i’ll have a salad, please.

Posted at 25 Jan 2:32 pm. 0 comments

Pet owner? Meat eater? Pharmaceutical drug consumer?

Watch this.

digital masks

Posted at 22 Jan 11:21 am. 1 comment

I’m attempting to bring this blog into the 21st century by updating it with plugins, a horrible task if one is indecisive. The sheer variety available is quite astounding.

One type in particular keeps catching my eye: those extolling greater connectivity. Where else can you find me? one app asks before listing some of the most popular platforms available today: Facebook, Friendster, digg, Flickr, Orkut, etc.

I’ll not kid myself – I’m tempted to jump on the bandwagon and embrace the kind of accessibility they’re dangling in front of my nose. (Basic internet marketing: the more people know who you are and how they can reach you, the better.) But a greater part of me isn’t so happy.

I am by nature a wary sort of person. I’ve struggled with this in the eleven blogs I’ve had in the past eight years – where to draw the line between being truthful and overexposing myself? In person I’m about as likely to divulge a gruesome tidbit of my sex life just for the shock value as tell you about my day, but the difference, you see, is that I know who I’m speaking to. I simply don’t like the idea of some stranger knowing more about me than I know about them.

Once upon a time I used to track through cyberspace members of online groups I subscribed to, just for fun. I learnt their real names, siblings’ names, birthdays, personal descriptions, hopes, dreams and issues. With just a bit of determination and no complex computer skills – I was about thirteen then – all this information was available. When you think about it, that’s quite unnerving.

(While time and internet privacy campaigns appear to have wised up my generation, kids growing up with the Net seem even more blase about sharing their personal details than we were. Coupled with their tendency to camwhore incessantly and speak to/add everyone who drops by their blogs/social networking apps in order to look more popular, it’s a breeding ground for disaster.)

Made even more cautious by the results of my trawlings, I lurked for years under a whole host of personas, email addresses and websites. It took five years before I would even reveal my real hair color to online friends. I never really grew out of it.

Now, facing me: the option of providing randoms a link to my Facebook, the repository of my friends, pictures, personal references to my life.

It’s a massive step. Probably not one I’ll be taking anytime soon, either, although of course with a bit of determination it’s easy enough to find out who I am.

holey crap

Posted at 08 Jan 7:37 pm. 0 comments

This is what I hate about taking a stand on a topic of argument: the position you find yourself in when you realize your defense has holes in it.

(Debates are overrated! I’m always right!)

future past

Posted at 01 Jan 6:11 pm. 0 comments

I think that the dreams and hopes we nurture in our youth become, ideally, the memories we cherish in our old age.

things I believe:

Posted at 23 Dec 7:51 pm. 0 comments

• Men exist to be taken care of, not the other way around.

Friends. Lovers. Family.

ants

Posted at 21 Nov 2:38 pm. 0 comments

Granddad fell down some steps, fractured his spine. To help him deal with the pain they gave him first morphine, then a new pill. In the hospital bed he is shrunken, diminished.

Ants, he says the first day of his new medication. Ants.
What ants?
Ants. He grabs my arm, squeezes. There, there. And there.
We three are gathered around the bed, wife, daughter, granddaughter.
What ants?
Can’t you see? He blinks at the ceiling. He points.
Maybe they need to keep the hospital cleaner, my grandmother says gently and leaves his side.

An hour later there are more ants.
A whole trail of them from behind the wall-mounted TV, crawling over the ceiling. His arm moves urgently, trembles.
So many ants! He says. Get rid of them.
You’re seeing things, my grandmother tells him briskly. Close your eyes. Rest.
For a moment he faultlessly mimics lucidity, precisely matching her imperious tone. I’ll give you a thousand dollars for each ant you catch.

We cajole him, play along, practise tough love. It makes not one whit of difference. The ants won’t be denied.

He won’t sleep. He is the most active he’s been for months, even before he fractured his spine. He’s been awake for four days and counting and that means so have we, in shifts. We’re exhausted. He shows no signs of slowing, but the hallucinations are getting worse.

He sees our names written in glowing letters behind us. He is disgusted by the water dripping through the ceiling boards. He tells the photographers to get the flash bulbs out of his face and tells the strange dark man who visits him late at night to leave him alone. He is in a speeding car without brakes, at the train station, standing in the middle of the road, in a shoplot he once owned and sold a decade ago.

We are worn out. We must be there every second in case he should try to get up or pull the oxygen tube from his nose or hallucinate that we were kidnapped. Patience is a precious commodity; his querulous demands that we deal with his ever-changing surroundings are taking their toll.

A book about Alzheimer’s I recently finished is stuck in my mind. It says patients respond better if the carer makes an effort to deal with them in their world instead of forcing them to confront reality.

So I reach for invisible objects for him, fetch him non-existent phones, point out for him his trousers which aren’t there, an absurd, ceaselessly changing pantomime of domesticity.

It must have fooled him enough into believing I can see what he does because he grabs my arm, pulls hard, pulls harder. My head is on the pillow, twisted up at the ceiling.

See the ants? he whispers urgently. See? See?

I nod. I can’t speak. From this point of view, his point of view, the world looks very different.

bliss

Posted at 14 Nov 3:16 pm. 0 comments

Everyone’s downstairs in the pool, swimming, taking pictures with poshkin’s underwater camera.

I’m not with them for a number of reasons, but I’ve opened the sliding door to the balcony and parted the floor-length curtains so there’s nothing but a wrought-iron rail between me and the horizon.

I’m curled in a chair with a pillow, basking in the breeze as my fingers coax a story from the keyboard without guidance. The laptop is balanced on my knees, rigged to a speaker amplifying Depeche Mode, and two bottles – one of a strong alcohol mix, the other of cool water – are conveniently at hand.

All I can see is the vast grayness of the ocean and sky, textured with waves and clouds, their immense pent-up power dwarfed by infinite space. I struggle to take it all in, find myself absorbed by it instead, am turned inside out and sent to soar over the endless seascape. The wind in my hair smells faintly of saltwater and ozone.

Words are inadequate for this feeling of security, of happiness and utter peace. My thoughts drift gently with the tide, from imaginary world to real one. Both are equally delightful.

Bliss comes in many forms.

skin deep

Posted at 11 Nov 5:55 pm. 1 comment

Every now and then I go into phases where I think, I should really take better care of my skin.

Bugger.

I usually can’t be bothered with products, save eyeliner if I’m attending a social event. Everything else I use is pretty much natural. Lip balm? Vaseline. Anti-frizz product, and product to hold the waves in my hair? Baby oil, lite. Body moisturizer? The same.

Now and then I use face powder, but it’s not the sort you buy in compacts, it’s bedak sejuk. The stuff your grandmother can make from broken rice and water.

(My grandma does, anyway. She knows how to make everything. She’s awesome.)

Recently I sat down with a Sothys consultant who was part of a promotion in Bangsar Village II. It was a bit of a joke, Sexybum and I approached it together, giggling like lunatics.

The consultant started a questionnaire that went something like:
“So what toner do you use?”
“Er – Clinique? Occasionally?”
“OCCASIONALLY? And moisturiser?”
“Vichy. Once in a while.”
“ONCE IN A WHILE? How about face masks, how often do you use them?”
“Once in… probably once in the past six months?”

She sat and stared at me disapprovingly while I fidgeted and felt like an errant schoolkid.

On the malaysianbabes.net forum, some members post up their daily regimen with pride, and I swear some of the lists are over 14 products long. Who has time to do all that?

As for makeup, the very idea exhausts me.

I think it’s easier, faster and cheaper to remind my partner, “Honey, you love me for who I am, not what I look like, don’t you?”

The guilt shuts them right up every time.

(A++.)

pet peeve

Posted at 10 Nov 5:46 pm. 0 comments

Pet peeve: when, in novels, the heroine’s great love dies, usually to save her… BUT she finds out she’s carrying his child.

As if that’s real consolation. If my partner died on me and left me a single mother, I tell you what I’d do. I’d take a trip to the next world and drag him back by his ear, how DARE he abandon me at a time like this. Or I’d offer an exchange, my firstborn for him. Once I’ve got him back, we can get back to making more babies.

Similarly, I must be one of the few women who don’t believe that kids should detract from the quality of romance with my partner. I want date nights, I want to be nauseatingly romantic at thirty and forty and fifty without earning a look of disgust from my womb-droppings, I want lots of hot sex.

Hey kids, I didn’t marry him just to provide you with a stable household to grow up in, you selfish, self-entitled demonspawn. I married him because I loved him and wanted to spend the rest of my life with him. You were meant to make us happier, not take over our lives and consume our souls to fuel your own.

Capisce?

Excellent.

keetahns

Posted at 08 Nov 5:37 pm. 0 comments

It’s really kind of depressing when you read all the stories of the other animals on petfinder.my, quiet, fearful-looking creatures with shocking histories of abuse and neglect. Then there’s my ad:

Three kittens – a ginger, a tabby, a tuxedo – to good homes for free. Friendly, frisky, curious and healthy. Firmly of the opinion that people exist to play with them. Have a foot fetish. Will pounce on anyone who stays still long enough.

They have never seen the inside of a cage and I would appreciate a respondent who intends to keep it that way.

Right about then I realized how carefree and happy these kittens are. They grew up in a shady, sunlit corner sheltered by tall, leafy potted plants. They have never had an illness other kittens suffer – cat flu, watery eyes, grossly distended bellies. They terrorized the only other cat who might have been a threat to them, our young male Oreo, who for the longest time refused to come near the house for fear of flying kittens. They played without restriction among our shoes, opened the cupboards, tried to climb the grille, slept on a tool box under the teak bench. They play all the time, really, except for short naps and the occasional snack break.

They have never known a harsh word or a person who didn’t want to stop and play with them. They have their fill of kitty kibble a few times a day, are hand-fed canned catfood and still suckle on their mother’s milk. They think the great big hands that descend from the sky were put on earth for the sole reason of giving them a tickle.

The lady who took the tuxedo kitten away seems no-nonsense but nice enough. She had been looking for three weeks for a replacement for her cat, who lived to 11. Inasmuch as possible, I think she gave all the right answers, but of course I’ve just handed my sweetest kitten over to a stranger, a baby who loved to curl herself up between my feet and pat at my leg with her paw, instead of running around as if possessed by a demon like her ginger-furred brother.

I miss her terribly.