Wanted to tell you guys earlier but my wife said to wait first. Anyway, now you guys are in on the secret, along with Helena, Hazura, Siti, Reduan, Tim, Pannaporn, Noi, Janet, Beng Cheang, Chui Yan, Yeuw Leung, TV, Billie, Pixie, Christina, Grace, Sree, Angeline, Vasanthi, Eva, Jenn, Hazel, Su Yin, Audra, Jenny, Eldo, Ay Leng, Steve, Franky, Toby, Chris, Nathan, Roscoe, Gilbert, Najah, Jikon, John, Kwan, Mike, Szen, Shen, Charlie, Kiat Hong, Adrian, Derek, Erna, Ernie, Erny, Philip, Patricia, Danny, Vianney, Denise, Ker Loon, Lydia, Wan Lee, Khoo, Diana, CY, Debbie, Jui Hong, Elaine Anne, Fitri, Robin, Helen, Ju Nah, Li Nah, Charles, Surin, Malcolm L, Justin, Patricia, Sharon, Meng San, David, Gladys, Miss Loh, our family and our relatives.
Don’t tell anyone yet though. It’s still early.
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“Deterrence is the art of producing in the mind of the enemy... the fear to attack. And so, because of the automated and irrevocable decision making process which rules out human meddling, the doomsday machine is terrifying. It's simple to understand. And completely credible, and convincing." (by the character Doctor Strangelove, played by Peter Sellers in the Stanley Kubrick movie “Doctor Strangelove OR How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb”).
I used to think that the best thing a person can do for self-preservation in all situations is to stay calm and be rational. As a kid, I was constantly being told to not get angry, to always be calm, to always be mindful of what I say. For the past three and a half decades, I’ve been trying to become the perfect thinking machine - like Vito Corleone (Marlon Brando) in the Godfather movies – always putting aside grudges to think of what is best in the present situation. The problem with that is people will start expecting you not to hold grudges and they will keep changing the current situation to your disadvantage knowing that the present will become the past tomorrow.
Now that I’m married, I’ve learned to appreciate the value in an explosive temper. My wife is able to do for me what I am incapable of doing myself. Whenever I’m being taken advantage of, it is very difficult for me to react rudely or loudly or even quickly. I have to just say “Oh, I see,” then go home, think of what’s happened and look up my feelings in a thesaurus before I can write a long rant. On the rare occasions when I’ve actually been complimented with a quick wit, it is actually because I’ve been had in the same situation before and had time to write down my complaints in some form. Now that I have my wife, the process is much simpler. I just let her loose on the unsuspecting salesperson, cab driver or motorist and let the words fall wherever they may. Usually, we end up the better for it. Every family needs a little unthinking doomsday device - a Sonny Corleone – a person who speaks their mind without fear of waiters spitting in their food.
The other day, I forgot to wear my seatbelt and was pulled over by a traffic cop. We kind of knew what would happen, so in the short time it took him to get off his bike and walk to our car, we’d already concluded that we’d accept the ticket and pay the fine. If there is one thing my wife hates more than corruption, it is a corrupt cop. The officer came over and did the usual routine that can be expected of a Malaysian cop – ask for my license, tell me my offence, tell me how much it would cost to pay at the police station, and ask me how I wished to settle the matter.
Before I could arrange my words into a sentence, my wife said it for me, “Takpa, tulislah. (It’s okay, just write us the ticket)”.
The guy was a little stunned and repeated how much it would cost to pay the actual ticket.
Then my wife said “Ya, kami anti-rasuah. Awak tulis lah (We’re against bribery, just write it)”, and pointed to his “Saya Anti-Rasuah (I’m against bribery)” badge.
(She saw the badge, I didn’t).
The guy said okay, he’ll write the ticket. While he went back to his bike, we were consoling ourselves that we’d learned our lesson and we could afford the fine and everything’s going to be okay.
The next thing we heard was this loud noise, “Vroom Vroom”. The cop had ridden off on his bike.
Doomsday machine 1 – Greedy cop 0.
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We had our first taste of yoga yesterday.
Our alarm clock woke us up at 6:30am and we had to make a decision between staying in bed on a Saturday morning and driving all the way to Subang to join some friends in their class. We had heard our share of horror stories involving back injuries and overzealous instructors, so I was half ready to grab my wife and run out of the class at the first sign of craziness, but being the conflict-avoiding chicken shit modern man that I am, I ended up following the class all the way through.
It wasn’t too bad actually. The instructor was a lady who gave birth four months ago and she was quite tolerant of our inflexibility, which was a good thing because the last time I was able to touch my toes was when I was ten. She was more concerned when we skipped a step, or had our hands wrong, or forgot to curl our toes, or frowned, or clenched our teeth. But I found that as long as we kept our backs straight, she didn’t really care too much if we were folding ourselves in half or just sitting upright.
I’m not saying that it was easy though. We worked up a sweat just trying to stay in the poses, even though many of our poses didn’t remotely resemble what we were supposed to be doing ideally. There was this one pose that I totally struggled to do, called the “Warrior One” which was basically balancing on one leg while flying like Superman with the other 3 limbs. When the instructor demonstrated that, my wife and I just looked at each other and tried to keep straight faces. I don’t know how anybody else were doing with their Warrior One, but I kept losing my balance and just put up some semblance of effort until we moved to the next pose. The rest of the class didn’t get any more difficult, thankfully.
We were warned we’d have some muscle aches for the next few days, and we do. All in all, I think it was great and we’re looking forward to the next class. We have to thank our friends Ju Nah and Li Nah for inviting us and for all the help. Hey, maybe my back aches will go away for awhile. That would be great!
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Gosh! 3 weeks since my last blog entry. It’s not like nothing’s been happening. It’s just that we’ve been a little busy and there are things I’m not supposed to blog about and things I can blog about but not yet and the thought of separating what is allowed and what is not is making the whole writing exercise not a great deal of fun. Also, my memory seems to be failing me quite a bit which makes it difficult to write things in my head while we’re moving about. Will try and recall everything when the dust settles, but here are a few that are on top…
My sister and her family was in Bangkok for the holidays and escaped the bombings. They’re safe at home now so I can take that out of the personal worries folder and put it into the statistics folder. It’s a mean and selfish thing to say but it’s really what goes on in my head and if I cannot admit that, then there’s no point in me writing anything.
Meanwhile, me and my wife spent the holidays in her hometown of Teluk Intan and learned how to play mahjong from some kids. I absolutely hate the game. It must have been invented by some demented lawyer. It’s full of clauses and loopholes. It’s like Gin Rummy except you need to collect 5 points (called “fan”) before you can win. You generally collect these points from special flower card tiles but you can also get points from making suits out of certain tiles, but then that all depends on who won the last game and where you’re sitting in relation to that person, and also there is a special way to collect 3 points in one go and there are times when you don’t need any points at all and – oh, there’re lots of rules.
Okay, we lost to the kids.
If you think the two ladies are teaching that little boy how to play, you are wrong!
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We’re back from London. It was a great trip and I’d like to tell you all about it but it looks like we’ll be spending every spare minute of the next few weekends unpacking and cleaning the apartment. The dirt has grown to the point where it takes all our effort to keep it in check. It’s like we took some cleanliness loan, missed a few payments and now can barely afford the interest.
Today, we could no longer tolerate the stickiness of the kitchen floor, so we tried to do a bit of mopping. I think we did quite a good job of it considering our method. One of us was doing the mopping and focused mainly on the kitchen while the other walked in and out of it, spreading thin the stickiness from the rest of the house with her feet.
Of course, you could say that it would be helpful if we were more systematic and did things in the right order – say only mop the floor when we have time to do the whole apartment and preferably only after we’d picked up the dirty laundry, books and magazines. And of course, we while we’re picking up the dirty clothes, we should consider doing the laundry as well. You could also say that if we’re going to do that, we might as well hang up the load that is in the washer but before we do that, it would be a good idea to wait for the ones that are already hanging to dry, so we could put them back into the cupboards but then the cupboards are already full because we’d been doing too much shopping (You might notice I’m using “we” more often now because we’re both really trying to think of ourselves as a single unit from now on). And we’re not buying any new cupboards for this apartment because we are planning to move out next year. Besides, not all of the clean laundry goes back in the cupboards. The towels are supposed to go into a towel box which has not been accessible for the past six months because it has barricaded itself behind a wall of books and magazines. The books and magazines themselves have nowhere to go, which means we’ll need more bookshelves. New bookshelves are also out of the question because the study is already full, not to mention also inaccessible for similar reasons.
And so on and so forth, until it is impossible to even think about the correct order of things to clean. So we just do the little bit that we can when we need to. We use the same two bath towels over and over, so we don’t need to worry about storing them. We throw out the garbage before it makes us retch – most of the time. We mop the floor before it stops our ability to walk to the phone and call for help.
I guess you could say we’re both dying to move into the new house because it would be like having a bigger carpet to sweep our dirt under. We can hardly wait!
(Anyway, the London pages are here and should slowly be filling up in case I do that instead of blogging.)
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