BLOGGER



Youngest kid of six with an inferiority and black sheep complex, but determined that God saves not just his soul to heaven but the remainder of his manic-depressive life, so others won't say he became a Christian and remained a jerk.


MAIN THEMES

On identity
i won't be transparent before i'm opaque. and you'll get to know me starting from the small things: who my favourite bands are. what kind of movies i like. who are my heroes.

On Christianity
I’m convinced that when confronted with sincere, real love, the Jesus factor will become obvious. But let’s not plant the cross before we carry it. I’m not trying to con you.

On dreams
Some dreams are meant to be achieved. I know that. But maybe other dreams are meant to drive us, privately. Never known to anyone but ourselves.


OTHER THEMES

On melancholy
It is a sadness that, when choosing between crying and sighing, will choose sighing. I'd almost say that melancholy is being sad about sadness itself.

On memory and nostalgia
It saddens me when life moves forward and people decide that certain things are worth forgetting.

On language
I've learnt that the word irregardless is filed as a non-standard word in the English language. That's a lexicographer's way of saying it's not a real word.

On politics
Crowds are fickle things. So when we stand in the thousands and cry against the present government, do we know who we're actually crying for?

On society
People always want the best for themselves. But I want to sometimes take second or third or fourth best, just so that the loser down the road doesn't always have to come in last. It must feel like shit to always come in last.

On growing old
Leasehold property make me feel sad. It doesn't matter how old the family photos are that you put on your wall. It's your family but it's not really your wall.

On philosophy
I ask you, if God loves everyone, and if God is also incapable of loving evil, how can there be such a thing as an evil man?

On a daily basis
One line quips, like this.


CHAT





Thursday, November 20, 2008
REMEMBERING MAVIS

Do you remember mavis? we weren't really that much younger if you do the math. 

i'm sorry it's not panning out for you right now. we never really kept in touch like how we said we would. i didn't even really know when the shit started hitting the fan.

i downloaded that lantern album two days ago. partly as a tribute to you. i'm listening to it properly now for the first time. i never really got to hear it properly when you wanted me to. 

please hold up. 

please stop holding up.

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Genusfrog [ 2:04 pm ] | 0 comments

Monday, March 31, 2008
ON OPINION, RESTRAINT AND ALWAYS BEING RIGHT

Today, i offended my friend. i never meant to. but inadvertently i did.

by inadvertently, of course, i mean that i misplaced my honesty, i was sensationally insensitive and i lacked restraint when holding an uncompromising position.

the fact of the matter is that some of the values i hold offend people. i don't know how i grew up like this, but i've emerged from my teens and twenties as someone who needs to hold a strong opinion on almost everything. now having an opinion has never been a bad thing. even the opinions themselves - though some may argue otherwise - are not in themselves the problem.

the problem is that i've not learned how to keep my mouth shut.

and so today, at a fairly overdue age of 27, i've learned how important it is to be restrained about some of my values. i'm learning today that sometimes, the conversations i want most to participate in are the ones i should avoid the most. i'm learning today that i can afford to let comments move back and forth in front of me without me having to tell people what i think. even when asked.

because when 19th century american presidential candidate henry clay was told to dumb down his hardline position on slavery, he said "I would rather be right than president". but today i have this to say: i would rather be related than right.

i would rather keep some of my relationships than defend an idea that i think is correct. today, i'm deciding that, and so i am consequently deciding to show more restraint. cos there are few things more unpleasant than a self-righteous jerk.

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Genusfrog [ 3:10 pm ] | 0 comments

Sunday, March 16, 2008
HAPPY BIRTHDAY JAN

She's always been ahead of me.

in kindergarten, she taught me how to count 11 to 99 in malay. when i reached 99, i didn't know how to go on. and then she taught me satu ratus.

when we grew up, she learned many years before me that there was a lot of appeal in society's rebels. today, i really dig people who go against the grain of normalcy. but she was digging that - at least in boys - from a long time ago.

and then she ended up in europe before me too. she even got to rotterdam before me. she missed me. she was at least one year too early. or maybe i'm one year too late.

yesterday, she underlined her constant aheadness of me by turning 28 a good three months before me. she's always been about three months ahead of me, plus minus here and there. and so, to the truest muarian nostalgist i know, here's to a splendid year of homecoming.

happy birthday.

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Genusfrog [ 3:03 pm ] | 0 comments

Thursday, February 21, 2008
ON OLD FRIENDS: SAY NO TO BIG GROUPS

I told boon ping this chinese new year that i wasn't interested in seeing any old friends if they were gonna meet in big groups.

that's true. all my old high school friends meet every chinese new year at a particular house. it's an open house concept, and all the old boys are pretty much welcome. but i've been to a couple of them and i really don't like it at all. to begin with, everyone's really more interested in gambling and drinking than in catching up. but i've observed something else about old friends.

when they have the security of a big group, they're quite willing to remain cliches. they drink, talk loudly, smoke, gamble, and make very superficial conversation. but if you can isolate them - get them out in small groups of twos or threes, a different side of them crawls out. the side that knew you shows up - the side you knew. and all the pretenses fall away surprisingly quick.

this chinese new year, i met up with boon ping, then again with him plus glendon and bernard. in the isolation of a small group, it felt every bit like a reunion seven, eight, nine years ago. you don't really feel that it's been ten years since we left school. a bit like going into the same car after a week of not driving, starting it up and the same song continues playing on the cd player at the exact spot where you last ground to a halt.

right now, i'm thinking, maybe you can only get to that stage if you've spent something like five to ten years together. maybe that kind of quick restart needs a lengthy foundation period. i can't seem to recreate that with more recent friends. either that or maybe it boils down again to what i set out to say - people just need to be isolated before their true selves emerge.

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Genusfrog [ 1:33 pm ] | 0 comments

Monday, February 18, 2008
ON OLD FRIENDS: THE YOUNG AND DYING

Today, i'm overwhelmed by an incredible feeling of sadness.

i went back to muar for a wedding dinner this weekend. by and large, i had fun meeting old classmates, exchanging stories and seeing one of my closest friends from school get married. but somewhere between joyous exclamations and saving numbers i may never use, something a lot more insiduous was going on.

i heard about a primary school friend who became a bit of a local singing sensation. apparently, growing up was good for him and he turned out good looking. so he also had a modelling career going for him. some years ago, he crashed his car somewhere outside town and died.

this reminded us of another primary school friend who died in our teens. that night, i found out that he overdosed. my friends said he'd been on drugs since standard six.

there was another guy who got into tons of debt, and loansharks, among others, wanted him dead. his girlfriend left him and his family kicked him out. he told a friend that he wanted to kill himself. the next worse fate eventually befell him and he went mad. they say he started talking to walls. he got committed to an asylum of sorts for a year, and supposedly came out improved. but as soon as he gets better, everybody wants him dead again.

this guy - his grandma used to bring him lunch every day to school. she really doted on him there. i even remember a teacher teasing him for it. this same teacher is now overweight, retired and doing odd jobs to pass the time.

not every story is tragic - some are almost parodic. one friend, best known in our days as a real jerk, ended up with two wives. they all live together and somehow have to get along. apparently, there was a double childbirth thing going on. the first wife bore a daughter, the second bore a son. i don't know whether to laugh or cry.

one of our close high school friends appears to have the success story of the night. he's now in singapore, making a five digit salary. well done, i guess. except that he works for a whiskey company, and that comes on the back of successive employs by tobacco and alcohol giants. today, the success story of my school is a very wealthy chain smoker and almost-certain heavy drinker. so i ask you - what is your marker when you measure something like success?

it turns out, i'd be sad not just for all these folks who weren't there, but also for one right by me. a very old, very dear friend, for lack of a better word, looks every bit like an alcoholic. i think he's always felt like he needed to prove himself, and i think to him, being accepted by a group means a lot. i've always sensed that about him.

cut to ten years later - the boy becomes a man and he discovers that he has an enormous threshold for holding liquor. so i guess it shouldn't have surprised me that he spent large portions of the night taking on drinking challenges, impressing tons of guys and being carted along for the toasts. he finds his acceptence. and i guess he gets their respect. but for what? so he can die young?

we were all held together at some point in school. and that same institution, which is supposed to shape us all commonly, eventually spits us all out into lives that couldn't be more different. some of us are dead. some are mental. others are roaring down the highway to untimely deaths. some of these people hold big jobs. but really, what's it all for?

you.

twentysomething.

are you fast tracking your life so that people can say you're a success? they don't take scores at thirty. they only start counting the day you die.

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Genusfrog [ 10:53 am ] | 2 comments

Saturday, January 19, 2008
ON TAKING INSTRUCTION

What are you like when you're told what to do?

ps charlie once preached that obedience to god is doing when told, without asking first. he gave the illustration of a guy in the line of fire - when told to duck, he doesn't ask why. he just ducks. same thing with god - when he says This, you This because you may have as little time to stick around and debate on the logic of Thissing as it takes for a bullet saying hello to your head.
 
but i'm not good with being told what to do. and in the past two days, i've had to look at this trait in the eye and either stare it down or back off. this is me thinking it's time to back off.

the main thing about not liking being told what to do is not really the message but the messenger. i can take instruction from leaders - i don't have an insurbordination problem. whether it's my team leader at work, our bigger bosses from on high, to my cell or zone leaders in church, or pastors (definitely pastors) or even the tricky one with parents, i'm generally receptive and inclined to nod my head at the dispensation of instruction.

the other category of people to whom i don't have a problem taking words from are peers whom i deeply respect. these are people who have clinched the buy-in factor. off the top of my head, vernon and adrian are two such people. they have shown that they care enough about me, we have shared enough cups of everything over long nights talking, for me to put my head down and say yes when they give me the boot in the arse.

but in my okayness with them lies the stark comparison - all the other people. i don't like being told what to do by the rest of the world. i get rebellious. i feel like doing the opposite sometimes, just to wind them up. just to show them that they have no business talking down to me. it's rebellion and i'm naming it. but it also has another name and it's respect. 

respect is a very big thing for me. and i believe that peers should respect each other as peers. i have a big problem with peers dispensing advise when no one's looking for any and i've experienced this enough times to know that it's gonna happen again - it's i who have to deal with it. and while i may not appreciate my friends violating our lateral relationship, maybe sometimes god puts words in the mouths of imperfect communicators and i need to close my eyes to the messenger and just listen to the message.

it's not easy. and believe me, there's a sincere bone somewhere in me that wants to change. with whom do i start? 

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Genusfrog [ 4:20 pm ] | 1 comments

Thursday, October 25, 2007
ON TRANSPARENCY

To my leaders

if you want me to be transparent

i'll need something from you first.

i'll need you to get to know me. i know you want to know me, to know the transparent parts. the hidden parts. the juicy parts. i know you want me to confess to you all the remorse and sorrow and hurt and guilt and hopes and fears and lust and greed and deception and vulnerability and ambition.

but i won't be transparent before i'm opaque. i know i've not been faithful with the small things. i need to work on that. and i'll need you to get to know me starting from the small things too. you'll need to know who my favourite bands are. what kind of movies i like. who are my heroes. what i love about football and beer and buddies. whether or not i'm a nightbird these days. do i like coffee? what would i eat for breakfast? what would i do with a million bucks? or an extra thousand. right now.

and i'll let you know me. i'm not hard to get to know. those who have tried found me. and then some people never really tried. i want you to know me. and i want to know you. but i won't make myself transparent for you to observe if you're not yet observing me while i'm still opaque. don't mind me. it's a trust thing.

from now on, i'll only trust someone with my secret side if they bother to know the easy things.

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Genusfrog [ 9:23 am ] | 1 comments

Wednesday, October 17, 2007
10 CONFESSIONS

To ten different people, this is what I want to say to you.

1. I've been lying to you
2. I fear you more than anyone else
3. Most of the time, I forget that I'm betraying you
4. You've taught me the cost of friendship
5. It will never, ever be the same again
6. I have such a deep respect for you
7. Yes, I know I've been neglecting you
8. I wish I could tell you what a big mistake you're making
9. You will never know how happy I was just sitting next to you
10. Only you can understand me now

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Genusfrog [ 4:26 pm ] | 8 comments

Tuesday, September 25, 2007
THE NEW MOVIE

It's strange when you leave a past behind. you walk for the sake of going away, and you forget that in your haste to leave where you were, you're actually going somewhere else.

three months ago, adrian asked me what i thought it'd be like one year from now. maybe we all won't be doing the same things anymore, no longer hanging out in the same group, no longer having the same routines.

it turned out much faster than next year. three months was all it took for our lives to be completely flipped over. today, it bares little semblance to what it was this june. do you ever get that? like you've just walked out of one life and into another, and everything is now different?

i first felt that when i came home to malaysia and then broke up with laura. i felt like a movie character who had just stumbled into the wrong film. like clint eastwood's cowboys in a hong kong art film, or robert de niro's gangsters in a b grade zombie flick. it's weird when you move on in life and live out an entirely new routine, surrounded by new things.

but now it's different. right now, it feels like a sequel under a new director. the new director likes a different palette, so he changes the colour scheme a bit. he thinks that some of the characters should interact differently, so he readjusts the dynamics between the main players. some characters are killed off. some characters are being drafted for a mid-movie arrival. the setting is augmented but by and large the same. and though it's nothing as radical as walking onto an entirely new set, it is essentially still a distinct and new movie.

i'm living in this new movie right now. i think a few of us are. some parts of it are nice but other parts of it are really hard to watch. it's a movie with a few more giddy ideas but it's also got a lot more deep sadness. and sometimes, the poignant soundtrack moments mask the fact that there is a bitterly painful subplotline going on underneath. as the lead actor in my own narrative, i can't say i know what this new director is doing.

just please don't kill anyone else off.

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Genusfrog [ 9:01 am ] | 0 comments

Friday, July 20, 2007
GOODBYE NOBODIES

Getting rid of people from your life is rarely a fun thing. heck, sometimes it can be a bloody messy job. but on rare occassions, getting rid of people can be fun.

one such rare occassion is deleting obsolete entities from your phone. i've run out of space to add new contacts, so it turns out that there are just too many people in my phonebook whose identity i am unsure of, who have double entries or whom i will practically never ever call again.

the following is a list of the strange and mysterious entities whom i'm axing from my phonebook. good luck folks. i'll never call you again.

Astro mr saran
Astro murali
Astro telemarketing
Catherine
Connie
Darren
Deric
Emma
Fatul (accidentally deleted this guy. final cut expert. real friendly. will ask for his number again)
Grace
Hasriq
Hotel Leewa
Hot Chocolat Cafe
Jackie (Schroff?)
James Dean on location (that's ernest's old office)
Jane
Joyce
Kevin
K Tel
Leen
May
Mr Poon
Mr Wee
Mystery
M Hotel
Nasrin
Nick
NTV HR
Phoebe Chan (who da heck is this?? i've got both her landline and office number!!)
Projet Khairul
Projet Zul
PTM
Roy
Salman Eastin
Selvam (basist)
Sgt Shahidan
Starbucks Taipan
Stella D&T
Surinder
SM FAM
Telekom Directory
The Star hq
Tommy Video
Victoria Station PJ
Woon
Zariff
Zul TMnet

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Genusfrog [ 11:22 am ] | 1 comments

Sunday, July 08, 2007
DISSONANCE

I'm not sure about your posse, but mine aren't perfect. we won't grace magazine covers, get sporting and cosmetic endorsements or have our faces blown up for the big screen (ok, some of them will - that would be my fault). still, the point is that we're not the kind of people who set society's benchmarks for desirebility. at some point, we've all had zits to match our fart jokes, bad haircuts, weight issues and pitching problems.

which is apt, therefore, that there's a growing culture in at least this dengkil squad group of friends that we now sing our happy birthdays dissonant style. yeah, that's off-key, off-tune, off-timing happy birthday belted in public spaces, usually at full volume with - what should eventually grow into - no shame. or as adrian says, "it's too easy to sing happy birthday in tune. everybody knows how to do it". but ask your neighbourhood songbird to do a bad rendition of happy birthday and she probably won't know where to start.

i like that - the celebration of dissonance. it's not a celebration of mediocrity, it's saying that at least once in a year, we're cool with the fact that we won't always hit most, if any, of life's high notes, and we celebrate instead the fun that we can have while hitting all those bum notes. i know when we sing happy birthday out of tune, we're not thinking too deep about it. we're just having fun making the birthday person feel embarassed. but now that i'm thinking about it, i think i like it a lot.

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Genusfrog [ 3:00 pm ] | 2 comments

Thursday, June 28, 2007
COMFORT (THE KIND THAT DOESN'T HANG AROUND)

Comfort. that bitch of an illusion. it’s a rare commodity these days, this thing called comfort. if you have it, don’t ever lose it. if you don’t know if you have it, you probably don’t.

this isn’t the comfort of a warm bed, fluffy pillows and the heavenly marriage between air-conditioning and a very thick blanket. sure, if you’re numbered among those who can’t afford ten-dollar coffees then these might be some of the joys that avoid you like the plague. but there’s a more insidious brand of soothing that’s just so much harder to hold on to.

sometimes, it’s almost convincing – that life, in all its plurality and richness, pulls all its resources together to perform that one monumental task of picking apart your heart. like a contraption, it gets prised, hammered at, unscrewed and ultimately dismantled. and it’s almost as easy to do as it is to be done to. walk down any street and there is enough fragility around you to shatter if you so much as sigh. don’t believe me? befriend someone and see how easy it is to break their heart.

today, i just want to run into someone’s arms and stay there, never to be lured back out into a world of perpetually regenerating false sense of security. but today, there are no arms to run into, so i’ve run to the next best thing: nangka chips.

comfort food does little in the larger scheme of things. sure, they certainly do make the scheme of some things larger, but no, they generally do not work. like how richard ashcroft said, the drugs don’t work. neither do nangka chips. half an hour and half a bag of chips later, this elusive sadist that is comfort still hasn’t showed up. on some days, i don’t know if it ever plans to.

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Genusfrog [ 8:45 pm ] | 0 comments

Monday, May 28, 2007
LEASEHOLD

Leasehold property make me feel sad. they remind me that at some point, everything that you try to hold on to so tightly gets taken away from you. sometimes by some strange and mysterious force. sure, you set up home, decorate it, put in some plants, maybe even live a life there. the cracks in the paint, the drippy tap and the windows that don't open properly after a few years, all trick you into believing that you've settled down. but it doesn't matter how old the family photos are that you put on your wall. it's your family but it's not really your wall.

i don't like to lose things. i just don't know how to hold on to the things i have. if i had it my way, i would probably never change anything in my life but i know now that when the weird hand of removing starts waving, there's nothing more you can do if you're not the one it's clutching. after a while, it just becomes a routine of moving what ought to be meaningful things along some factorial conveyor belt, to be passed on to the next loser. who i might add is only one because he too has also just lost.

i wish i had more freehold friendships. the kind that nobody can take away.

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Genusfrog [ 11:32 am ] | 1 comments

Tuesday, May 22, 2007
TEST DRIVE

Adrian: eh when are you gonna remove the plastic covers off your seatbelt buckles?
Shu yee: dunno lah. i like them.
Adrian: makes you feel like you're still test-driving your car.
Fergus: haahaha. ya. maybe you can test drive your car forever.

You can't test-drive anything forever. after a while, either the bubblewrap needs to come off, and you take it home with you, or you put it back on a shelf.

i wish i could live in a bubblewrapped life, where all the hard-knocks are cushioned and nobody gets hurt. nobody needs to get hurt because nobody's really being owned and used. everyone's just on display, a shop window item that points towards other more real and tangible copies. people would pick us up, hold us against themselves, try us, look at us in the mirror and then bring a store-room copy home to do all the dirty work: the wearing, the using, the washing, the dropping and breaking.

it's a bit dehumanising but that's how i want to be today. i wanna be test-driven. and after mr toad's wild ride grinds to its proverbial halt, i would be restored to my original position without chip or bruise. like that button which restores the factory settings. i wish today that they could restore my factory settings. put me back into bubblewrap and seal the box with new tape.

you can't test-drive forever. after a while, you have to head back to the showroom and go home.

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Genusfrog [ 10:01 am ] | 1 comments

Tuesday, April 17, 2007
NEW SHOES

New shoes are nice. i just bought a couple pairs of new shoes because the older two were falling apart. apparently, everything's getting replaced nowadays.

that's the thing about new shoes... they feel really nice in the shop. they look spanking cool and they're quiet, like german cars quiet. but maybe it's this universal prank that the yellow lighting, screwey mirrors and mall air-cond play in unisive cohesion, conspiring so that two days after you walk out with your funky new footwear, they start to shed their original splendour.

take my new adidas shoes, for instance. little did i know that new adidas rubber has this squeaky thing going on so that the more i walk, the more i sound like a four-year-old in one of those shoes that go bip-bip-bip everytime they set their foot down. and it's not even a stepping down thing. when i raise my foot and twist it around inside, it makes that sound. bip-bip-bip.

and my new working shoes - the most comfortable hush puppy in the world - i swore in the store that i could walk forever with this puppy. the left heel... something... what's wrong? it's not like the right heel. it's stiff... and clunky. maybe the leather needs to be worn out. or worn in. maybe i need to give these two shoes more time. be more patient with them and eventually, they'll be as glorious as i originally saw them to be.

i wish friendships weren't so much like new shoes. i wish i could spend forever with my friends in the friends store, deluded forever by the warm lights, wonky mirrors and cool air. we could all be happy trying each other on, fun with the mirror and mounds of shoes. we would always feel nice, look good and sound just right. safe in the comfort of relational commerce, we can put away our insecurities in the name of good humour and a fresh new look. and last year's shoe of the year will forever be the shoe of the year.

my shoes are my shoes. i've bought them. and i love them.

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Genusfrog [ 5:17 pm ] | 2 comments

Monday, March 19, 2007
HEYO ENG...

we went to eat kari chicken today. it was fun. we talked about nonsense. and the tea was too light when i poured it out. the curry was redder than usual. and the yao char kuai wasn't warm and wasn't soft. but we laughed a lot. and somewhere in the middle of lunch, though i didn't say it, i wondered if we would get together and do something like this when we all grew older. on the way back to the office, we talked about holidays. and i wondered if we would ever all go on a holiday together. it's weird. when silly lunches make you think about the rest of your life.

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Genusfrog [ 3:11 pm ] | 0 comments

Friday, February 23, 2007
HOME AND LEAVING

Today, i leave muar to head back again.

i don't know how you feel about your hometown, but i love mine. it's changed alot in the nine years since i left, first for the bright lights of melbourne and then for the madness that is KL. i feel sad whenever i leave muar. it reminds me that with each passing year, i'm leaving a part of my childhood behind, to move on without me. and in this, i too am moving on, without it.

this chinese new year, i didn't meet my old friends - not even one. i didn't bother because our reunions always gravitate around a gambling table, with drinking and small-talk the auxillary features. i could have, i guess. i had all the numbers in my phone. and if i met them, i could have kept in step with all their changes: of jobs, marital status, looks, scenes, gossip. but that didn't matter much to me. instead, i spent most of my time at home. and in the little time i spent outside, i preferred to inspect the changes in my town: its storefronts, the new shops and new houses, the redirection of its one-way streets, and the unstoppable dilapidation of some places that will never go away. the neighbourhood provision shop just got some new owners. but it still looks the same from outside. i need the comfort of knowing that some things just don't change.

this year, i didn't bother playing catch-up with my old friends. those guys are fine without me. and though muar seems to be doing no worse, i can't say the same for myself. and i'm definitely not fine without muar.

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Genusfrog [ 3:16 pm ] | 4 comments

Friday, July 30, 2004
POKER, GOODBYES & A HARD APPLE CIDER

now, i'm giddy because gordon fed me this apple cider thingy that had 20% alcohol. it was nice.

i'm a little sad cos vernon is going back to melbourne tomorrow for another year (before he returns for good) and i'm not only gonna miss his friendship, i'm also gonna miss his wise counsel.

we played texas holdem over at my place (like always, with monopoly money only) after the dust of mamak and couz nite had settled. ernest joined us as well, so that was really nice. i like my brother joining in with my friends. carol said i looked like him. that's nice. i like looking like ernest. i think he's good looking.

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Genusfrog [ 9:44 am ] | 0 comments