hargh

As far as awkward family dinners go, that took the cake.

Not a word exchanged between the two in the car, through dinner, and on the way back. Jesus effing christ.


In the meantime, I'll entertain myself by choking and hacking my throat out.

grunt

Woke up after a late afternoon nap. Scrambled eggs for dinner cause there's nothing in the fridge. Add truffle salsa. Open the chewed-up newspaper. And 'gong xi gong xi gong xi ni' goes off in my head. Fuck me.

zzz.. ZZT

For two or three nights in a row now I've been having the strangest, most perverse dreams. Now I'm not going to bore you by giving a blow by blow account of the different dreams so I'll just say that they're very Sade (the Marquis, not the popular singer) and Bataille-esque. Really disruptive and disturbing. Although I don't put much weight in dreams (my explanation is that they are your brain's way of making sense of random neurons firing. see what I do with a bit of PSYC1001? shoo Freud) these are bugging the life out of me because for one, I almost never remember my dreams - all this year dreams have evaded me, making for very good sleep, even during the most turbulent periods - and for two, these bizzaro scenarios keep waking me up with a jolt in the middle of the night, making it difficult for me to get back to sleep. And when I do manage to drift off again, it's only to have another disturbing dream. Which shocks me back into the waking, middle of the night world.

I'm not loving this. And I'm not going to narrate the dreams either. The last thing I want to do is to delve into my subconscious mind or even my brain's chosen method of decoding random neuron movement. thbbpt

omifuckingod

this one - such a bastard. so much for being friends when you can't be there for me the one time I ask you. I could be a grown up and pretend it's alright but you've done nothing to deserve decent treatment. this is you being pushed out of my life. bye now.

---
Melburn tomorrow. Hope to restore my appetite there. Strangely I haven't been hungry for the past two days. I've been eating around friends, not because I'm hungry but because it is expected of me. Dinner last night was after having an apple and coffee for lunch (not by conscious choice, there was a lot going on). And despite the intrigue of a fluffed-up piece of roti canai (think an irregularly shaped ball made by someone who has never seen a ball) and the first roti in months, I ate it with a semblance of enthusiasm. Because I was supposed to.

The same thing happened at lunch today. C and I shared a panang curry and pad thai at one of the best places in Sydney (conveniently close to home too) and I just pretended to be hungry. Dinner was a few strawberries because they needed to be eaten before I left. Nothing in between but a latte. Still not hungry.

Here we go again.

In less than 24 hours Dubya's successor will be known. I'm going to miss G W actually. The gems he's come up with are priceless. You could put a dyslexic with tourettes on stage and he still wouldn't be able to top G W. ah good times.. (if at the cost of international regard and basic competence)

purrr

another 3 hour lunch, big breakfast with poached eggs
talk: Malaysian and Singaporean politics, miscellaneous topics, food, the perks of being an academic, god knows what else. the heat saps everything.

AND IT"S FUCKING HOT! 38 degrees out and sweltering

tomorrow: pyrmont market to see if they have any more pomegranate vinegar and bush dukkah. and confused eggs for brunch

i hear the constant sound of yarping

9am:
still asleep, i hear
yarp yarp yarp yarp

(cover head with pillow and go back to sleep)

11am:
i wake up to more
yarp yarp yarp yarp

they made headphones and microphones for a reason. and do you have to make the living room your phone booth? yergh
blast PotUSA in return.

hehehehe

boo-tan

I'm tired of Malaysian party politics and the filth surrounding it. Which is why there will be no rant on the topic today. For today: I would move to Bhutan if they would let me in. Although I'd prefer it if they kept their enlightened monarch for now and only made the shift to (messy, dysfunctional) democracy when he's passed on.

I wish I was rich enough to buy myself an island. It wouldn't have to be a big one, just enough for subsistence living so I can let the rest of the world fuck itself to hell while I potter away in my garden.

ugh.

much as I'd like to leave you pigs to wallow in your own filth, I have to live here too

divisions

A close friend of mine had a letter he wrote published on a Malaysian news/ opinion site. Unsurprisingly, it was on the state of ethnic relations and the rising tensions. He is optimistic about 'our common humanity' and Malaysians' capacity to rise above the petty fearmongering and playing up of communal tensions.

I used to share his views but here's the thing now.

These statements are petty, true, but can it really be said that these are the sentiments of very few and that 'the people' can rise above the basic emotions that they arouse? I wonder if we are not the ones living in a little bubble, imagining that most people see things the way we do. That there is such as a thing as 'common humanity'. Even in the prosperous, middle to upper-middle class area that is Bangsar, the divisions are so clearly visible.

I remember the first day I walked into BB all those years ago. It was like entering a parallel universe from the one I was used to. People clustered together according to bumi/ non-bumi. Most of the time.

How open are we, truly? We have friends from different ethnic groups and different background. But would you and could you discuss issues of ethnicity with them as openly as you would with people you already know will share your sentiments?

The 'othering' of each other is something which cannot be avoided. In the depths of your mind you know this is true. We look at someone who looks slightly different from ourselves and the first thing that automatically pops into your head is the difference, not the similarities.

In an egalitarian country, this may not be the case but in Malaysia, this instinct is compounded and institutionalized by the state. The NEP was the wrong answer. It was a bandaid for the state to enable business to run 'as usual' but in the long run it hasn't solved anything. Jamming the lid on an overflowing pot doesn't help.

What we needed was an open discussion, no restrictions for the sake of avoiding 'sensitive issues' but an extensive, broad based discussion where all views were heard no matter how polarizing or discriminatory. Because once you have all this out in the open, only then can you see how absurd statements such as Ahmad Ismail's are. That didn't happen, and that won't happen anytime soon. So the different groups will keep fueling their flames, pointing at 'the other' and what the other is saying, and the state will be trapped in the middle.

We put our faith in the everyman, blissfully thinking that the everyman is not susceptible to such talk and scaremongering. But the everyman is flawed and human. Malaysia has social and cultural differences that have been reinforced by the state to form divisions among the everypeople.

Malaysia is a nation-state that has multiple nations in it, not unlike North America in the early colonial era. But it is also a colonial construct that would not otherwise exist because of these multiple nations. Globalization has enabled the resurrection of these nations within nation-states. The Zapatistas in Chiapas, Mexico are the clearest example of this. Wikipedia/ Google it. The voices that were previously on the margins are making themselves heard again and I think that the modern post-colonial nation-state is not strong enough to keep it together.


Solve this.

peevish

Dammit, what is it that you want now? The letter was the end of it and it did what it was supposed to for me. I'm moving on. There was no need to reply to that or for you to follow up on it. Now you've got me wondering what exactly is it you're sending to me, why you wanted my birthdate, why you're doing this when I made it perfectly clear that that was all there was to it. No response expected nor wanted.

I suppose I'll find out soon enough. Maybe you're returning anything I gave you. That would be better than a letter I would be reluctant to open.
Hmm... I hope you're not planning to burn my unit down. Now that would really be uncalled for!

chapter 5 in its preliminary form is done. and my word count is not terribly excessively over the limit set for it. but they all add up! all these little bits and pieces of 200, 400 add up. fret fret fret. malaysian politics. fret fret fret. man problems. fret fret fret.

my lip balm is making me crave grapefruit soda. my nails are blue.
it's one of those days.
go away, come back. why are you still here? no, really come back.
that really sums up everything.
I will now bury my head in the sand for posting something as short attention-spanned and vacuous as this.
mm... chorizo buns with salsa verde

delightful insights from conversations with E soon to come. when i remember them. d-oh!
cookie dough..

outrage

look at you lot, infighting and squabbling and plotting to take over

show me the difference between the two sides. it would be blatantly undemocratic, set a dangerous precedent, and ultimately result in more of the same shit. over and over again, it's the same shit in that place. And the rest of you, civil society, NGOs, 'the people' are just sitting quietly not saying a thing about it. In fact most of you probably think 'fantastic, we'll get a new government!'. What about the means through which that government comes into power? Have you lost your senses so completely in the anticipation of change as to imagine that the ends justify the means in this situation? what kind of a country is this?

I want to defect