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.

the freaky bed

Today, we bade farewell to a bed frame which we’ve kept for about 20 years, because we’re giving it out to charity. It was double layer bed that’s made of steel and was very solidly built. It was given to us by a relative, and I’ve always liked this bed frame.

But there was something about this bed frame which I’ve not told many people. Something paranormal about it. It happened when my daughter Regine was barely able to stand on her own. We left her on that bed sleeping, ‘crosswise’… in such way that she would not fall off that bed even if she were to roll over, and we pulled the bottom layer mattress a quarter way out as a precaution (the other side of the bed was a wall).

So we left her there, and we went out to the living room for some rests. About a while later, we suddenly heard a loud bang. It was like a large bag of cement being dropped on the floor, and then followed by a loud bawl. Regine’s voice. By then I was already halfway dashing into the room, panicking, because I knew that it must be Regine who had fallen to the floor (the bed was about 2 feet high). A thousand and one things came crashing into my mind at the same time.

Upon reaching the room (took us only 2 – 3 secs, because we’re very close), sure enough, Regine was on the floor. But it didn’t seem like she had fallen off the bed because she was some a distance away, in the same position on the floor as she was on the bed. Had she rolled down, it would have been at a different position and angle, and she’d be on that bottom layer mattress. It was as if, someone had carried her down from the bed to the floor – just to fuck with us.

Anyway, my wife and I started to frisk her for bruises or bumps, but there wasn’t anything on her. She just stopped crying and looked at us, while we were wondering what the hell happened. She was completely unhurt, just startled with both of us suddenly frisking her all over. We discussed what could have happened, but neither of us could explain that loud bang, the brevity of the whole sequence for Regine to get to that position that far away, and the lack of injury on her. I told Regine about this incident when we gave away the bed, and she got freaked the fuck out.

invest in an earphone please

A couple of decades ago, I remember, one of the most annoying things that people do, was to check their phone messages on a speaker phone. You know, back when mobile phones were not so common, people actually called each other on the land line and left voice messages. Then there’s this type of fuckstain people, who checked their messages with the speaker phone (in lieu of using the handset) – which broadcasts their messages in max volume across half the office space. With many of them doing that, you can imagine how fucking annoying it could get.

That is why I hated working in my office desk because I just couldn’t stand listening to other people’s bullshit. Then came the mobile phone, and the shit just gone mobile. Now instead of voice messages in the office, you get douchebags watching videos on loudspeaker with their mobile phones! Just the other day, I encountered this middle aged Indian man watching Tamil movies on his phone in a hospital waiting area with zero regards to everyone around him. Then yesterday, there was this fat fuck watching Japanese fetish anime in Company T cafeteria, broadcasting Doraemon voice across annoyed patrons.

Kids, grown ass men, ladies, every fucking one – they do that all the time and it is fucking annoying. I think I am going into depression if I am not allowed to hurt these people legally. God fucking damn.

pour sand into own rice bowl

A friend was delivering my lunch and he was driving into my apartment compound. In the guardhouse, was this new guard. He was tasked with an SOP to register all visitors coming into the apartment. Since the car’s window was right next to the guardhouse’s, my friend requested the registration book to be handed out from the window. But to my friend’s bewilderment, he unexpectedly got yelled at by the guard – to get down from the car to write on the damn book himself. (the book was just right next to the guard).

Pissed off, my friend phoned me to collect my lunch from the guardhouse, because he’s not coming in. So I had to go outside the guardhouse to collect my lunch. Guard wasn’t too happy when my friend and I talked outside, about what unfolded before. The guard then chose to confront me when I was heading back to the apartment (I wasn’t planning to say anything to anyone, just wanted my lunch and be done with it). I didn’t know what he wanted, as he was bitching some shit in Malay that I couldn’t quite get. But I told him this (politely and articulately in his language) – ‘Delivery guys work very hard to earn a living in hard times like this and it wouldn’t be too difficult to extend some courtesy to them, such as conveniently handing over the registration book. Just pick it up, and hand over. Very simple.’

I thought the guard would understand, being a wage earner himself at this advanced age (he must be in his 60’s), but that fucknut of a guard told me this in a rather condescending manner – much to my own turn of bewilderment – “THIS IS NOT MY JOB!”. *facepalm * So his job was to sit on his ass all day and dispense crude remarks to innocent strangers? And he can’t lift his ass up for a second to pass the registration book over to visitors? And they’re wondering why guard jobs are all going to the foreigners? Fucking shit. He even tried to pick a fight with me when I laughed at his confused ass and told him he has a stupid process of doing his work (he thought I was calling him stupid).

I walked away, leaving him babbling behind. He was an old man, much smaller in size compared to me. It would have been sad for me to beat an old man up. But what got me thinking was, why was he given this job? Old man being a security guard. That’s like hiring a midget to be your basketball coach. And being in the job already, why does he have to pour sand into his own rice bowl by being such a prick like that? A job is hard to come by nowadays, and this asshat is wasting it away by being such a delinquent.

I later reported the guard to the management and I hope he loses his fucking job. Then, his job will be to really do nothing and contend with unemployment. I’m sure many other deserving people would like to apply for the position and be much more appreciative with the opportunity.

bad dad joke

I was home from work and missed my lunch with my daughter,

Me: “Did you enjoy your lunch today?”

My 14 yr old daughter – Regine: “Yeah, I had rice with ginger chicken”

Me: “So, your chicken had red hair huh?”

Regine: squints at me “Bad dad joke…”

She turned 14 today.