along with the usual fashion and beauty features, other articles in this month’s Cleo include: “THE BITCH IS BACK”, “I BLEW $80,000 ON MY WEDDING…THEN WE SPLIT UP”, “C’MON ADMIT IT – YOU’VE THOUGHT ABOUT SLEEPING WITH A WOMAN”, “I HAD LIPO IN MY LUNCH HOUR!”, “GUYS, DO YOU JUDGE A GIRL BY WHAT SHE WEARS?” and “ONE NIGHT STANDS – WHAT HE’LL REALLY THINK OF YOU”.

Dear Cleo (and other “women’s” magazines), Instead of displaying a whole array of skinny jeans for this month’s fashion feature, why not be way fashion forward and feature fat genes. And if you’re going to feature the articles you do: “I STABBED THE BITCH IN THE BACK” “I BLEW $80,000 ON MY WEDDING..THEN I SPLIT THE BASTARD’S HEAD OPEN”, “C’MON ADMIT IT – THEY SAY YOU’RE A MAN-HATING LESBIAN FEMINIST BUT YOU’VE THOUGHT ABOUT SLEEPING WITH A MAN”, “I ACTUALLY ATE LUNCH IN MY LUNCH HOUR”, and “ONE NIGHT STANDS – WHAT HE’LL REALLY THINK, OH WHO CARES WHAT WHAT’S HIS NAME REALLY THINKS?” Sounds like a stupid idea? Wow, you don’t say…

Yeah, yeah, I’m fully aware that Cleo and its peers never made any promises about being an Academic Journal of Very Academic Stuff with Lots of Clever Things That Clever People Only Pretend to Get. But still, can’t one have one’s cake and eat one’s veggies too? The excuse is that they’re only giving their public what it wants, that the articles they publish are what interests most women. Yeah, alright, shoes, clothes, a little celebrity dish, a silly quiz – they’re great. Who wants their toilet reading to feel like a lecture from Germaine Greer anyhow? But if Playboy and Penthouse, publications essentially devoted to supplying men with pictures of women with their tits out can have articles that don’t surpass the maximum level on the stupidity meter, then I don’t see how these self-proclaimed “women’s” magazines can’t. And if you think men’s magazines are doing a bad job with their portrayal and treatment of women – “women’s” magazines, well – tell me, really, what is the point of asking Sienna Miller if she has “fat days” or Kirsten Dunst about what she thinks of Britney (instead of anything they’ve done or achieved) unless it’s to propagate and amplify the notion that females do nothing but look pretty and bitch about other people. Which we do, every once in a while. But we also have day jobs and hobbies and interests that extend far beyond that and sometimes, we’re bloody good at it.

What’s that? What’s that??! I’m a Femi-Nazi? Hey buddy, I just waxed my mustache this morning.

Elvis Has Left the Building .. So Who Does that Arm Belong To?

2007-05-17T18:31:00.000+10:00

Here is a good way to start a Sunday morning: You don’t. You sleep till noon and get up only to transport yourself to the living room couch.

Here is a less than ideal way to start a Sunday morning: You wake up to the sound of your frightened housemate yelling, “I’LL CALL THE COPS! I’M CALLING THE COPS!!!!!!! GET OUT!!! GET OUT!!!” Even worse, if you are my housemate, you wake up at six something in the morning to the sight of a strange arm poking through our kitchen window and you nearly choke on your toothbrush and super-whitening toothpaste in shock.

And I’m tucked in bed, in my room, sleeping. I had heard the knocks and the rustling of the blinds earlier but I figured it was just Z waking up way too early again and for a while, I considered getting up to tell her to stop moving so noisily – wear padded gloves and slippers or something and to please tell Mother Nature to move the position of the sun so I wouldn’t have to put up with it shining directly into my room every morning. But I figured it would just be easier to bury my head under two blankets, a pillow and think of all the sheep you could count in New Zealand. (The following story is of course, as told to me by Z).

“Who’s that?! What do you want?!!” Z yelled out to the strange arm, her own arm gripping a firm toothbrush. Don’t come any closer or I’ll brush the plaque out of your teeth, motherfucker she might have added.

A thief or a cat burglar might have instantly jerked his arm away at being detected but this Arm persisted in trying to reach our (locked) kitchen door knob. “I’m …..sch….sch…schtrying to gettshhh… in…uh….into…my house………I…uhm…schneedsh….your…your..

hh….helpsh…”

Funny, the last time we checked we only had two pairs of arms living in this unit. At this point, I don’t know whether Z opened the door or looked through the window but she caught a glimpse of the guy that came with the arm – he didn’t have a shirt on, his eyes were bloodshot and he was bleeding from a cut on his face. She had never seen him in her life. “This isn’t your house, dude, this is MY house. Go away!!”

“I……needshhhh…yerra……shhhhelpshh!” Mr. Arm slurred.

“My what?!”

“Yerra……….shhhelllpsh……your….a…a…a..assis…….tance…your help. I need…to…..uh……my house, get into my house.”

“Then what are you doing trying to get into mine?!”

“I…… uh.. can’t get … into my house…..Won’t you…you…help?”

“You can’t get into your house because you’re trying to get into mine. Dude, go away!!”

And Mr. Arm slurred something along the lines of balcony, of how he needed to get onto our balcony to get into his house. But of course, even if there was some magic portal on our balcony leading to strangers’ houses, he wouldn’t need to go through our house. There was a public access stairs (for everyone living in the building) to get up there… “I’m……I’m….uh...baaaaaaad.”

“You’re what?! You’re bad?!!!! I’m calling the cops!”

“No! No!” said Mr. Arm, “I’m…..baaaad….uh…I’m M*****…real….real estate…agent……I….I’m….yerra…neigh..bour. I.. live… downstairs..”

Wait a minute, he’s a bad real estate agent called M****** and he lives downstairs? “If you live downstairs then what are you doing trying to get into my house? Go downstairs, use the stairs, this is my house- you live downstairs!”

“But…but…I’m …….balcony..”

“Are you drunk?” Z asked.

“Yesssh….” Mr. Arm slurred and then suddenly perked up and boomed, “NO! I’m not….sh…drunk..yessh…no…yessh…NO!”

Ok, probably just crazy then. “Go away or I’m calling the cops.”

“Fine, no, fine, no I”LL CALL THE COPSH!!!” declared Mr. Arm and then at someone else (possibly invisible), he yelled, “Call the cops! Call the cops! Call the cops!!!!!!!!!!!!”

This was when I came bursting out of my room, “What’s going on?” Zher and I stood huddled in the living room as we watched the silhouette of Mr. Arm/ Mr. Bad Real Estate Agent/ M***** still standing outside our kitchen window. We discussed calling an adult until we realized wait a minute, don’t we qualify as adults? Oh, shit……

Mr. Arm disappeared from our kitchen window and we thought we had seen the last of him until I heard him coming up the stairs which led to our balcony. Thankfully- he headed for the unit next to ours – A** the rocker, guitar-player single mom and to our surprise, she let him in.

So here’s the story according to A** - Mr. Arm is really called M*****. He’s not a real estate agent but he does live downstairs. Despite his proclamations of being “bad”, A** insists that he’s “usually such a nice, sweet, quiet boy” who helped her a lot while she was going through her divorce. Apparently, he had meant to say “I’m feeling bad” because yes indeed, he had waaay too much to drink after getting into a fight with his big brother (who he lives with). “He’s just drunk, girls,” A** assured us, “He really is usually a sweet boy..”

And so the neighbours say about most serial killers.

Later in the day, the girlfriend of Mr. Arm’s brother, S** came to apologize on his behalf (Mr. Arm was still passed out on A**’s couch). “Oh god, I’m so sorry, some people just can’t handle their drinks.” They had even left the door open for him. Apparently, this wasn’t the first time Mr. Arm had spooked the neighbours and embarrassed himself while drunk. At their last place, he had accidentally crawled into the neighbor’s apartment and passed out on their couch.

That must have been a less than ideal way to start a Sunday morning: Waking up to a drunken stranger passed out and taking up all the space on your living room couch.

And he wasn’t even cute.

Ha..ha…ha…

Consuming & Giving

2007-05-11T19:45:00.000+10:00

I started out today with only one simple objective in mind: to go for a nice, leisurely swim. And I did. Unfortunately, the pool complex was right across the street from a shopping complex. As I was leaving the pool complex with every intention of heading straight home, my body became possessed by the spirit of consumerism and I soon found myself standing at a cash register, debit card in hand, the proud new owner of things I never meant to get (just yet). My mind, no doubt in cahoots with that vile cash-sucking spirit tried to justify my purchases in a multitude of ways.

5 new novels? I know what you’re thinking, said my mind, where are you going to find the time to read them when you haven’t even gotten through all your required reading for Uni? But who cares? They’re books! Books are never a waste of money. Books contain knowledge, knowledge is POWER. You like power, don’t you? Sweet little megalomaniac, you……

No, I said, if Foucault is to be believed, knowledge is not power, power is knowledge.

Foucault is a cunt! spat my mind, besides, it’s not like you even properly read through his work – you just had Z practice her presentation on Foucault on you over and over again.

I read through Foucault’s Discipline & Punish, thank you very much, I said indignantly.

My mind sniggered, really? How come I don’t remember that?

Well, how do you justify me buying a new pair of jeans, then?

Easy, said my mind, how many strangers have you flashed your butt-crack to in the past week? What are your hands doing right now? Holding up your old pair of jeans, eh?

And two workout tanks?

Well, doh, how else are you going to fit into that new pair of jeans five months down the line?

But the two new pairs of bras and undies have got to be ridiculous right?

You, not wearing a bra is ridiculous. Your boobs are sagging and your friends are tired of your nips saying hello! I can’t believe you only have one functioning bra in your closet before. An 11 year old owns more bras than you do.

That’s because we live in an over-sexualized society. Just take a look at toys aimed at young girls these days – Barbies, Bratz dolls, even a toy pony is not spared from having physical signals of female sexual behavior – My Little Pony’s G3s has its accentuated rump up in the air, bedroom eyes, long legs and don’t forget lips parted like a porn star – and it’s aimed at ages 3-12! We live in a society where girls are under pressure to move from being cute to sexy all too soon. Why else would an 11 year old girl feel such need to wear a bra, just like mom and big sis?

Well, you have to take into account that not all girls bloom as late as you do. Just because you didn’t grow boobs until you were 18, doesn’t mean everyone else didn’t. Besides, you’re 21 now, not friggin 12 although by the pitiful size of your chest lately, you might be forgiven for thinking you’re still 12.

Oh, shut up, I said. You’re detracting from the issue here.

No, YOU’RE straying from the issue. The issue is you need to get a new tube of mascara. And throw that lip-plumping lipgloss in the bag too. Why? Cause you’re ugly and you should take all the help you can get.

Oi! Didn’t you get the memo, dear mind, that I don’t speak to myself in such a negative manner anymore? It’s called the law of attraction. Apparently, it’s a secret and it’s some self-help schmaltz that’s supposed to change your miserable life for the better. Actually, it’s not just a secret it’s The Secret. Except it was on Oprah so I really don’t know how much of a secret it is anymore.

Yeah, I got the memo. Didn’t you get mine? It’s the one with

Re: You’re Still Ugly – HAHA. Oh, don’t forget those eye masks. You look a little post coke-binge/party Lindsay Lohan under the eyes. And when you get home, don’t forget to download Tori Amos’ new album from iTunes. And…………

“Excuse me, Miss, could you spare us a little bit of your time?” asked a young man wearing a UNHCR t-shirt, standing at a United Nations Refugee Agency Booth they had set up in the middle of the shopping center, in the midst of all that spending, excess, convenience and mindless consumerism. He had cornered me on my way to buying a pack of cigarettes.

I looked at the time and saw that I didn’t need to know it. I had no classes to attend, no plans, no responsibility to be anywhere else. All I had were my swipe-weary EFTPOS & Visa Debit Card and instead of the weight and the fate of the world on my shoulders, I had six shopping bags of things that went beyond necessity. How’s that for a charmed life I don’t appreciate enough? Yeah, sure, I said to the UNHCR guy.

He pointed to a poster of Saint Angelina Jolie at a refugee camp.

Uhm, uhm, I nodded. I’m not much for celebrity endorsements. Oh yes you do, a dress in my wardrobe called to say, you bought me just last week because you thought I looked like a dress that Kate Moss might wear to Glastonbury.

UNHCR guy talked of the crisis in Darfur and showed me a photo of a sprawling refugee camp in Chad. “As big as a city, isn’t it?” he said, “Except in this city, there are no 7 Eleven, no….” he glanced down at my bags, “No, Jeans West, no Bras N Things…err…yes… shopping for Mother’s Day, are we?”

I hung my head. Not even. All for me. Me Me Me. I don’t mean to get all schmaltzy faux bleeding heart on you but here I am, silly me, worrying about not having anything to wear to go running in. At least I’m not forced to run from my own country. I run 10 kilometers 5 times a week out of sheer vanity, bitching about how my thighs won’t shrink and wondering if that cone of White Chocolate Gelato or extra Grande cup of Starbucks Soy Chai Latte would fit into my calorie allowance for the day. All while fellow human beings run 300 km away from home, not to fit into that idiotically tight but very vogue pair of jeans but for their lives, stomachs shrinking with hunger.

“No, no, I’m not trying to lay a guilt trip on you. It’s alright to shop, heck, I’m going shopping in a while. Haha. But think about it, it just takes a contribution of 80 cents, only 80 cents a day to assist 2 families or only one dollar a day to help 500 lives, 500.” said the UNHCR guy.

But you’re no Hollywood superstar Angelina Jolie, you’re a broke student, one half of my mind said. Then I glanced down at my six shopping bags of frivolous things – this is what got me broke, nothing at all to do with my life circumstances. How much do I spend on a pack of cigarettes? 10 bucks for every 1-2 days? That’s 5 bucks a day. How much is a latte? 4.70? At one point in my life, did I not spend 50 – 100 bucks a week/a month on getting high? And if I were to be honest, it didn’t even help make my own life, my one, single, me me me life better.

So I ended my Friday with committing 25 dollars a month to UNHCR relief efforts. Just two less packs of cigarettes to smoke a month and you help two whole families and not to mention yourself. Funny, isn’t it, all the riches you think you don’t have?

For more information on UNHCR and how you can help, please visit http://unrefugees.org.au

--------------

*Note: Karma, I believe in karma! As I was walking back home from the bus stop, I dropped one of my shopping bags with a 100 dollars worth of items on the side of the street and didn’t realize it until I had been home for awhile. Running back out to look for it, I was pessimistic about actually finding the thing - previous experience taught me that someone would have either made off with the loot or kicked it into the drain for it to be washed away into the sewers. What I found instead was someone had picked it up, carefully folded it and placed it on the fence of the house that I had dropped it by. Hurrah!

300 Men in their Underwear

2007-05-04T13:04:00.000+10:00

2003ART PRODUCING CULTURE
ACADEMIC RESEARCH ESSAY:
(Lack-a-demic research essay draft)
MAKING SENSE of the 300 CONTROVERSY
(Working title: 300 Men in their Underwear Spouting Rubbish and Why Not Every Homo-Erotic Repressed Conservative Fantasy Deserves to be Made into a Movie)
by Maryam B - Undereducated Undergraduate © 2007 Maryam A. B. All Rights Reserved. All Wrongs Deserved.
----------------------------------------

300 is essentially the story of the 300 Spartan soldiers who fought against the one million-strong army of the Persian Empire at the famous Battle of Thermopylae (300 is essentially a stylish montage of 300+ buff, shiny men in their underwear plus a few naked ladies plucked out of a Lancome Hydra-Zen moisturizer ad in an attempt to stupefy audiences into not noticing that there really isn't much of a story because the filmmakers are too busy sourcing for ridiculous amounts of baby oil to slather all over Gerard Butler, leaving no time to work on a decent script) But more than just being yet another simple-minded action movie , it has been accused of being not only an analogy for a current-day conflict – the “War on Terror” but also propaganda for the Neo-Conservative Bush Administration. The Iranian government which has come under heavy criticism by the United States and its allies recently, released a statement saying that the movie is aimed at “humiliating Iranians”, the descendants of the ancient Persians and it is “part of a comprehensive US psychological warfare aimed at Iranian culture”(in Thomas, 26/3/2007). Using the theories of Edward Said, Roland Barthes and Jean Baudrillard, this paper intends to examine the current political climate and culture we live in and how it may affect our sense-making practices, particularly the way in which we make sense of the 300 before attempting to answer the question of whether the film could be said to be analogy and propaganda for the “War on Terror” (or rather, this paper intends to not let the precious AU$11 & 2 hours of my life I spent on watching the movie be wasted in vain. By using the movie as the subject of my term paper, at least I can tell myself that it was all for academic research purposes and not because like a dolt, I was once again duped by the media hype and publicity fanfare and that I have a pathological weakness for beautifully sculpted men in their underwear with their very big uhm... swords waving Hello!)

The ways in which we make sense of things are not a natural part of reality – it is not biological or fixed but rather changes with time and culture (McKee 2003). In analyzing the 300 and the controversy that followed, one must first take note of the time of its release. Perhaps, in a different time, under a different political climate, the 300 might just be viewed upon as being just another silly movie but the world is currently suffering the effects of September 11 and the political and militaristic disorder that followed. These events have arguably, contributed to and intensified the culture of fear, paranoia and great distrust of the other and this has no doubt influenced the way in which people interpret and make sense of the 300.

In the 300, many would agree that the Persians are portrayed to be “the forces of evil: dark-skinned, depraved and determined to terrorize the West” (Thomas 26/3/2007). The soldiers of the Persian army are made out to be slaves in service of a tyrannical, megalomaniac king and look more like grotesque monsters than human and is said to have “no souls” thus removing the audience from any sense of universal human kinship and sympathy towards them. Of course, the story of 300 is told from the viewpoint of a Spartan soldier about to go into battle against the invading Persians – under these circumstances, one would hardly expect him to say anything to the contrary. The interesting question is, why would the modern-day, non-Spartan makers of the 300 choose to tell the story solely through the viewpoint of a Spartan soldier? (Yah, yah, because it's based on a Frank Miller graphic novel. I'll get to that in a while.)

In opposition to the Persians from the East, the Spartans, as part of the Ancient Greek civilization that makes up the foundation for modern-day Western civilization are portrayed to be “noble” and “possess a fierce love of liberty” (Thomas, 26/3/2007) and the character of Spartan King Leonidas (played by good ol' Gerard Butler) never tires of reminding us just how much the Spartans honor and cherish their freedom (in fact, I think it was the only thing he talked about in the film. Unless you count "GRRRROOAAARRR" which might just be code for "Give me that bottle of baby oil for free, Johnson's-bitch") “We are free men here,” he says to a Persian envoy; “Your men (Persian King Xerxes’ army) fight as slaves, they (Spartans) fight as free men”; “we are fighting for freedom” and “we are fighting against the forces of tyranny and mysticism” he says of their cause and the character of his wife echoes this sentiment by saying that, “Freedom is not free” while trying to convince Sparta’s ruling elite to send more troops into battle. This rhetoric and justification eerily echoes that of the Bush administration on the increasingly unpopular war in Iraq and has also been used to garner support for the possibility of military action against Iran. “Freedom and fear are at war,” US President George W. Bush had said (cited in Poynting, 2004) and his administration has been pushing for a move to increase troop numbers. And just as the Homoioi were reluctant to send more troops, so too is the Democrat-controlled US congress to Bush’s plan for troop increase (CNN 11/4/2007).

Here, we will begin to note that the dichotomy between the freedom-loving, democratic, humanistic, civilized, rational West and evil, totalitarian, terroristic, barbaric, mystical East clearly evident in the 300 relates greatly to Edward Said’s work on Orientalism and the cultural stereotyping and vilification of the other (the non-Western world) that has occurred from it (Said 1985). Said wrote that the idea of “the Orient has helped define the West as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience”. While Said is unable to pinpoint the exact origin or point of departure of the Orientalist project, he has noted that its history goes back a long way in time and is a result of a long-standing relationship of power, domination and of “varying degrees of a complex hegemony” between the East and West (1985: 5). In this light, it can be said that the dehumanization and extreme-vilification of the Persians in the 300 did not merely arise from the events of September 11 but rather a testament to the stronghold and lasting power this particular discourse has had over our culture by which it has affected the way we perceive and make sense of our current situation. Said then also notes that film and television has reinforced the stereotypes by which the Orient is viewed; particularly by how the “Middle East” and its people are viewed – “oversexed degenerates, capable of cleverly devious intrigues but essentially, sadistic, treacherous and low” (1985: 287) Said uses a Rudolph Valentino movie from the 1920s (ibid.) as an example and we see this image still being reproduced over eighty years on in the 300 - King Leonidas is shown as having a loving physical and emotional relationship with his wife, while Xerxes’ chamber, consistent with the stereotype of the Oriental as an “oversexed degenerate” resembles a seedy, underground S&M parlour that is host to orgies and other acts which might constitute as “sexual deviance” in conservative circles (on second thought, it actually looks like Pussycat Dolls music video. Oooh, don't cha wish your great King was a freak like me, don't cha wish your Great King was raw like me, ooh don't cha?). The Spartans preferred to fight with their sword and sheer physical strength and this is portrayed as the ultimate in valour and manliness while the Persians relied heavily on archers - in another war film, one that probably does not concern a struggle between East and West, the use of archers might instead be viewed as a sign of tactical genius or a technologically advanced society – but in 300, it is portrayed as devious and cowardly.

Now let us examine one of the final images of the 300 using a semiotic approach– King Leonidas dies bravely at the Battle of Thermopylae and his bloodied body is shown at the center of the camera frame, arms spread out to his side so that his body forms a T-shape and the camera is angled in such a way that Leonidas’ body seems vertically hung across an invisible crucifix rather than lying horizontally on the ground. Barthes and Saussure agree that sign systems are based on a signifier, the thing doing the work of representation and the signified, the thing/concept represented (in Smith, 2001). The signifier here is a lifeless body with arms spread out. If one lived in isolation and is wholly unaware of Christianity then this image might just be that of a lifeless body but for most of us, this image seems to share an uncanny resemblance to religious art depicting the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, hence the concept represented here (or the signified) is that of Christianity. The fact that the Spartans were not Christians and Battle of Thermopylae took place 481 years Before Christ (de Souza, 2003) makes the inclusion of this image in the film a seemingly baffling choice indeed (also, wasn't Sparta a warrior society? I doubt the King of a warrior society would be, like Jesus, telling his people to "turn the other cheek". Yah, turning the other cheek works great in battle because you always want your opponent to behead you on your best side, no?) but Barthes explains that in the semiotic analysis of culture, sign systems build upon themselves and have many layers (in Smith 2001). Hence, the signified image of Jesus Christ’ crucifixion now becomes the signifier for the Orientalist discourse of the other; that “we know them only through disorder and opposition: non-white, non-Western, non-civilized and non-Christian” (Isakhan 2005). The “War on Terror” arguably, comes off as having religious undertones – we have “Islamic extremists” fiery denunciations of “the Christian Infidels of the West” and while US President George W. Bush has said that the war on terror is not a war against Muslims, he has gone on to use choice words such as “crusade” in describing the war – a word which means nothing more than a campaign, a movement, a struggle but to many, it signifies a historical clash between Christianity and Islam – the Holy Crusades. Hence, the image of King Leonidas’ body toward the end of the 300 might go on to signify to some that the film is less an account of the Battle of Thermopylae but is further proof that it is an analogy of the current ‘War on Terror’. In Mythologies, Barthes suggests the need to combine the abstract study of semiotics with a more sociological approach that will allow us to “connect a mythical schema to a general history, to explain how it corresponds to the interests of a definite society” (cited in Smith, 2001). He suggests that myth works to justify or naturalize the existing social order (in Smith, 2001). Barthes defines an existing social order as always bourgeois (in Smith, 2001) but could we perhaps say that the myth discussed here work towards justifying or naturalizing an existing social order of Western dominance and the superiority of its values? After all, Orientalism is “the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient (or the East) by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it – a Western style for dominating, restructuring and having authority over the Orient” (Said 1985; 1-3) Critics have lambasted the 300 for being historically inaccurate (CNN 27/3/2007) (among other things) but in all fairness, 300 has never made any claim to being a truthful historical replication of the Battle of Thermopylae; instead it is an adaptation of a graphic novel by Frank Miller and Lynn Varley that is a willed hallucination of ancient history. But then this would be consistent of Said’s argument that Orientalism is not an inert fact of nature but “a kind of willed human work” (1985: 15). The historical inaccuracies within the 300 can also be said to be further proof that the film is an analogy for the “War on Terror” (although others might argue that Miller’s graphic novel was written long before the events of September 11). But what matters is that it can be easily seen as such and thus the following part of the analysis will be conducted based on this assumption.

From an aesthetic aspect, the 300’s visual pacing and flourishes “seem intended to mimic the sensation of reading a graphic novel” (Seymour 9/3/2007) although one may also say that it has the look (and the substance or lack of) of a very stylish video game (what I'd really like to see is a movie that resembles old-skool Pac Man) rather than a historical epic which tends to use real landscapes, on-set locations, elements of photo realism to give the viewers a sense of this actually happened. 300 was filmed in a virtual studio in Montreal and the film’s backdrop was later filled in with what is obviously, highly-stylized computer generated images hence, “when the audience cheers one particularly aesthetic decapitation it's because it's not quite the same thing as watching an Iraqi execution video” (Charity, 9/3/2007). Because of this, fans of the 300 might argue that because it is quite obviously just a fictional movie which provides us with a sense of escapism, it should be spared from ideological criticism and be rubbed in the mud of politics and the “War on Terror” – Newsday reviewer Gene Seymour wrote that the 300 is “just too darned silly to withstand any ideological theorizing” (9/3/2007). (ah, but Mr. Seymour is probably too darned silly and lazy to do any ideological theorizing. I don't blame him, who can think when you have Gerard Butler's big sword waving in front of your pocket letter opener? But alas, in uni they teach you that no text is innocent and the dumber the text, the more fun it is to analyze and then they go ahead and rob you of a life and all sense of humour so that you will have nothing else to do/think about but the wider socio-political implications of Britney without panties instead of merely going "ooohh....waxed Va-jay-jay") Here is where we bring in Baudrillard’s theory on Simulacra and Simulation in which he wrote that the second and third phase of the simulated image is “it masks and perverts a basic reality” and “it masks the absence of a basic reality” (1988). Baudrillard uses Disneyland as an example - it is presented as an imaginary world but all of the American values are exalted here in miniature and comic-strip form – he concludes that it is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest of America, which has become a simulation in itself is real (1988). The same concept/principle might be applied to a film such as 300. There is no doubt that in recent times, journalism and journalists have been facing the worst press that they have ever had with “journalists rating with used car salesmen in surveys of public perception of honesty” (Burns 2000: 23) and news reports on the “War on Terror” met with a great amount of skepticism from the public with Fox News in particular being accused of being propaganda mouthpiece for the Bush administration (BBC News: 27/1/2005 & BBC News: 26/8/2003) Could we then consider the possibility that the presentation of war, violence and the other in movies such as 300 as silly, entirely imaginary and comic book-like is in order to make us believe that the portrayal of war, violence and the Oriental other we see on the news is real?

If this is the case, then it’s easy to see how a film like 300 could work in gaining favour for the Bush administration’s military and political endeavours in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as their strong stance against Iran. But a conspiracy theory that 300 is propaganda for the Bush administration and that they somehow have had a direct hand in the making of this film needs to be further questioned. This paper has already discussed the 300 as an example of an Orientalist text and in attempting to answer this question, Said’s words might once again come in useful – “Orientalism is a discourse that is by no means in direct corresponding relationship with political power in the raw but rather is produced in an uneven exchange with various kinds of power, shaped to a degree by the exchange with power political but also power intellectual, power cultural and power moral” (1985: 12). Frank Miller’s graphic novel, on which the film is based on, was first published in 1998 – two years before George W. Bush became President of the United States and thus we could say that the notions put forth in the 300 was influenced by a dynamic exchange of decentralized power, an exchange that precedes and exceeds the time of Bush’s presidency.

To conclude, let us consider the effect that the 300 could have on society? It might be ingenuous to assign the media so much power as to say that if the media broadcasts a certain message, then that is what everyone will start to think (McKee 2003). “The media texts; like the sense making practices of individuals, have to work within the practices (or culture) that already exist” (McKee 2003: 46). But the media is indeed, “central in reproducing dominant cultural frames” and assists greatly in “generating a kind of ‘common sense’ of the world which naturalizes that reality and the relations of power which structure it” (Couldry 2000 cited in Poynting 2004: 14). And because “how we make sense of other people is important to how we treat them”, the reproduction of the Orientalist cultural framework in the 300 and the furor and debate that followed shows that in times such as the one we live in, a bloody movie with ‘soulless Persian monsters’ will only add fuel to a culture already fraught with fear, paranoia and great distrust of the other (and a shortage of baby oil and body hair wax for the rest of the world)

(Also, by sticking this incredibly snore-worthy paper up on my blog, I hope to give a clear example as to what it is I really study in Uni for the benefit of every friend, relative and random stranger that asks me repeatedly, with one raised eyebrow nonetheless, "What the hell is Communication & Media Studies exactly? Do you like, learn to communicate with people and watch a lot of TV? It's just a whole lot of rubbish isn't it? What can you do when you graduate?" Well, I can't perform brain surgery, that's for sure although I might be tempted to attempt one on you, one of these days...... right before I start my shift at McDonald's)

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Bibliography

(27/1/2005). Fox News Propaganda Says Mogul. BBC News. Retrieved April 12, 2007 from BBC News, Web site: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/tv_and_radio/4211395.stm

(26/8/2003). Fox Drops ‘Fair & Balanced’ Fight. BBC News. Retrieved April 12, 2007 from BBC News Web Site: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/3181983.stm

(27/3/2007). Greek Critics Rip 300 but Audiences Love It. CNN. Retrieved April 12, 2007 from CNN web site: http://www.cnn.com/2007/SHOWBIZ/Movies/03/27/film.greece.300.ap/index.html

(11/4/2007). McCain Calls War Necessary & Just. CNN. Retrieved April 12, 2007 from CNN web site: http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/04/11/mccain.iraq.ap/index.html

Baudrillard, J. (1988) Selected Writings, ed. Poster, M. Stanford; Stanford University Press pp.166-184. Retrieved April 11^th, 2007 from: http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/Baudrillard/Baudrillard_Simulacra.html

Burns, L.S. (2000). Chapter 2: Comfort or Curse? In Journalism Theory in Practice, ed. Tapsall, S., & Varley, C. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Charity, T. (9/3/2007). Review: 300 Far from Perfect. CNN.com. Retrieved April 10, 2007 from CNN.com, Web site: http://http://www.cnn.com/2007/SHOWBIZ/Movies/03/09/review.300/index.html

De Souza, P. (2003). Greek & Persian Wars 499-286 BC. London: Fitzroy Dearborn.

Isakhan, B. (2005) Re-ordering Iraq: Minorities & the Media in times of Disorder. Retrieved from: http://www.media-culture.org.au

McKee, A. (2003) Does it Really Matter How People Make Sense of the World? In Textual Analysis: A Beginner’s Guide. London: Sage pp. 34-62

Miller, F. & Varley, L. (1999) 300. Dark Horse.

Poynting, S., Noble, G., Tabar, P., & Collins, J. (2004). Chapter 1: The Arab Other. In Bin Laden in the Suburbs: Criminalising the Arab Other. Sydney: Sydney Institute of Criminology Series.

Said, E. (1985) Orientalism. London: Penguin

Seymour, G. (9/3/2007) On the Field of this Battle War is Swell. In Newsday.

Smith, P. (2001). Structuralism and the Semiotic Analysis of Culture. In Cultural Theory: An Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers pp. 97-116.

Snyder, Z. (2007). 300. Warner Bros.

Thomas, E. (26/3/2007) The Few The Proud The Movie. In Newsweek.

PRESSed for Time

2007-04-27T22:46:00.000+10:00

Wow, wow, wow – hasn’t it been a long time since you last heard anything from me? Fear not, all 2.5 readers of my blog, I’m still alive and relatively well despite the fact that I’m covered with tons of bumps and bruises and a shitload of assignments. You know, I had so much brilliant, fascinating, witty stuff to say since my last blog entry but absolutely no time to write down that I’ve forgotten it all. Oh well, my genius will have to be revealed for 0.0000042% of the world to appreciate some other time, eh?

One: Conversations with an Envious Self

The newsreader on TV said, “And finally, some good news about our continuing water crisis and traffic woes… Due to the drought, construction work for the (I can’t remember its name) tunnel (in Brisbane) is six months ahead of schedule (while the construction of a water pipeline is over six months late). The tunnel will help ease traffic congestion………..”

Wonderful. What the hell is wrong with the press? Who needs water when you have a tunnel? Because we all know basic human needs must be met first before we can aspire to the vain trappings of “civilization” such as water. Yes – air, food, shelter, sex and ‘tunnel’.

Speaking of basic human needs, I must say, the search for a new place to stay brought out the good, the worst and the Martha Stewart in me. Anyway, I sold out and went for the sucker-like/touristy option of getting a place at Surfer’s Paradise and I love it.

(The Room Where No Magic Happens But Still Pimp, eh?)

(The View from the Balcony)

It’s 10 minutes walk to the beach and close to everything; it’s a nice change from living in Labrador – instead of rolling out of bed and feeling like I’d rather roll right into a grave then live here another day, now I start my mornings by taking a walk/jog along the beach and thinking that damn, I’m so jealous of myself right now… “I live by the beach, nyeh-nyeh-nyeh-nyeh-nyeh-nyeh – where do you live, sucker?” I smugly said to myself and myself replied, “In your body, unfortunately.” Yeah, that sucks. As I was trying to jog in the sand (although to the casual observer, it might seem like I was a crawling sea turtle), I tried to motivate myself by thinking, “Brazilian Beach Babe Butt, Brazilian Beach Babe Butt, Brazilian Beach Babe Butt” but Myself replied, “Bagel Bakery Beef Burger Baloney Blisters Bullshit Bitch Bloody Bastard Bugger Bangang Bahlol Babi I’m dying here ……can’t……… breathe…………eckh…cough……quit… smo-cough….splat………Nee-Naw Nee-Naw Nee-Naw.....clear…tooooooooooot….” I can’t believe that I, the Chief Executive of Kaki Bangku Couch Potato Federation of the World and President of My-Old-Gym-Membership-Was-As-Utilized-As-Tits-On-A-Man-Club, am saying this but I think I’m beginning to understand why people get hooked on exercise. All those happy happy endorphins being released in the brain; it really is a rush……… except when you’re bypassed by an 80 year old springing like a gazelle on speed – now that’s just a blow to your ego.

Two: Paris Hilton & Press Freedom

Every week, 99.8% of my journalism class goes on a tirade about how Paris Hilton is evil and how she should be banned from being mentioned in the media. And these are the very people who five minutes earlier were going on and on and on and on and oh my god still on and on about press freedom and how inflammatory cartoons in the press are fine in the name of “freedom of speech” and yet now they’re saying that Paris Hilton should be banned from the media spotlight because it’s beneath them, an insult to their superior intellectual capacity? Hey mate, if you really have better things on your mind than Paris Hilton, why is it that every class discussion we have seem to end up being about Paris Hilton? “I think Paris Hilton is a despicable, disgusting human being,” said one girl wearing a dress Paris would be proud of, “I won’t let my children be exposed to Paris Hilton! I don’t want them turning into bimbos.” Well geez lady, if you don’t want your children turning into bimbos, then you better not have and raise any. “These tabloid journalists, they’re not real journalists. Writing about Paris isn’t journalism.” Then apparently, neither is talking about her. Snigger. Snigger. And yet, here you are still talking about her. See you at the Hello office this time next year, eh?

Of course, I will agree that I don’t want to hear about a celebrity breaking up with so and so while watching the evening news. There’s a time and place for these things and it is called Pink is the New Blog (which alas, alas, I occasionally frequent). When evening news reports about an entire tsunami-devastated community in need of urgent aid is swiftly followed by reports of Prince William’s break-up with his girlfriend/ Nicole Kidman & Keith Urban going to the Easter Fair, you start to wonder……. If you take the Prince and the name Nicole Kidman & Keith Urban out of the picture, you’re left with: Rescue workers combed the remote coastline of the northern Solomon Islands on Tuesday, trying to rescue victims of two powerful earthquakes and a tsunami that destroyed at least 20 villages, according to local police. The first boatloads of international aid have reached survivors of but officials warn of a dire food shortage and health risks if supplies don't quickly get to hundreds of people camped on hillsides and elsewhere, a twenty something bloke dumped his girlfriend. Plus, a woman and her husband attend an Easter Fair.

Three: A Kayak, A Surfboard, A Tan Covered by a Whole Lot of Bruises

In other news (hahahaha, geddit? Geddit?) I went off to Byron Bay with KJ and her friends last weekend and went on a kayak tour (again). With the company that provides us with Tim Tams. Got to go with the company that feeds you Tim Tams. Those cheap chocolate wafers are bloody amazing; I couldn’t give a shit that we didn’t get to see any dolphins this time around. Saw Flipper & friends the last time I went kayaking in Byron. Here is picture of KJ and I at the start of our kayaking expedition, right before the waves overturned us a couple of dozen times:

Oh yeah, laugh at those red helmets now – soon everyone will be wearing a red helmet. Didn’t you hear? Red helmet is the new black. And it was probably the very thing that saved my head from being split open. The waves dumped the very solid kayak on my head a few times. Alas, alas, no one handed me a helmet when I tried getting on a surfboard for the first time. Good fun but absolutely disastrous as my instructor/sister KJ will attest. Why God? Why did you place upon me the burden of having absolutely no balance? If you happened to be in Byron last weekend and you saw a chick being dragged around the water by her right ankle by a surfboard, yeah that was me. Anyway, woke up Monday morning with what I think was a mean tan but I couldn’t tell for certain since it was covered by a layer of black, blue and purple bruises. There’s a huge, painful, swollen lump on my lower back that prevents me from doing all sorts of important things – like lying down and watching TV. Gnarly, dude. Seriously, gnarly. It was great fun though and I would do it again…..if I manage to walk again. I tried to get on a surfboard and all I got was paralysis. (Ok, ok, I shouldn’t make jokes about paralysis)
Anyway, I'm a bit annoyed that everytime I seem to be enjoying myself, someone says, "Don't you have work to do? You comm. students have it real easy......." It's not all sun, sea and sand. I have work but I make time to play. It's called time management, you asswipes. Gah, don't mind me. I'm just bitching because my back hurts and I'm creaking all over. Speaking of work, I have to get back (ouch!) to it. You know how they say those who fail to plan, plan to fail. Well uh, those who fail probably didn't stick to the plan. Will be back with something more insightful and coherent someday. Eventually. Hopefully.

Back to the Gold Coast - Daily Notes - Collection II

2007-03-13T04:01:00.000+10:00

Friday, 2^nd March 2007

NIGHTISH – KJ came down from Gladstone. We caught a screening of Guillermo Del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth. Think a darker, Alice in Wonderland for grown-ups. Enthralling.

Saturday, 3^rd March 2007

MORNING – Inspected the “2 bedroom fully furnished unit for rent” in Southport which was really the converted 2-car garage of a family home (with the family living in it). The ad said “a short walk to uni” but what it meant was “a kilometer long walk to uni across a darkened, forest-y/bush area where hoods and predators may hide in the shadows and jump you at any given moment.” And there wasn’t a bus stop nearby. And one of the first things you see is a sign that says “NO SMOKING OR RISK IMMEDIATE EVICTION” followed by a framed poster of Donald Duck on the wall along with Donald Duck sheets and a skinny iron bed that looked right out of a correctional facility. I refuse to live in a suburban garage shrine to Donald Duck. A non-smoking one at that! Didn’t Donald smoke a pipe?

***********

REST OF THE DAY – Attended St. Jerome’s Laneway Festival in Brissie with KJ. I know I said being stuck at a music festival with all the sneering indie-hipster kids in their floppy hair, thick framed glasses, skinny jeans and i-haven’t-bought-a-new-dress-since-I-was-9 glory was my worst nightmare but KJ paid for the tickets. I’m a grateful free-loader. Lots of drunk, underage-looking kids running around with red plastic cups and Jack Daniels cans with bits of cookie in their hair. Caught Youth Group, The Walkmen, The Sleepy Jackson, Peter Bjorn & John (plus a duet with the chick from Camera Obscura)and Yo La Tengo. While I’ve never thought much of Sleepy Jackson, I have to say I love musicians who seem to be enjoying their show more than their audience is (syok sendiri). Seriously, if you’re going to go up on an elevated stage and appear as awkward and uncomfortable as the rest of us, then you might as well not be on it (The Walkmen, I’m talking to YOU!). Peter & Bjorn brought some Swedish humor to the proceedings – “Hello Brisbane! I was…..hello……yes, I was. I was born that way.” Yo La Tengo lived up to their reputation of being the ugliest band ever – when they came onstage, I couldn’t help but think, “Jeebus, what is that?!!” – still, they had moments of musical brilliance which I would’ve enjoyed thoroughly had it not been for the fact that they were the last people to go on and I’m ageing rapidly and I need my rest. My mom called my mobile while I was at the event yelling, “What’s that noise?! Where are you?! Why are you at a music festival? Aren’t you supposed to be out looking for a house to live in?!!!!” Yes. Except it is 10 p.m. and which shady real estate agent is open at this hour?

Sunday, 4^th March 2007

Waved goodbye to KJ in the morning. Crashed on the couch and decided that I’d rather watch some corny, American dog movie on TV than be productive. Despite the fact that I find all movies featuring clever animals rather irritating (perhaps, because they make me feel inferior). A dog that can fold a napkin while outsmarting the baddies? Wow-wee, Beethoven! They’re always showing a movie about some kind of wondrous dog on Sundays. I think it is part of some underground conspiracy to punish the people that don’t go to church or play footie in the park.

In the afternoon, I was manipulated by Zher and SD into attending a poolside barbecue at M’s place (You might remember that M was the guy in the chicken suit and the bling necklace from last Halloween) out near Carrara (but further). It’s a nice, shiny, new, two-storey house, huge yard, decent-sized pool facing a snaking, river canal, rolling greens and a (golf course?). Bob Marley was playing on the stereo and a German guy they call “Scheiße” was barbecuing fish he had caught himself in the morning. I don’t know how I feel about eating something cooked by someone who has been nicknamed after the German word for shit. And I hate being conned into socialization. I was trapped in conversation with P (the guy with the silver face mask on his crotch from last Halloween) for a while. He was talking about how he went to Phuket & Bangkok and all the girls he met were hookers (well, he is a white boy hanging out at all the touristy places) or they used to be boys and now they were girl hookers. He said the experience made him uncomfortable. There are only so many hookers a man can take before wanting to have fun for free, I gathered, although P tried to phrase it in a way that would make him sound as if he just wasn’t into hookers. Please. You’re probably just cheap. P asked me what the girls in KL were like. Well, not all of us are hookers, for a start. “I don’t know, they’re like me, like Zher, I guess,” I said. Yes, I was boring myself in this conversation. “You mean, hot?” P asked. Uh. Yeah, sure whatever. But yes, Zher is hot. (Alas, I’m either ‘alright’ by association or hideous by comparison). In other conversations, Grandma C (dubbed “Grandma” because she’s loud, she nags, she bakes killer cakes and keeps harping on about how young we are as compared to her grand old age of 27) talked of her tendency to catch diseases that have been largely unheard of since 1939.

Back to the Gold Coast Daily Notes (Collection 1)

2007-03-11T16:17:00.000+10:00

Tuesday, 27^th February 2007

NOON TO 9 P.M GOODBYES AROUND PJ & KL - I’m flying back to Oz tonight. Uni started yesterday. Heck, nothing important ever goes on in the first week of the semester, eh? (and sometimes middle and sometimes end and sometimes throughout). In light of my imminent departure, The Mother has graciously decided to sign a treaty to end the Cold War between us; a battle for supremacy which was sparked weeks ago after I had the audacity to park in a parking spot not of The Mother’s choosing while driving her around. Kere, The Mother and I went out for lunch where the drinks flowed more smoothly than our conversation which consisted mostly of Kere and I saying back and forth: What are you eating? I don’t know, what are you eating? I don’t know. I love Dean. Sure you do. So what are you eating? And then my mother finally piped in, after a long period of I-haven’t-completely-forgiven-you-yet silence, “I want hummus. Does anyone want hummus?” To which Kere and I said no but when the hummus came, we ate it all anyway. And mid-way through the meal, my mother said, “That girl, at the table behind you; she just gave me a bitchy stare…” Kere and I considered the possibility that perhaps, my mother, unconsciously gave the girl a bitchy stare first and she was only responding in kind. My mother firmly said, “NO.” Then I said it’s probably because she’s jealous of our stunning presence. Laughter all around. The sound of cutlery clinking on eachother.

The Alia came by in the afternoon and scared the living infantile slacker in me by talking about marriage and babies and insurance and work. If there’s one way to relief my anxiety over flying tonight, it is to start talking to me about babies, joint savings account, mortgage loans --- can you hear me hyperventilating?

The Cousin won’t stop calling asking if I was free to hang out. I say, “Dude, I’m flying back to Oz tonight.” She says, “Ok, when?” I say, “Tonight!” She says, “So are you free to hang out now?” and I say, “I haven’t finished packing and my flight is tonight!” And she says, “Alaaa….why are you flying out tonight?” and I say, “Uh, cause uni started yesterday.” Then what does she say, “Ok, then why don’t you meet me at O.U. now?” and of course I have to say, “I can’t. I haven’t finished packing.” And then she says, “I really want to hang out with you again before you go. It was so fun the last (and only) time. How ‘bout later tonight?” and then I huff and I puff, “I can’t. I’m flying out tonight!!!!!!!! Get it?!” And she says, “So when are you free to hang out?”

This cousin, she’s really a nice girl; she’s younger, she’s impressionable and best of all, she’s under the (false) impression that I’m cool or something. I’m flattered and at the same time kinda annoyed, it’s like that stray kitten that decided to follow you home after you petted it on the head once and now sits at your front door, mewing loudly and constantly, scratching the door and biting your ankles everytime you try to leave the house.

A couple of friends call to tell me to have a good and safe flight. As if I have much control over how safe and good my flight is. Do I look like a pilot, or the weather, or God to you? One says, “Okay, have a good and safe flight,” and then, “Wait a minute. Aren’t you afraid of flying? Oooooo……ooooo…..” and hangs up.

Ju, the maid, started shedding major tears when I said goodbye. She does this everytime I go somewhere for more than three consecutive days. The Mother says she can’t understand why the maid would be upset at the thought of my absence. Because everything I touch apparently turns to Mess, The Mother thought my maid should be rejoicing with song and dance. The Daddy said, “She was probably crying tears of joy.” At my absence? What are you talking about?!! In the words of Dean Winchester, I’m a joy to be around!

*************

10 50M3TH1NG p.m.-KUALA LUMPUR INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT, SEPANG– Zher and I are on the same flight together. Which is good. Some time ago, I came to realize that I was a sheep. I hate being involved in most things unless I can have at least one friend/sister there with me. If I were to die in a fiery plane crash, I’d feel more comfortable if I had a friend on the plane with me, sharing the same deadly fate.

We left my dad and her boyfriend chatting away at the airport. My dad brings his work everywhere with him and I told Zher, “I bet you my dad’s talking to F about his company’s solar dried bananas. I bet he’s saying, “You like bananas? You want to try’s uncle’s bananas? Maybe your mom would like to try my bananas?” And don’t forget the solar-dried mangoes. I bet he’s giving F the recipe for making his special Mango Mint Tea. F later confirms that my dad was indeed, asking if F and his mom wanted to try his bananas. And he now has the recipe for Mango Mint Tea.

Kere’s parting words had something to do with Dean, complete with an awkward bloke-hug thrown in. My mother’s were over-the-top as usual, “In case anything happens, know that I’ve forgiven you.” What the?!!!!!

**************

I’ve got three words for you: DUTY FREE CIGARETTES. It’s like music to a girl’s ears. Must buy them and smoke them before boarding. The smoking lounge was a skankpit though. I wonder whose bright idea was it to put 2 dozen nervous smokers in a carpeted, fully air conditioned room with no open windows? It’s sad and at the same time, poetic that we find smokers trapped in a room filled with smoke with nothing to do but smoke; like a pig living in their own filth.

**************

11.30 p.m. TAKE OFF Strapped to my Seat in the Damn Plane – I feel reasonably calm for someone stuffed into a giant aluminum can and shot up 25 000 feet into the sky. I settle down by reading Farish A. Noor’s The Other Malaysia – interesting collection of essays but I got distracted by the thought that at any moment, someone was going to accidentally turn their mobile phone on and cause the plane to crash.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Wednesday, 28^th February 2007

1.00 a.m. UP IN THE CLOUDS BUT FEELING ONLY SLIGHTLY BETTER – Dear children, if you plan to one day travel the world which undoubtedly requires more than a couple of flights unless someone has invented teleportation by then, make sure that you don’t ever grow above 4 feet tall as airlines do not provide enough leg room in Economy to comfortably accommodate anyone above aforementioned height. If you do end up being over 4 feet tall, better hope you’re rich enough to afford First Class plane tickets or risk having your knee cap pushed back to your pelvis because the person in front of you keeps reclining her seat waaaay back. If this happens, you can proceed by lightly tapping offending passenger on the shoulder. “Excuse me,” you can politely say, “Could you help me? I can’t feel my legs!”

**********

3.00 a.m. – My legs might be asleep but the rest of me can’t seem to. I’m itching for a cigarette or some kind of tranquilizer. Heck, at this rate I’ll even try lavender pillow sprays and chamomile tea. Somebody give me something so I can sleep this boredom away. In-flight entertainment did little to alleviate the psychological pressure of being stuck in a giant flying aluminum can. There’s a lot of turbulence going on. The fasten seatbelt sign keeps lighting up. I tried to distract myself by watching Dreamgirls. The movie made me feel like I’d rather be killed in a plane crash right now than watch the movie the whole way through. What tops my fear of flying? Talk of babies and now, Dreamgirls. The movie put the fear of Diva in me.

***********

7. 50M3TH1N6 a.m. – Too late to sleep now. Sun is up and the cabin is buzzing with hunger, bad breath, a sore neck and potential DVT. A lady walks along the aisle carrying her crying, wailing baby up and down the cabin. Do you notice that in every public bus, train and plane, there has to be at least one crying baby? Companies actually plant them there because they secretly hate their customers for always being right. They served us recycled paper modeled after cheese croissants for breakfast. But it’s alright. I’m a smoker. Everything tastes like airline food to me. I want a smoke. Right. Now.

**************

8 50M3TH1NG a.m – We’re constantly reminded that Australia is free of rabies and other funny ass animal and plant diseases. But recently they had something funky break out (I think it had to do with cows). That’s why the flight attendants started bug spraying us shortly before landing. I wonder how many countries could get away with ordering all incoming visitors and tourists to be bug sprayed like a bunch of fruits before setting foot into their country.

The Captain made the usual pre-landing announcement. Except he said in that we were to arrive on schedule at Sydney International Airport. Twice. Except this is supposed to be the flight to Brisbane. It took him a while to realize it and correct himself. I wonder if we should trust this pilot…

***************

9/ 10 50M3TH1NG a.m.- ARRIVALS, Brisbane Airport- So landing was crap but at least we’re alive and at the right airport. Immigration Man is yelling into every foreigner’s ear, “DO YOU UNDERSTAND EVERYTHING ON THIS CARD??!!!” while waving the disembarkation/declaration card thingie in front of their faces. I feel tempted to yell in his ear, “NO! BUT I HAVE RABIES. RWARRRRR!” Haven’t slept in over 24 hours. Feel light-footed but heavy-headed. I’m trying my best not to look like a suspicious character. Customs Man eyes my luggage with suspicion as he makes a move to lift it onto the conveyor belt of the x-ray-thingie. “Is it heavy?” he asks. “No,” I said. He didn’t look as if he believed me but he lifted it anyway and was pleasantly surprised. “It’s light! Where’s all your shopping?” he asks. I didn’t think he cared to know the answer. If he did, he would have learned the following things:

a) I didn’t do much shopping because

b) I’m convinced that I have a skank-shaped body and no item of clothing I buy will remedy the hideous skankiness of my natural or unnatural body shape. A skank-shaped body is a taller Lil’Kim with no breast implants with a dose of Britney’s barefoot, cheetos-eating, trailer trash, teenage mom of two infants with a deadbeat husband aura.

c) I nearly died of shock while shopping for eye cream. I had so far been nicking my mom’s L’Occitane one. But I thought it was time for me to get my own bottle. The salesgirl told me that the cream would, “reduce puffiness and dark shadows around the eyes and great for soothing it after staring at the computer all day.” Yah, yah, I said and she said something about cucumber and mountain blabla leaf essence and I said yah, yah and she said, “It’s RM168” for a tiny tube and I choked, “WHAT?!” How much are cucumbers these days?

d) I’m a Sagittarius and I love long walks by the beach.

****************

ALMOST 1.P.M – BACK IN THE GOLD COAST – Our house in Labrador looks like a small-time drug dealer’s den. Two cheap neon plastic & aluminum lounge chairs sit on the lawn, the grass is overgrown and the landlady had put up a scary, ghetto-looking wooden fence around the compound. It doesn’t help that Labrador is known as one guy put it, “Labrador, Lock-Your-Door”. Every time I tell someone I live in Labrador, I am met by an expression of horror and disbelief. “Seriously?” They’ll ask. “Yeah, it’s just a 20 minute walk to uni,” I’ll say. And it was cheap. And the interior of the house itself was fully furnished in relatively passable taste (except for a huge white painted clay bust of a Romanesque woman sitting in the living room, a couple of garden gnomes out back by the bathtub-masquerading-as-a-pool, and a gold-framed painting entitled “Mr. Will Long on Bertha”, a naughty-sounding title that could’ve easily passed off as a porn flick).

The house has been slowly emptying out. Last winter saw AA and SS return home to the States while C, the hairy, neo-hippie alternative medicine post-grad student moved to Brisbane. At the start of the past summer holiday, SD moved to Surfer’s Paradise – it’s closer to her workplace. Z and I are the last remaining occupants and we’ve actually been talking about moving out for some time now and came up with the pros and cons of continuing to reside at our current address:

Pros	Cons
Cheap – fully furnished incl. cutlery, linens, wireless broadband, electricity, juicer and a collection of all the Mel Gibson, Robert Redford, Barbara Streisand and Tom Cruise movies.	Other places don’t come close to being this fully furnished and definitely not at this modest price. Can’t stand Tom Cruise. Can’t stand Barbara Streisand but The Way We Were rocked. No, seriously.
A short walk to uni and close to public transport (the bus stop!) Apparently, it’s also close to all the drug dealers.	But we wished we had a car. Any car. Ghetto neighborhood with apparently, a high crime-rate. Might get stabbed when walking home late at night. A bunch of kids stabbed a man for no reason at the nearby shopping mall. And rumor has it that a man living in Labrador chopped off his own balls during a psychotic episode on Ice last year.
Spa and food storage benefit. When it’s hot outside, the house turns into a sauna and when it’s cold outside, the house turns into a fridge. Solar-powered water heaters make hot showers cost-effective and environmentally-friendly.	Heat exhaustion, dehydration, hypothermia. Oh and if you plan to take a shower to cool off, watch your head! The shower head is set too low that you risk bumping your head on it. Brain hemorrhage, concussion, death.
Despite all the reported crime going around the neighborhood, our street feels rather peaceful and quiet. Like a euthanized dog. It’s alright, I did commit to a life of quiet, hermitude a couple of months ago.	In the event of a social occasion on the livelier side of town, hardly anyone will be happy to give you a ride home after hearing that you live in Labrador. Not even after you’ve been charming all night.

In the end, Zher and I decided that it would be nice to move out. Except we never did. The lazy outweighed the pros. Once you go ghetto, you can’t get off the couch. But that was before today. Today, we arrive home to find a note from our landlady on our kitchen counter:

Dear Z & Maryam, As you know, due to my personal circumstances (her husband and her are separating and he’s not paying for the mortgage) I have had to put (the house) up for sale… The new owners have not bought it as an investment; they are going to live in it… Unfortunately, I have to give you notice to vacate the house by Sunday March 18^th. I will be in Singapore until March 5^th. Regards. That’s right, you’re supposed to give one month notice for these things – she cleverly dated the note February 18^th.

Questions arise: How are we going to find a new place at such short notice? How are we going to get a place this late into the semester? The freshies would’ve snapped up all the cheap, decent places weeks ago! How are we going to find another furnished place for this cheap??!!!!!! What’s on TV?! What’s for dinner? Why do I exist? What is the meaning of life? Is there a God? Why is the sky blue?

I suppose the Cosmic Order has a way of snapping people into action. Sort of. Zher and I said, yeah, right now we really have to commit to finding a new place, a nicer one. Tomorrow.

We sat on the couch for the rest of the day in a cloud of smoke and contemplated the nothingness of things.

Bahasa Jiwa Bangsa

2007-02-24T14:38:00.000+10:00

Blogger’s General Warning: The following entry was written between 5 and 6 a.m. Just goes to show, don’t let the Gremlin type after midnight.

Selamat sejahtera kanak-kanak. Hari ini Kak Yam akan bercerita dalam Bahasa Melayu atau kalau hendak lebih muhibbah/ nasionalistik, Bahasa Malaysia. Memang, Kak Yam atau lebih gemar dikenali sebagai ‘aku’ sudah lama tidak menulis dalam BM, sejak zaman sekolah menengah lagi. Itupun cikgu BM Tingkatan 5 aku selalu memaki hamun dan menyindir aku kerana keputusan peperiksaan Bahasa Inggeris aku selalu cemerlang tetapi yang BM pula, selalu masuk dalam longkang. Cikgu BM kata, minda aku telah dijajah. Lantas aku menjawab, minda cikgu telah dijaja di tepi jalan tanpa lesen dan disaman oleh pegawai Majlis Perbandaran yang kau rasuahnya dengan sepuluh ringgit dan dua cawan Kopi ‘O’. Dia sindir aku macam aku tak faham BM pulak. Aku tahu lah aku tak makan buku rujukan Pelangi SPM BM bersama Kismis Ajaib untuk sarapan pagi dan memuntahkannya semula kat kertas ujian; dan aku tahulah aku kerap bertutur dalam Bahasa Inggeris tetapi itu tak bermakna aku tak faham atau malu dengan Bahasa Ibunda ku sendiri.

Wahai Cikgu BM lamaku, aku bilingual-lah siiiooot!!!!!! (Malangnya, aku tak tahu perkataan Melayu untuk ‘bilingual’. Dwibahasa? Dwilingua? Bilingua? Nak guna takut DBP marah dan tuduh aku mencemarkan Bahasa. Yang RTM tu guna ‘Bajet’ untuk menggantikan ‘Perbelanjawan’ apa halnya? Dan di Putrajaya, jalan dipanggil ‘Presint’ ala ‘Precinct’ kat New York. Tapi aku suka perkataan Melayu untuk ‘download’ – muat turun. Sungguh literal. Dan bunyi macam gerakan senam Aerobik. Ooh, lapan lagi!)

Dulu masa aku di sekolah rendah (darjah 4) aku johan sajak Bahasa Melayu dan juga syair. Bila aku bagi tahu kawan-kawan baru tentang kejayaan zaman silamku, diorang gelak, tak percaya. Sial betul. Benda yang aku memang buat lawak, tak nak gelak. Aku fahamlah suara aku sekarang, setelah dicemar dengan beribu-ribu batang Setan British American Tobacco, bunyi macam katak hisap ekzos Bas Mini dan kurang merdu untuk menyair. Yang aku tak faham, diorang tanya aku kalau aku betul-betul faham ke sajak yang aku deklarasikan. Bah! Aku kata masa Darjah 6, aku wakil sekolah untuk Pertandingan Perbahasan BM dan juga pertandingan Balas Pantun. Kawan-kawan baru yang tak guna ni, diorang gelak sampai meninggal dunia, terus jadi Angkasawan Malaysia pertama di bulan. Macamlah tak pernah tengok aku berbahas kat sekolah menengah dan kolej. “But that was in English!” jawab kawan-kawan yang tak guna ini, “Your Malay kinda sucks, man.”

Memang, sekarang secara skemanya, BM aku dah karat. Tetapi, bak kata pepatah Melayu yang aku reka sendiri, “Sekarang karat, dahulunya berkilat.” Sebab itulah aku wakil sekolah dalam pertandingan Balas Pantun. Walaubagaimanapun, aku kalah di pusingan pertama. Dengan teruk. Tambahan pula, aku pakai skirt pendek dan aku lupa duduk elok-elok. Sambil asyik memikirkan pantun, aku duduk kangkang luas-luas depan para panel hakim dan penonton sampai semua orang tahu seluar dalam aku berwarna pink yang dihiasi dengan corak rama-rama. Aku jumpa balik lawan aku 2-3 tahun kemudian, dia kata, “Oh, engkaulah budak yang pakai seluar dalam rama-rama tu!”

Malu tu, kucing pun tahu malu. Ini bukan malu, ini trauma. Mungkin sebab itulah aku dah lama tak berpuisi dalam BM. Tetapi sekarang aku dah tak kisah. Seluar aku selalu londeh (eh, betul ke eja ni?), tak payah kangkang pun boleh nampak seluar dalam. Dan kalau hari yang aku pakai seluar tapi tak pakai seluar dalam, anggaplah dirikau bertuah dapat melihat buntut ku yang cantik menawan seperti dua biji papaya tua kecut yang monyet kebuluran pun tak ada selera nak makan.

Aku kata kat kakak aku yang aku tiba-tiba teringin menulis karya dalam BM. Dia sangsi dengan kebolehan aku menulis dalam BM. “The end result will probably be rubbish,” dia kata. Aku kata aku tulis dalam Bahasa Inggeris pun aku tak akan menang apa-apa anugerah sastera. Anugerah blog pun takde. (Yang tu dapat kat minah-minah gedik yang suka tampal banyak-banyak gambar muka diorang beraksi ayu. Ah, memang aku cemburu sebab muka aku lebih layu daripada ayu.) Apa bezanya kalau aku tulis dalam BM? Lebih-lebih lagi, ‘bahasa jiwa bangsa’. Malangnya bangsa ini banyak yang sakit jiwa. Kah Kah Kah (kah-kah-kah ni gelak antagonis Melayu klasik; antagonis Mat Saleh suka gelak Muah-ha-ha.)

Tadi aku main gitar burukku yang D-stringnya terputus dan sengaja aku biar tak ganti sebab macam ‘cool’ dan ‘indie’ kalau main gitar 5-string (sebenarnya, aku malas nak ganti). Sambil aku berkugiran dan melalak macam anjing kena makan buaya, terkeluar pula perkataan-perkataan BM dari mulutku secara spontan tetapi memberikan mesej yang kohesif secara keseluruhannya. Biasanya, aku tulis lirik lagu dalam Bahasa Inggeris tetapi agaknya tadi, subconscious aku yang nyanyi kot. Nampaknya Subconscious aku cakap BM walaupun aku tak tahu perkataan Melayu untuk subconscious. Subconscious aku ni memang kekurangan kebolehan artistik; lirik yang diciptanya buat aku hampa sampai nak gelak sebab kalau nangis pun buat rugi air mata sahaja. Ya, kamu nak baca lirik lagunya? Kalau tak nak, pejamlah mata kamu wahai manusia ataupun kamu boleh pergi dari sini untuk melayari berjuta-berjuta halaman web lucah tetapi kalau takut dosa, pejamlah mata kamu juga wahai manusia. Ah, ini dia lirik lagu Melayu aku yang belum siap dan tidak akan disiapkan sebab tak lulus otakku punya Quality Assurance Manager:

Oh, kau di bawah lembayung ketakutan,
Di mana lain berpijak, di situ kamu menjunjung.
Jelas kata-katamu hanyalah helah minda yang lena,
Baying-bayang tidak berpunya
Tidak akan bersuara
Sedekad berkurung dalam mimpi,
Terjaga dalam gua
Apakah bezanya?

Kan aku dah kata, kau akan hampa sampai gelak terbahak-bahak. Ah, takpe, minggu depan aku tampal gambar muka aku beraksi ayu/layu. Aku pun dah menyampah baca karya tulisan aku sendiri. Aku tulis ni pun sebab aku takde kerja lain nak buat dan tak boleh tidur sebab pagi tadi aku dah membuta sampai tengahari. Bila aku bangun, mak aku marah aku secara telepati. Apa? Secara telepati? Ya, sebab mak aku dan aku sekarang tengah ber-Perang Dingin (atas sebab yang aku tak boleh ingat) – dah dua minggu lebih dah dia tak cakap dengan aku . Dia gunakan kuasa telepatinya sahaja atau kalau reception tak bagus, dia gunakan kakak aku macam bomoh yang dijadikan medium pertengahan untuk berkomunikasi dengan orang halimunan/jin. Aku ni jin lah nampaknya. Dan ayah aku pula, eh, mana pulak dia pergi kali ini? New York? Brunei? Melaka? Ayah aku ni memang dari dulu lagi macam biskut Chipsmore – sekejap ada, sekejap takde! Dia patah tangan, tumbuh sepuluh pasang kaki dan 3 mulut baru. Balik lima minit, suruh buat kerja tu, kerja ni, bising-bising, marah-marah lepas tu dia tanya kalau aku nak makan kacang. Aku kata aku bukan monyet sarkas. Tidak boleh dipujuk dengan kacang. Tetapi belum habis aku nak mengamuk, dia lenyap. Mak aku berkata secara telepati, monyet sarkas pun berbau lebih wangi daripada kamu. Memang, kalau aku rasa depressed, aku tak mandi. Kalau angin tak baik, aku tak boleh kena air, nanti cair macam perempuan sihir dalam Wizard of Oz.

Aku sekarang, baru mula membaca buku Steppenwolf karya Herman Hesse. Dulu aku baca bukunya, Narcissus & Goldmund dan Siddharta dan aku jatuh suka dengan karya tulisannya sebab aku perasan Herman Hesse ni sama jenis sakit jiwa dengan aku. Dalam Steppenwolf, Hesse bercerita tentang Harry Haller, seorang lelaki yang “struggles to reconcile the wild primeval wolf and the rational man within himself without surrendering to the bourgeois values he despises.” Aku rasa dalam diriku pun ada manusia dan ada serigala liar. Yang serigala ni nak membaham si manusia, yang manusia pulak nak tembak serigala dan jadikan kulit dan bulunya sebagai topi dan kot berfesyen ranggi. Tapi aku rasa memang tak ada monyet sarkas dalam diri aku. Kalau ada pun, dah lama di makan Si Serigala dan otaknya pula dihisap oleh Si Manusia. Yummm.

Tengok, sekarang aku dah lari topik. Blah! Aku nak pergi tidur lah. Sekian, terima kasih.

Who's Afraid of Vagina Day?

2007-02-16T13:35:00.000+10:00

It’s hard to convince people that you’re against the whole Valentine baloney based on principle when you’re not exactly known for having principles and that oh, you’re single. They automatically assume that you’re merely being a bitter, envious, sexually frustrated grouch that can’t get love if they sold it for a dime a dozen at Giant and would probably think better of the day if you had your own lovebunnycheesebucketvomitbagspermpuppet by your side. Funny how nobody says that when you also, verbally spit on them for wishing you a ‘Happy Birthday’ or can’t see the big deal or the point of celebrating New Year’s Eve. They take it as you just being you instead of you well, just being single.

Valentine’s Day would have gone past unnoticed for me this year had it not been for a friend text messaging me a “Happy V-Day!” complete with a dorky electronic rose that sort of looks like this: --------()--@. I had a hard time figuring out what V-Day stood for. My first thought was Vagina Day and my second thought was what the hell is Vagina Day and my third was, is there any particular reason why should one be happy on Vagina Day as compared to any other day? And then it hit me, right, Valentine’s Day. This friend should’ve known better than to waste 20 cents on a Valentine’s SMS for me. I replied the SMS with a “Shove it up ur ass and suck on my dick. Warm Wishes.” Harsh, yes, but where’s the fun in being friends with someone if you can’t tell them to suck on your imaginary sexual appendage every once in a while? Friend promptly responded with, “Bitter r we? Sum1 needs sum lovin. P.S. u r a JERK.”

No, I don’t need some loving unless it’s by Dean the Demon Hunter with pretty lashes, sexy pout and biceps as big as (but firmer than) my thighs. But oh, alright, I can be a jerk although I think if you take my imaginary penis out of the equation; a more fitting term would be “shrew”. I would however like to think that I’m a generally nice person.

My friend, on the phone with me some time later, scoffs, “Nope, you’re a jerk.”

“Handsome though,” I said. It’s a quote from aforementioned Demon Hunter but it’s also in relation to a running joke about how I’d make a fine catch if I was a man. As a woman, I’m more like a can of Coke that was thrown by some fool into the sea.

“Still a jerk. No flowers for you.”

Just as well. The last time someone gave me flowers or rather, tried to give me flowers, it didn’t end too well. I was 14 and the poor guy called me up the day before Vagina, I mean, Valentine’s Day to make a date for it. I don’t think I said yes because I remember going out guilt-free to watch a movie with my girlfriends instead. But when I switched my mobile phone back on at the end of the movie, I had several missed calls from the guy and a sad message saying that he waited all day for me at the appointed place, he even bought me roses and everything but “you can forget about it now because the roses are dead!” Judging from the tone of his voice, I think what he really wanted to say was, “You’re not the only chick in the world and you’re not that hot so you can fuck off and die like the roses did, you rotten bitch.”

No one has tried to give me flowers ever since. It might be Karma. Still, I don’t think it’s as bad as this girl I knew who once made a guy eat the roses he was trying to give her. And he did. Poor sod. Fools in the name of St. Valentine. I don’t know if anyone else has tried to give her flowers since that incident but all I can say is that giving flowers as a romantic gesture is a completely unoriginal, thoughtless idea (eating it on the other hand…) Giving chocolate isn’t very original either but it’s a safer bet in case your intended makes you eat it.

Besides, what is a flower but a plant’s sexual organ? A flower more often than not means “I’d love to get in your pants”. It can also mean, “I’m making myself think I love you because I’m afraid of dying alone. P.S. can I get into your pants?” or “Wife, I’m hoping that this flower will stop you from nagging me for five minutes so we can have sex P.S. Can I play golf this weekend?” or “I’m sorry I cheated on you. Forgive me so I can continue having sex with you.” But yes, a flower can convey non-sexual messages. When you’re sick, a flower can mean, “Get well soon so you can be of use to me once more” or “Aren’t you allergic to pollen? Suffer and die, bitch!” It can also mean, “You’re dead. Oh, damn.” Of course, on V-Day, a flower probably means nothing more than “Everyone else is giving flowers so I guess I should too and you’re probably expecting it because everyone else is getting flowers so here you go. P.S. Can I get into your pants tonight?”

“So, what’s original then?” asked a friend.

I don’t know, if both you and I had thought about it before a guy thought of it then it wouldn’t be very original, would it?

“Woman, you’re impossible. What do you want a guy to do? Write you a song?!”

Well, that brings me to another story. I was in Form Four and this boy I had met through mutual friends and had spoken to a mere handful of times rang me up on V-Day, saying that he wrote a song especially for me, declaring his love. Now, this guy has a habit of “falling in love” with every breathing thing without a dick that passes his way and unfortunately, I was one of these things. It’s hard to take a declaration of love from someone like him seriously. And he made it even harder with his song.

Yes, let me tell you about his song. I remember it because it was too awful to forget. I was a big EPL fan back then (now, I couldn’t really give two hoots) and was a Liverpool supporter and I think this was the only thing he knew about me. He was a Manchester United fan and the song went something like, “There’s not much difference between me and you, except you like Liverpool and I like Man U but baby, it makes no difference because it’s true, I’m just so truly in love with you…..”

I thought I was going to have an aneurysm and die and had to abruptly end the phone call so I could laugh in peace. Besides, I was afraid I’d catch whatever vile disease it was that made him write that song. The song was no Layla and he’s no Eric Clapton, that’s for sure but hey, I’m no Patti Boyd. Fair enough.

I told this guy in our very next phone conversation (an hour later) that I didn’t feel the same way about him (how could I? would you?). I thought I was nice about it. I did sprinkle some sugar on top of the rejection. I told him I appreciated the effort he put into the song (uh, kay, this might’ve been patronizing) and that he had a really sexy singing voice (which I meant). Of course, I made the mistake of telling a big mouthed friend in “confidence” that “too bad the rest of him isn’t as sexy as his voice” and the comment was ultimately relayed back to the guy.

Boy, did I get into trouble for that remark. Apparently, he exploded with a “What?! And here I thought Maryam was a nice girl but she’s a fucking bitch!!!!!!” His big sister threatened to hunt me down and beat the crap out of me.

Hey, wait a minute. Your baby brother said ‘fucking bitch’. Maybe you should smack his mouth around first before you smack mine. And what’s this, Richard Marx, getting your sister to fight it out for you? Nevermind chivalry, machismo is dead and it wasn’t even a violent death.

Anyway, a week after his big musical declaration of love and hate for this fucking bitch, he was off chasing the skirt of Big Mouthed Friend and shortly after, declared his deep, true love for some other girl in my school and the cycle continues…..

Yes, I think that was the last time anyone has tried to be romantic with me. Now the few interested guys just stare at my boobs or get all wandering hands on the dance floor. That’s as romantic as they get. Well hey, while I will still jab your sperm sack with a corkscrew if you grab my ass without permission, I do appreciate the honesty and straightforwardness. One needs to be able to tell love from lust and love from infatuation and love from sheer desperation and low standards. And try not to tell it in a song. Please. Even Eric Clapton writes shit songs these days.

In my humble opinion, flowers are bad but when it comes to love, you can’t do worst than trying to show it with words – be it in a song or a V-day card or a spoken “But I love you, really, I swear, by the moon and the stars in the sky.” And don’t go ripping off Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 either. God knows we’ve all heard it one too many times and Shakespeare is a cunt in tights and frills. Would you like to be a cunt in tights and frills? When he wrote, shall I compare thee to a summer’s day, I’m sure he meant, “You’re hot. Let’s take our clothes off and get wet like people usually do in summer.” (words = worst) because people use words to cover up the truth, deceive, manipulate, outright lie. Seriously, have you ever tried lying without the use of words? If yes, then I’m sure it wasn’t easy and you were probably unsuccessful. Also, how can you say you’re “truly in love” with a person you barely even know for about a week? Does actual love come and go that easy? Maybe it does, maybe I’m naïve. Or maybe just saying it (or singing it. Ugh) is. Easy. For some people. I’d rather remove my tonsils with a teaspoon.

Regardless, what I hate about V-day is that it encourages people to employ all these gimmicks – flowers, words, etc to “celebrate love” and the whole mob mentality of it all. It cheapens the very thing it’s supposed to celebrate. Oh, and the idea that romance is scheduled in once a year on a set date everyone knows about and restaurants, hotels, spas will offer couples special packages at a special discount – geez, I’m sorry, but the words “schedule”, “everyone”, “package dinner/getaway” and “discount” kind of sucks the romance out of it, don’t you think?

You see, I’m not against V-Day because I’m bitter that I’m single. Hey man, if I wanted to be part of a couple for the sake of being part of a couple, I could by tomorrow (alright, maybe I’d have to actually shower and leave the house. Maybe get some plastic surgery and a new personality, oh, fuck you). My point is, I’m happy to be single fully knowing that I haven’t settled for just any person offering a plant’s vagina. After all, I’m still young, eh? I still have time to hold out for the fairy tale, for my Demon Hunter Charming to come riding in his 67’ Chevy Impala and whisk me off into the full moon where we will kick demon butt together ever after (I’d drive myself but my car’s not working). Also, I’m delusional. That helps.

And for that, I think I should get points for being a true, hopeless romantic. So call me a jerk (I am, I am) but don’t call me a heartless bitch and don’t make jibes about me being as romantic as a root canal performed without anesthesia on a perfectly healthy tooth by a sadistic dentist high on laughing gas and wielding a chainsaw.

“Dude, let’s face it, you’re too cynical to be a romantic,” a friend insisted.

“I’m not cynical,” I argued.

“Fine, realist, whatever. Remember once, when I said to you that love is the greatest, single most important thing in the world, that people live and die from love? What did you say?”

Oh, right. I said, funny, I thought people live and die from unprotected sex. Well, it’s true. You think storks brought 6.5 billion people to this planet? And like Lisa Kudrow’s character in The Opposite of Sex said, “You think they would coin the term ‘died at childbirth’ if it was a one-off thing?” (or something like that). And AIDS is a killer epidemic. And sex raises one’s heart rate and if one has a weak heart and popped one too many Viagra pills well yeah, one can drop dead from doing it.

“Romantic, huh?”

Oh, Happy Vagina Day to you too.

Sherwood Condos

2007-02-08T15:15:00.000+10:00

The Sunday edition of The Star has a section where kids/little demon spawns can submit their drawings/demon graffiti and have it published if it’s any cute (I’m reluctant to use the word ‘good’).

When I was in my early primary years, (I can’t remember whether I was 6 or 9 or somewhere in between), the section ran a little story on Robin Hood & his Merry Men. At the end of the story, they asked us young readers what we thought Sherwood Forest would look like in this modern day and age – draw it on a piece of paper, mail it to them and selected entries will be published the following Sunday. This was a time when I was still bothered to try and get anything of mine published in the mainstream Malaysian press. I thought long and hard about the topic and I came to the conclusion that surely by now, Sherwood Forest would have been ravaged by development. So I set about drawing a big, yellow bulldozer, men with chainsaws and a dozen dead and chopped up trees. I think I might’ve even sketched in a condominium or two and emaciated wildlife scampering away.

You see, my dad worked in Environment back then and it is his nature to insist that his kids take much interest in his work even if he takes little real interest in ours. By the time I started school, I was relatively well-learned or at least aware of the issue of deforestation, illegal logging, sustainable and non-sustainable development, the clearing of rainforests to make way for a hydro-electric dam, all while struggling to multiply 7 by 12. I also grew up near Bukit Gasing and it was around this time that they started wrecking the green lung to make way for high rise condos. What was a nice, old suburb surrounded by greens before became a so-so, old suburb surrounded by another suburb.

Well anyway, all that thinking and drawing was a damn waste of time and stamps. The drawings that were selected to be published were those that depicted sparkling blue lakes, rainbows and flowers and big trees, squirrels and bunnies happily trawling fra-la-la around the forest in one big, kumbaya ecological love-fest. And if I remembered correctly, one even featured a unicorn. Give me a break - a bloody unicorn?!!! If unicorns didn’t exist back then, they sure as hell weren’t going to exist in the 90s and if they did, don’t you think they would’ve fallen victim to poachers for their magical horns?

But I’m not bitter. I still occasionally read The Star. Of course, that’s only because I have a pathological need to be lied to. Remember people, unicorns are real and every mushroom cloud has a rainbow lining.

------------------------------------------------

* The blogger insists that her drawing was not horrible. Her old art teachers from school might beg to differ. But then, in the words of Jonathan Swift, “When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.” I’m a fucking genius!!!!!!!!!!! Uh. Ok, no. Maybe I just can’t draw.

Wookiee Gone Wild

2007-02-03T23:28:00.000+10:00

You read the papers and on the second page, the Deputy Prime Minister is saying that Malays are not lazy and that the community would do well to instill strong Islamic values in their children and you’re thinking, oh, tell me something important instead of your usual racial politicking or shut the fuck up, save your energy for getting someone to clean up the bits of skeleton in your closet or here’s a thought, go run the damn country. You read the papers and you feel like you sympathize with the plight of the flood victims in Johor. Then you go out and a car with a Johor license plate is being an ass on KL streets and you find yourself nastily thinking, Go back and drown in your flood, asshole! You immediately regret having the thought at all; you’re a rotten person and you should do more to help those less fortunate than yourself. Instead, you go home and read the papers and they’re reporting that the US’ National Intelligence Estimate have concluded the situation in Iraq is only going to get worse and you’re thinking well, doh, one doesn’t need much intelligence to figure that one out. The papers are reporting that the US government have come up with a clever, brand new strategy for Iraq and that is to….wait for it……send in more troops and you’re thinking, wasn’t that your old strategy? And they’re reporting that Iraqis are fighting themselves but they’re not the only ones who have resorted to in-fighting. The Palestinians, taking a rest from fighting Israel perhaps, have resorted to a spot of in-fighting too - Fatah vs. Hamas and you’re thinking alright then, it sounds like a new development but it’s not really since someone, somewhere is always fighting in the land so dearly mentioned by the Torah, the Bible, the Quran. You read the papers about the very important issue of global warming and they’re telling you It’s Real! It’s Real! and it’s man-made and again, you’re thinking well, doh, what’s new?

And then you read the papers and learn about Chewbacca gone amok on the streets of Los Angeles and you’re ……wait, Wookie Gone Wild???! Here’s an excerpt from the Los Angeles Times report (Feb 3^rd 2007):

The buzz on Hollywood Boulevard on Friday was over the Chewbacca who police say crossed over to the dark side in front of hundreds of tourists at Grauman's Chinese Theatre.
LAPD officers arrested "Star Wars" street performer Frederick Evan Young, 44, of Los Angeles in his furry brown wookiee costume Thursday on a charge of misdemeanor battery for allegedly head-butting a tour guide who complained about Young's treatment of two visitors from Japan.
Authorities said it began when a Star Line Tours guide allegedly observed the Chewbacca character harassing two young girls from a rival Japanese tour company.
Guide Brian Sapir said that when he asked the performer not to touch the visitors, Young became angry.
"You could see in his eyes he was exploding beneath the mask," Sapir said Friday. "He yelled at me, 'Nobody tells this wookiee what to do!' "

See, I always knew these Star Wars freaks pose a danger to society. Bad Chewy, bad, bad, Chewy, what would LucasFilms say? “We are disappointed that someone dressed as Chewbacca would behave in this way.”

Previous Entry: Cooking With Three Generations

Cooking with Three Generations

2007-02-03T23:25:00.000+10:00

My grandmother’s kitchen has always been the busiest place in her house and today, even with more than half of its original occupants gone, it still bustles with energy and activity that one might think would only be reserved for the festive season or a visit from 10 army battalions, demanding to be fed by sundown.

I had taken my grandmother out earlier in the day to buy a few groceries and supplies at the local hypermarket. Over seventy years old and riddled with joint pains, she had walked at a crawling, snail-like pace and looked at risk of collapsing somewhere between the canned goods and dry goods aisle.

But there was something about being in her own kitchen that gave her endless reserves of energy. She was barking orders, darting from one end to another, mashing bananas with the kind of force and strength that would rival that of Xena the Warrior Princess. At her command was a well-oiled army consisting of her new domestic helper, my mom, and my mom’s domestic helper. And I, I was the trumpet player they sometimes brought along to stand around and make a lot of noise.

I would normally avoid my grandmother’s kitchen while she was working partly for fear of disrupting her battle plans (my mother claims that everything I touch turns to mess and I’d do best to stay away. She calls me the “Kitchen-Molester”) but mostly because I’m just lazy and would rather be sprawled on the living room floor, bitching about the heat and boredom and how we should outfit my grandmother’s house with air-conditioning, ASTRO and broadband internet connection. That is usually when my mother will make some kind of snide reference to me being a princess (“Tuan Puteri Diraja Pulau Pinang” – the fact that Pulau Pinang has no royal family only adds to the sarcasm). If I still insist on making no effort to conceal my domestic uselessness and laziness by disappearing out of sight, then my mother will proceed by comparing me to a beached whale and complain to her mother that she doesn’t know what she did to deserve daughters like this. She claims she was always a good daughter. My grandmother never gives any kind of response to this comment. Perhaps, she begs to differ.

Today though, was different. Today, this princess’ banishment from the Exalted Kingdom of Kitchens had been lifted and I was actually invited as an observer which meant that I got in everyone’s way by just standing around like a structurally redundant pillar in a crowded shopping mall. Among other things, my grandmother was making two traditional Malay desserts, Pengat Pisang and Lepat Pisang both of which I enjoy eating, clueless about preparing and tend to confuse the names of the two dishes with eachother.

“Ah tu lah, pasal nak makan pandai, nak masak tak tahu. This is your opportunity to learn,” said my mother.

“Wait, which one is the pengat and which one is the lepat again?” I asked.

Both my mother and my grandmother looked disappointed at my confusion which they had mistaken for ignorance. They pointed to the thingie wrapped in banana leaf in the steamer, “Lepat.” The creamy, stew-like thing boiling in the pot was “Pengat tapi orang Utara panggil ni Serawa”. I nodded, unwrapped a Lepat and swallowed almost the entire thing in one go.

My grandmother asked how is it that I managed to survive on my own in Australia without knowing how to cook. This is where I need to defend my culinary honor. I do know how to cook but I will admit that my cooking skills are limited to crazy Asian-Italian fusion pasta dishes, simple stir-fries, and an assortment of experimental nameless dishes not commonly known to any culture that by a combination of luck and relatively good instincts, turned out better than expected. I don’t know a single recipe to anything. Once in a while, I’d like to be able to tell people what it is exactly I’m cooking instead of, “Dunno, I’m just throwing a bunch of stuff into a pan.” I’d like to make some authentic, traditional Malay dishes.

(We had a pot-luck picnic for my college’s inter-cultural communications class once, where everyone was encouraged to bring a dish that reflected their own culture. I was the dolt that ended up bringing bottles of Coke. I came up with some sham excuse about being the child of Globalization, Capitalism and American Imperialism through soft-power and what better represents all this than Coke? Truth was, I was cheap, lazy and had forgotten all about the event until 10 minutes before and Coke was readily available at the 7-Eleven on the way. The Danish exchange students were smart enough to bring Carlsberg beer, at least the brand’s Danish, just like them. Wait, is Carlsberg Danish?)

My mother assigned me the task of mashing some bananas for the Lepat. Instead of shirking away from work like I usually do, I took it as a good sign that I was no longer Marie Antoinette, worthy of only eating cake and a trip to the guillotine and was now a proud member of the working plebs that will one day sick and tire of making cakes. I mashed the bananas as if they were the heads of all the people that had gotten on my nerves this past week – with much enthusiasm.

“You’re not doing it right!” yelled my mother. She grabbed the bowl of half-mashed bananas from me and nudged me to the side. “This is how you do it,” she said and mash, mash, mash, she went in what seemed to me, exactly the same way I mashed it. Is there really a proper way to mash things? Mashing is mashing, no?

Okay, okay, I nodded and tried to grab the bowl back from her. “Nevermind,” she said, moving away, “Faster if I do it myself.”

Fine, I’ll keep my incompetence to myself. I’ll go back to performing my beached whale act on the living room floor. As I walked out of the kitchen in a bit of a princess-y huff, hurt pride and all, grabbing a cooked lepat on the way, I hear my grandmother sharply reprimand my mother for not mashing the bananas in this mythical Right Way. She grabbed the bowl from my mother and my mother tried in vain to reclaim her place in the Kitchen Army. Too late.

My mother gave me the look she always gave me when she wanted to say, “Look how nice I am as compared to my mother.”

All I could say was, Ha-Ha….Ha-Ha….Hahahahahahaa.

Residue

2007-02-02T20:40:00.000+10:00

There’s a song by Iggy Pop called I’m Bored and it goes, I’m bored, I’m the chairman of the ‘bored’, I’m a lengthy monologue, I’m living like a dog, I’m bored, I bore myself to sleep at night, I bore myself in broad daylight cause I’m bored. If anyone is ever dumb enough to make a TV show of my life, I want this to be the theme song. It’s either this or a low, droning sound. Whichever one is cheaper and easier to acquire the rights to.

A friend in the vaguest sense of the word is suffering from a catastrophe of apocalyptical proportions, “Oh my god, I can’t go to Maison this Thursday. I’ve been there every Thursday night for the past three weeks! People are going to think I’m such a loser if I show up there again!”

I feel my eyes rolling to the back of my head. My head is a magic 8 ball but instead of ‘yes’ and ‘no’ it says ‘uh-huh’ which means I’m not really listening and I don’t really care either way and ‘please..’ which is an abbreviation of pleaseshutup. I’ve known her since secondary school and she was always a stickler for rules. She did everything she was supposed to in school; everything that people told her would look good on a college application.

Well, the rules have changed since school but she hasn’t - still a stickler for rules that aren’t entirely based on logic. Now apparently, you must not be seen at the same club on 3 Thursday nights in a row or loser be thy name. Please, it’s dark in there and everyone is drunk. Do you think anyone is going to remember you were there last week, let alone be thinking that you’re a failure in life based on your repeated patronage of a nightspot? Do you really think anyone would be doing anything that can qualify as ‘thinking’?

We’re having dinner with a few mutual friends and they’re all talking about guys – “Blablabla is cute, blablabla was so into you. Is he really into me? No, I don’t like him. But oh, he’s so cute, if he’s going, I’ll go but I don’t like him, oh, maybe I do but only if he likes me, I don’t think he likes me, why doesn’t he like me? Not that I like him but he has to like me. So what if I have a boyfriend? I’m not going to play him, oh, I just want to play around with him, should I play him? Oh, I like him if he likes me blablablablabla..”

I’m starting to wonder why I’m here. I feel like the Mouth of Hell opened up and I’ve been plunged into its deepest depths which just so happens to be an episode of Laguna Beach. I don’t know whether I need to grow the fuck up or they do but I’m certain that I don’t belong at this table anymore. And yet here I am, creature of habit, you.

The restaurant is closing and we’re now heading to a 24 hour mamak, 250 metres down the road.

“We’re not going to walk there, are we? Why can’t we take the car?” says one friend.

I start off on a rant about how half the world’s problems are due to oil and petroleum and we would do well by trying to consume less. I’m partly serious; the other part is merely alluding to Mark Wahlberg’s character in I Heart Huckabees.

“Oh my god, what happened to you?!!” says Vague Friend in shock-horror, “You’ve turned into a hippie.”

Hippie. She’s not the first person to inaccurately slap me with the label. What if I tell her that inside; beats the mechanical blood-pumping device of a yuppie? And look, look at the people on the streets of this city, looking like yuppies but broke as a hippie.

Labels and image. Image and labels. What’s your style? What am I? No, What’s your style? This. That.

Midnight. A male acquaintance calls. I met him a few years ago through a mutual friend. He was trying to get into mutual friend’s pants at the time, right before he actually got into another mutual friend’s pants. What is he doing calling me at midnight? Attempting a booty call? Ugh. Find someone else. Or does he want to cure my insomnia, just like he used to, by whinging about the latest girl who ditched his poor, sleazy soul? Ugggh. I don’t pick up his call. He won’t stop calling. But I won’t stop to answer.

I’m hanging out with someone I used to know from college. She works six nights a week and hasn’t gotten any sleep since 2003. She announces she just got paid today. “Now, I can buy drugs!” she whimpers with joy. Yes, one can whimper joy. All she wants to talk about are the days when I used to get high with her and getting high in the present and getting high in the future. No matter what I say, I can’t steer her away from the topic. “Oh my god, my friend had like 15 pills on him yesterday. Man, today’s my first day without batu, it sucks, weiii but I’m getting some tonight…. I’ve got a whole set of K on me. Wanna powder your nose with me, just like old times? Why not? Why are you so uptight these days? You know what would loosen you up? Some horse tranquilizers.……”

I thought she had quit. It was not so long ago that she overdosed on Ecstasy pills and landed in the ICU .

“Hey, maaan. I don’t pop anymore. Just Ice and K,” she defends herself and vacuums thick lines of white powder up her nostrils.

I tell her it was nice to see her again but I’ve got to be home soon.

“Why, your mother?” she asks.

No. Me. This is the past. You can’t re-create it; you can’t repeat it or it’ll end up like that song you played one too many times. The thrill is gone and it makes you sick to hear it again. A song by Matisyahu comes to mind and the Hasidic reggae-man is singing, “If you’re trying to stay high, you’re bound to stay low……”

“I’ll rescue you from your mom,” the friend says and a few more dozing horses sleepwalk up her nostrils. She starts to feel sick and pukes all over her own car. “I don’t know why I’m feeling sick…….”

I can guess.

“It’s the damn smoothie I had earlier. There was milk in it. I’m lactose intolerant!” she says.

You’re probably horse tranquilizer-intolerant too. Seeing how you’re not quite a horse.

She pukes again. “Babe, help me, I’m feeling like shit……”

She was always a lightweight. I give her some water. She curls up into a ball in her car. “Right. That’s it. No more. I’m sending you home,” I say.

The next day, she calls me and asks, “Hey man, how are you?”

I should be asking her that question.

“Hey, I got some more K for today. Snort some with me? Why won’t you snort some with me? Babe, I’ve missed you when you were in Oz! Are you the Queen of K that I used to know or not?” she asks.

No. I’ve not only abdicated, I’m in exile. Long live the plebs.

She calls the next day and the conversation is repeated. She pleads and I say no thanks, not today. She calls the following day. And the next. And the next and her questions never vary and my answer stays the same. I stop picking up her calls and after awhile, she stops calling. I sincerely hope she’s not dead.

I sit at home and watch TV late at night and I realize that I know exactly what’s going to happen in the next 45 minutes within the first 15 minutes of a show. I must be psychic. I’m either that good or they’re really that bad.

Part of my routine since I’ve been home: Monday and Tuesday mornings, I drive my mom to her religious class near Asian Heritage Row, opposite the bars and clubs I used to frequent when my mom was out of the country somewhere and couldn’t keep a leash on me. Like all Promised Lands, those clubs and bars seem now like a waste of time, an absolute mess not worth fighting for. I can never sleep at night but I hate getting up early in the morning and driving through KL rush hour traffic. Still, I figured helping my mom get to her kelas agama is sort of a good deed, isn’t it? I drop my mom off at the front of the building, and her tote holds a copy of the Quran. On the car stereo, Nazareth’s Heir of the Dog is playing and I’m singing along – “Hell don’t mess with a SON OF A BITCH!!!” The irony doesn’t dawn on me until much later.

Johnny Cash comes along and he’s singing, “You can run onnnnn for along time, run onnnnnn for a long time, sooner or later, God’ll cut you down, sooner or later, God’ll cut you down……”

I pick my mom up two hours later and Sublime’s Santeria is playing on the stereo. I’m singing along happily. There’s something about Sublime that puts me in a cheerful mood. “If he knows what is good for him, he best go run and hide, Daddy’s got a new 45…and I won’t think twice to stick that foul stick down sancho’s throat, believe me when I say that I got something for his punk-ass……”

“Well, someone’s happy today,” says my mom. “I can never tell when you’re going to be in a good mood and when you’re going to be grumpy. You’re very unstable…”

Unstable? I think of the periodic table or whatever parts of it that I can remember. I think of a horse stable being torn down. Unstable? “I’m not unsta---”

Some car is pulling a lane-changing stunt and nearly runs me off the road. I lose it. I chase him down Jalan Maarof, screaming bloody murder. Okay, maybe a little unstable.

“Maryam, please. You’re not very pretty when you’re angry,” my mom says.

And I say, or was I yelling that the guy’s an idiot and why would I care if an idiot sees me at my prettiest or not? Would he be more considerate and have more concern for my life and safety if I was prettier? Judging by his driving, he’s blind anyhow so it wouldn’t make a bloody lot of difference would it?

My mom shrugs, “You have a lot of anger issues…..”

No, I don’t. I had a lot of anger issues. When I was 13. Now I’m just bored. Bored and sick and tired. Anything else, everything else, is all just residue from shots fired in the past.

This is all just residue.

This Is Not a Book Review

2007-01-31T14:17:00.000+10:00

Revolutionaries, self important children of Independence, a cat whisperer, struggling writers, struggling Coke-fiend writers, an Egyptian family – oh, the people you get to know through books. Some of the books I’ve read in recent (+not so recent) times:

1. The Bolivian Diary by Ernesto “Che” Guevara (+The Motorcycle Diaries)
The prose itself is nothing to shout about. Of course, if you were holed up somewhere in the Bolivian jungle, leading a guerilla army, you too would have little time to wax poetic about the moon and the stars, the sand between your toes and the bullet between your shoulder blades. This is the diary of Che Guevara right before he was captured and shot thirty something times and went on to grace the front of many t-shirts. If you happen to own of these t-shirts and find yourself confusing Guevara’s iconic mug with that of Zach de la Rocha from Rage Against the Machine (and trust me, I’ve met someone like you before), I’m sure Zach is flattered but you might want to try reading this.
A few years ago, I read Guevara’s Motorcycle Diaries – his personal journal from when he was 23 years old, before he became “El Che” and an icon of the Cuban revolution, when he was just a young medical student on a road trip around Latin America with his buddy. While the American media often portrays Guevara as a cold, hard, executioner and The Bolivian Diary doesn’t do much for making the guy seem more affable, the Motorcycle Diaries presents quite a different story. It’s not a book about revolution or guerilla warfare but instead, it’s more of a coming-of-age account of a young adult, someone not much different from you and I, coming out of his largely comfortable, middle class bubble for the first time and is awakened to the realities and injustices of the world. He sees the harsh treatment of mine workers, the ruins of a once great civilization destroyed by corruption and gunpowder, he feels plain hunger, and he quite nobly, volunteers his services to a leper colony without treating the patients well, like lepers. At the same time, he’s no shiny, superhuman hero; he’s not infallible to the stupidity of young love nor the follies of idealism. It makes him well, relatable. And he writes well. He really does. Reading both journals, I started out thinking that I was going to be learning about how a man changed the world but what I actually discovered instead, was how the world can change a man. From that nice boy next door that you think you could’ve comfortably hung out with, to the historical icon that is hero to some and villain to others and well, the lead vocalist of Rage Against the Machine to a misinformed few.

*Note: I came home to find that my copy of The Motorcycle Diaries has been booknapped by a phantom reader. If I ever find you, I’m torn between wanting to hit you for spiriting away one of my favorite reads and wanting to congratulate you for making such an excellent version from my bookshelf. You could’ve done a lot worse for yourself by stealing one of those crappy Anne Rice novels buried somewhere in the back of the shelf. Well, at least they won’t be missed by me. Oh, and the movie based on The Motorcycle Diaries, directed by brilliant director, Walter Salles and starring the equally brilliant, Gael Garcia Bernal is an excellent watch. And not because I think Bernal is the sexiest short man alive. That’s not the point.

2. Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami
It’s typical of Murakami isn’t it? Something starts out seeming like some kind of murder mystery with a cat-killing figure called Johnnie Walker and ends up really being a meditation/ exploration of the nature of existence, life, etc…yadida. Don’t let my yadidas fool you, I’m actually a fan of Murakami, I’m just a terrible book-reviewer. Yes indeed, more important than ‘who-killed-who’ is ‘why are we here?!!’

3. Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
My first experience of Rushdie’s work was The Ground Beneath Her Feet and I was taken by how Rushdie managed to use a fantastical, fairy tale-like narrative to tell a story that is deeply rooted and concerned with history and social realities. Still, I was told that it isn’t one of his best works and I should try reading Midnight’s Children which is an interesting way of looking at the birth of Modern India and Pakistan. So I did. I went to a second-hand bookstore on the Gold Coast and bought myself a copy for 6 Aussie Dollars right before I was due to return home to KL for the summer holidays. And then what do I find out? I could’ve saved AU$6 (approx RM18) and fished the book out for free from the Johor Straits. Apparently, this book is on the list of banned/restricted/we-think-it-is-but-it’s-not-for-sure-because-no-one-knows-what-the-fuck-exactly-they’re-doing books in Malaysia. Apparently, it has been deemed a threat to our morality by the good people at our Kementerian Keselamatan Dalam Negeri. Uhm, excuse me, a threat to whose morality, exactly? Morality is subjective and relative and one would have to have a certain degree of intelligence to discern what is right and what is wrong. By dictating to the people what they can and cannot read as if they were still trying to learn the alphabet and struggling to boost their IQ into double digits, you become a threat to our intelligence and thus, can it be said that you are a threat to our morality and we’d have to throw you into the sea? Oh yes, some things are banned/restricted on the basis that they might alarm public opinion so shouldn’t we then restrict our ministers, government officials and authority figures from saying the alarmingly inane things they do in the press? Put a duct tape over their mouth and throw them into the sea? Oooh, don’t tempt me.

4. Ideas that Changed the World by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto
This book is really more of an Idiot’s Guide to Everything Anyone Has Ever Thought Of. It contains a brief overview of nearly all the bright ideas Humankind has had since the dawn of history – from cannibalism to cultural pluralism which most also accept the idea of anti-pluralism – it’s a good place to start learning a little about everything but not a whole lot about anything. Useful to have around for: a) boring someone to tears with your fun facts during small talk so they’ll leave you alone b) fooling people into thinking that you know more than you actually do and c) when your niece and nephew is at that age when they want to know about historical dialectic and you can’t remember anything you’ve learned in uni because you’ve become a mindless drone who yaps on about that artist who had a scandal with Datuk SoandSo all the time, you can just hand them this book and tell them to turn to page XYZ and leave you alone.

5. Down & Out in Paris & London by George Orwell (+1984)
I have a confession to make: it took me ages to get through Orwell’s 1984 when I read it awhile back because I kept falling asleep after every three pages. Not because it lacked any interesting, thought-provoking ideas (quite the contrary) but because I found Orwell’s style of writing like a charcoal suit left out in the desert – dull and dry. But when you’re writing about Dystopia, fanciful and flowery prose would just ruin the effect, wouldn’t it? I suppose the same can be said for Down & Out which is basically, about poverty and as Orwell clearly demonstrates, there’s nothing pretty or romantic about poverty. It’s true that life kicks you when you’re down, then bitch slaps you twice and flicks your nose. It’s all too easy to keep staying down when you’re down. Poverty and homelessness doesn’t only affect the lazy, the junkies and the crazed. Through a few cruel twists of fate, you might find your relatively hard-working, relatively sane self in dire consequences. Aspiring artists and writers be warned, maybe you should’ve listened to your momma when she told you to be a lawyer. Oh, bah! Screw that. Oh, by the way, I found an old, interesting article from the New York Times about Orwell’s 1984: click (here) if you’re interested in reading a few excerpts from the article.

6. Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McInerney
Like in Orwell’s Down & Out, here is another story about a struggling/aspiring writer. Except, while Orwell’s depression was largely economic, the narrator of this book’s depression is really all in his cocaine-fuelled head. Set in New York City in the heady, glitzy 80s, the narrator works as a fact-checker in the Department of Factual Verification at a well-known magazine and whinges about wanting to work in Fiction instead, his supermodel wife just left him which results in more whingeing and coke snorting with a nightlife-loving, freewheeling friend called Tad Allagash, whom the narrator describes as either reminding him of his best self or his worst self, a character and description that reminds me of a few of my own real life friends. The book starts out funny, in a cynical, tragic way but by the end, you find out the narrator’s doing all this cause his mommy died the year before and he misses her. Boo-hoo. Uh. Alright, alright, I might have missed the point entirely. The book has been dubbed the ‘80s version of The Great Gatsby but I don’t recall being overcome by a feeling of ‘Meh’ at the end of The Great Gatsby.

7. Palace Walk by Naguib Mahfouz
Eh, I just bought this book and am only halfway through it. Check back with me later.

8. Projek: Elarti (December 06 – “Majalah Kulturpop yang Plural Lagi Liberal”)
A non-profit project and an interesting and refreshing magazine read because Off the Edge is “Arts and Culture for the Business Person” and you’re thinking – What?! The Business Person is interested in arts and culture?!! And Cleo and all those girlie mags about 10 Ways to Wank A Man and 100 Pants that Flatter Your Fat Ass only If You’re Willing to Lose About a 100 pounds and spend 1000 ringgit is poison to your system. I’m probably a bit late in pimping this magazine but I think we’ve established a while ago that I’m slow, alright? For more info, click “Dubuk Dekaden” in the links section and find your way from there.

Your Fictional Gene Pool

2007-01-30T15:24:00.000+10:00

Ladies and gentleman, all 2.1 readers of my blog, meet your new blogger-in law, Dean Winchester:

Okay, okay, so the delectable face and body really belongs to actor and real-life person, Jensen Ackles. Kudos to his gene pool. His mama must be so proud that she popped such a hot bun out of the oven. And yes, part of my attraction to the character of Dean Winchester is due to his physical attributes like:

a) the pretty doll-like eyes and the pouty I-think-I’ll-Have-That-For-Lunch lips. I like girlie features. Because deep down, you know I swing that way.

b) the mancung nose.

c) the chiseled bone structure.

d) the thick hair

e) The 6’1” hunka Texan beefcakeness. My own 5’7”ness and the four-inch bright red, patent-leather heels that I recently bought and unconvincingly swear that I will actually wear out some day will require a male arm accessory that is at least 6 feet tall. I’m not dainty, willowy or particularly fragile-looking so it’s a plus point that Dean with his badan sasa isn’t either. I want someone that doesn’t make me feel like Chynna standing next to David Spade. Judging by Jensen Ackles’ bulging biceps, I think it’s safe to say that I don’t look like I can beat him up. I’d like to be able to if the need shall arise but I don’t want to look it. Ever.

f) The nice, solid butt. I like butts and I cannot lie. I’ve had enough of ass-less guys. You know when you move to grab a guy’s bum and all you end up feeling is the wallet in his back pocket? Well yeah, that kinda sucks. Unless you’re a pickpocket.

g) The slightly sharp canines. Sharp canines are sexy. They suggest that a person eats meat. Meat lovers are sexy. Eating meat is what helped human beings evolved from simple, ape-like stupidity to a more complex, advanced form of stupidity. God help me if I ever have to put up with a vegetarian. Don’t get me wrong, I love animals. They’re tasty. Mmmm….bite me.

h) The light dusting of freckles on his nose. Because I’m actually in love with myself.

Right. But there’s also all those other aspects of Dean that I love that can’t be attributed to Jensen Ackles because lets face it, I don’t really know what this Jensen guy is like. How is my attraction to Dean more than just physical? Let me count the ways..

1) He’s funny, full of quotable witty one-liners. Call me delusional or full of myself, but I think I’m the funniest person I know which makes it hard for me to laugh at other people’s jokes. Ha-Ha. A guy that I consider to be as funny as me is good. But not funnier. He’ll steal the show. I don’t like people stealing my show.

2) He’s a trusty sidekick, unlike his “I’m so special, I’m a psychic demon spawn and I’m all my Daddy thinks about” younger brother, Sam. I don’t like people stealing my show. I’m an egomaniac. I come from a big family. I have issues. Of course, by sidekick, I don’t mean someone who doesn’t know how to take charge and make decisions when time calls for it. The operative word here is ‘sidekick’ not spineless. You can’t do any kicking, side or front without a spine.

3) He’s the best older brother ever. You’ve got to love a guy who watches out for his brother.

4) He’s an orphan. No, I’m not exactly popping out balloons and streamers over the fact that his childhood was tragic and his parents are dead. And no, I’m not wishing anyone’s parents dead. But the lack of a mother-in-law-type character in the picture isn’t a bad deal. Because my own mother is a handful. She’s 10 mothers, 3 mother-in-laws, half a stepmother and 1 grandmother rolled into one and she’s pretty much all the mother I can handle. Anymore and I think I might have a serious mental breakdown. Also, the fact that Dean grew up without a mom and a demon-hunting-work obsessed dad means that he knows how to take care of himself. Good. Who needs a guy that has to be constantly mothered? I don’t want kids. There can only be one baby and that’s me. Actually, I’m not that bad. I can open jars, carry heavy things and have no qualms about killing nasty cockroaches. Yes I’m both a baby and the Man of the House. Is there a difference?

5) He doesn’t seem to have any friends other than his brother. He hates small talk with strangers. He makes being anti-social look like it’s what all the cool kids are doing. Because at the rate my mother is cutting into my time with friends, I will have hardly any friends left by the time I’m 25. The few that remain will be the ones that fully understand what it’s like to have a mother like mine. And they will only understand because their moms are a lot like mine, in fact, their mom is mine. Hello, sisters (no, no hugs!). As for small talk with strangers, yes, I love a guy that doesn’t feel the need to constantly act like some Yang Berhormat MP walking about his constituency two weeks before the election. I myself find small talk with most (though not all) strangers not only awkward and uncomfortable but most importantly, boring and highly annoying. I’d rather chew my own foot off. And swallow it.

6) …..But can be charming when it’s required of him. While you don’t want to associate yourself with a budding politician, you’re not prepared to kick it with a complete social retard either. You need someone yang boleh dibawa majlis because some social occasions just can’t be avoided unless you’re dead.

7) He’s a hero. He saves precious human lives by working as a demon/ghost/evil supernatural creatures-hunter for free. I think I mentioned before that I wanted to be Buffy the Vampire Slayer when I was 14. Well there you go, Vampire Slayer and Demon Hunter – perfect.

8) He’s adept at committing credit card fraud. Yes, money doesn’t matter. But stuff does. You can’t live on air. He has sacrificed a lot to save lives, goddammit! What’s a little credit card scam if it helps the greater good?

9) He knows how to use a crossbow because err…..bowhunting is an important skill.

10) He’s serious about work but knows how to kick back and have fun. You’ve got to play hard when you work hard to save the world from a demon-led takeover.

11) He’s streetwise. Nevermind that he confuses American history with School House Rock or that he finds the use of the word ‘corporeal’ pompous. I’ll read the books, he can read the maps.

12) He knows how to fix cars. My hand in err….yes, just hand to the first valiant suitor that can restore my beat-up, problem child of a car back to full health, maybe even pimp it – put in a hot tub and LCD TV or three. But seriously, the fact that Dean can fix up his ‘67 Chevy Impala as if it had never been hit by a giant truck is impressive. Also, he makes being smothered in black oil look so sexy, you almost convince yourself that black oil is edible. And that car, ah, that car is a punctuation mark at the end of a long line of hotness.

13) He’s not a metrosexual. Ugh. Metrosexuals. A little scruffiness is attractive. Dirrrty is even better. Heh.

14) He likes “frisky women”. Good. I’m frisky….A little repressed and insecure but “frisky”, nonetheless. Besides, all that repression and insecurity just makes a girl a whole lot friskier deep down, doesn’t it? Isn’t that right, sisters? Hahaha.

15) He likes classic rock. I believe you can tell a lot about a person by their taste in music. Also, anyone that still uses a cassette player over one of those shiny, new, hi-tech fancy mp3/camera/phone/microwave/GPS/WMD/mini-UFO gadgets must have an appreciation for old things and I’m only going to get older.

16) He has masqueraded as an FBI agent, a fireman, a CDC doctor, etc - he doesn’t mind a little role playing. Ooo….tee hee…eh, wait, what was I saying? I got distracted……….

17) He’s a bad boy with a heart of gold. Like fried chicken, men are best served crispy on the outside, tender on the inside…….and hot. New Age heart-on-the-sleeve sensitive types please exit stage left and take your sniffling and weeping to a therapist who cares.

For these virtues, I’m willing to overlook the fact that Dean

- sometimes suffer from the atypically American affliction of shoot-first-ask-questions-later-itis. The shot-in-the-head don’t tend to answer, man.

- can sometimes look a little puffy when he’s not well rested. So do I. Well, you can’t do a lot of sleeping when you’re…… what was I saying? I got distracted.

- wears too many layers of clothing. Honey, don’t be selfish. Why keep those treasures to yourself?!!

- has a younger brother with a hot body. Eh, wait, why is this a bad thing?

And oh, alright, so Dean Winchester is really a fictional character from the TV show, Supernatural. Still, if writers mostly right about what they know then surely the creators must base the character of Dean Winchester on someone they know in real life, right? Right? Yes? No? The Cosmic Order has been trying to teach me that all men, no matter in what form – husbands, fathers, brothers, lovers, friends, acquaintances with benefits, rock stars, lecturers, waiters, random passing stranger on the street – are disappointing. And while I’ve tried my very best to be an apt pupil, I sometimes find my commitment to pessimism wavering.

I just wrote 4 pages on a fantasy man. I must be coming down with something. Shame on me, shaaaaaame, shame.

Ah, well. Give me a break. I’m on holiday and my brain has a flashing, neon ‘Vacancy’ sign up-front. An idle mind is a fictional demon hunter’s playground.

He can ride my see-saw. Anytime.

Ugh.

I need to go get a hobby or something. But, I already know what I’d like to do……

Err….I’ll shut up now.

Bedtime Stories for Children

2007-01-23T13:37:00.000+10:00

Neverland & Unicorns

I went to Sunway Lagoon the other day with a couple of old friends. We’ve been having trouble coping with being young adults and feeling grey (we’re passed being blue) and were trying to recreate our childhood. Except, despite Sunway Lagoon being the most over-hyped theme park in the history of Malaysia and only 15 minutes away from my parents’ house, I never went there as a kid. My friends all got to go as kids. My mother was against the principle of it all. She didn’t want to support anything that made money out of giving people the illusion of danger and the sense that they’re about to die. She also thought the people behind the Sunway development made a bloody mess of the place and shouldn’t be made rich. Still, Sunway Lagoon featured greatly in my childhood because I remembered seeing countless of ads for it and wishing that my mother would let me risk my life and make lousy project developers rich every once in a while, just like all the other kids I knew. The older I get, the more people tell me that I’m turning into my mother. God, I’m not ready to turn into my mother. Not before I throw myself face first down a giant water slide.

Sunway Lagoon is tacky to the point of being laughable. But it was the most fun I had in a long time. Perhaps, it was sunstroke that made me feel deliriously happy. No, I think it was just the company of old friends that made the experience what it was. Old friends that I don’t get to see as often as I’d like to anymore. We had planned the outing a week in advance. I thought it was funny how we had to officially schedule ‘fun’ in our lives these days. When did Fun start needing to make an appointment before dropping in on you? The night before, I thought I was the only one that was ridiculously excited. But one friend says to me the next morning, “Shit, I’m more excited about today than I was before my first date with my boyfriend! I even planned my outfit and everything. Maybe I’m a lesbian and we’ve been friends all these years because I’m secretly hoping that if I hang around long enough, you’ll one day take your pants off for me.”

“Well, today’s your lucky day!” I said. I warned my friends that there’s a chance that my saggy, old tankini bottoms might accidentally come off on the way down the giant slides. I didn’t end up losing them but it did shift around alot and I’m afraid I might have flashed more bits to the Arab tourists at the park than I would have liked. Masyaallah.

After we had tired ourselves by going up a killer hill just so we can throw ourselves down the giant slides, we waded around the pathetic wave pool and basked in the sun. This is the life, we said. “It’s a Thursday morning and we’re splashing around a pool. Do you think we’ll still be able to get away with this when we’re 30?” asked one friend. Sure, as long as I have an adult holding my hand to make sure that I don’t wander off with some candy-offering stranger.

We then landed into an argument on whether Unicorns should be called Monocorns. I was in favor of Monocorn. Everyone else was a Unicorn supporter until they decided that it should really be called Unihorn. I argued that the thing on its head is more of a cone than it is a horn. So we settled on Unicone. Three years at university and this is the kind of conversation that amuses us most.

On our way home, we stopped by the oldest A&W branch in Malaysia and tucked into a waffle topped with ice cream and strawberry syrup. Just like we did when we were kids. This particular A&W branch used to have a killer playground in the back. It used to be the place to celebrate your 7^th birthday and beat up the poor guy in the A&W Bear Suit. Ah, fond memories. Now half the playground has been paved over to make way for more parking spots.

Joni Mitchell was right. – paved paradise and put up a parking lot. But this wasn’t the time to think of Joni Mitchell and all her worries about the state of the world. On this day, we were in our own world, we were Peter Pan in Neverland and Wendy can go fuck herself, the anal-retentive prude.

By the way, it’s Monocone.

Kidnapping Mister Potato

On second thought, I don’t think I’m turning into my mother. I think my mother used to be something like me before she turned into well, her. “I can see that your mother used to be a punk like you,” said one friend.

“Hey man, first of all, only I am allowed to call my mother a punk-ass and second of all, you’ve got to be kidding, right?!” I had just finished telling her the story of how my mother tried to get me to commit an act of vandalism in Bangsar Village. There was a one foot cut-out of the Mister Po-tah-to chips mascot, with its upturned mustache and Mexican hat, sitting on the parking barrier. I was already entertaining the thought of ripping Mister Potato from his rightful advertising place and taking it home with me, just for laughs when my mother said out loud, “Hey, let’s rip Mister Potato off that thing and take it home with us!” I suddenly found myself getting all uppity, “Mama! Don’t be ridiculous. What on earth are we going to do with it?”

“No idea,” said my mother, “But it would be funny…..You should do it!”

My mother never ceases to shock me. Just when I thought I had her accurately pinned down as a middle-aged, ultra-conservative Ice Queen hermit with full obedience to the outdated social laws of propriety and all-consuming paranoid fear of trouble and danger, she tries to get me to kidnap Mister Potato….because it’s funny.

But then, I should have seen it coming; my family has been producing repressed punk-ass women for generations. For each time we think to ourselves, “Yeah, let’s fuck with ‘em all” a voice long ago genetically encoded into our heads by our First Prude Ancestor says, “What will the neighbors think?” (Nevermind that we currently live in a world where the neighbors hardly notice we exist, let alone give a damn what we do.).

While I don’t doubt that they love eachother, my mother is of the opinion that my grandmother is as maternal and affectionate as a pile of rocks. If I am the Jantan Macho (as the kids in college used to say), then my grandmother, with her tough-as-nails exterior is the original prototype. She would rather give you 100 bucks then give you a hug. I would know; I’ve been made rich from offering to hug her when I’m broke. No chick-flick moments for this lady, thanks. My grandmother often alludes to the fact that she was never really keen on settling down and being stuck at home with a family, like all the girls of her generation were expected to do. She did because she felt there were simply no other options and thus the good love she has for her family is often undermined by a creeping aura of buried resentment and bitterness or simply, a wistful yearning for something else. She would often say, with a mixture of pride and sadness that it’s nice to see girls these days, her granddaughters, being able to drive cars, travel the world on their own, pursue a career, yadida…. My grandmother is a Nazi when it comes to neatness and presentation but when my mother complains to her about me living like a jungle savage and stubbornly insisting on doing what I want, I can almost see a hint of a smile crack through Grandma’s stern face. When I got my belly pierced, my mother blew a fuse but when she calmed down, she warned me not to let Grandma see it in case she gets a heart attack or starts nagging my mother on not being able to keep her daughters in check the way she felt her mother expected her to. Funnily enough, it was my Grandma that insisted I show it to her. No shock, no disapproval, just a whole lot of curiosity, wonder and fascination. “Oooh…aaah…,” she went, “Sakit tak? Cucuk dengan apa? Tu berlian betul ke?” It was only after my mother showed up that my grandmother quickly covered her fascination with a stern, “Ish, macam lembu.”

Coming home from a day at Sunway Lagoon, I half-expected my mother to make some kind of sarky remark along the lines of “Ha, dah puas berlagak macam monyet hari ni?!” After all, a lot of other people that knew of my plans (and weren’t part on it) said, “Geez, how old are guys, man?! 10?” But instead my mother said, “You know, Maryam, sometimes I still feel like I’m still a kid inside...But I see my friends and how they behave and I think that I wouldn’t be a proper adult, a proper mother if I didn’t act like them…..”

Uh? What? Are we sharing here? Awkward. All I could say was, “Err..the slides were fun. Very exhilarating. And a Giant Duck kissed my hand on the way out. Oh, and I flashed a couple of tourists.”

And my mom said wistfully, “I’d still love to do the things you do but then, what would people think of a 56 year old grandmother in a bathing suit screaming and squealing down a giant water slide?”

I can't speak for anyone else but I know what I would think: Awesome.

Variety Pack

2007-01-20T22:17:00.000+10:00

Testify

The other day I yelled at some lady in the BSC parking lot. She was waiting for a parking spot. She could’ve pulled to the side instead of holding up 10 cars behind her, including my own. So I decided to knock on her window and give her a piece of my mind. She said she was waiting for parking. I asked her if she expected the rest of us to join hands around her and pray until she gets a parking spot. She didn’t get it. Move to the side, dumbass, then you can wait for a parking spot till your tits sag down to your ankles and the rest of us can happily get on with our lives. The problem with Malaysians is that they’re only ever considerate to inconsiderate people. Someone blocking traffic, someone cutting queue yadda yadda--- nevermind, that’s just the way things are…Bullshit. It’s the way things are because it’s the way you let them be. If I could just yell at one stranger a day, I think I’d make the world a better place.

Alright, alright, maybe yelling isn’t exactly the solution to all the world’s woes. After all, the lady didn’t end up moving her car but simply clicked her heels three times and said, “I’m waiting for parking. I’m waiting for parking, I’m waiting for parking”. Dear Lady, I hope an entire parking lot falls on your head while you sleep tonight. Warm Wishes and all of my love to you, bitch. By the way, there were plenty of parking spaces available on the floor below. No waiting and hogging traffic required. Oh, I forgot, perhaps going two floors up in an elevator might prove too strenuous for the gentle lady.

Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman but Quite Possibly a Man

“Hey, guess what Auntie L asked me about you, today?” said a friend of mine. This was about two years ago, while I was still studying at my old college.

Auntie L was a fellow student and famous figure at the place. Her fame was partly derived from the fact that she was part of a group of students dubbed the Relics; people who had first enrolled at age 18 and had stayed on for far too long, longer than it would usually take for someone to get a degree, seniors to the seniors (the King of Relics is a guy whose name I can’t remember but I know that he’s been in his freshman year for 8 years. Whenever he passed by, people would say, “That’s the guy who’s been in the same 2+2/ 4 year program for 8 years!”). Auntie L wasn’t really anyone’s aunt, not that I know of anyway but people called her that because she had the demeanor of one. Think of your loudest, most obnoxious Mak Datin aunt with the big ass, stiff RTM newscaster’s bob and a compulsion to stick her nose into everyone else’s business – that was how Auntie L came across as. I had no idea she had any idea who I was. She was an antiquity, I was a freshman (or was I a sophomore? I can’t keep track of these things) and we’ve never said a word to eachother.

“She asked me whether you’re a lesbian. She’s convinced that you are.”

“Why, is she interested? She’s not my type,” I said. I usually prefer someone, more whatyoumccallit, biologically male. If I did have a thing for the ladies, I’d probably go for the playboy bunny or better, beer-ad type. Yeah, I’d like that. Some tease and all-sleaze. “And convinced? How? She’s never even talked to me. She’s talked to you but not me.”

“Well, you do come across as a bit butch, you know. And she’s not the first person to ask me the question either.”

I did run around with the Mardi Gras crowd in college. Half of my friends were gay and the other half were probably just in denial. I was gay by association, I guess. “More like fag-hag,” said my friend. Him and another friend of ours once handed me an article they had found in some dumbass female magazine entitled “Why You’re Still Single” and circled in red was Reason #5: You’re a Fag-Hag. “Don’t worry,” they said, “Who needs to date when you can be our fag-hag?” Just because I’m not entirely worried about being single doesn’t mean I find being your fag-hag a dream come true, pricks.

“Anyway,” my friend said, “I told Auntie L you’re not a lesbian; you’re a man.” He thought this was funny. Me, not so much. I don’t have much of a problem with being mistaken for a lesbian. But a man?! You bitch! “I would say that you’re actually a gay man trapped in a woman’s body but then, even when you seem to like a guy, I’m not sure whether you want him or you want to be him,” continued my friend.

Well, what’s the difference? We’re all attracted to people who remind us of either our best self or our worst self, either way, our most interesting self, a self we could not be bothered to actually be.

I don’t know when I started growing invisible testicles and something dangly between my legs though I have a feeling it started in college. My mother gave birth to 4 daughters and one son. Next to my brother, I always thought I was the girliest one in the family. At the all-girls primary and secondary school I attended, I wasn’t exactly the epitome of femme but I thought I held my own as a member of the female race. Sure, I was a little rough and was a few characteristics short of being ladylike and sure, as a curve-deficient, broad-shouldered, tall-ish, flat-chested 14 year old with a boyband haircut, I would’ve made for a very handsome boy but I was never at any risk at being kicked out to the neighboring boys school across the road. At 18, I grew ass, boobs and my hair out (I’m a late bloomer, alright?) but funnily enough, that was when people started referring to me as a man. Blame it on a co-ed college environment where gender stereotypes are more prevalent than it is in a single-sex environment. It wasn’t enough to just be female; in order to compute in their brains as one, I needed to be something more or something less than what I am, either way, something they thought I should be. But I thought hey buddy, fuck you – if you must insist that men are Martians and women are from Venus then I’ll sit right here on planet Earth thanks.

I remember this one time in class, the lecturer was yakking on about the difference in masculine and feminine communication styles. “Masculine does not automatically mean male. Take Maryam, for example. She’s female but has what you can identify as a largely masculine style of communication,” said The Lecturer and another friend piped up to say, “But Sir, Maryam is a man!” The Lecturer laughed, “Oh, that’s right, my mistake.” Bleh. I flipped the friend a finger salute and went into a sulk. “Maryam, don’t merajuk,” said my friend, “Merajuk-ing only works for girls. It’s unbecoming on a man.” I punched him in the arm in response because I’m juvenile like that and possess the social skills and refinement of a kindergarten kid. The friend came to college the next day with a big, purplish mark at the spot where his arm had collided with my fist. “Oi, look at what you did to me,” he whinged, the sissy, “Why are you laughing? It hurts.”

Padan muka. Who the man now, suckah?! Who the man?! WHO THE MAN?!!

“You are,” he answered and then thought better of it. “Eh, sorry, no, I’m kidding! Please don’t hit me again…”

Footballer’s Crypt

I couldn’t sleep last night so I ended up watching an episode of Footballer’s Cribs on MTV. It was some Italian footballer and boy, do these people make for fascinating TV personalities. Here is an account of the second half of the episode:

1. We see Italian Footballer’s kitchen. Italian Footballer opens the fridge and takes out a clear, plastic Tupperware of what are obviously prawns. “Here are the prawns. I like the prawns,” he says. The wife says, “He likes the prawn very much. Prawn everything.” Italian Footballer takes out a bar of chocolate. “This is chocolate. I like the chocolate.” The wife says, “Yes, he likes the chocolate.”

2. We see Italian Footballer’s balcony. “This is the balcony,” says Italian Footballer. We see a rabbit eating a carrot. “This is my rabbit,” says Italian Footballer. He takes the carrot from the rabbit. “The rabbit likes eat the carrota.”

3. We see Italian Footballer’s closet. He points to the jeans he’s wearing. “I like the jeans.” He points to his jumper and says, “I like the jumper.” He puts on a beanie and a jacket and strikes a pose. “Now I am model!” he says.

4. We see Italian Footballer’s lovely swimming pool. “This is swimming pool. We like the pool.”

5. The end of the show. Italian Footballer says, “You see my crib. Now bye-bye.”

Oh, e troppo interessante! I couldn’t stop laughing. Ok, ok, I get it; the language barrier is a problem. It’s not like I’d sound all that interesting or intelligent in Italian (or in English & Malay for that matter). I took a class in Elementary Italian in college and cheated through half of it. My Italian vocabulary is limited to useful things like Parla Inglese? (Do you speak English?), Sono rimbata, vaffanculo! (I’m stoned, fuck off!) and Sono el Diablo – baciami, pollastrello mio o si va diritto al Inferno! (I am the Devil – kiss me, my little chook or go straight to Hell!). I vaguely remember how to say “I’m 18 years old” in Italian but that line is 3 years passed its due date. Still, I’m amazed at the stuff that qualifies as television entertainment these days. Even more amazed that I’m actually entertained by it.

Of Looks and Bigger Things

2007-01-17T21:02:00.000+10:00

Me So Pretty: Confessions of a Wilted Flower Girl & the Princess That Turned into a Toad

Once upon a time, there lived a girl who used to play the beautiful fairytale princess. But when she grew up, she got fat, got skeletal then got fat again,, grew a mustache, dressed like the love child of a crazed hobo and a discount-priced hooker, sometimes forgot to shower and made combing her hair more of an annual event than a daily ritual. And when she realized that people no longer remembered what a lovely little princess she once was and became very insecure, she started swearing like a sailor on fire and threatened to beat their faces till even their mama won’t recognize, let alone love them anymore. The End.

I must admit, for someone who doesn’t seem to own a hairbrush or a mirror, I’m rather vain in the most common sense of the word. I don’t look like it but I am deep down. Blame it on the fact that I spent the early formative years of my life as a professional flower girl of sorts. The attention and compliments one receives for basically looking pretty and holding a flower does wonders for a little girl’s ego and a whole lot of damage to her psyche. It taught me that you could be a demanding, disrespectful little tyrant just as long as you looked pretty; the world will love you. In other words, it made me think that people valued looks in females more than anything and thus, I learned to treasure it above all else and behold - vanity is thy name! What I didn’t learn was that the older you get, the more effort is required in looking presentable and since I’m also as lazy as they come well….

Oh, how the flower girls have wilted and fallen! Here is the winter of my adolescent-awkwardness that seems to have amplified, instead of diminish in my young adulthood. My mother thinks I sabotaged myself. Perhaps I did but to make it easier on myself, I choose to believe that my dad and her didn’t give me any kind of supermodel DNA so I really don’t have that much to work with (It’s easy to be cute and pretty when you’re 5, it’s a different story altogether when you’re 21). Some friends say it’s because I’m “not superficial” and have more important things on my mind that I seem to pay little attention to grooming as compared to the hot babes on campus. Oh, they give too much credit. I’m really not that deep. My superficiality is only surpassed by my laziness. A Hot-Babe classmate of mine once mentioned that she would get up at 5 a.m in the morning so she can look good in time for an 8 o’clock class. Fuck that, 5 a.m is the time I go to bed and I need at least some sleep, thanks. I’d be lucky if I even showered before showing up for an 8 o’clock class. I say, “what does it matter what I look like? It’s school/ college, not a fucking beauty pageant.” But secretly and ridiculously enough, I get a little miffed, when people start choosing the word ‘smart’ over ‘hot/pretty’ to describe me. I don’t want to be smart, you damn confederacy of fools! I wanna be hot, damn it!

When I was a lot younger, I used to get the roles of the pretty princess a lot in school stage plays/ shows. But by the time secondary school came around, I somehow found myself being typecast as the brutish male lead (I went to an all-girls school, remember?) – I was Petruchio in Taming of The Shrew when I really wouldn’t mind playing sweet, pretty Bianca or even the shrewish but in the least, female Katrina; I was the male prosecutor in a pantsuit, ridiculous cape and dodgy mustache in the afterlife trial of the aristocratic and elegant Lady Margaret Fontaine, a role which of course, went to the pretty Eurasian girl with the long, tumbling tresses. The one time I got to play a female role, it wasn’t of the hot babe or the darling damsel – it was of a battle-scarred, sword-wielding, religious loon with a bowl-haircut by the name of Joan of Arc who ended up getting flame-grilled on a stake. I can tell you that there was nothing pretty about that role although people did compliment me on “playing crazy really well.” By the time college came around, I had virtually seized to appear on stage or onscreen and instead was relegated to the behind-the-scenes role of writing, directing and barking at cast and crew members, earning myself the nickname of Jantan Macho and Dragon Boss. “Maryam, you’re a quack. You’re more twisted than I realized. Most people would think that writing and directing is a step up. It means you have more substance than the rest of us,” said a friend. Shut up, you fool! Writing and directing is for people that are too ugly to appear onstage – people who have something to say are only making up for being nothing to look at. (Okay, okay, not true. Little girls don’t listen to this crazy lady who has fallen victim to the very thing she often criticizes in society. I’ve just been damaged by my childhood. You can be both smart and beautiful!). As for having more substance, honey, back in my first two years of college the only kind of real substance I had was a substance abuse problem.

A friend recently said that I should try for a job on TV upon graduating. “I think you would do a good job, you’d be really entertaining.” Then another girl who was only there because we were “friends” by association said, “Really? I think Maryam would be better suited to radio because for TV over here they usually look for someone more…….” More? More what, bitch?! More Pan-Asian? More supermodel-like? More of a vacant husk of FHM-worthy features? Yeah, stick a microphone in my mouth and cover the face, won’t you? Sure, I wouldn’t mind working for radio, the public won’t really know or see what I look like so I’d be able to get away looking like a victim of a bear-mauling more than I would if I had a job on TV. And I know that since my flower-girl days, I’ve grown into more of a talker than a looker. Still, that’s no reason to lock me up in some Hitz.FM bell tower somewhere like a mass communications version of Quasimodo. I could always work for RTM. Haha. They’ve got some serious ugly going on there.

Over the years, I’ve resigned myself to the fact that I’m not commercially good looking. The older I get, the more obvious it is that I’m not all that gifted in the looks department, average at best, that my Cosmic Order-given gifts lie elsewhere, somewhere, I’m sure it’s somewhere, perhaps in the ability to fool people into thinking that I’m smarter than I really am. Or perhaps, the people have fooled me into thinking that I’m smarter than I really am (but that’s another story altogether). Of course I say that it’s unfair that society seems to heavily judge and evaluate young women based on their appearances as if nothing else about them mattered. So thank you for choosing to describe me as smart or entertaining or “playing crazy really well” or “someone of substance” but sometimes, a person of so-called substance also wants to be a person of style because of late, I feel kind of utilitarian; like a communist-era apartment block in a street filled with glitzy, capitalist architectural marvels – functional and that’s about it with a crazed developer somewhere raring to bulldoze me. It would seem that in an effort to be more than just a cute girl in a pretty dress with a flower, I seemed to have torn the dress, crushed the flower and become a faceless yapping voice or a bunch of rambling words on a page which isn’t really a bad thing. But you know, sometimes a former flower girl/ stage princess also feels the need to be validated and cherished just for looking pretty before she completely forgets that she has some kind of corporeal form.

“If you’re so worried about people not finding you pretty anymore then make the bloody effort to look pretty, ass!” a hundred voices snap back at me. What?! Make the effort?! Dude, I’ve got better things to do, like staring into space for 8 hours running. If Angelina Jolie can roll out of bed looking like Angelina Jolie, then why can’t I roll out of bed looking like Angelina Jolie? Uh…because you’re not, for one.

“There’s no point in being insecure over something you don’t try at,” the voices snap at me.

Okay, okay, they’re right. Bah, I don’t need to be Miss Universe or a fairytale princess! I’ll take over the world and be QUEEN of the FUCKING UNIVERSE – you little people won’t even see me coming. You’ll read something. You see a brain in a jar and hear it yapping away and then I will CRUSH you like a bug. You will have to crawl with your face to the floor in servitude towards me and your inferior eyes will no longer be allowed to look directly upon my face. Yes, call me smart instead of pretty then! You will have no idea what my face looks like then anyway, not with your nose sniffing the back of my ankles.

Uh, do you think this is how tyrants and evil dictators are made? Because people stopped seeing them as ‘pretty’? I’m just saying……….. “Dude, you’re not vain” says a friend, “You’re more than that -you’re a freaking egomaniac!”

Brains without a Brush

The other day, I was re-organizing my bookshelf when I came across my senior yearbook from secondary school. I was suddenly overcome by a feeling of nostalgia and decided to flip through it. I wished I hadn’t. Most of my favorite memories from school weren’t exactly yearbook material. Instead I found photos of me in the dumbest poses ever – one that was a half-hearted Charlie’s Angel thing, the other seemed right out of a cheap deodorant commercial – and a caption provided by my classmates: Maryam- this crazy, messy girl never bothers about work or anything but has quite a brain in there. Really? I have a brain in here? Why, gee whiz Gepetto, I’m a real boy! How insightful. I’ve had my teenage years immortalized as nuts, lazy and unkempt but with a brain, apparently.

Still, I didn’t have it that bad as compared to some of my other friends and classmates. One friend was “tall” and that’s it. Another, a girl called YL had a “just look at her and you’re guaranteed a laugh” while her friend had “makes more sense than YL”. There’s also the girl who “is so quiet, you’ll hardly know she exists” and another one who “we’re all still trying to get to know” except if no one knows you after 5 years, it’s kind of game over isn’t it? Jeebus, kids can be cruel. By the way, if you happen to have a copy of this yearbook, they printed my name as being partly responsible for the class captions but I swear I was only responsible for three not mentioned here. Some other idiot and her gang of verbally-challenged and wit-deficient friends were responsible for the rest, I swear. I sort of flaked out because I couldn’t bear the responsibility of reducing a whole person into a sentence so they took the job over for me.

Anyway, today, I bumped into a former teacher of mine from secondary school while on a mission in PJ State for breakfast and cigarettes. It was too early in the morning and perhaps, the worst time for me to be bumping into anyone that I used to know from school that I had someday hoped to impress so I can watch them eat their words, choke and die. Today just wasn’t the day. And while I think in general, I’ve improved in my grooming a little since my Mowgli Jungle-Savage Days in school, today I suffered a relapse. I hadn’t slept much the night before; I had dark circles and my face was puffy making me look like the result of a cross-breeding program between a raccoon and the Pillsbury Dough Boy. I was wearing the same t-shirt I had slept in the night before, a t-shirt which boldly proclaimed in gold that I was “Queen of the Effing Universe” and so busy was I in running the universe that I couldn’t find the time to shower or comb my hair before leaving the house. I did make it a point to brush my teeth, if that counts. Heck, I was hungry alright and hunger beats vanity.

“Maryam!” said The Teacher.

Crap. I had seen her earlier, she of the helmet-head haircut and Mary Poppins-skirted glory but I was hoping that she wouldn’t recognize or remember me. I wasn’t exactly her favorite student in school nor was she my favorite teacher. I pulled out the best forced smile I could muster, a great feat seeing as how I don’t usually smile before lunch.

“Girl, I haven’t seen you in four years!”

Oh how four years is not long enough.

“What have you been up to these days? Still studying?”

Yes, final year of Communications and all that boring detail.

The Teacher looked disappointed. “Why Mass. Comm? I would think you’d be doing something better…like law. You used to argue with me a lot!”

Hah! Law is better?! Screw you. Like any idiot, my career ambitions have been influenced by TV and I can’t remember one law drama that I liked, just a whole lot of lengthy monologues yelled out at the top of the actor’s lungs. No thanks. I wanted to either be Buffy the Vampire Slayer which was not a feasible option no matter which way you look at it or like CNN chief international correspondent, Christiane Amanpour. But I didn’t go into straight up journalism because I wanted to keep my options open. Mass Comm. it is.

“You look well,” said the teacher. “But still as disheveled as always. Some things never change!” she laughed her evil, little laugh. “You know, we always felt like you were such a bright girl. It’s a pity you took so little care of your appearance; always had messy hair.”

Eh? When did bright have anything to do with neat? Do you see Einstein’s hair nicely tied up in a bow? Sure, I’m not Einstein and working on a weapon of mass destruction. I’m working on a weapon of mass communications. Now stop picking on me, alright? It felt like I was 15 and about to be hauled up to the quack school counselor’s office again. I used to get sent for counseling for all sorts of reasons (most of them dumb) – some lonely, whiny classmate complaining that I was cliquish, wearing red socks instead of regulatory white, making some jibe in an English essay about photographing a Taliban leader for the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue cover, playing Blackjack in class, not doing my homework, defacing an anti-drug poster by changing its motto from ‘Drugs Kill’ to ‘Drugs Thrill’ but guess what was their number one reason for sending me to the counselor’s office? Messy hair. Seriously, I kid you not, they said it themselves.

The Teacher just kept yakking but I realized that I no longer had to take this shit. “Sorry, Miss. It was nice meeting you ,” Liar , “But I’ve really got to go.”

“Busy day?” she asked.

“Yes, very – I made plans to comb my hair.”

The Fight

2007-01-13T17:44:00.000+10:00

Round One

In Form One, I celebrated the last day in school before the December holidays by fighting in an impromptu wrestling tournament in class. For some reason, there were no teachers in class, and I decided to mark the occasion by running around with a Malaysian flag tied around my neck, proclaiming to be Captain Boleh, the undiscovered, future superhero of Malaysia. My friend thought it’d be funny if she tried to tie me to the teacher’s desk with my own cape, perhaps as payback for the times in Standard Six when I used to tie her hands and feet to various poles around school with her own shoelaces or perhaps for the time when I flicked an endless barrage of rubber-bands at her while she was nursing a fractured ankle and was helpless to run away (Yes, we’re friends). A struggle ensued; we had gone viciously primal on one another - lots of punching and kicking, arm locks around necks, body slamming and slamming-heads-to-the-wall-tables-and-chairs action ensued. For some reason, some of our other friends and classmates thought what we were doing looked like fun and decided to join in. (I went to an all-girls school and if you think an all-girls environment was all giggles, nail-painting and dainty pillow fighting - think again, sir). By the end of the day or by the time someone who wasn’t in on the fun decided to call a teacher up, all the tables and chairs in class had been overturned and haphazardly pushed against the wall, I had broken two window panes by having my back slammed against it, ripped my uniform/ kain baju kurung from attempting one too many flying kicks and my friend had a bump on her head the size of my fist. The teacher came in and asked why all the tables and chairs were overturned and pushed to the side.

We smiled sweet little girl smiles and answered, “Spring-cleaning the classroom.”

A classmate whispers to me, “I think you hurt my spleen” while trying to control her laughter.

“Don’t make too much noise,” the teacher said before turning on her heels to return to the staff room.

I still can’t believe the teacher fell for it. Or maybe she didn’t but found it hard to believe that a bunch of girls or young ladies would ever start their own young, female Fight Club.

As for us little wrestlers, we could hardly believe how we were feeling. Dirty from being pinned to the floor, sweaty, bruised, aching all over and probably suffering from some mild concussion and minor brain damage, we were also, utterly and inexplicably elated. It was the most exhilarating day in school we had all year. To be able to let out all that pent-up aggression of adolescence in an open and direct manner usually reserved for boys was a welcomed release. They say that boys will be boys but girls, well, it seems that we aren’t encouraged to just be so most of the time girls will appear to be whatever people expect them to be. But when we think no one’s looking, we might just turn out to be no different from our male counterparts, anatomical structures and biological functions aside. Hey man, chicks get aggro too. Society just doesn’t think it’s becoming of us to show it. Boys, well, they can take it outside. But girls, girls are socially taught to be non-confrontational so we plaster on fake smiles when faced with our nemesis while verbally assassinating them when their backs are turned so that the other party will never ever know what the issue is. Or, we learn to take that anger, aggression out on ourselves.

The last bell of the day rang and my friends and I hobbled out of class with wide, deranged smiles on our faces. My friends, my classmates, they say, “Shit, that was fun. Hey, we should do it again next year!”

But we never did. Not ever again.

Round Two

Eight years later, I meet up with my friend for lunch at a café in town filled with dirty yuppies and faux-sophisticates. She’s wearing a pretty, spotless white dress and dainty heels, sitting with her ankles crossed and back straight. She doesn’t have a single hair out of place. We greet eachother with an air-kiss as to not stain each other’s cheeks with our lip-gloss. I apologize for being late – traffic and lack of available parking spaces always slows a girl down. I compliment her on her dress. She compliments me on my haircut. I ask her ‘what’s up?’ She says “Nothing much”. She asks me the same and I say, “Nothing much.” But we both know the other is lying. I ask how her boyfriend of two years is doing. She says fine; they’re planning to move in together soon. She asks if I’m with anyone yet. I say no. She asks why and I say, “Well, it’s not something you can exactly buy off a shelf, is it?” I tell her that a couple of other friends are giving me a hard time for being single, feeling sorry for me when I personally don’t feel like it’s much of a problem. It’s them thinking that they should feel sorry for me that brings me down. I confess that I just want to rub that look of pity off their faces with a cheese grater. I don’t do it, of course. I just tell her that I want to. We talk of the weather. We talk about our separate lives at our respective universities and future job prospects. My friend confesses she wished she hadn’t listened to her parents when they told her to do pharmacy. She hates it, hates it with a passion. She wanted to be an archaeologist. She says more and more, she’s feeling the weight of other people’s expectations crushing her into a splatter of the person she used to be. I tell her I know what she means. Then I commend her for not having a hair out of place while being crushed and reduced to a splatter.

She laughs, not as loudly as she used to, without showing much of her teeth and says, “Hey, you remember the wrestling match we had in Form One?”

I grin. “Yeah, what about it?”

“Why didn’t we ever do it again?”

“Because Gandhi said violence is not the answer.”

“Gandhi got shot.”

“Yeah, sure, go ahead and hold it against the man. It’s not his fault he got shot. Lennon said give peace a chance and he got shot too. Jesus said turn the other cheek and he got crucified.”

“Exactly. So we should just do it again,” my friend says. She looks around. So many people around. She looks at me and says, “Eh, maybe not you’re about a foot taller than me now…But then, you’ve been smoking for the last, what, 4 years, so you’d probably tire pretty quickly now, won’t you?”

“Shut up. I’m fitter than I look. Kinda. Whatever it is, I think the question we should be asking is why we started beating the shit out of eachother in the first place.”

“I don’t know. But it was really, really fun.”

And unlike the many other things we do in our lives, it felt absolutely natural. And we felt free. And when we hurt, the pain had a name, a color, a wound, a scar that was visible for all eyes to see. And if others saw it, then they would finally see that it was real, that it was justified, that it would be something they could remedy. And it felt good. And ironically enough, we’re still better friends with eachother than the people whose stomachs we’ve never kneed, whose backs we’ve never slammed to a window.

“I don’t want to ruin your dress,” I say. “Besides, we’re civilized people now, eh?” We’re 21 not 13 any longer. It isn’t about boys will be boys and girls will be what anymore. They’re young men and we’re young women. It’s about being an adult. You don’t punch people in the face for no reason anymore. You have the right to vote, so instead, you can empower your government to drop bombs on a nation you’ve never visited, whose people you’ve probably never met. It’s the way of the civilized world.

My friend sighs. She shrugs her shoulders. She runs her hand along the bottom of her dress to smooth out the creases. She straightens her back and takes a deep breath in. She exhales and collapses into a defeated hunch over her half-eaten lunch. “Being civilized sucks.” She stabs her food right through with her fork. Stabs it again and again and again. But doesn’t eat it.

I laugh, probably a little too loudly seeing how the people at the next table turned to glare at me. I light a cigarette and take a long slow drag from it.

The world sees two nicely dressed young women (well, one more than the other), having a nice chat over lunch at a nice little café in a nice part of town, like a poor imitation of a scene from Sex and the City. What the world doesn’t realize is that we’re sitting there in wait of a great, invisible weight to come crushing down upon us; the weight of other people’s expectations that by our own fault, we have made our own. And what the world doesn’t know is that all we really want to do is smash all their heads against a wall. Repeatedly. Instead of our own.

Round 3

I always get a funny if not an outright frightened reaction every time I mention the secondary school I used to attend.

“You’re from Assunta?! Assunta?! Shit……” said one friend I made in college.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked. Not that I didn’t already know. Anyone who has ever crossed path with an Assuntarian has some kind of horror story to tell. That is if they’ve managed to live to tell the tale.

“You Assuntarian chicks are ganas. Brutal siioot.” My friend rolled up her pants to her knees and points out the part in her shin where the bone feels sort of misaligned. “One of your Assuntarian hockey players did that to me during a match. On purpose. Still hurts.”

I shrug but didn’t feel the need to apologize. I wasn’t on the hockey team; I was the sissy on the debate team. The hockey team hit balls with sticks. The debaters rip balls with words. Two different worlds. I didn’t even know the girls on the hockey team. I rolled up my jeans to show a similar injury on my left shin. Of course, I didn’t get it from playing hockey. I got it from climbing and jumping out the school fence and falling on pieces of a broken chair some other school-cutting idiot had left there earlier.

“What’s your point?” asked my friend. “Who asked you to cut school in the first place?”

“My point is: shit happens. Assuntarian hockey players or no Assuntarian hockey players.”

I didn’t tell her the story of how one of my classmates lost her virginity at 13 to a plastic skittle. We were playing a game of Rounders, which is basically a dumb-down version of baseball (if it’s at all possible to dumb down baseball). She was bringing our team down by not paying attention to the game so we decided to hit a few balls in her direction. The objective was to scare; we weren’t actually intending for a ball to hit her. But poor classmate must have thought we were out for blood and in an attempt to save herself, she lost her balance and fell backwards, butt-first onto the pointed end of an orange skittle and screamed, “Fuck, I think it went in!!” It was bad enough that she had difficulty in walking for the rest of the day. To add insult to injury, for the next few weeks, every time we went down to the field for P.E. and came across an orange skittle, we would say to her, “Hey man, don’t you want to say hello to your boyfriend?!”

Now that’s brutal.

Hello 2007

2007-01-09T12:17:00.000+10:00

Starting Off 2007 Single Handedly
This past Christmas, I was gorging myself silly on roast lamb, turkey and pineapple tarts at a friend’s open-house when I received a call on my mobile from The Mother which I initially refused to answer seeing that a) my mother had been slowly driving me crazy and back into a pubescent state of passive aggression ever since I arrived home for the holidays and b) it was only 6 o’clock in the afternoon and even by my psychotically over-protective mother’s standards, I was under no obligation to be home.

“Is that your mother?! Don’t tell me she wants you to go home now?!! You’re 21! It’s early! And it’s Christmas!!” said my friend, The Hostess.

Of course, it doesn’t matter to my mother whether I’m 12 or 21 or 210 years old; I was still to abide by her rules as payback for spending 9 months in her womb rent-free. It also didn’t matter to my mother that in 2006, I had proven that I can successfully live away from home on my own without a) getting kidnapped and having my organs forcibly removed and put on sale in the black market; b) being robbed in a dark alley at gunpoint; c) get run over by a rogue pig-transporting lorry; d) having random, promiscuous sex with diseased strangers; e) dying of a drug overdose or f) all of the above – my mother is of the opinion that the best way to keep yourself safe in a dangerous world is to be locked away from it… and only coming out once a week to shop for pesticide-free organic fruits. Little does she realize that this idea of hers, while annoying when I was 12, is turning me into a verifiable pesticide-free fruitcake at 21.

(The other day, she caught me eating non-organic grapes and she yelled, “Don’t eat that! You’re putting poison in your system!!!!” As an act of civil disobedience or err…childish defiance, I slowly popped a non-organic grape in my mouth and said, “Yummmm…” to which my mother responded by saying, “Fine, if you want to die a slow death of pesticide poisoning, go ahead.” The way I see it, I could either die of a slow death from overzealous parental control or a slow death from non-organic grapes. I choose sweet, juicy grapes, thanks. Same goes for cigarettes.)

“These are really good tarts,” I said to The Hostess, eager to change the subject. I’ve hardly had any mother-free time since I got back and I was determined to make this Christmas Open-House one of them. “You Seranis make the loveliest tarts…”

Laughter all around. Clearly, we weren’t talking about tarts of the pineapple kind anymore.

“Why, thank you. I pinched the tarts myself, you know. Spent ALL day pinching tarts yesterday,” said The Hostess. “Serani girls do make the best tarts.”

My phone wouldn’t stop ringing.

“Oi, answer your phone-la before your mother calls the police,” said The Hostess who after 11 years of being friends with yours truly is more than accustomed to my mother’s eccentricities.

“Shut your skankhole and go get more tarts for me,” I tell her.

The Hostess returns with two mutual friends of ours. “Here you go, more tarts.”

The sound of laughter was interrupted by the sound of my phone blasting the stupid Star Wars ring tone. You know, the tune they play every other time Darth Vader appears on screen. I finally answer the call and as expected, my mother was on the line screaming, “Come home, NOW, NOW, NOW !” What I didn’t expect was for her to be saying, “Your dad fell off a ladder! I need you to take him to the hospital!!”

At first I thought, boy, this is the craziest ploy my mom has ever pulled to get me to come home early. And then I realized that it wasn’t a ploy at all. My mistake.

I sped home to find my dad sprawled on the floor, a toppled aluminum ladder next to him. He had clearly broken something but was conscious enough to say that the incident was my mother’s fault.

“Why?!! Did she push you off the ladder?!!!” I asked, thinking that 32 years of marriage had finally gotten to my mother.

“No,” my dad replied. “But she made me stay at home and I got bored, that’s why I decided to fix the ceiling light and that’s when I fell. If she didn’t make me stay at home then I wouldn’t have gotten bored and climbed the ladder in the first place.”

Falling off a ladder can do funny things to one’s sense of logic and personal responsibility. Of course, so can living with my mother. Still, I felt bad for her.

“Don’t worry Mom, it’s not your fault Daddy fell off The Leaning Ladder of PJ,” I said.

And my mom replied, “Why is your dress so short?!! You’re not going to take your Daddy to the hospital wearing that, are you?”

The dress was knee length. Red with tiny white polka-dots. Very retro. And not at all tarty. I was even wearing a bra and all which is an achievement by my standards.

At the hospital, they discovered that my father’s wrist was horribly broken in three places (other than that, he was fine) and decided that surgery had to be performed on the hand as soon as possible.

“You mean, tonight?” my mother asked the attending A&E doctor.

“Possibly. We already called the surgeon. He’s on his way.”

“From a Christmas party? What if he’s drunk?! What if he drank too much wine or eggnog or brandy or champagne at the Christmas party?!! He can’t perform surgery…” my mother rattled off in panic, convinced that they would let a drunken, scalpel-wielding surgeon loose on her husband if she didn’t insist otherwise.

“Don’t worry. This surgeon celebrates Deepavali, not Christmas,” answered the doctor.

“He can still get drunk with his friends on Christmas!!” said my mother. Yes, doctors on call usually consume bottles of whiskey to while away the time between surgeries. Actually, I wouldn’t know. Still…

When my mother finally met the surgeon later that night, he showed absolutely no signs of being inebriated. Of course, my mother still wasn’t sure of his abilities seeing that she found him “Too young, very young, too young.”

Not that he was Doogie Freaking Howser or anything. He looked like he was in his late 40s. Any older and his hands would be shaking, his eyesight would be shit and his memory would be failing. Possibly. Anyhow, they postponed my dad’s surgery to the following morning. Perhaps to give the surgeon time to sober up.

The operation went well – they inserted some metal thingamajigs to hold the bones in place. My dad came out of anesthesia pretty quick – perhaps because he was ‘bored’- and the first thing he said was, “Where’s my handphone?! and proceeded to spend the rest of the day text messaging with his one good hand and mostly ignoring us. When the lovely nurse told him that his blood pressure was up and that it was best that he rested, he said, “Okay, but don’t move my handphone away from me!” When we did, he nearly burst his stitches trying to grab it back. When the doctor came in to check on my dad’s post-surgery progress, my dad asked, “Doc, how will this affect my golf game? Will this metal thing make me into Bionic Man?” and to every person that visited him in the hospital for the next four days, he said, “I’m the Bionic Man now! The Bionic Man!” and when he wasn’t claiming to be the Bionic Man, he was…you guessed it, text messaging. He was like a teenager stuck with a 57 year old’s body and sense of humor.

Of course, by the time he was discharged, he had found a new statement to repeat over and over and over again. “Now I have to handle things single-handedly! Literally. You know mean? (this is what my dad says in place of ‘you know what I mean’. I don’t know why.) Handle things single-handedly! Single-handedly! Because I only have one working hand, you know mean?! Single-handedly! I have to handle things single-handedly because I only have one working hand, you know mean? So it’s literal. I literally have to handle things single-handedly! Single-handedly!”

In 2007, I’ve heard this ‘single-handed’ comment 72 times. And it’s only the 4^th of January. It doesn’t help that ever since I came home (but especially since the great ladder accident), I’ve ended up spending almost every hour of every day with my parents- some by choice and by my own personal sense of familial obligation, other days I was carefully manipulated into doing so (guilt trip!) but most days, by forceful coercion from Mother Paranoia and Daddy One Arm. At my parents’ behest, I cancel plans with friends over and over again which is fine for now, I owe it to my parents to devote some of my time to them but I also need air and contact with people my age that did not contribute to my genetic make-up. Of course, my dad says, “I’m your father, ALL your time is MY time if I say so! Especially now that I have to do things single-handedly! You know mean? Single-handedly! Because one hand is broken so I literally have to do things single-handedly! You want me to do things single-handedly?!” “

No, sir. Here, take my arm so you can successfully strangle me with it. It’s hard to strangle someone single-handedly.

That’s where my mother comes in, “And this is MY house. I can’t control what you do when you’re elsewhere but as long as you’re staying in MY house, you do as I say! You can spend time with your friends when we’re dead.”

Yup, that’s right. I’m ashamed to say it but I’ve been parentally-whipped. It hasn’t always been this way. There was a time when I used to, as the Beastie Boys put it, ‘fight for my right to paaaartaaay’. But that was back when I was younger and had more energy to argue, when my hearing could be switched off on command and my skull was thicker, when my dad still had two hands and my mother, three.

A friend calls to say, “Hey, I’ve got a gig at Laundry tonight, 9 P.M. Come see me play. Haven’t seen you in ages- we’re all beginning to think that you died or something! If you don’t support the Malaysian music scene than at least support your friend. Don’t die on us, woman!”

Dear friends, I’m sorry to tell you this but I am dead. Socially, at least. (I would tell you to come by my house to pay your respects but my dad would immediately hijack our conversation and whisk you off to give you a Grand Tour of The Great Ladder Accident which caused him to have to do things, “Single-handedly!”). My mother says, “No, no going out so late at night! All these music-people with their sex, drugs...” Right. This friend’s a singer-songwriter who loves his mom and sings wimpy John Mayer-like music, probably still a virgin and the one time he took a puff from a joint that I, during my days of being the kid my own mama warned me not to be friends with, cajoled him into trying, he nearly collapsed from an asthma-attack. Hardly sex, drugs and rock and roll. “It’s so unsafe at night. Why can’t you go during the day?” Yes, go during the day to a gig that’s going on at night. Great idea. “I’m your mother and if I say no, it means no. You’re no longer a teenager. You’re 21! So be an adult and stop arguing with me. You can’t go out because I said so.”

Then my dad asks, “Maryam, when are you planning to go back to the Gold Coast?”

Yesterday.

“I hope not so soon…”he says.

And so I began to think that maybe my parents appreciated having me around; maybe they actually enjoyed my company.

But then my dad says, “Because, we’re moving to a new place in February and we need you to move and carry all the things. Besides, with a daughter around, your mother doesn’t pick on me so much.”

I am a fool.

Then he added, “If you go back, I’d have to handle things single-handedly. You know mean? Single-handedly! Because my left wrist is broken! So it’s literal. I have to handle things single-handedly! Single-handedly! You know mean, single-handedly!”

Okay, okay I get it. One arm = Single handed = no carrying boxes, climbing ladders or changing lightbulbs = daughter will help out.

“SINGLE-HANDEDLY!!”

Oh, hell. Shoot me in the head already. Shoot me. That is, if you can handle a gun single-handedly. You know what I mean?

Music I’m Starting 2007 with: (Yeah, I’m going old-skool)

Strange Face of Love by Tito & Tarantula – Makes me think of slinking around in tight leather pants with a dangerously sexy, mysterious stranger in some smoky, whiskey-soaked bar in the Middle of Nowhere. Nevermind that I’m currently in the world’s ugliest, Pasar Malam shorts at home in The Sterile Depths of Suburbia with no sexy anything in sight. Where there is music, one can dream.
Speaking in Tongues by Eagles of Death Metal – Even after a 100 listens, I have no idea what is being said in this song. Hence, the title, I suppose.
In A Gadda Da Vida by Iron Butterfly – Who has the time to listen to a song that lasts for 17 minutes, half of which is quite possibly, the world’s wankiest drum solo? Well, I do and I love it. Love It.
Carry on My Wayward Son by Kansas – Kinda cheesy but a little cheese is good for you.
Poison Whiskey by Lynyrd Skynyrd – Because deep down, you know I’m just a lazy hillbilly with a mullet.
Laugh, I Nearly Died by The Rolling Stones – If someone forced me at gunpoint to list my top ten favorite bands, The Stones would be one of them. If someone forced me at gunpoint to list my top ten favorite songs of The Rolling Stones, this would be up there with Paint It Black and Gimme Shelter. I think Mick is complaining about how fame doesn’t bring happiness here. I don’t get the fame part but the misery, estrangement and lack of fulfillment connects. Funny, how a dirty old man with hip spasms would connect with me. “I’m living for the city, but I’m all alone, I’ve been travellin but I don’t know where, I’ve been wonderin’ but I just don’t care……Livin’ in a fantasy but it’s way too far, this kind of loneliness is way too hard, I’ve been wonderin’, feelin’ all alone, I lost my direction and I lost my home, oh, I’m so sick and tired, now I’m on the slide…” Oh you say it, Mick, you say it in your simple, rhyming words! And I like the gospel choir thing going on in the chorus. Who knew a bunch of pasty Brits could have so much soul.
Back in Black/ Highway to Hell by ACDC – There’s something about ACDC that seems custom made to be listened to while driving. And since I’ve been doing a lot of driving lately, well, there you go. There’s also something about listening to ACDC while driving that earns you a lot of speeding tickets. Bitches, speed doesn’t kill (ask Germany!); stupidity does.
Don’t Fear the Reaper by Blue Oyster Cult – When I was a kid, I watched a crappy Michael J. Fox movie called The Frighteners (or something) which featured this song and I fell in like with it. Still like it, I do.
Paranoid by Black Sabbath – The first time, Sharon Osbourne met Ozzy, he wore a water tap around his neck. When asked why, Ozzy replied, “In case I get thirsty.” Yeah, this little anecdote has nothing to do with the song but I’m just saying; how can you hate a song sung by a dwarf-hanging, bat-eating, tap-wearing loon?
All Right Now by Free – another song perfect for driving along a highway to. Watch for speed traps, cops and idiot drivers.
Bad Company by Bad Company – This song makes me think of a lone vigilante gunman in the desert, beneath an orange sky. Perhaps, crushing a cigar with his worn cowboy boots and squinting like a young Clint Eastwood. Leather pants recommended. *Bandito mustache not included.
Me & The Devil Blues by Robert Johnson – Robert Johnson is like the David Copperfield of Blues Musicians. No, not because he once dated a German supermodel that was way out of his league (because he didn’t) or can make a building vanish into thin air (because he didn’t). It’s because there were rumors that he apparently, made a pact with the devil to acquire his skills/ talents. It didn’t help that most of Robert Johnson’s songs had to do with Hell and the Devil. In this song, he sings, “Me and the Devil, we’re walking side by side….” Of course, unlike Mr. Copperfield who is currently alive and well somewhere in Washed-Out land, Robert Johnson died young, screaming that there were black dogs coming to drag him down to Hell. But then he did also sing, “Man, I don’t care where you take my body when I’m dead and gone..” Uh-kay. While the story is creepy, the music is brill, if you like old-skool blues.

The Festive Season

2006-12-22T12:17:00.000+10:00

A Time of Optimism

The optimism disease is perhaps, the oldest, surviving disease known to Humankind and it is not a health issue that can be taken lightly. Those infected with optimism have been known to jump to their deaths from tall buildings under the impression that they would be able to fly. They’ve been known to spend all their money, hopeful if not certain that there will always be more. Optimism is a disease that will cause one to hold on when others are willing to let go. It’s a disease that has defeated many great generals throughout history despite the fact that it is often closely associated with unremarkable men.

But what is even worse than being infected with optimism is to be cured of it; there is only one known remedy in fighting optimism and that is disappointment. The recommended dosage varies from case to case. Research has shown that patients who are given small, frequent doses of disappointment recover more slowly than those that are given a large, one-off amount but are less likely to be re-infected by the disease later on in life. Experts say that currently, the complete eradication of the Optimism Disease will only be possible if the world community unites toward the total annihilation of Humankind. They are however, hopeful that an alternative solution will miraculously be found in the near future.

In the meantime, some preventive measures can be taken to reduce our risk of being infected. We can start by identifying carriers of the Optimism virus – the blindly faithful, hopeless romantics, Oprah Winfrey, the mentally well adjusted, happy drunks, well meaning friends on your birthday, well meaning friends on your birthday that are happy drunk versions of Oprah Winfrey – and completely avoiding or at least, limiting direct contact with them. Research has also shown that one is more susceptible to being infected by the optimism virus during New Year’s Eve and birthdays where empty greetings, well wishes and lavish celebrations might lead one to believe without any good, solid proof that the next twelve months will be better than the last. Therefore, it is best that one stays in bed, buried underneath the covers with one’s mobile phone switched off on such occasions.

Patient A is a life-long chronic sufferer of optimism and describes her condition as “an unfaithful lover that comes and goes as it pleases, each time leaving you worse off than the last.” She recently turned 21 and when asked on how she was feeling, she answers, “Hopeful.” She said the exact same thing on her 20^th and on her 19^th (not to mention the year before that and the one before that..) despite repeated warnings from experts in the field that “Hope is the wasteland of the unfulfilled.”

Rudolph’s Mercy

Someone, somewhere is about to be crushed by a falling Christmas tree. Not just any Christmas tree, but The World’s Tallest Christmas Tree in a shopping mall that occupies the world’s (formerly) tallest building where the spirit of Christmas can be bought for a bargain at a 50% discount. They will even throw you a free set of steak knives with a red ribbon on top if you’re nice. Perfume promoters are dressed in short Santarina outfits that would make Santa Claus seem like the Hugh Hefner of the North Pole. The overenthusiastic Santarinas will have your eyeballs smelling of Paradise, Pleasures, Mania, Crave, Stella, Whatever, BlaBla if you’re not careful. On the other side of town, a little boy is getting the lyrics to Jingle Bells wrong: “Jingle Balls, Jingle Balls, Jingle till you’re gay, oh much fun it is to ride on a one-night manly lay, hey!” The crowd of adults around him clap their hands with glee and go, “Awww….how cute!”

A friend says to me, “Come over to my place for Christmas lunch on the 25^th.”

“Sure,” I say. I’ll go anywhere where there’s free food because I’m Malaysian to the bone.

Another friend says, “I’m having a Christmas open-house on the 26^th. Come. It’s not an invitation. It’s an order.”

“Yes ma’am,” I obligingly say for even if one is not religiously or traditionally obliged to celebrate Christmas, there seems to be no escaping it. No escape.

At home, I turn on the TV and there is Ben Affleck trying to survive Christmas by paying a bunch of strangers to celebrate it with his big chin. I switch the channel and there is Rob Lowe helping a poor boy buy a pair of Christmas shoes for his dying mother.

Yet another friend sings, “Rudolph the red nose reindeer, had a very shiny gun, and if you ever see him – you better turn around and run!!!!!!!”

You can run. But there’s no escaping it. No escape. I am at Rudolph’s mercy.

Maryam's Guide to Everything Pt. 1

2006-12-20T19:39:00.000+10:00

How to Eat Healthy
When given a choice, don't eat this:

Eat this:

Oh, I'm sorry. Did I say 'how to eat healthy'? I meant, how to eat the (fit) and healthy.

How to Tell Right From Wrong
This is wrong:

And this is right:

How to tell Fantasy from Reality
I hate to admit it but this is fantasy:

This is reality:

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This public service announcement has been brought to you by S.E.X.Y.F.A.T - Society for the Exploitation of Yummy Men in Film and Television. For a more comprehensive guide on living life, please visit Google.com or ask your momma.

Thank you. Come Again.

December 2006 Shit List

2006-12-15T15:42:00.000+10:00

Fines for ‘Indecently Dressed’ Muslim Women in Kota Bharu

Yes, God save us from the people who think they’re doing God’s work. The Municipal Council insists that “it is to protect the dignity of our women”. Here is what I would like to ask them:

a) Why are they your women?
b) What makes you think that women need you to protect their dignity?
c) And how in the world is this crazy rule going to help “protect a woman’s dignity”? If anything, it’s an insult, insinuating that women are nothing but walking lumps of flesh and sin. So you’re saying that a woman with her knees exposed is immediately a person of no dignity? Eh, today, I showed members of the public my forearms. I must have no dignity. Here, I shall redeem myself by giving you money.

Hearing this, I feel tempted to make the long drive to Kota Bharu and run around in booty shorts just out of spite. Not that I own or would normally wear booty shorts. Ever. What is the big deal with women’s bodies? Even in the US, which claim to be “the land of the free” they made such a hoo-haa over Janet Jackson’s accidentally exposed boobs at the Superbowl Half-Time Performance. Yes, children can watch people’s heads getting blown off on TV but God forbid they should see an exposed boob! I’m not saying that women should all get their tits out; I’m saying that people should stop acting as if they’ve never seen one. And if you haven’t, don’t panic; women’s nipples do not shoot out deadly bullets unless you’re in a James Bond flick.

James Bond’s Super-Aggressive Marketing Machine

Hype and enthusiastic promotion is one thing, but the super-aggressive marketing campaign behind the James Bond movie franchise seems more like a direct order: Watch Yet another James Bond Movie or DIE! In November, I couldn’t read a magazine, watch television, turn a street corner or buy a burger without something or someone telling me to watch the latest James Bond movie ….or DIE! And they even brainwashed one of my oldest friends into becoming a walking billboard for Bond.

“Have you watched Casino Royale?” she asks over coconut water and fried popiah one afternoon.

No. No. No. I’ve never been interested in the whole Bond thing. It’s always the same old thing: womanizing almost middle-aged dude in a tux, aided by a bikini queen nuclear scientist/ (Victoria) Secret Agent saves the world from a Soviet / North Korean megalomaniac hell-bent on world domination. Seems like fishy propaganda to me. And Bond has to be the worst spy/ secret agent ever – everyone knows his name and he drives flashy look-at-me cars. In real life, some bad ass Russian agents would’ve long poisoned him with a heavy dose of Polonium-210. Bond, Dead Bond. (Yes, I know it’s an escapist flick)

“This one is different!” my friend insisted.

So I’ve heard. “Good for them. But I still don’t intend to pay good money to watch it.”

“The new Bond is hot……”

Yes. I’ve seen the pictures of a very buff Daniel Craig emerging out of the wave in tiny trunks. Who hasn’t? It’s nice to see the new Bond being as equally sex-ploited as his female counterparts but “Yes, if I were to watch every movie with an attractive guy in it, I wouldn’t be doing much of anything else would I?”

“WHY WON’T YOU WATCH BOND? WHY WON’T YOU WATCH BOND?!” my friend screamed as sparks flew out of the top of her head. The promote-Bond-chip they implanted in her brain must be malfunctioning. Perhaps, they didn’t engineer it to meet with any sort of resistance. “HOW CAN YOU NOT BE INTERESTED?!”

Exactly. Oh no, is it possible, is it possible that there is a woman on this planet that can resist the marketing charms of Bond, James Bond? Don’t be fooled, Bond is the evil megalomaniac hell bent on world domination and I, well, I’m shaken…. but not stirred.

Stars of “Supernatural” Wearing Too Much Clothing

For the uninitiated, Supernatural is a TV series about two twenty-something brothers, Dean and Sam whose mother was killed by a demon when they were kids and now hunts all evil things that go bump, whack and muahahaha in the night. Now, Dean and Sam are HOT but on account of them being male, they get to keep their two layers of clothes on most of the time. Even during the rare times Dean and Sam manage to lose their tops, they manage to obtain a new shirt within 3 minutes. If they were female, I can bet you that everytime they encountered an evil hell beast at the start of an episode, their clothes would be ripped to shreds and they’d be spending the rest of the show in their underwear where the jiggle of a pair of boobs and flash of the butt cheeks is equally effective in fighting the creatures of the dark as say, a wooden stake to the heart or a shot of a silver bullet. There is a great injustice happening here – men have equal right to be sexploited in film and television as women do. Let us work together to free Dean and Sam’s pecs from the tyranny of heavy sweaters and leather jackets. They deserve some credit for the hard work they put in at the gym! ------- Maryam for S.E.X.Y.F.A.T- Society for the Equal Exploitation of Yummy Men in Film and Television

The Over-Abundance of Shopping Malls in Klang Valley & Window Parking

Oh, the sweet scent of consumerism! These days, one can’t trip over a pebble in the Klang Valley without falling into a shopping mall. I hear they now even have plans to build a new shopping mall in a pothole in Jalan Gasing. And what’s with stuffing cinemas, gymnasiums, petting zoos, batting cages and karaoke centers in shopping malls? I want to watch a movie, I don’t want to fucking shop – why do I still need to fight the crowds in a shopping mall?! Why?! Why do many parents think that taking their litter of brats to a shopping mall during the school holidays is a good idea? Why is it that even on weekdays, these shopping malls are still chocked full with people walking around aimlessly at an irritatingly slow pace – don’t Malaysians work anymore? One would think that in Malaysia, it’s not the atmosphere but air-conditioned shopping malls that make it possible for life to thrive and survive.

Why does one neighborhood need 4 shopping malls – all housing the same old retailers – when there’s poor accessibility and limited parking spaces? Instead of building more parking spaces, why cordon off half of already limited parking spaces into “Privileged Parking Areas” and doubling the fees? Why can’t I find a spot to park in after circling the parking lot for half an hour, paying double the fees for “privileged parking”? And if the parking lot is at full capacity, why don’t they put a sign up at the entrance instead of letting us find out for ourselves? You know how there’s window shopping? Well, I call this “window parking” where one only looks at parking spaces without actually getting any. The saddest part is, after 30 minutes of circling a parking lot without any success in actually finding a spot; one is still made to pay parking fees upon exit. This happened to me in One Utama and I was told that if I refused to pay the parking fees and wish to complain, I can take it up with customer service on the (1^st?) floor. Yes, but where shall I park my bloody car while I talk to fucking customer service? I can’t! Exactly. You bastards.

Alright, why drive then? Why not take public transport? Hahaha - public transport in the Klang Valley – one has a better chance of riding the Lochness monster or having tea with Bigfoot. Want me to walk? Why don’t you just throw knives in my direction? There are no bleeding sidewalks to walk on and if there are, they’re taken up by either illegally parked cars or stupid looking giant potted plants. And we all know how much respect most KL drivers have for pedestrians…..

United Malay National Organization (UMNO) & Malaysian politics

Things that UMNO is good for: state-the-obvious contests, demanding apologies, exploiting underlying racial tensions for their own political gain while preaching “racial tolerance and harmony” to the choir, waving traditional deadly weapons around and later insisting it was a “non-threatening gesture” (eh, Datuk, what if I wave a gun in your face? Can I tell your security personnel it was a “non threatening gesture” too?), plus many other things that would take too much time to mention. Why seriously debate and analyze the ways in which UMNO has failed and ceased to become relevant to the people it claims to represent when UMNO has become a joke with as many punch-lines as those knock-knock ones? Somewhere along the line, they seem to have forgotten what the letters in UMNO stand for; the ‘M’ could easily mean Menteri, Makan-Makan, money, moron, me-me-me or Macam Mana. Eh, eh, it can also stand for ‘Maryam’! To think that I briefly considered the prospect of joining Puteri UMNO – I’d probably be kicked out in a day for not “toeing the party line”. Bah, some of these people sound like they’ve been sniffing the party line more than they’re toeing it. By the way, why is Puteri UMNO being so quiet, allowing UMNO Youth to hog the spotlight? Aren’t there many issues facing young Malay women in this country that needs to be brought to light? Or are they just there to look pretty in pink so male UMNO members will have something to perv on at the General Assembly? .

*Note: Yes, yes, I know I’m not even a registered voter yet. Give me a break; I’ll only be eligible to vote next week, after I officially turn 21. It’s not my fault that in this country, we’re allowed to marry a deadbeat and breed, drive into a road divider, smoke and drink ourselves to death before we’re even allowed to cast a vote that counts. When I was in Form Five, I wrote an essay for English class which contained a comment that the teachers deemed “too political for a young girl” and was subsequently threatened with detention (which meant having to clean toilets) and forced to attend ‘counseling’ sessions. And then they complain that Malaysian teenagers and young college students lack political awareness. Why be aware of something that ignores you? Lagi syok sembelih kambing to rock music, kan? Lepas tu, boleh buat kari and makan kenyang-kenyang. Yummm.