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





Tuesday, December 08, 2009



Life moves fast. and it's easy to forget that as it flutters by, new memories are being made. athalia and i have started a blog together called These glorious days. i like to think that it arrests the everyday mundane moments so that we can grow old safe in the knowledge that we're leaving behind a trail with which we can use to reminisce.

you can journey with us by clicking here.

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Genusfrog [ 2:41 pm ] | 1 comments

Tuesday, June 30, 2009





I've had this self-styled quote on a strip of paper stuck to the top of my monitor for years. today, i'm consigning it to the bin. i never really knew what it meant. but it's strange, that today of all days, with all the uncertainty of the world before me, i put this quote down.

there, buddy. come down.

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Genusfrog [ 3:59 pm ] | 0 comments

Friday, May 29, 2009



What started off as an abbas saad feature on soccernet led me down a very nostalgic trip along one of football's more local memory lanes.

it's 1991. i'm eleven years old. my school buddies are stanley wong and munadzam. we share a common love of two things: gila gila magazine and the johor state football team. 

that year, johor wins the malaysian semi-pro league. abbas saad is the top scorer with twenty odd goals. we go to the malaysia cup final to face selangor. i don't know about stanley or munadzam, but this is a particularly big match for me because five years prior, when i was six, i saw selangor demolish johor 6-1 at this same stage. 

but on this cup final night, that guy above, ervin boban, struck three past selangor and we carried the malaysia cup home. it was one of my best experiences ever as a football fan. and until today, that team - with abbas saad, alistair edwards, ervin boban, nasir yusof, a young annuar abu bakar, captained by salehan mohd som and managed by mike urukalo - will always be one of my favourite, if not my alltime favourite, football team.

my dream would be for johor to be in the final of the malaysia cup again, when i can bring my family to watch it at the stadium. i can imagine the conversation already.

me: kids, the last time johor was in a malaysia cup final, papa was eleven. and he saw us destroy selangor.
kids: but pa... we live in selangor.
me: no we don't. who said? who said?
kids: pa. subang jaya is in selangor. my school badge has yellow and red on it.
me: where got? i don't see any yellow. that's blue, son. stop pretending to be colour blind.

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Genusfrog [ 4:38 pm ] | 2 comments

Tuesday, May 06, 2008

MY MODBLOG

In The red street diner, i wrote about a girl who goes home to discover that her hometown and family have disappeared.

after writing that, a part of my life also disappeared. it was my old blog.

goodchristianboy.modblog.com was in many ways the heyday of this corner of the internet. i remember attracting 80 hits every day, mostly from the small but supportive modblog community. it was the blog on which i started blogging.

i had a voice when i was there. i blogged about my journey of faith, philosophised about god, life and christianity and preached like a legitimate preacherboy with a pocketful of relevant verses and an altar call at the end.

modblog closed down in january 06 and along with it died my voice.

i wonder, how did i lose my voice? was it work? was it time? or growing old? maybe i started learning that christian material without the edge of cynicism came across as uncool. i stopped talking about jesus online. the blog of a flawed guy trying to get it right became the blog of a flawed guy trying hard to get it more wrong. by march 07, this place was already steeped in defeat. by july, it got about as bitter as it could get.

sometimes we lose things in life. and we replace them with new things. i found myself a home here on blogger. for the first few months, my modblog could still be viewed but i was so stupid, i never backed up my posts. i kept saying, one of these days i'll back up all those posts. one of those days became one of those weeks. one day, it just couldn't be viewed anymore. in its place, a page error.

i'd lost all my posts.

two years of my documented life, erased from the internet. maybe it was just as well. i had seemingly lost the same heart that posted them.

*

last night, athalia told me about something.

she told me about webarchive.org. they have this search engine there called the wayback machine and what it does is, every two months, its robots crawl all over the internet and archive web pages. it's been doing this since the 1990s.

athalia told me that it's there. that's she's found it. my modblog. she found my modblog.

today, i saw it for myself.

ripped around the edges, with pages falling off the spine, sat my modblog in the middle of some monster filing cabinet of digital garbage. some of the posts never got archived. but many of them are there. i'm not making the same mistake twice. today, i started backing them up, from 2004 onwards. i'm even reposting peoples' comments with the names they used back then.

it's strange.

rebuilding your past in a new home is like putting old photos behind new frames. and as i read what fergus wrote at 24, i'm starting to wonder if it's really a bunch of posts that i've recovered, or perhaps a voice that had been dead for too long.

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Genusfrog [ 4:41 pm ] | 0 comments

Monday, April 28, 2008
THE TOY SOLDIER'S LEGS

When i was young, i read a short story about two fellows who shared a toy soldier. it was a fine toy soldier, except that one of its legs was shorter than the other.

they sat down around the soldier and thought about what to do. the first fellow said "let's cut some off the other leg". the other fellow agreed. and so they cut some off the longer leg. as luck - or good storytelling - would have it, they ended up cutting too much off that leg.

so one leg was still shorter. just that it was now the other leg.

"what shall we do now?" the first fellow thought.
"i'll cut some off the first leg", the second fellow answered.

and so they cut some off the first leg. true to form, they cut too much off it, and the poor toy soldier still had one longer leg than another.

the story goes that by the time both legs were of the same length, there wasn't much leg left on either side of the soldier. and though he was now a stable soldier, he was also now a very short one.

today, i feel like that soldier.

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Genusfrog [ 10:12 am ] | 4 comments

Tuesday, April 15, 2008
ON MAGAZINES AND MEMORY

If memories could be canned, I hope this one will never expire. If an expiry date must be added onto it, let it be "10,000 years".
- Cop 223, Chungking Express

You know what makes me feel sad? a stack of magazines sitting by the door, waiting to be thrown out.

so much writing gets put into those magazines and so quickly they get chucked out. how long do you keep your magazines for? six months? a year? depends on the magazine, right? exactly my point.

it saddens me when a lot of work gets put into a publication that expires, in what might just as well be, overnight. if i were to write, i would like to write things that last a long time. i'd like to write something that can be read years from its publication date and still be entirely readable. i decided a long time ago that this blog would be about ideas and not events, because i could never read my archives if i blogged about what happened everyday. and i'd never want an archive that i couldn't bare to read.

it saddens me when life moves forward and people decide that certain things are worth forgetting. like magazines. or newspapers. never to be referenced again. yes. stacks of magazines waiting to be recycled sadden me. but bookshelves make me happy.

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Genusfrog [ 4:57 pm ] | 2 comments

Monday, April 14, 2008
IN DEFENCE OF NOSTALGIA

I have never had much fondness for modernity. by and large, i find that the stuff of today is too temporary, and the stuff of tomorrow too speculative. i have thus, for the best part of my life, sought meaning from the backward glance we call nostalgia.

there's a lot more security in the past. things that have happened have happened. there's a sense of finality to them, but in that finality too lies a sense of eternity. an old coke bottle will outlive the coke bottles of today. it does so because it has died its death and now lives forever. perhaps i fear that death - that decay which renders the stuff of fashion unfashionable. perhaps i'm afraid of my own sense of style. and so i choose the best option available - to indulge in that which can no longer go out of fashion. or maybe it's something more. maybe it's some sincere unhappiness with the way the world is today. or maybe it's a phobia of the unceasing surge of our natural order in its linear and forward tangent.

two days ago, i bought myself a 1984 liverpool crown paints jersey. it's perhaps the definitive football jersey in my wardrobe. the crowning glory of my fandom. i've seen pictures of liverpool's new kits for next year. they don't really do much for me. it's interesting though. my excitement over my new old kit was met with the following conversation:

Fergus: Check this out man, Liverpool's 1984 jersey.
Tim: Cheh. Not nice lah.

maybe.

but i swear, that shirt makes me feel a million bucks. so now i'm wondering. alan kennedy in that pic above has a moustache that also has retro written all over it. maybe it's something i can think about. together with that permed hair.

hmmm....

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Genusfrog [ 4:15 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

Friday, February 08, 2008
ON PHOTOGRAPHS AND MEMORY: MEDIATION

Many guys i know experience important events in life through a camera lens. at some point in my life, i decided that i wouldn't do that.

i like photographs as much as the next guy. i like them for the documentation they do and i like them even more for the aesthetic good they bring. above all, i like how photos remind you of good days, ordinary days, an hour, a feeling, a person. but as much as i appreciate these things, i won't trade that for the real thing.

whether it's someone blowing the candles off a cake, or a singer taking to the mic on stage, or a couple wearing rings at the altar, i think i've reached a stage in my life where i'd much rather have my real eyes on the event. i'd take that over having a beautiful photograph to help me remember something that i had a compromised real experience of.

to me, it misses the point. i'm there. if i'm right there when it's happening, i'd much rather have a real and really good experience of the thing, live - not mediated. eyes opened. ears trained. taking it in. maybe we live in an age that is somewhat insecure. we feel like we have to preserve all our memories. that if we don't do that, that maybe we'll forget that anything ever happened. maybe we're so afraid of this that even before we experience something, we hijack it by putting a camera in front of our eyes. we never experience anything first hand anymore. we have no memories of a live experience. but we have photographs to help us build these memories.

i was looking through my melbourne photos and many of them were taken hastily. some of them are composed dodgily. others are a bit off-focused. but i'm happy with them. i really am. i'm happy because i didn't go to melbourne to take photos. i went to melbourne to see melbourne. and saw it i did. i can't show people what i saw. i can show them my photos, but those photos were never really going to replicate the experience anyway. so my photos, warts and all, do enough to remind me of the real experiences that i had. nothing more. put differently, i don't need perfect photos of my holiday. i just need thumbnails, so to speak, that remind me of the real moments. the rest, i have real memories for.

do i sound like an experiential fascist?

experiential fascist. yeah, maybe that's me.

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Genusfrog [ 11:43 pm ] | 1 comments

Friday, January 25, 2008
ONE WEEK

royal parade
bailleau library
swanston street
cinema nova
state library
arts centre
flemmington racecourse
homeshow video
coles
jb hifi
a1
myer
south lawn
royal park
princess park
lincoln square
lygon street
readings bookshop

yes. to melbourne i return. here's a smile.

:)

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Genusfrog [ 6:43 pm ] | 0 comments

Tuesday, November 06, 2007
ON PHOTOGRAPHS AND MEMORY: ERASURE

When you break up, do you throw away all your photographs together?

i have. all it took was dragging one folder into the bin and emptying it. and almost magically, it's as if you can forget the past. it's not that you can't. it's just that it's absurd.

throwing away old photographs is like denying a portion of your life. it's like saying that for x number of months, somewhere in some now indistinct past, you didn't exist. you don't talk about it anymore, you don't have documents to show for it anymore and you certainly don't have pictorial memories of it anymore. while at its best, it looks like a disciplined operation to move on and not dwell in the past, at its worst, it's a disciplined operation to pretend that you never did live.

i don't know what to do with my past now that i've thrown away all my photographs. i understand why i've trashed some memories - however good they were - but i also now understand why it's sad that some pasts have no place in a life that must move forward.

i also don't know what to do with the gaping hole in my personal history books now that i've censored my own existence. new memories will be formed, will propel me forward and will keep on shaping me. but new memories should not replace old memories. they should sit chronologically in front and sentimentally on top, but our hearts are not hard drives. you can't overwrite one cluster with new knowledge.

but maybe throwing away these photos is the only thing that can help you take new ones. maybe the only way into a meaningful and reconciled future is the denying of your once-meaningful but irreconcilable past.

photos, then, merely act as a substitute. a symbol of not just a person but of mondays and sundays and streets and parks. and burning them is like burning away an old house so that you can build from the earth again.

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Genusfrog [ 7:00 pm ] | 0 comments

Friday, November 02, 2007
ON PHOTOGRAPHS AND MEMORY: YEARBOOK

Do you remember your yearbook photos from school? i remember all of mine, from form one to form four. i've got them all in an album. you can see how we grew up. i remember also the day we took our form five class photos. i remember where i stood. what the day was like.

i don't think i missed a normal schooling day in form five. at least not until a day when i had a fever. went to school the next day and they told me the photographer came back yesterday. something happened to his film so he came by to reshoot my class photo. just like that. no announcement, no forewarning. i was out of my final year's yearbook and it was over a silly fever.

i never claimed my copy of that yearbook. i remember wanting to dissociate myself from it, knowing fully well that i wasn't represented there. so today, i have no form five yearbook. i don't regret not owning it. it would hurt a lot more to have it lying around knowing that i remember everything about the photography day and still not ending up in the pictures.

i wonder, when my school friends grow old and look at that yearbook, will they remember all the faces in the class? chances are, they won't. being photographed is no guarantee of being memorable. but not being photographed doesn't make things better. an unmemorable but photographed face can still conjure an imagination of who a person was, regardless of how unfaithful that imagination may be. but an unphotographed person, no matter how memorable, has no place in the pages of some of life's inane histories. his place is in the hazy recollections of forgetful people. and while photographs never fade, memory does.

when i woke up this morning, i remembered my form five yearbook. and i feel sad for all the boys like me, who also didn't show up on that random day when the photographer came back. i'm sure some of them don't care about such memories.

somehow, that seems to sadden me even more.

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Genusfrog [ 9:45 am ] | 2 comments

Sunday, September 23, 2007
THE FAMILY FACTOR

My family went all von Trapp this weekend. we do this sometimes, gather round a table and sing songs for hours together. my dad had this idea that when we came home for our annual mooncake festival celebrations, that it had to be a singing night. so we played this game, singing oldies, with one person singing one line of a song and the next person continuing the next line. we played until someone couldn't remember the lyrics, and then that person had to choose a new song.

you know, when i become a father, i want my family to be a singing family. it doesn't matter if nobody knows how to hold a note. the point is that i want my future family to live in full abandon, expressing themselves through songs with little inhibition. family shouldn't be too inhibited with each other. mine sometimes is but sometimes isn't. and i like my family best when we drop our guard and dare to be weird or funny or different together.

i'm really enjoying my weekend back home in muar. there is a feeling of certainty and security. the feeling that some things never change, and that somewhere in this huge, bizarre and everchanging world, there is a group of people who are gonna be exactly as i expect them to be. and on rare occassions like this, being with my family makes me feel like a 7-year-old again. in the larger scheme of things, it didn't last too long: about four hours. but for those four hours, it felt like 1987, and i was a little kid again. and we were all together, being family.

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Genusfrog [ 4:45 am ] | 0 comments

Saturday, September 01, 2007
THE BICYCLE IDEA

Ever woken up to bizarre new ideas? i woke up with one the other morning, and it went something along the lines of "I want to buy a bicycle".

the last bicycle i had was a second-hand racing bike that i bought in melbourne to fix a childhood fixation with light-weight bicycles with funny handlebars. I called it June, partly because I bought it in my birthmonth, but also because I had only recently christened my then-spanking new Les Paul Jude (which in turn, was named after Hey Jude, but that's a different story). I cycled to uni and back, sometimes at breakneck speed in the evenings. I never crashed June. I sold her just before I left. With her I sold a life on two wheels and traded it in for the jammed-up bore-draw of PJ's disgusting highways.

but some mornings have a way of inspiring new old habits. i have little idea where i'd go with a bike if i bought one now - i could cycle to adrian's house, centrepoint and one utama. swing by a park sometimes. maybe that's it. but the idea still fascinates me. maybe it's that intrinsic need to fill the void of old habits with new ones. maybe now that another chapter of my life back in malaysia has been closed, i can open a new one and feel comfortable drawing references to my life in melbourne again. maybe now that life has moved on, i can reembrace who i was for five years in australia, and dip my toes into some of that freewheeling once more.

i don't know if i'll actually get myself a bike. but i do know what i'd want. wind in my face and road zipping beneath me. cold ears. i want to ride away into anywhere.

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Genusfrog [ 1:12 pm ] | 0 comments

Sunday, June 10, 2007
TOYS

Nostalgia sizzles. an old cupboard. inside, a box of toys. outside, a boy grown up. a treasure chest. matchbox cars. an air france bus. an orange soda truck. a maroon bentley with a white hood. a red lamborghini with yellow and black streaks. made in france. (not bad.) an orange matchbox car launcher. stick a car all the way in till it clicks. press the button. bang. instant home-made car wreck. an orange motorbike and a detachable red and blue rider. more matchbox cars. a black corvette and a white and red mazda. you can open the doors. so cool.

soldiers. toy soldiers. lots and lots and lots of green toy soldiers. standing. kneeling. crouching. some in attention. most at gunpoint. and then, cowboys. two horses. lots of cowboys. and lots of indians. cowboys and indians in different colours. mostly red but some are green and yellow and orange. blue indians. and then, mini robots. multi-coloured plastic robots with holes for lost limbs to be stuck into. strange rubbery aliens with cool rubbery spaceships. civilians. tiny normal people. about fifteen bottle caps. and a weird gardener action figure.

and then... m.a.s.k.

switchblade. miles mayhem's helicopter that turns into a jet plane. goliath. matt tracker's truck that carries his flying racecar. raven. a corvette that transforms into a seaplane. hurricane. a chevy that turns into a six-wheel tank. buzzard. a racecar that turns into two speeding motorcycles and a jet plane. and outlaw. sweet god, my favourite m.a.s.k. toy. my black oil tanker that turns into a missile-launching unit. the mechanisms mostly don't work anymore. the buttons don't respond. all the projectiles are gone. but they still look so cool. outlaw. i remember the day i came home with it.

and then... voltron.

golion. my five lion giant robot. one... two... three... four... wait. where's the green lion? treasure chest. rummage. rummage. i can't lose the green lion. plough. plough. there it is! all five. the blue one was always my favourite. voltron, 4/5ths assembled. i dismantle him. for the first time in decades - individual lions. some of their limbs have broken off. green lion has lost a hind leg. blue lion has lost his tail. black lion has lost a whole shoulder.

cars crash. aliens land. soldiers surround outlaw. a cowboy defends the oil tanker and guns down the entire army, the tanker rolls over the cowboy. the indians start hacking with their axes. spaceships swoop in. the voltron lions bite them. an alien terrorises the lions. cowboys are killed. indians are killed. the civilians enter the scene. they also get killed. a matchbox car launches into midair with an indian on the hood. both spin towrds the alien. boom! the car explodes. the indian dies. the orange motorbike does an elaborate motorcross flip from behind outlaw to enter the scene. but explodes. who else... who else... ah. the weird gardener action figure. he's holding a rake. hahaha! the voltron lions return. they form a grandiose throne for the gardener. (he looks like xerxes from 300!) all the toys form an aisle. on one end is the gardener on his lion throne. on the other end, the pink rubber alien. the gardener steps forward and twitches. the alien explodes. a yellow cowboy takes two bottlecaps and makes a casket for the alien. the gardener turns around and twitches. everything is destroyed.

i crouched there. on the floor. for one hour. playing with my old toys.

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Genusfrog [ 1:03 am ] | 1 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, May 19, 2006
You know what i miss? hotel rooms.

it's not even like i used to travel so much. i just miss the feeling of checking in to a hotel room, deciding where you put your shoes, checking out what they've got on tv, checking out the rooms, jumping on the bed, checking out the view, putting my things down on the bedside table, playing with the light switches by the bedside table, checking out the bathrooms and all the wonderful little things they have there, checking out the drawers and their bibles, unpacking my travel bags and hanging up a few shirts with the hotel hangers, putting my toiletries in the bathroom, turning up the air cond, rolling around in bed and checking out all the wonderful things in the fridge, even if it means only looking at them and not eating or drinking any of them.

most of the time, when we say the we are going on a holiday, we talk about the places of attraction, the culture, the people, the customs, the shopping, and all those things tourists talk about, and photographs will tell about. hotel rooms are like an incidental part of holidaying. nobody travels so they can stay in hotels, people stay in hotels so they can travel. but i miss staying in hotels.

maybe what i really want is a holiday. maybe for some strange reason, my desire for a trip somewhere nice is emerging in the form of a subconscious association to the hotel habits that inevitably follow such journeys. maybe what i'm really desiring is not the keys with numbers, doors with funny card locks, bellboys or all those yellowy-yellowy lights. maybe what i want is a week in the heart of buenos aires, or a vineyard in bella tuscany. i've been wanting to post my top 10 holiday destinations for a while now, and i even have the individual thumbnails to go with the post saved on my thumbdrive. i've just been... so caught up with the life and living in the local, that the foreign has either barely been on my mind or whenever it does creep in, it does so so late in the night, when my eyes close and the world attempts to go black. but it never really goes black. i think i'm leaving the world behind, but i still see it, in ribbons of faint light: an evening in gothenburg, a glacier in alaska, a green-coloured canal in venice, with music playing.

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Genusfrog [ 3:37 pm ] | 0 comments

Tuesday, April 04, 2006

For some reason, i had to come into to work at ten pm tonight, and stay here for goodness knows how many hours till i've either done enough work or chalked up enough hours for the books. now, i don't mind working late - seeing as i don't make it a habit, it's not that bad. i also don't mind putting in the hours - it's necessary, and doing so with no one else in the office just means that it's easier to concentrate. what i do mind, however, is the driving.

i've grown more and more impatient with the LDP. it's got to be the ugliest stretch of highway anywhere on the face of greater KL. in the day, the buildings along it look drab and miserable. the malls look somewhat trashy and there's always a jam somewhere near kelana jaya. it's a thoroughly disgusting journey.

but that's in the day, anytime near peak hour. driving in at ten pm, you'd forgive me for thinking that i'd have a better time. and it actually was better. still, the highway managed to get the better of me.

when i was growing up, i remember listening to this dolly parton song that goes "the bright lights of the city / are a pretty sight to see / perhaps they're extra pretty / to a country girl like me". the song goes on to talk about how lonely and cruel the city is, and how she feels lost, and she asks her "mamma" to say an extra prayer for her. know that one?

well, driving down to cyberjaya tonight made me think of that song. the buildings along the LDP looked distinctly foreign tonight, and they felt cold and strange. not strange in a weird sense, but strange in a "stranger" sense - they just felt foreign. and as i drove, i felt like i was so far from home.

at that point, i don't even know if the home i felt far from was my bachelor pad, my family in gasing, or even my hometown. and in a way, it didn't matter. i was so far from them all. i felt like a nobody driving into the nevada desert and finding vegas, except that my vegas is the non-nocturnal desolation of cyberjaya.

and right now, as i bang away a blog while i ought to be finishing up my work (fancy going home at 2am, don't i?), i feel so lost in this big, almost bad, world. this whole young working person's existence feels so damn lonely.

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Genusfrog [ 11:26 pm ] | 1 comments

Saturday, February 05, 2005
I LOVE CHINESE NEW YEAR BACK IN MUAR

This is amazing. i'm back in muar ready to take on chinese new year with full aplomb!
i got my new clothes, my fedora, a funky topman tie (which, however, doesn't go with the shirts and the fedora, and therefore may get the drop), and the best of all - i'm back here to chill and chill and then cny!

i always wonder what it must be like for those living in kl during chinese new year. they clean up, buy new stuff - like everyone else - and then, the celebrate right where they are. which is fair enough, i guess, if it's never been any other way. maybe i can get a better idea if i remember how i approached cny all my life right up till form 5.

but even then, there was always the thrill of going to kl to shop for the clothes and new stuff (house decorations and whatnot, though to be honest, none of that ever fascinated me) and then coming back to small town muar and celebrating.

i guess i just like coming home. i always think that peoples' kampungs are very sacred to them and it is fair. i love muar. say what you want about the congested streets, the colour-coded buildings (jan!) and the new and not-necesarilly improved tanjung, i love muar from the bowels of my heart.

and i'm so glad to be back.

for nine days too. it's gonna be so much fun - there'll be lots of mahjong sessions, cards, board games, angpau, shandy, orange crush, cny songs, red table cloths, fireworks, bright lights, jam tarts, seven up and visitors.

for some time, i kinda lost the mood for cny. i thought that it was gonna be harrowing, with nosy relatives asking silly questions like "when are you getting married" (to which i will answer July 2011, citing that a stupid question deserves a stupider answer), or business-types asking business type questions... (whatever that means... oh, i know. they could ask me if the company i work for trades on the main board!). la di da di.

i'm excited man! what's this? i am excited! i can't wait to start cleaning the last few things mummy left for us to deal with, change bulbs (though elaine always gets to do those) and... man! i love chinese new year! and now that i'm back, all i can say is BRING IT ON!!!

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Genusfrog [ 9:20 pm ] | 0 comments

Tuesday, January 25, 2005
SCHOOLTIME NAUGHTIISM

We were talking about the notorious things that happened in our schools last time. for me, a few of us who didn't take chinese class booked ourselves into an empty classroom and started playing ping pong by joining tables, using pencil cases as nets and exercise books as bats. needless to say, our ruckus eventually brought the penyelia petang to our classroom, where we got quite the punishment. we had to wash the bathroom. not just any bathroom too - the one next to the science lab, the one that smelled like ammonia all the time.

we had a goreng pisang stall opposite our school, on the road. you see, my school hand three roads going through it (or rather, it was built on three blocks). so our classroom overlooked a pisang goreng stall three floors down, opposite the road. boon ping, glendon, bernard, ang, and of course, myself... used to order goreng pisang from them using hand gestures. they'd gesture back and then bring the goreng pisang over... where one of us would go downstairs and collect. this one time, she gestured that the penyelia petang was in the class next door, but of course, we didn't understand what they were saying. lucky didn't get caught. don't want to imagine what we'd be cleaning for that! haha...

i used to think that kl schools were really notorious. in fact, they are. compared to my school, the stuff kl kids got round to doing far exceeded what we ever dreamt of. the student-teacher conflicts were more heated, the boy-girl shenanigans were more scandalous, and the 100% tulen juvenile delinquency was always more 100% tulen.

in one of the schools, dunno if it was seaport or seapark, the students blew up one of their teachers' cars. waw! that's really crazy, man. jeremy said that the worst they ever got was to move the teacher's car by carrying it and putting it in the middle of the road or somthing like that. man, i hear these stories and i still think they're quite amazing. then, jeremy told us about this one time when the police came into his classroom and arrested his teacher. apparently, the teacher was carted off for some stock fraud or something like that. but here's the best part - guess what subject that teacher was teaching?

moral!

can you believe that? that is like, so cool, you know. how many times do you get police storming into a class to arrest a teacher, and not just any teacher, your moral teacher! wahoo! man, what i'd have given to see some of my moral teachers get arrested midclass!

and then i think... ok, so juvenile naughtiness is normal. it will be around everywhere. and then there are some things which are just not really funny anymore. and i guess, to put myself in the teacher's shoes, having this bunch of kids totally torment you in this way must be quite harrowing (not that some of them don't ask for it). and then, to think that this guy would get arrested in front of all his students while teaching moral is just plain embarrassing. the truth is, the police don't have to do that. they can arrest him anytime when he's at home. but i know our police like to shame people. they're really no different from those teachers who make you stand on chairs and draw question marks on your cheeks with marker pens because you forgot to write them in your questions when you were 9.

yes, that happened to me and vernon. question mark for one, dollar sign for the other.

so in this shame society, where the punishers go for gold, i guess it's only fair that the cheeky gits get their fair bit of fun. heck, if i only heard your stories, i'd be sure it wasn't the punishers who were taking home first prize.

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Genusfrog [ 3:04 pm ] | 0 comments