Posted at 12 Dec 5:27 pm. 0 comments
The buffet lunch at Kampachi sets its participants back $90+ each, but it’s worth it.
Sashimi so fresh its ghosts are still lingering around the delicately sliced meat, glaring at you balefully. Green tea ice cream that is absolutely divine. If tempura’s your thing they keep it coming as fast as you can crunch your way through, and the mochi was good enough for everyone to want – and get – seconds.
A table of about half a dozen is large enough to order all the varieties of teppanyaki, so we had two rounds; everyone had a taste without getting ahead of their stomachs. Our table was divided into two: those who do the buffet every year, and those who were two obviously newbies. Mine was the only ala carte order, showing which side I belonged conclusively to.
The stomach capacities of the veterans was amazing to behold. Some even managed bowls of cold soba at the end.
Then dinner at Brussels, Jaya One, which makes a decent sausage. Their brownie more closely resembles a chocolate cake, served with chocolate sauce, a scoop of ice cream and a halved strawberry. I do not recommend the Blue Jamaica cocktail; go for the beers, it’s what everyone else is there for. I can’t tell the difference between most, but ordered a Leffe Brune and Hoegaarden on advice from others.
What came could just as easily have been a Guinness and Kilkenny. I’ll simply never know.
It’s a Hoegaarden, dammit. Sez so on the glass.
Posted at 07 Dec 2:43 pm. 0 comments
Finally entered No Black Tie.
This is a great achievement because in the three or so times we’ve attempted to visit it in the past, we just couldn’t figure out how to open the door.
(Total. Utter. Complete. Fail.)
Inside there were wooden chairs arranged around tables in front of a small stage, an amazing deep-fried soft shell crab, a few glasses of 10-year old Dow’s, and a saxophonist with magic fingers and his band.
Would go again.
(Now we know how the door works.)
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.
Posted at 16 Nov 10:53 pm. 0 comments
PD was great.
Good food, watery fun, and a brilliant game called Ring of Fire/Four Queens. Subdued debates late at night when most were asleep. We only went to bed hours into the new day and woke early for the hotel breakfast, but while exhaustion was expected it was funny how throughout the entire trip we were rarely all in the same room at the same time. People kept wandering off for catnaps in ones and twos.
Maybe five years earlier, a trip like this meant staying awake for as long as humanly possible, and indiscriminately employing the use of caffeine stimulants if unconsciousness was imminent. Every ounce of fun had to be milked of the time.
Now it’s “Fuck it, I don’t care if everyone’s dangling naked from the ceiling fan, I’m going to bed.”
We’re all getting old.
Then there was the thing about alcohol. I had fun the first night, but when everyone had gone off to bed without a single head spinning from overindulgence I admit to disgust. “Drink with me,” I appealed to Tiger, and he obliged, therefore saving my night.
We had half a cup of langkau each before I stopped, deciding I had enough.
Half an hour later my buzz was completely gone and I found I was as guilty of overcaution as everyone else. Pwned, totally pwned.
—
Rules for Ring of Fire:
People sit in a circle with a shuffled deck of cards. Each open one card at a time.
Ace, 2, 3, 4 – Pick the corresponding number of people to drink a shot – or one sucker to drink all.
5 – Question card. When the person who has this card asks a question and someone answers, the answerer has to drink. If the answerer says “Fuck you,” the questioner drinks. Is nullified only when the next number 5 card is opened.
6 – Thumb on table. Person can place thumb on table (or floor) at any time. Last person to notice and follow suit drinks.
7 – Hand on head. Same as (6)
8 – Strike a pose. Same as (6)
9 – Topic card. Person who opens it picks a multiple-answer topic eg. “Name the types of coffee at Starbucks” and gives an answer, followed by the person beside him and so on. If people fail to answer in time, they drink. Questions may be as obscure as the questioner wishes.
10 – Toilet card. No one may go to the toilet without this card. It may be exchanged for a penalty, eg. finishing their drink before they are permitted to go.
Jack – Ring of Fire: Everyone starts to drink. People may only stop drinking if the person beside them puts down their glass. Pray your neighbor isn’t a sadistic bastard.
Queen – Drink to the Queen. Everyone drinks a shot.
King – The first three Kings escape unscathed. The fourth King downs his entire glass (in another variation, the contents of the glasses of the first three as well).
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.
Posted at 12 Nov 1:17 pm. 0 comments
Organizing accommodation for our PD trip was a bit of an eye-opener. It’s not the same as it was when we were students. I only just realized that – slow, I know.
I suppose it’s only natural that when you’re on a tight budget, you’re more casual about your comfort. But for me, squeezing as many people into one bed as possible was part of the fun – that slumber party atmosphere, the whispers and giggles in the dark.
I’ve spent the night four to a double bed, each unable to turn on their side without disturbing everyone else, unwilling to use the ample bunk beds in the next room. On most trips, or even when the boys stayed over on Saturday nights after clubbing, we used to crash three to a sofa bed. And it was fun, convenient even, because if you wanted to stop someone snoring, you could just poke them instead of sacrificing your pillow to throw at their head.
(Sometimes they solved this problem by throwing socks. Dirty socks. Yes.)
It does makes perfect sense that some like their personal space, some are willing to pay for comfort. But though I hate to admit it, I’m nostalgic for unconscious mutterings, increasingly violent shoves against the insensate leg that’s taking up your sliver of the bed, the press of warm bodies in the cold dawn, the comforting chorus of regular, muffled breathing that seeps into your consciousness first thing in the morning.
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++.)
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.
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.
Posted at 05 Nov 4:52 pm. 1 comment
I feel I owe the experience a post, even though it’s already old history in my mind. Long story short, last week I got stalked through the supermarket by an employee with a somewhat limited vocabulary.
“I want to fuck you. What’s your name? Where do you live? Huh? I want to fuck you. Come on. What’s your number?”
At the meat section, in front of the dairy products, through the biscuits, and again at the parking ticket machine. Ad infinitum.
Firstly: I’m fine. Worse things have happened. The initial reaction was disgust and anger, but it wore off quickly. He didn’t even touch me. He was a rude, passive-aggressive ass-tard with no social graces, but too much of a non-entity to get worked up over.
Insouciance intact, I posted a light message on my Facebook status about it and received a variety of responses. They troubled me more than anything else I’d encountered.
I’ve noticed that people have a certain perception of sexual harassment/assault victims. They think they should be sobbing in a corner – or else they’re loose women and obviously asking for it. I had that truth brought home before yesterday, after other scenarios that happened to myself and friends, even during the creation of a script we were writing from experience.
But the immediate reaction I wanted from everyone else, then, was anger – that this could happen to anyone, that there were assholes like that out there running rampant. I wanted people declaring that the next time they saw something like this happening, they’d stop it, they’d make the pervert pay, they’d make him sorry he ever thought it would be fun to harass women walking alone in public.
Because it occurred to me, too, that the reaction of the people immediately around me left a lot to be desired. When a man molested me in a crowded LRT and was loudly ordered to “take your fucking hand off my thigh right now, pervert” all people did was stare at him. The train slowed to stop at the next station five seconds later and he slid away unscathed in the rush.
When I told various staff of the supermarket what happened and asked for their manager, I could see their curiosity and moderate concern being held back by a sense of “it’s not my business”. And so no one asked if I was fine, if they could accompany me to my car, if I wanted to walk around with them and point out the culprit.
Maybe because I wasn’t shaking and crying, I don’t know.
I wrote the following once when a friend was held at knifepoint on the STAR and nearly kidnapped, and I’ll write it again: Don’t be afraid. Be angry.
Fear is never the appropriate response. There is no point in it, both during and after, yet most often it is the only one. When I told my mother what happened, down to the conclusion of the tale, she replied, “What if he gets mad now and comes after you?”
I admit to a case of “it’s over, nevermind-lah”-itis; if it hadn’t been for Sexybum I’d not have pursued the matter further. I emailed the supermarket management about what happened, told them to see to it that it didn’t happen again to another woman, and corresponded with them over the next few days. They asked me to identify the culprit from the CCTVs, which unfortunately did not cover the areas where he spoke to me. They then told me who he was, that his employers had been notified, and that a letter banning his entry had been forwarded to all outlets under the umbrella corporation throughout the country – though I have no doubt he could walk in undetected as a normal customer.
The store manager further suggested I go to the police but I declined, telling her half-jokingly that she had more faith in the police than I. In any case I wanted to teach him a lesson, not ruin his life.
See, I’ve got my happy ending, as far as I wanted it. They exist. It’s up to you to make sure they keep happening when shit like this happens to you, your loved ones, or a stranger in the street. The bad guys don’t always win.
