comedy hour

i just woke up from my nap, but i'm quite tired. I had bad dreams the whole two hours. something about spiders. last night it was something else, involving trains and murder, i think. non dreamers have no idea what it's like to fall blissfully asleep only to have dream after dream after dream. it's worse when half the time you're running, fighting, or trying not to get killed. exhausting, i tell you. maybe it's a not so subtle hint from my sleep saturated mind to, well, sleep less.

anyway that wasn't my point. when i woke up i went to the living room, and at first i thought i was still asleep and dreaming, cos my mom was rocking with laughter (not literally, gee). apparently my bro had shot off some smartmouthed comment...

Mom: So who gave you the duit raya (green packet) at Uncle's house?

Lil bro: This woman.

Mom: Which woman? Your Auntie?

Lil bro: I dunno. (pause) She's really fat.

Mom: That could have been any one of them.

Lil bro: Yah. You should be proud of yourself for not being... (pause) fat.

(His last line wasn't too sure and i remembered when we'd just seen a Marie France slimming commercial on TV. Bro turned to me and asked, "How come mother doesn't go to Marie France Bodyline?")

My mom laughed, flattered, and continued watching her islamic forum. My dad asked her why, instead of the usual malay, it's in badly accented, lousy english.

Lil bro: It's ok, she's trying to improve her english.

Which shows how highly he thinks of her english.

If nothing else, bros are good for a laugh. When the older younger brother was nine, he cracked one that's become my favourite. It was a phonecall from my good friend and I wasn't in.

Friend: Hello, can I speak to Raudaa?

Bro: She's not in.

Friend: Oh okay.. Who's this?

Bro: The Devil.

Friend: Oh, ha ha.. Really, don't play la, who's this?

Bro: It's the Devil.

Frined: Uh.. Ok. Umm... what time will she be back?

Bro: I don't know. It's a long way to Hell.

At which point my friend hurriedly hung up. When i heard about it I wanted to submit it to the Reader's Digest and maybe make some money. Maybe I should do that for every single one of their jokes. Maybe I'll strike it rich and retire with a full time job of submitting stupid jokes to stupider mags that'll pay me good money for it.

I think what i really wanted to say in this post is that I'm broke and jobless and it's giving me bad dreams.

Sigh.

wrongfully, yours

i did a mood test cos i was bored. i wonder how they come up with this crap. and i wonder who believes it. and yet... i wonder if it's true...
do your own test, see how you feel.

here's my results

You are tending to pursue your objectives with concentrated intensity and it would seem that whatever obstacles may come into your path, you will stick to your guns and will not allow yourself to be deflected from your purpose. You are striving to achieve recognition and what is more - you deserve it.

You seem to lack the energy of late to get up and go. Your objectives appear to be unattainable and no one seems to care. You feel lost, neglected and need some W.T.C. (Warm tender care).

You know what you want and you are very dogmatic and demanding - especially in your emotional demands. You have specific ideas and beliefs and if these beliefs are not realised you can become extremely frustrated. You may not be that perfect but you are looking for perfection with the perfect partner.

Whatever you strive to do, something always seems to be holding you back. There is no subterfuge in you. You are a clear thinker and all you demand from life, in a relationship, is a partner whom you can trust and with whom you can, together, develop a foundation of trust based on understanding. You are your own person and you demand freedom of thought to follow your own convictions. You have no interest in 'two-timing' and all you seek is sincerity and 'straight-dealing'.

You don't like authority and you rebel against all forms of limitation. You are your own person and you intend to stay that way and to get on in the world simply by your hard work and determination.


Uh huh. Mm hmm. Well... whatever.

I'm really bored. I hate having visitors. Ya, that's really how i feel, so sue me.

::Selamat Hari Raya::

the act

It was a quarter to six.

I sat in bed and listened in dread to the stream of people moving through the house. If only I could somehow switch off my consciousness for the next couple of minutes so I would function as normal but not have to be aware of it! I would escape the dreariness, the mundane hypocrisy of greeting, talking, asking, not answering – all the things we do when visitors come, though neither of us have the wish nor want to.

I looked at the clock. Come on girl, I silently exhort myself, in half an hour’s time, you can be lying in this exact same spot, this exact same pose, and be looking at the exact same clock and the time would be a quarter to seven and you’ll be thinking, am I glad that’s over. No, I stubbornly answered, I want that time to be now, and I don’t want to waste my breath and effort going through empty motions that mean less to me than a rock to a sparrow. What if I just tried to disappear? Maybe, if I just lay here and close my eyes, and concentrate, I could make the end come now.

I did it. I tried. I close my eyes, measured each breath, in, pause, out, slowly now, again and in, pause, out. I listened to the sound of my own heart beating pump pump pump, to the clock now pump, pause, pump, pause, pump pump pump. After a moment I stopped feeling my body. I couldn’t feel my feet, then my legs, then torso disappeared, hands, arms, neck, face - Finally I was nothing. I was of as little substance as the air. My body went on like a machine on auto pilot, while my mind broke free of its confining vessel and soared to infinitesimal heights. I was free! I could do anything I wanted! I would listen to me and only me and nobody else had a right to ask anything of me! I –

Knock knock. Damn it, I thought, can’t you all just leave me alone? It’s been, what, five minutes and already you have to break in on me? But the spell was broken. With an ache like a lost love, I unwillingly came to. Blood rushed tingling into my limbs and swooshed into my brain, pricking the cold skin of my face and ears. With a jolt, I sat up, curiously lightheaded. “Oi! What are you doing in there? Can’t you come out already?!” Stuff it, asshole, I muttered. I swung my legs over the bed, toes curling against the cold marble, stood up and stretched. Vindictively I took my time, turning around to peer out of the casement window, squinting against the glow of the setting sun. I yawned hugely, and turned to walk out. This is it; thirty minutes of entertaining that I would enjoy as much as prying a bloodsucking leech from my thigh.

As I walked through the door, I was struck by the absence of something. At first I couldn’t put my finger to it. Then it dawned upon me that everything was strangely silent. Where was the meaningless babble of empty chatting, the shrieks of ill-behaved children, the loud obligatory guffaws at stupid sexist jokes? They’re all waiting for u, jerk, hissed my conscience. I grimaced and mustered as innocent a smile as I could. Pasting it on my stiff face, I ran my hand through the tangle of my hair and stepped out. Hi everyone! Sorry, I was taking a nap. When did you arrive? Where were you from? How’s the kids? What…

Slowly, as I took in the scene, the stream of my forced bright chatter petered out. Chairs lay askew, the tablecloth hung half over the coffee table onto the floor, spilling mounds of peanut shells on the carpet; teacups piled around, some stained with lipstick around the rim, others with inches of tea like dirty laundry water pooling in their depths. The room rung with the silence of people come and gone, walls coldly reflecting the barrage of noisy lives that had paraded before it moments before. Everybody’s gone, I thought incredulously. As the blood drained from my face, I blinked against the pink rays of sun streaking through the window. Dusk already, I thought absently – then did a double take. With a growing sense of exhilarating wonder, I turned on my heels and stepped back into my room. Slowly, I stood below the rusty clock high on my bedroom wall; slowly, heart pounding, I brought my eyes up to the hands of the clock, moving slowly but inexorably, tick tick tick.

It was a quarter to seven.

ambiguous thoughts

i had dinner just now with an old friend, at the food centre. it's been ages since we met up and talked, and i realised how much i miss just talking to my friends, the ones who i've known since secondary or so. when we were younger, we'd always meet up like once a week and have council on our latest problems.. we'd eat, chat, bitch, whine, confide, and generally just share our ups and downs. but now that we have our school, our jobs, our relationships..

i guess we're older now; we have other people in our lives that are as important to us as we used to be to each other, and much lesser time on our hands. we don't meet often, but when we do, we talk about the same things, laugh at the same jokes, nod wisely at the other's follies and smile in understanding of mutual experiences.

i duno what it is really that's bothering me, but i think it's the sense that time quietly slips past without one noticing until something of import takes place. it leaves me wondering where i will be the next time i pause to take stock of the last ten years or so of my life; whether i'll be successful, happy, loved, whether i'd have lived my life the way i wanted to, the way i want to now - not that i know what that is, at the moment. not knowing scares me because i may just live my life one day at a time without any plans of where i'm going to be the next day, week, month, year. i'm not supposed to know every single thing about myself, about my future, about who i am and what i'm going to be, but i'd like to have a sense of what it is that really makes me want to see tomorrow, come. and right now i'm not getting that.

what luxury it is to be able to sit back and think, and wonder, and tremulously hope that the life i'm slated to live will be fulfilling and worth living. it shows that i have freedom - to choose, to speak, to think - and as yet nobody is making demands on me save myself.

this started out as something completely different; now i can't remember what i had in mind to write. but strangely i feel something settling in me; i feel like sometimes, i just need this, to sit and think and reflect and wonder; to be insecure and scared and fearful of the future; then out of that comes the realization that there is a future and i'm going to be in it, and it darn well better be good. but i'm not gonna be some anal freak to control each and every aspect of it, nor divest myself with godlike powers to think i can steer every single day of my life just the way i want. at the end of the day, i'll think back on what i have rather than what i don't, and be thankful rather than unsatisfied that it's not enough, yet. and take my rest knowing full well that each day i'm given is another day i get to live a better life than i've ever lived.

and whether you wanna call it hopeless romanticism, sheer unrealistic stupidity, or refusal to face up to the real world, as long as it makes me happy, well what do you care.

so long, then.

i got my new comp!

yay... welcome back to the virtual world. i've missed you.