Thoughts

Five Star Giver

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I’m a high-level Google Maps user. I know most of you don’t know or care, but that’s my secret flex. I’ve submitted many reviews to Google Maps—two hundred and forty-one to be exact. That’s probably more than any of you reading this have done.

For some reason, this thought crossed my mind this evening. And I felt compelled to write about it. It doesn’t affect your life, or mine. In fact, it doesn’t even matter if I’m a high-level Google Maps reviewer. Well, it used to – I remember many years ago, they used to give rewards for being a top contributor.

I’m not sure if they still do – I haven’t gotten any rewards in recent years, but those rewards did inspire me to continue leaving reviews. The first reward was an RM40 Zalora voucher, which I spent on a wallet. The second one was a redBus voucher which I never claimed (I had nowhere I wanted to travel to by bus that year).

I bet most of you didn’t even know they gave rewards

After that, the rewards stopped coming. Maybe I fell off. Washed.

I realized there’s a flaw in my reviewing—not the content of the review itself, but the fact that I tend to leave positive reviews. Most of the time, I leave reviews because I enjoyed myself and not to complain about the venue.

I grew up with the mentality of “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say nothing at all.” Especially in public for everyone to see. A quick Google search shows that this saying is most commonly associated with Thumper from Bambi. I must have watched the film too many times as a child.

See, you learned something new today

Perhaps I learned something new today about myself. Maybe that’s where all my positivity stems from. This one quote I unconsciously absorbed and turned into my personality.

I believe that if you have the energy to complain, you have the energy to fix a problem. If you don’t want to fix it, you enjoy complaining more than solving the problem.

But leaving negative reviews is doing something about it – I would be saving other people (who believe me) a trip from a bad experience. So maybe that’s why I do leave negative reviews – sometimes. However, they are far and few in between.

I leave negative reviews for places that absolutely deserve them. If they left a really bad impression, I will call it out.

Once in a while, I submit a middling review for a place, which I feel makes no difference—it doesn’t move the scales. It doesn’t generate impact. So I tend to avoid doing those. If I don’t review a place, it’s because I didn’t like (or dislike) it enough.

I leave good reviews because I want more people to patron a place and the owners to succeed. Fortunately, I’m not a huge influencer so my words don’t drive flocks of people to restaurants and cause them to overcrowd (another problem I’d like to write about one day – the negative influence of foodies).

My food pictures suck, but that’s okay, I don’t think people care that much as long as you show them the food. I recall one of my most popular photos of a friend at a restaurant (LOL).

So what I usually talk about? The taste of the food, the service, the value for money, the crowd (if it’s a noticeable thing – i tend not to enjoy places that get too crowded), booking requirements (if necessary), and sometimes parking issues if it’s an issue. I would say I’m pretty fair.

11(3)34 again, I’m not even trying

I don’t believe there’s a point to this article other than being able to flex my Google Maps level and to let any restaurant owners who stumble upon this blog post know: if you’re looking for a high-level Google Maps user to review your restaurant, reach out to me and kick start my journey of turning into a person I despise food critic.

Who knows, this could be the start of something amazing. Heck yea.

Unoptimized H1

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Every time I told people I blogged, I said that it was my way of practicing writing. My way of keeping my writing sharp. Yet, it’s something that I haven’t been doing consistently. Am I truly honing my skills? Does writing once a month count as practice?

Let’s look on the bright side – it’s infinitely better than zero times a month!

I set aside some time today after work to check myself in(to a cafe), free of all distractions, just to get some writing done. It was a chore. But I forced myself to do so and I’m glad I did.

It took me a couple of minutes to get started but now the words are just flowing out from my fingers. Yes, this post is going to be a brain dump.

I’m writing less frequently than I used to which isn’t a problem. But not doing anything else productive with all the free time is. However, after sitting through an SEO workshop today, I felt inspired. The advice from my colleague who ran the workshop wasn’t directed at me, but I felt it. He said, paraphrased:

“There’s no being perfect, just write. You can come up with the perfect article, but if you don’t optimize the keywords, nobody is going to find it. And in our fast-paced landscape, being late means other people are going to rank their pages before you. Write your article quickly, then use data to optimize it later.”

It wasn’t a revelation, in fact, it has been my philosophy for creating content. I’m the kind of guy who will push out shit thinking I will go back to make it better in the future (which rarely happens when it comes to personal projects). I enjoy the feeling of creating content. It pleases me to work on something that other people (no matter how few) can enjoy.

Why? I don’t know. I’m just built that way. In case you didn’t know, almost all my hobbies involve creating some sort of content (the other hobbies involve consuming content). From writing blogs to recording and performing songs and drawing drawings and trying to make videos (I know, I still haven’t started work on a video essay) – these hobbies give me a sense of achievement.

Okay, back to the lesson from the workshop: I know I’m not writing hard-hitting SEO-optimized posts on this blog (did you know I moved from number to text slugs over the past year? lol). I don’t even categorize or tag my content properly most of the time. But the advice reminded me of one of my favorite quotes: “Progress, not perfection.”

It got me thinking, about how when I first started blogging back in school, I would treat my blog like a diary. Writing all sorts of cringy shit…it was all but a Xanga in name. Over the years, it has evolved. Slightly. Still cringey, but I hate what I write now much less than what I did before. Decades of aging does that to you, naturally.

(10 years later, I’m going to come back to this and laugh.)

I can’t believe that after writing for decades I’m still not some writing savant. See, I used writing twice in a single sentence. Check out my unbridled vocabulary. Yet, I have the audacity to call myself a writer and ask to be paid for my work.

What is this mid-life imposter syndrome crisis resurfacing?

Writing about writing. It seems to be a frequent topic on this blog. Me feeling bad about not writing enough and writing about that promising that I’ll write more. I’m not going to do that because I don’t need to. This site doesn’t survive on clicks (it survives because I give money to my web host annually). And as long as I want to keep a public place to pen my thoughts, it’ll remain that way.

Keeping in line with the theme of today’s lesson, I won’t be editing this drivel. Hope you enjoyed reading it. If it inspires you to write or create something of your own, great! I look forward to ingesting it…like a fish swallowing a worm. And it means that something positive came out of this.

Clinically, Officially Ancient

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You know, back when I was younger, I used to think forty was the right age to die. Not too young, not too old, just in time, before any debilitating diseases had a chance to set in and make my existence painful. Then I got older, became an uncle to three wonderful kids, and decided, maybe I do want to see them grow up. They kind of gave meaning to life again.

I didn’t think of it much until something strange happened to me yesterday as I was standing up after sitting through an all-hands meeting in the office. I felt extremely dizzy and almost fell over. Fortunately, I could grab the bench I had risen from to break my fall. I sat there for a few minutes contemplating what had happened.

I got up again and everything was back to normal. I don’t think anybody noticed. I went about my day but I never stopped thinking about it.

Fast forward to this morning when I turned in bed to shut off my alarm, that dizziness hit me again. Fortunately, I was still lying down, so I couldn’t fall. Thoughts started racing through my mind.

Holy shit, am I going to die?

I lay there for a while longer and got up feeling fine. I took my mom’s blood pressure monitor to measure myself. I did it twice, a minute apart. It was normal. I still wasn’t convinced, so I went to the hospital and got myself checked out.

The doctor asked me some questions and ran me through some tests. He:

  • Measured my blood pressure and temperature
  • Flicked my fingers
  • Made me identify the colors of objects without my glasses on
  • Made me track his fingers with my eyes without my glasses on, without moving my head
  • Made me count how many fingers he was holding up without my glasses on
  • Asked me to grip his fingers while he pulled
  • Made me lie down, neck tilted over the edge of the bed while he turned my head to the side

And probably more that I missed.

Basically, he was trying to see if I had any hints of a stroke. Then he asked if I was vomiting or had diarrhea (I didn’t) to see if I was recovering from another illness. He asked about allergies and if I had any flu or nasal congestion (nothing more than usual) which can mess with the balancing mechanism in your head.

After all that, he decided with certainty that what I was experiencing was orthostatic hypotension, aka postural hypotension. It’s when the blood pools in your lower vessels and doesn’t get pumped fast enough to your heart and from your heart to your brain.

This happens most frequently when moving from a sitting to a standing position. He asked me if I exercised, to which I told him yes (proudly lol), three times a week. Since I was physically healthy, he concluded it was probably due to my age.

Yes, you heard that right, I’ve been officially diagnosed as old.

To address this issue, I will have to be more careful whenever I get up. Like, wait for a bit so the blood flows to my head first because I am an elderly person.

Perhaps dying at forty isn’t as farfetched as I thought.

Song of the day: