Doddered

I don't want to make a wish

2006-08-22T13:24:00.000+08:00

I received this today. Another piece of heartfelt junk mail from people who care so much they send you something that’s been around the Internet block twice over rather than an email asking ‘How are you?’

Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for inspirational stories. I read all that I get before I delete them. They give me a nice warm feeling, knowing that somewhere out there, something good is going on. It refreshes me and sometimes even corrects my perspective on a bad day.

But when it gets to the end of the story, whatever goodwill that has filled my heart is drained completely when you read the inevitable line ‘Now send this to five people and your greatest wish will come true.’

How in the world does that work, anyway?

How does forwarding something that someone sent by mass mail ensure that the thing that I’ve been wanting and hoping and praying for for 2 years will suddenly fall into my lap? What metaphysical strings will my hitting the ‘Forward’ button pull? What kind of mechanics, on which abstract plane, makes this possible? In which cosmic universe can there exist such a ridiculous, brain-paining connection?

I can see how if I kick my cat, she will turn around and scratch me. I can understand that, eventhough I don’t even own a cat. But I don’t see how by forwarding a piece of emotional blackmail in a blanket email to everyone in my address box can grant the deepest desires of my heart.

It’s like blackmail, that’s what it is. Like I can’t enjoy a story for its virtue as a story but need to validate my guilty pleasure by subjecting someone else to the same arm-twisting. Its just plain silly.

One other thing that really got me riled up was the prayer at the end. It tells you to make a wish. Then pray. And wah-La I will finally be a proud owner of my own little MyVi in the exact same shade of teal as my 50% off Vincci sandals. Yeah that’s my greatest wish – to match my car and my shoes because colours just come out so terribly different on different materials.

But back to my rant.

So I make a selfish little wish, then pray a prayer that was written out by someone else – AND which, mind you, doesn’t mention my little wish AT ALL – and I’m supposed to see some kind of result next Tuesday. So eventhough I don’t believe in this God that the prayer profess, I will get my wish by virtue of this recitation.

By inference, therefore, God cannot resist the power of a forwarded email, nor the Prayer of St. Theresa, nor every other ridiculous line written by a bored adolescent and will grant my every whim and fancy like a fat, blue-skinned genie.

These emails imply that God, who is supposed to have created the universe, can be arm-twisted into granting my wishes. These imply that God, whose timing and plans no one can discern not even the angels, can be manipulated by the very beings that He created. These imply that God is weak, bound, limited, disappointing and not very God-like at all.

That may be a God I like, but its definitely not one I want.

Ode to 2005

2006-03-02T16:05:00.000+08:00

2005. Gone another 365 days of mine and this planet’s life.

What was it like?

According to the Time magazine, it was a year of dismay. Hurricane Katrina and the Bush administration’s shoddy, half-hearted attempt at rescue, the suicide bombing of the London Underground system, the 7.6 Richter earthquake which struck Pakistan, the immigrant uprising in the French suburbs, the passing of Pope John Paul II.

The photographs of these sad events are those up for vote for Time’s Best Photo of the Year 2005. Supposedly the winning image will represent the zeitgiest of the year that has passed. All are snapshots of grief and sorrow, each capturing the breakdown of the human spirit and the heights of man’s depravity in bright, mega-pixel clarity.

A young girl’s blue unbelieving eyes staring from the envelope of her father’s arms as they survey their devastated home post-Hurricane Rita. An inert form, bloated and anonymous, floating in the aftermath of Katrina. A numbed mother whose baby nurses at a shrunken breast, she is too weak to even sit up so the baby suckles with his head at a strange angle.

Death. Disease. Catastrophe. This is 2005. I am no idealist. But does life really suck so much?

No doubt there have been moments in the year of clear, unaffected joy, some form of human achievement or progress that lifts jaded hearts. Maybe something in the areas of space exploration, computer science or medical technology? But what made the headlines, what stood out and resonated in all peoples across the globe where these disasters – where lives are lost and anger triumph. Overwhelmingly, a year of loss and failure.

Then just as I was wallowing in that sinking feeling, Popular Science’s look back on 2005 instantly puts things back into perspective. Marking out man’s greatest inventions in the past year, one creation stands out – a feat that astounds and captures the imaginations of both man and child, a event considered equally groundbreaking in its niche field of science as well as in your home’s living room: the coloured bubble.

Casting every toy ever created in the for-your-baby-cousins heap, the coloured bubble was such a feat of chemical engineering that it took 11 years, half a million USDs and hundreds of stained kitchen countertops in order to come up with what could conceivably be nothing more than some detergent, water and food dye.

But oh no, if you were a colour chemist or a molecular biologist (which I’m not but www.popsci.com makes it look really cool to be one) you would realise that the common combination of the above would create nothing more than a clear bubble with a dot of colour at the bottom. What were talking about is a clear, transparent bubble of colour.

Anyhow, to cut a long story short – because even I don’t fully understand the intricate chemistry behind a dye that’s light enough to be supported by the two water molecules that make up a bubble or some such scientific mumble - two men did. Tim Kehoe and Ram Sabnis. And its set to hit toystores worldwide this year. Zubbles by Ascadia. Remember the name.

Bright yellow, electric pink, dazzling blue, purple transparent spheres floating serenely in the air. Lifted by the breeze to just go where ever it may lead. Just think about it.

I know it doesn’t make all the devastation we’ve brought upon ourselves any less painful. It doesn’t make death any less sorrowful. But just for a second – as long as it takes for the bubble to pop, perhaps – suddenly Life doesn’t feel so much like the dump it really is.

Bittersweet

2005-10-18T14:31:00.000+08:00

My heart is scored by a suicidal melancholy
Stabbed, I bleed all over my stony fascade

I am reflected in the shimmer of my leaking life
I - and you.

Feeling important

2005-04-27T15:08:00.000+08:00

I’m so occupied with the necessary that on my off minutes I think in

· Point forms

Fragments

..sound bites..

::BLURBS::

I can no longer string a proper sentence containing coherent and well-mediated thoughts together without losing its mojo under the burden of time constraints and the fear of someone finding out I’m whining like a petulant child instead of being a good little cogwheel playing my part in the national economy.

BOH Cameronian Awards 2005

2005-04-26T18:06:00.000+08:00

11 Things That Made BCAA 2005 Worth It

1. Ida Nerina’s take on Jessica Rabbit

2. Jit Murad having to remove his glasses to read the script

3. Deputy Minister of Arts, Culture and Heritage Dato’ Wong Kam Hoong’s BOH tea joke

4. Jit calling Caroline Russell, CEO of BOH Plantations, ‘theatre’s favourite tea lady’.

5. Malaysia’s tortured performing arts community laughing at themselves

6. Marimasri’s gay cabaret meets boy band. Oh wait – they’re both the same thing.

7. ferrerorocher@yahoo.com

8. Deputy Minister’s slip-of-the-tongue anecdotes.

9. Ramli Ibrahim exercising some muscle to prevent the Minister from regaling the audience with more.

10. Izlyn Ramli’s disembodied voice rescuing Jit from a very awkward moment on stage.

11. Multilingualism

And THIS deserves very very special mention: Edwin Sumun’s very very sexy accessorising. Shiny, very very shiny.

In honour of Valentine's Day

2005-02-18T13:57:00.000+08:00

The lights turned blue. The night went red. Afternoon delight.

She let out a sigh and fell, cradled, against his chest. The void had opened, the world had fallen through. Only her body remained. And his.

In the stillness – oblivion. My body is divested of its will, its tension, its desires, she thinks. My body rests, she feels. I am at peace. He brings me peace. No – it is Love that brings me peace.

She lifts her head and whispers into his ear, You make me feel so peaceful. He actually titters. Your closeness, she says, your giving. This is love. This peace. This revelation. She pledges herself forever.

Forever never lasts.

The third eye of hindsight caresses the jagged edge of her naivety. Peace, she spits. Grotesque and primitive, two bodies tyrannised by one instinct. Mired deep in the carnal pathways of evolution or sin or destiny, it drives the heaving of desperate bodies, the heated beast is in pursuit and they run and gasp for it to end. The chase peaks, the prey is caught, torn apart, devoured.

Peace. What the body in the red night knows is not peace. We throw our flesh to the beast, we leave our chains and meet the jaws of lust, we claw the boundaries of control and release, then we lie back and are emptied, this satiation is not peace. It is the ravished body, lying prostrate in ungodly defeat, whose perverse ownership, for a few darkly lucid seconds, cannot be denied. It is the paralysis of the broken, who, in the unguarded moment of release, embraces the dirty truths of her origins.

_________________________

Exerpted off an anonymous woman.

To Love: the icon of higher happier things.

Curious aftertastes

2005-02-14T11:56:00.000+08:00

I've just managed to complete a 26-episode anime series. It took me a couple of months - notwithstanding the fact that I only get my fix (three to four hours at a go) about once a week but the series - Witch Hunter Robin, institutionalised witch hunting set in modern times - suffered from a slow plodding pace and a plot which left too many questions unanswered. Robin was often sidelined in favour of more entertaining activities.

Still I trudged on. I hate to leave things unfinished. The only book I remember abandoning in a sigh of exasperation was Herman Melville's Moby Dick which had everything and nothing at all to do with a white whale and its maddened victim. Even so, I determinedly returned to its tattered pages after a year's recuperation.

For a while Robin seemed promising. The series ran on the premise that there were still witches even in this 20th century world whose powers lay hidden and unknown, even to those who possess them, until their awakening. Once awakened, of course, they were evil and had to be completely wiped out. Hunting them down has become a full-fledged occupation with Headquarters and Chiefs and branch divisions in almost every country in the world. In Japan, they operate under the name STN-J where the protagonist, Robin, an innocent cloistered Jane Eyre type with the gift of the Craft, is introduced as the newest member of the local squad. In her Victorian widow-in-mourning get-up she sticks out like a sore thumb among her colleagues who wear regular clothing on their hunts, yet as a visual clue it marked her, as two-peas-in-a-pod with the leader of the squad, a talented mysterious similarly black-clad Amon.

The series began as a kind of a-case-an-episode crime fighting anime - and unfortunately, a bad one. The cases were simple, the lessons cliched and trying to love any of the STN-J members was difficult because they were so two-dimensional. Still I plodded on - a friend had highly recommended it - and it was only after 15 episodes of slow, pointless witch-hunting that things begin to come together. The STN-J is attacked, apparently on orders by its own HQ, with Robin as the apparent target. One thing leads to another and its discovered that STN-J's chief is conducting some secret research revolving around the Orbo - the substance that protects Robin and her squad from being affected by a witch's power - which is coming under heavy scrutiny from Solomon, apparently another name for HQ, which accumulates in the entire operations being destroyed.

At the same time Robin undergoes a kind of identity crisis when she finds out that she's the result of a genetic manipulation of a witch - an experiment that makes her one of the purest form of witch power since Salem.

Robin is unconvincing. I sometimes wondered as I progressed through the series if I'd missed out one or two vital episodes where they explain the origins of Orbo or Solomon or why is Robin not considered a witch although the has the powers of one. I also find it slightly incredulous that Robin's colleagues, despite having gone through attempted murder and the agony of loss together, should still band together to storm HQ in order to get a captured colleague out. Relationships in Robin are stiff and starched, as if everyone first met, and personalities suffer from depthlessness. Any redemption that comes at the end of the series is forced and superficial.

The end: HQ and the controversial Orbo manufacture goes up in flames. Everyone is in one piece. Amon and Robin, who returned to the squad for this final mission, have gone missing. Michael, the staple geek of the Squad, smiles knowingly as he narrates 'Robin and Amon died in the fire. That is what they say.' And I get shivers down my spine. It is a feeling that borders on the cringeworthy. First impressions of both of them are mysterious to the point of being anal with dispositions that bring to mind a discipline that is almost religious - something that the series has failed to break through. To think that they've found love with each other and have disappeared to explore this new life is a leap to big to be made.

And STN-J returns to normal. The questions that were raised during the upheaval regarding the true nature of witches, Robin's Craft, the nature of the Orbo - all these return to under the carpet whence they came and have apparently left no impression on this team who continue to hunt witches and condemn them to a dark end.

By the way ~

2005-01-14T11:55:00.000+08:00

By the way, just in case you wondered:

After the self-righteous piece about post post modern buffonery below, I am wholly ashamed to announce that instead of quitting after two months like I said I would, I am today a full-fledged member of the offending gym.

Hey - it was that or shell out RM200! What is a girl to do? Huh? Huh?

Huh?

No different

2004-11-01T01:56:00.000+08:00

If anything, today confirmed it: I am a sucker for brand image.

Defined: The external manifestation of a business concept from point-of-sales materials to radio jingles to employee uniforms. In other words, the superficial packaging of some intangible state-of-being which everyone secretly aspires to yet never really are. Those who are need no such crutches.

In this case, I’m talking about a gym I recently signed up for. Oh yes, the latest addition to the arsenal of must-haves of this post post modern generation obsessed with the body beautiful and bed fellows with the organic vegetable and brown, unscrubbed rice.

And oh, what a lifestyle this magnificent gym preached to me, a young yet tubby executive, with its chrome floors, wall-to-wall mirrors, ambient lighting and white leather lounge couches. Energy! Carpe Diem! High Flyer! Go Getter! Flashing my glittering purple members card I would saunter in, silently greeting fellow gymers with a mental pat-on-the-back for recognising the need to enter into this close and exclusive cult of the body, cross into its terracotta-paved changing room to emerge clad in the appropriate attire for which to flail and work those pasty limbs.

With these images in mind I was ready to sign my own life away. Until the realities of inconsistent branding reared its ugly head.

A ‘membership consultant’ who was more interested in flirting his way into getting a friend to sign up than he was in ensuring that I, an existing member, had all my answers and doubts and needs met and addressed. Edgy interior design trading off with unfriendly finishings. Miles of policy that wrapped itself around my simple request for deferred entry. Inconsistency between everything-is-possible sales pitch and for-a-price follow up. Too highly incentivised sales team that took grinning yes-men to greater levels.

All in a packaging that promised that you, and only you, the customer, was the most important thing in their lives.

I admit, I was attracted by the good-looking consultants who led me to comfortable chairs, showed me big glossy pictures of the finished product, played honest-Jones with me, waxed lyrical about its high impact, MTV-styled young and happening concept. Why? Because that’s what they were designed to do!

Ok ok - Because I'm sad and pathetic that way. Ok? Geez.

Anyway, when it came to where it came to closing the deal, their honeyed, practiced words did nothing to soothe my disillusioned sensitivities. Of course I told myself that I prefered the muted, classy tones of my existing gym membership – that the frenetic energy of the young and dangerous weren’t for me. But really I am just as shallow as the lifestyle they were promoting: I was not being treated, although otherwise promised, as celebrity enough and cancelled my subscription.

But only after 2 months.

Hey, I paid for it already, ok.

Fantasy for fantasy's sake, please

2004-10-01T16:55:00.000+08:00

I was utterly disapppointed by Catwoman.

A blasphemous homage to the original comicbook (‘Patience who?’), whose sacrilege was made all the more horrifying by the movie’s curious philosophies (slashed leather is ok but if you wear too much makeup your face becomes as hard as marble and you will feel no pain – not even when you fall a hundred metres through panes of glass – altho you will die), absurd two-dimensional villian and heroine personalities and a plotline so thin it’ll be the latest clotheshorse of European design houses.

I actually love comic book adaptations – all the spandex-wrapped bodies of impossible sculpture, the supercool superpowers, the eternal struggle of good and evil in bold recognisable tropes with none of the complicated moralities. I love the voyeuristic visions it offers of familiar yet unfamiliar universes and the empathy it draws from the characters’ familiar yet unfamiliar struggles – yet never asking anything from the audience like thought or lessons: just that you enjoy the good ol’ romp.

Therein lies the problem with Catwoman. I went in expecting a hour or two of pure enjoyable escapism in a vacuum of suspended logics and I get a tale of capitalist hunger and of madness conceived in a superficial world whose goddess is beauty and money.

What’s wrong with that, you ask?

Well, its not fantasy anymore, is it?

Fantasy needs overblown villains with maddening desires to rule the world. Fantasy needs colourful heroes and heroines who possess extraordinary, unbelievable superpowers. Sure, make them human; ground the story in issues that are relevant to the average movie goer. But there are boundaries between fantasy and reality that should not be crossed - to overstep the thin line is to render the fantasy absurd.

To comprehend fantasy, one draws from a knowledge pool that would be vastly different if one were watching Bowling for Columbine. In Catwoman, we are expected to draw from both – with disastrous results.

The first hour is fine, when the viewer, as expected, suspends the voice of reason at the notion of a woman imbued with the supernatural powers of an ancient cat-goddess. All seems to be going the way of the average tho enjoyable adaptation effort when it all gets blurry with the introduction of the villian – a cold malcontent of an ex-model who’s put on the shelf in favour of a younger, tauter female and who now wants everyone to ‘pay’ for their obsession over physical beauty, the exact obsession that drives her very schemes.

To consider this character as evil in the context of comicbook logic requires quite a leap of fantastic imagination. There is no real menace in a fantasy sense of the word (think the fiery eye of Sauron); she doesn’t really want to take over the world and make everyone her eternal slaves, she’s just an over-the-hill hussy in the impudent throes of a mid-life crisis.

Against this kind of threat, Catwoman, with all her superstrength and lightning reflexes, is suddenly misplaced and ridiculous.

While there are bits of goodness in the movie – Benjamin Bratt’s delicious Latin physique, Sharon Stone’s suitably divaesque portrayal of the marble maiden, Lambert Wilson’s French accents. Yet these were insufficient to save what was essentially a flaw in its concept.

Laurel Hedare’s body-obsessiveness was too worldly to be villianous, her motivations too mundane. The evil capitalist firm was too bourgeouis. Halle Berry’s feline alter-ego thus sticks out like a sore thumb.

Why bother ‘grounding’ something that is supposed to be wide and sweeping? Why the ‘everyday’ take on a genre that’s supposed to be extra-ordinary? After all, who are we, mere mortals, to mess with a genre beloved by so many because it is – simply – fantastic?

Office angst

2004-09-07T16:33:00.000+08:00

Stale office air circulated and re-circulated. The quick taps of polished heels intermingled with the slipper-slaps of the less formal. Colleagues passed swiftly between the separate sections in the office, smiling briefly at the other if their eyes weren’t glued to the papers they held.

The whirl of private minds overlapped in the vacuum of the insentient air, an invisible buzz of hive-like activity, a mild electricity that flowed through the veins and compelled fingers to type, feet to tap, eyes to search and search and find.

Willed by the collective mind, I found myself typing, taping and searching. Yet I was ineffectual. The surrounding buzz penetrated my head, waging war with a mind that stubbornly insisted on remaining under the warm covers of blissful emptiness.

So I flopped to and fro, willing the hours to pass, suffering from my rebellion against the corporate spirit, suffering in my bittersweet wallowing in unproductivity, suffering the censure, the stifled spirit, the divided heart.

Redemption emerged from an unlikely source. Barely a few weeks before placed at our reception area to replace its browned and dying predecessors, two beautiful potted plants with big waxy green leaves stood. Without sun or oxygen, with only the measly sprinklings of water the busy administrator could afford in between phonecalls, I thought it was a matter of time before these lives where similarly cut short.

In such barrenness, how could anything grow?

But they did. In my hazy wanderings, I noticed that new white-green shoots were pushing forth from the soil. Still furled like some chlorophyllic foetus, they gave off a glistening sheen of cool paradise, unawares of the busy nothingness that surrounded its fertility. Drops of moisture dotted its leaves like distilled crystals of peace.

I imagined that each time I walked pass, I touched a little the bubble of bounty and life that enveloped each plant. I imagined that I could borrow from its mini-atmosphere of growth and fertility as a balm of my mangled mind.

And why not? In this sterile spic-and-span of the office environment, everyone is entitled to a little slice of life.

Anime life

2004-09-03T18:32:00.000+08:00

As a child, I grew up with and partly believed the fluffy themes of good and evil, brotherhood, friendship, love and filial piety as epitomised in such animated classics like Lion King, Aladdin and Cinderella. I loved every dancing, singing minute of it, so, as life began to slide beneath a viscous gloss of routine, animation became something I indulged in as an escape, enjoying for an hour or so the sweet naivety, the innocence that is fought for and retained, the beauty and simplicity of its primary coloured characters and set-ups.

When I was first introduced to anime, my Disney-fed sensibilities were electrified. I was shocked at the bold, sometimes vicious manipulation of the medium that created colours, movements, and angles that somehow manages to capture the hints, the subtlety, the greyness of ourselves and the world we inhabit. I was mesmerised by the use of colour, shadow, stills and tableaus in the creation of atmosphere that is more real that reality yet more fantastic than fantasy.

I was completely hooked. Animation was no longer the attempt to escape into a familiar and simple childhood world. Animation was no longer a revisitation of a warm and happy place, a place whose worth lay in the fact that it was so unlike the one we slog, cry and mess up in. Animation, now, became kindred - able to emphatise and comfort in a way that only a fellow-sufferer could. And more than that: animation became education, opening up horizons limited by first-hand experiences and exposing sheltered souls to the very edges of depravity.

In my world, anime was like a gentle yet a life-hardened cynic who loved standing in the rain.

Of course I refer to only a particular section of the whole anime community i.e those who use anime to tell tales of life’s tragedy, psychological bleakness and all other dark and unhappy things that afflict us. Yet even in the most mainstream of anime – Dragonball or Pokemon or Naruto – there resides an aching pathos that all fans would recognise as the single defining characteristic of anime.

What it is – this pathos – is something that I am still fighting to pin down. The ungodly juxtapositions of silly caricature and rape? The shameless combinations of lolita innocence or happy tragedy?

As close as I could figure was this: anime showed us life itself ; life, with its irony, tragedies and hard-earned joy; life, with its free happiness and simple goodness; life in all its sullied glory.

Life - unapologised.

Black day

2004-08-12T10:49:00.000+08:00

The eddies that swirl about my feet
Are dark
Foreboding
Thick and viscous

Clear pools appear
Changing faces float within
Scenes of past lives flicker
Visions of the past

The future holds no hope
I am left unchanging, unmoving, unlearning
As my past hails me
promises to heal me

figures dance a tantalising dance
I see them love, learn and grow
They are alight with life
While I dim in comparison

Stuck in a rut
Rotting

Anger is not being able to be selfish
Frustration wells as I feel guilty about being selfish
Unhappy sacrifices are useless

2004-08-04T10:13:00.000+08:00

Fine. So I'm heartless.

People accuse of me of not knowing how to 'be a friend'. Their basis of accusation? Because I don't remember birthdays.

I don't deny it. I find it infinitely difficult to match one day out of the 365 that make up one year to just one person. Add to that the fact that I don't just have to remember the birthday of a single friend, but I'm expected commit to memory the significant days of best friends, close friends, good acquaintances, casual acquaintances besides having to remember that of my father's, mother's, brother's, grandmothers' and fathers', aunties, uncles and cousins.

Ok, I exaggerate ( a literary technique, I might add, to emphasise the absolute ridiculousness of a particular subject). But the point is, many people place grave significance on this single feat of memory. Maybe its just my inherent incompetency when it comes to anything involving numbers. Maybe its just that my sorry compilation of grey matter cannot possible store this huge database of people and dates. Or maybe I just don't care?

That is often the conclusion people come to each time I respond to a call informing me that so-and-so's birthday is just around the corner and we should get her something with a vaguely surprised 'Really? Again?'. (Seriously, just when you thought you're done with one birthday..)

And yet, contrary to all forewarnings that I may very well soon be losing friends by the fistfuls, I still have plenty of them - old friends whom I've made since I was 10, new ones I'd found in university, friends whom I've practically grown up with in church - and I'm still making more. I must be doing something right.

Friendship, to me, is more than just remembering dates. Sure, it plays an essential part in the complex jigsaw of any kind of relationship, but it cannot possibly be the fulcrum on which the relationship rests. Sure, remembering a birthday comes naturally in a relationship that is long and intimate, where you want to celebrate them for being who they are, for being here, for allowing you to be their friend. And it does happen to me, especially when it comes to a birthday of a true good friend. But not remembering it does not mean you are less of a friend. If it is, then all my knowledge of their fears, anxieties, dreams and idiosyncracies is for naught.

Birthdays can be exchanged and recorded on a PDA, address book, even set on 'Reminder' mode on MSN Messenger. But knowing why she can't commit in a relationship or what his five-year plan is - that comes with years (days AND nights) of talking, sharing, discussing, of comforting silences, of gentle rebukes, of sobbing on your shoulder.

Years, that is, of being a friend.

Now what?

2004-07-21T12:44:00.000+08:00

Ok, so now what? I've exhausted my few recent rants and now I just sitting here staring at the measly 4 blogs and wondering if cyberspace'll be better off with somebody more opiniated.

It's odd, the responsibility I feel for filling up this space. Why should there even be responsibility? I created this blog to for the sole purpose of holding the thoughts I knew would be off no use outside in the real world, using the Web like a easy-to-access personal journal. I knew that no one could possible chance upon it through a search on Google. Unless I published the fact - which I haven't yet.

I knew that there would be no eager audience nor did I think I would ever have one - I write this, speak this, really, into a space that is expectedly empty and unresponsive. Such is the nature of the Web - providing a platform, not necessarily a stage, for people to express themselves. Is it not ironic then that I begin to wonder if my bloggings are considered valid without the equal-and-opposite-reaction of an audience.

I've seen some blogs - charting each day, hour, minute of the blogger's life like a diary that's open for all to see. I suppose that's alright if you are able to consistently wrangle quirky anecdotes and deep profound insights out of everyday experiences. I use to write my life once. I sent out mass mails with a few KBs of personal worries, wonders, life experiences etc. Now I've stopped cuz I realised how embarrassing it was. Not that embarrassing things happened to me, but thinking that my comings and goings might be of interest to others? Now that's embarrassing.

No, I do not consider this an open book into Fern-chan's life. If anything I view this blog as a kind of omnipresent friend - someone to whom I can turn to whenever I need to get something off my chest. Now, I have began to wonder if this friend of mine deserves something better.

(In this my moment of lucidity I find it even more glaringly ironic that I wonder about my lack of audience to - who else? - but the exact same audience I'm saying I don't have. For all it's worth I might as well have this conversation with my self in my own time, in my own head.)

Is a blog a blog without readers? Or is merely a self-indulgent exercise for people enamoured with their own invisible voices?

2004-06-29T17:28:00.000+08:00

the voices that reach across the blackness
the voices that answer my profered words
the voices that embrace my hidden mind
the voices that share my deepest thoughts
they do not judge, they do not sneer
because they hear voices too

Cyberspace intrigues me. All of a sudden you can speak with this nameless, faceless entity halfway across the world and find that geography is only a colourful bunch of squiggles and letters. The physical inability to meet no longer dictates the exchange and sharing of ideas and opinions.

Cyberspace makes one a citizen of the world - our beings are no longer dictated by colour or creed or nationality but by the interests, views and opinions that we flesh out in our cyberlife. My cyber ID is my list of interests that guide my journey through the webs of this world. My passport is a mutual respect and consideration for those who inhabit the particular plot of digital land I happen to be crossing.

I am new to this strange, alternate universe but found myself falling headlong the moment I took my first tentative steps. I was instantly hooked to the dynamism found on some messageboards but was only truly converted when I experienced the openness with which these veteran netizens received my bumbling efforts. Once I opened the door I knew that there was no turning back: like magic this (cyber) world with its own gods and religion, philosophy and hierarchy, emerged before me. It ran on its own axis and was fueled by its own force. I felt like I was on the moon and had chanced upon its alien inhabitants.

I have since been carefully flexing my virtual limbs, travelling, getting to know the creatures that inhabit these uncharted lands and creating my own cyber-personality. I roam this world with a face and an appended signature representing a side of me that doesn't see the sun of the real world. I meet with similar people whose avatars only capture the side of themselves they want you to see.

Paradoxically, this anonymous interaction comforts me. My thoughts, once whispered only in the corridors of my mind, now have found a voice. My interests, once limited by the more prosaic considerations of money and availability, are given new fodder.

Still I was not born yesterday - who can really believe the truth of the voice reaching out to me? Without the audible timbres of a voice who can discern anything at all?

But I believe that this world, at least, is freeing and liberating. A freedom that needs no apologies, no defence, no excuses. An endless forum where socialisation and interaction has taken on new dimensions, where the world is split only by opinions.

And opinions are easier to reconcile than colour.

Oh how the mighty..

2004-06-23T15:57:00.000+08:00

I was watching a programme on TV just yesterday chronicling the rise and subsequent fall of Pop music's self-proclaimed King: Michael Jackson.

Oh, what a god.

Who else but Michael Jackson - dimunitive lead singer of the Jackson Five dwarfed by his much-older brothers - could have pulled off the single white glove and the spangled songs above black loafers? Who else but Michael Jackson - child wunderkind turned teen sensation to rise above the success of his previous band - could have gotten away with red leather zippers and chunky chiming belts?

Michael Jackson created a music phenomenon with only one Master and one Follower - himself. It not just pop; it was Michael Jackson pop. The distinctive dance steps, the crotch-grab, the animal-like noise he made at the end of every line he sang.

Everything he touched turned to gold.

And then. Then came the suspect self-deification in the History album. Then came the curious private themepark-cum-home innocently called Neverland. Then came the astonishing marriages and divorces to Lisa-Marie Presley and the nanny. Then the increasingly incomprehensible plastic surgery decisions. And most disturbing of all - like the sullied gem that tops a famous but cursed piece of crown jewelery - the allegations of child molestation. First one, followed by another and another and yet another.

What was going on?

Throughout it all, he appears briefly, behind large reflective aviator glasses, clad in elaborate embroidered coats, to grin innocently at cameras.

What is going on?

Some say he never grew up. But to me, it seems more of regression rather than a static unmoving picture. No one, during his Bad days, would have thought Michael Jackson innocent nor childlike. If anything, he spoke the angst of his generation, inspiring his peers with anthemic rhythms and mind-blowing riffs. He was the bigger, bolder, brighter, mainstream Dylan. If he continued on this path would he have been like Sting - golden, untouchable yet still relevant? Maybe like Sir Cliff Richard - mellowed yet fondly remembered?

Instead he regressed - into a naivety so naive it was unbelievable. In a bad way.

Did we leave him behind somewhere? Had society laboured on - progressing from modernism to modernism - only to leave one of our icons behind? Which train did Michael Jackson miss?

Or did we do him some kind of wrong? Did our increasing affinity for bubblegum pop and our love for skinny, buxom women and buffed, strong-jawed men leave the slender, androgynous Michael out of the picture? Have we become so swift and unforgiving in our slights and praises that his attempts to change came too slow?

Or perhaps this IS his adulthood - this is what the teen star grew up to be. Nobody would say that his alleged paedophilia is a remnant of a childhood hobby. And his eccentricities - his obsessiveness about his appearance, his love of beautiful clothing are not childish - are just that: eccentricities.

Perhaps it is Michael Jackson who has fooled us all. Behind his gentle voice and demeanour beats the heart of a deviant - once unfurled to us in the songs of his stardom, now pulsing behind an inscrutable frame. A deviant whose clever manipulations have created scores of camps, each completely dedicated to the version of the Michael Jackson they preach.

It's sad, it's so sad the human condition. But I want to salvage Michael Jackson - in my head at least: Perhaps the best way to think of pop's megastar (when pop was still music) is enshrined in the context of his rise. Leave him and love him in the 80's when he was bigger than big. Why try to get him to fit into 21st century life? Idols who leave their place of worship become merely decorative.

Yes

2004-06-18T15:34:00.000+08:00

I think its a Malaysian thing. Our mangled English (fondly referred to as 'Manglish') is such that some words - while derived from a major language such as Malay, English or Mandarin - have been mixed mashed and moulded to form a lexicon that is bastard, hybrid and, yet, totally original.

For instance, the word 'Ya'/ 'ya-lah', meaning 'yes' in Manglish. In Malay, the affirmative is 'ye (yia)' while in the Mandarin, it is 'sze'. The suffix '-lah' has an even more mixed parentage, originating from somewhere in between the Malay archipelago and the Chinese continent. Anyhow, 'ya' - derived and yet not derived from the melting pot of languages that make up the Malaysian audio experience - has come to be THE form of affirmative.

Now, I've just started working. Somehow I have decided that my working persona is to be something polished and dignified, you know, professional. So I try very hard not to use words that may chip at this thin veneer of professionalism I throw on everytime I speak to a client or even to a senior colleague.

Facetious? I beg to differ.

Anyway, I've come to use the word 'yes' intead of 'ya' or 'yup'. And I was pretty proud of my progress until I realised that I tended to say 'yes' with a curious sort of accent. It was a very knowing 'yes' - a very lecherously knowing 'yes'. Like the kind of thing someone would say when offered a .. a .. lecherousity. knowingly.

Yow.

Well. Anyway, I've stopped it. I know offer a rather non-commitant 'yeah'. Not a drawly beachbum type of 'yee-awh' but a very crisp 'yeah'. Like 'Yes' with aspirated 'h' instead of a sibilant 's'.

Sort of a best of both worlds but with a elocution problem. Well, you can't win 'em all.

Let dead dogs lie

2004-06-17T15:49:00.000+08:00

Let them lie there I say. Leave them be. The dead can give us nothing more.

Look, I'm not being literal. It's a metaphor, ok. What I'm doing, see, is comparing dogs to people - which is not obvious in the header and first 3 sentences, but will be if you keep reading.

Death is always tragic. Even if you've been suffering from some disease that debilitates you day by day, actually and finally dying is something no one celebrates - much less if it was sudden and unexpected. So when the army dude crashed his plane and died together with his sweetheart (was the the story? Details can be so spurious) or when that man accidentally rolled over his 9-month pregnant wife with his truck killing her and the baby, we are appropriately saddened. Life, with its difficulties and dark moments, glory only in a few things - new life, best represented by babies and marriage. We spend a few minutes in solemn silence then move on to the comic page. What else are we to do?

Tomorrow comes along and army dude and toll-truck guy get into the news again. This time, parents/relatives are photographed bawling away with the caption '(His/her name) didn't even get a chance to eat durians!' or 'I cooked his favourite sambal ikan bilis but he didn't make it home to eat it!' Bawl bawl.

So what? SO WHAT? Is one to forever subject oneself to useless reminiscings or to attach tragic significance to what is already full of memory and regret? Is death itself not painful, not tragic, not fearful enough that we feel the need to add a bit of local flavour to the echoes that are already reverberating in desperate emptiness? How do we make death worse? How can we possibly quantify the ending of a life?

We can't! Death is the ultimate end. The final darkness, the beckoning abyss. And it should be left that way. To say that death is made worse because of these kind of things is to dilute and deny.