Final roll up

I’ve been blogging for 17 years. Now that’s a long time. It spans longer than some actual professional writers’ entire career. It was initially intended as an outlet for me to rant about my shitty work life, and eventually it grew into some sort of obsession to just dump anything that came across my mind. I went crazy with it, with imaginations and crazy thoughts that no one would deign to pay attention to.

It grew quite popular in its prime. Got up to 10k hits a day. I wrote about the birth of my child, who’s now going 15. I wrote about my family, my friends, and the shenanigans we did. Oh I lost so many friends because of this blog, but made much more better ones with it. I was offered ads service, guest blogging opportunities, etc – I turned all of them down – for this, was never meant to be anything more than a space for my thoughts to be readable by strangers. This blog has been such a big part of my life, and I am quite fond of it.

But times have changed now. I find myself having less angst to vent, and less frustration to fuel my madcap content. Suddenly my life becomes much more bearable. I find myself mellowed down, and much calmer in thoughts and less homicidal. I’ve been doing stuff that I wouldn’t thought I’d be doing. I have met my end goal in life, and I have surpassed my parents by many folds at both being a person and a parent. I am like a dog that has caught up with the car it was chasing and now doesn’t know what else to do.

With this new state of mind, I no longer get the thrill to maintain this blog any longer, as I have moved on to enjoy other things. So this will be my last post in this blog and I will never write another again. I will still retain the site for people to rummage through my past thoughts, until however long the server is able to keep it. Feel free to share any of its content, or save/print it, I don’t give a fuck.

It has been a pleasure of mine to be able to write for all these years, and I wish all of you well in life. Logging off.

comic

My daughter did this with a stylus on my laptop – thought of sharing it here…

strangers of the world 2

a continuation from part 1 here …

This is my impression of other nationalities I’ve met during my travels.

Japanese (excerpt from my past post)
The Japanese people aren’t as polite/friendly as everyone says (overrated). Well, not the way I like it, I should say. They’re not generally rude, you have to give them that. The only rude encounter I had was at the immigration. The overall Japanese society is apathetic to everyone. They don’t give a fuck about anything, unless they have to… which then they’ll be polite about it. They’re obliged to sound/act polite and it’s very rote. It felt fake, and there’s no feel of sincerity to it. Most of the time, it made me feel uneasy. Fake smile, fake bow, fuck me. I prefer them to be rude but sincere than a fake courtesy. If you want genuine politeness and courtesy, you should check out the Taiwanese. My favorite people on Earth. However, I also have to say that the streets in and around Tokyo/Kyoto/Kawaguchiko look very secure and feels very safe. I haven’t seen any loiterers or vagabonds or people peeing on the streets like what I saw at USA/Germany/Indonesia/China/Malaysia.

Italians
The Italians reminded me of the Cantonese mainlanders in Guangzhou. Loud, obnoxious and impolite. I booked a limo during my travels – the lady limo driver, sped towards the city like a bat out of hell, cursed at pedestrians (in Italian), and bitched to me about how stupid the general Italians are. I’ve gotten yelled at by a museum ticket seller at Florence because I was asking for direction and screamed at by a soldier at Rome because he didn’t liked the way my daughter opened her bag for inspection. Most of the merchants were butchers, they slaughter tourists with exorbitant price quotes for their merchandise – totally dishonest and I dare to say, immoral. Definitely one of the worst kind of people you can find in Europe. If one goes to Italy, plan your travel to not interact with the people there. They’re not dependable.

Australians
Before I went to Oz, I kept hearing people telling me that the Aussies are a bunch of racist people. That they don’t like Asians like most of Europe and I should be prepared for a shitty treatment. So, I had my expectations set quite low last year when I traveled there. But to my surprise, they aren’t anything of that sort (I was at Melbourne and the area, maybe it’s area-centric). I find the people there to be hospitable, they treated us like we’re the locals. There was no shitty treatment, or stinky looks (like what we encountered at Germany). One hotel owner even went out of his way to recommend us where to go to kill the evening. We felt welcomed and safe. Though they are not as exceptional as the Taiwanese or fake-polite like the Japanese, I’d rate them as exceptionally better than the angmohs in Europe or USA in general.

gas leak

Recently, during a routine air conditioner service at my daughter’s room, the service guy told me that the air con needs to be replaced because some of its gas was already leaking and a lot of its parts were corroded due to years of use. So, I opted to have it replaced but the room will have to live without an air conditioner for a day. I had to break the news to my daughter

Me: “Hey your air con died. The guy said it’s leaking gas and has to be replaced.”

Regine: “There’s gas leaking out from the air con in my room??”

Me: “I don’t know, it could be dangerous. That’s probably why your grades wasn’t so good”

Regine: “And it makes me dumber??”

Me: “Your IQ might have dropped a few points from the leaking gas. If we continue to use the air con, then one day you might have difficulty to tie your own shoe laces”

Regine: “…”

Me: “Let’s change the air con and see if your grades improve…”

And we went about with our business as usual at home.

priorities

Say, you have a female friend. She comes from a middle class family. Not very well endowed, but not too shabby either. She’s just an average girl, reasonably smart, has good teeth. Everyone likes her, and she has good personality.

But she has a problem. She is a bit of a party gal. She likes to drink and occasionally, do drugs for fun. Well, the habit has gone on for a while through her pubescent years, and now, she found out her kidneys are failing. That means, a big expenditure of her money has to be used for treatment (dialysis) and whatnots… and to quit her partying of course, just so to preserve her life.

And being a reasonably smart person, that is an expectation. But to your bewilderment, she used her money to get a boob job. Now, she has a pair of perky boobs to impress her friends at night clubs, nevermind her failing kidneys. End of story.

Fortunately, I made this all up. No such girl exists to my knowledge. Unfortunately, however, this is a metaphorical character based on my country Malaysia. Malaysia is like this sohai girl here who got a boob job instead of paying to go for dialysis to preserve her life. Here in Malaysia, we still have people who do not have access to:

1. clean water (or water at all),
2. quality education,
3. good healthcare,
4. efficient public transportation,
5. basic internet connectivity (ask the girl who had to climb a tree to sit for an exam…)

But we have a few of the world’s tallest buildings all in the same city… TADAAA!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merdeka_118

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Exchange_106

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petronas_Towers

Tell me that we have got our priorities set the fuck right.

kneel

Just the other day, a friend of mine recommended me to watch a Korean drama – “Itaewon Class”. I cringed at the phrase ‘Korean drama’, because the mere mention of it, gives me a vision of androgynous pretty boys running around a plot of geometry love. But my friend assured me that this drama isn’t anything of that sort. He sort of lied, as I found out.

There’s still geometry love involved, there are androgynous pretty boys, but the main plot does not revolve solely on tacky love story. It also revolves around preserving one’s dignity and self esteem, which is symbolized with the act of kneeling. Complicated plot that involves family feud, and the protagonist’ sheer will power of achieving his goals and planning an elaborate plot to revenge. And there’s one thing that he won’t do, evarrrr, that is to kneel in front of his archenemy – which I do not get. (similar thing in Game Of Thrones, where some would rather die than to ‘bend the knee’ for Daenerys Targaryen)

In Asian culture, kneeling is an act of servility, and respect to someone. And for me, it’s an act of getting out of a bad situation. You see, my mom beat me with a cane when I was a kid. I wore out canes like it’s a consumable. i.e. my mom had to allocate expenditure to replenish the canes, monthly, to beat my ass. Whenever she finishes the beating, or simply too tired to continue, she’d ask me to kneel in front of the deity’s altar at home to reflect what I had done wrong as closure. There were bonus times when I just needed to kneel, and skipped the beating, and I’d pretend to look miserable so as to paint an impression to mom that kneeling can be a substitute for beating – while I rejoiced inside for living the day without a beating. So, in my biological reflex which has developed over the years, kneeling means an ending to something bad for me (it’s a good thing).

When I watched “Itaewon Class”, I told my daughter that kneeling used to be a thing I did shitload of times when her grandma used to beat my ass with a cane. I sort of cheapened the act of kneeling in comparison to what the hero would do to preserve what he believed in that Korean fucking drama. I guess we’re just different people with different goals in life, and the worthiness of kneeling depends on your agenda. It’s not that important if you chose not to give a fuck about it. I’d choose kneeling over getting beaten anytime (maybe that’s why I am not rich like some of them cocksuckers – low self worth ma)

Animals like my house 2

Part 1 here.

*long post dedicated to birds.

Animals sure like my house. For the past couple of years, a few generations of birds (which I believe of the same family) have been nesting at one of our potted plants. It’s a rather tall potted variant of palm and the birds made it their home smack dab at the center of it.

Because the plant is located at our entrance, it attracted quite an attention, especially when the birdlings got old enough to chirp when they’re excited or hungry. And the whole place would be filled with the sound of birdlings chirping. We’ve got inquisitive neighbors who came to look/ask about the birds, and also piqued the interests of our contractors working alongside the nest during our kitchen remodelling work. The birds just won’t give a fuck but minded their own business.

After the last batch of birds grew up and flew away (that was around May, I think), a couple of them came back around early June, and that was when I took a photo of the bird from about 3 meters away (photo on the left). I later managed to find out that it is called “White-rumped munia” [wiki].

too dumb for a smartphone

The real new norm – having things delivered to your home is the new shit through these trying pandemic times. Food, groceries, electronics… hell, even furnitures. Anything can be delivered to your doorstep. With the advent of mobile internet and smartphones, this is as easy as whipping out your dick to pee at the urinal.

And yet, some of you fucking morons still get lost. I’ve encountered shitloads of delivery guys like you who got lost before. I mean, WHAT THE FUCK?? How fucking useless can you be?? Just use a map app! You’re in a trade of delivering things to random addresses, and you do not fucking know how to use a map app?? And they are FREE, for fuck’s sake!! In the old times, people actually had to pay for their map data on their goddamn GPS if they can fucking afford one! And now you have a device on hand that helps you do most of your work – FOR FREE! So, WHYY!?

Also, being old is not an excuse. Hell, I’m old and I know how to use a fucking map app. I’ve seen Grab drivers who are 70 – 80 years old and they probably couldn’t whip out their dicks as easy but they sure know how to fucking use a map app. And what is there left for you to make for an excuse??

let me tell you guys about gout

I started getting gout when I turned 40. It has been 3 years now since I started suffer gout attacks. At first it was just an attack every few months, then it got more frequent. As of Jan 2020, I began to get attacks almost every month. It was fucked up. If you do not know what is gout, it’s a form of fucking painful type of arthritis that makes you believe in God. As in… “Oh God what have I done wrong in this life that I need to go through this shit??”.

It happens when there’s high uric acid (UA) in your blood and elevates the probability of having sharp UA crystals depositing around your joints randomly. It will accumulate over the years until one day, when it is shit enough to pierce through the tissue surrounding that joint, and cause a massive inflammation and sudden increase in belief of karma. Fortunately enough, there are drugs that are effective enough to make the attack go away in usually a couple of doses, so, one has to skedaddle to the clinic pronto if there’s an impending gout attack.

The first time I heard about gout was when I was in my early 30’s, when I saw a colleague of mine named Andrew, who was limping to the office like he had his foot sawed off. When he told me he was having a ‘gout attack’, I thought he contracted some disease from some skanks and got an elephant leg or something and never gave a thought about it until when I first got it myself. I remember that day very well. I just had a sumptuous seafood dinner and in a matter of few hours, I started to feel a sharp pain on my left foot. At first I thought I had a sprain (because it sure felt like it), and then it gradually developed into something similar to the sensation of stepping on broken glass shards and my foot got so swollen that I wasn’t able to walk or sleep that night. The next day at the doctor’s, I found out that I had gout and I didn’t get it from a skank – but some fresh water crayfish.

So what does one need to do to prevent gout? Apparently, not much. Pretty much anyone could get it spontaneously. It’s a combination of what you’ve been eating, doing, did in your past life and which wildcard your God has randomly drawn for you in this life. The one sign you can look for is elevated level of Uric Acid in your blood test. If it’s higher than usual, then chance is high that you will one day get a gout attack as a bonus to celebrate your middle age. How to prevent high uric acid? There are certain type of food/beverage that you can try to avoid – but to do that, you basically need to give up the pleasures of life… It’s like turning into a celibate to reduce the risk of getting beaten up by your own son. One way or another, it’s a bad trade off.

For now, I am on a long term med called Allopurinol, which lowers the uric acid and dissolves the crystals that has been forming in my joints. Been on it since early July, and haven’t got an attack since.

the cursed roundabout

A long time ago in Penang, there’s this farm inhabited by a Chinese family of 3. The family grew simple vegetables there. Most of them, they’d consume themselves and the excess, would be sold at a nearby market. Simple family.

However, they’re somewhat famous because of the daughter. Bestowed with good looks and well endowed body, many suitors from near and far came to ask for her hand in marriage, but all of them failed. That was because the farmer’s daughter was in love with a local Indian cow herder from a nearby village.

The farmer was of course unhappy about the relationship. He wanted his daughter to marry off to someone who could provide for her, not some cow herder of another ethnicity. Anyway, nothing actually came of that disapproval until one clear night, when the farmer caught the cow herder making out with his daughter under the moonlight at the farm. Grabbing a hoe, he killed the cow herder with one whack to the head from behind, startling the daughter.

Horrified, the daughter screamed and tried to run, but the farmer captured the girl and locked her up in a cellar. Because it was quite secluded and rural back then there in Penang, the farmer buried the body of the cow herder in his farm, and continued to imprison his daughter in the cellar beneath his house.

It was said that the land was cursed from the moment of the murder, as the land was no longer fertile. Vegetables won’t grow, and eventually, the farmer and his wife starved to death, along with the daughter in the cellar.

The story was only known when the next of kin claimed the farm from the perished family and discovered the cow herder’s bones in the farm. Today, the land has transformed into a roundabout with an underpass below it. That very same spot of the cow herder’s grave, is now a spot of many inexplicable accident deaths. It is widely believed that people who enters the roundabout, would sometimes be blinded or hypnotized, and eventually crashed into the underpass and die.