Why Would I Write

Category: Thoughts

  • I’m supposed to be the very best at what I do.

    So it’s that time of the year again. Well not really. It happens more often than not.
    Clearing out the saved messages on my phone!

    It’s been awhile since I’ve done this and my phone is clogging up. So here we go:

    “Kinky prostitutes come over for great sex”

    The other day when I wrote this, I guess I must have been thinking about high school. When Ian came up with this mnemonic for remembering how to sort out living things in bio. In case you don’t know/remember, it goes:

    Kingdom | Kinky
    Phylum | Prostitutes
    Class | Come
    Order | Over
    Family | For
    Genus | Great
    Species | Sex

    Good to know that I haven’t forgotten it yet!

    “People who piss me off- waiters who are too damn cocky or lazy to write orders down. Or serve you the wrong food despite confirming your order with you.”

    So I’m sure everyone’s experienced this before. I mean seriously, if you’re having trouble remembering things, write them down! It takes 2 seconds and saves all the trouble you go through later! I don’t know what’s wrong with these people. It’s not illegal to carry pen and paper in a restaurant! And it’s better to admit you have bad memory by jotting stuff down instead of pretending you got everything when actually you don’t.

    “Man spits into helmet face guard”

    Its just something funny I thought of. Imagine a motorcyclist spits out phlegm onto his face guard instead, cos its so clean he doesn’t realize it’s there. haha

    “Why don’t bad guys fight among side their hench men?”

    Ever watch a movie where a bad guy sends his whole army after the hero, only to see them almost killing the good guy, but not quite, then get decimated? Then the bad guy is left all alone with the hero. Again, the bad guy almost, just almost kills the hero. But he fails, and gets his ass kicked. Now imagine this- instead of just sending his goons, why doesn’t the bad guy join the fight in the first place? He’s gonna end up fighting the hero eventually, so he might as well join in when he has advantage and a higher chance of winning! (Hollywood) movies are flawed!

    “I was so afraid to wake up cos I dreamt there was a roach in my room and didn’t want it to be true. Car spoiler stolen!”

    That was one bizarre dream I had with 2 separate incidents. No explanation needed I guess. Unless you didn’t know I have a fear of roaches. Well, you do now!

    “What drives you mad- keep on pissing someone off till they kill someone”

    Haha. I think it’s an idea for a story of some sort. Kinda twisted if you ask me. Too much for my taste :p

    “This evening when I was sitting by the stairs near the klcc fountain I overheard 2 men on my left talking about malaysia- ‘they can’t even manage a bus company and they want to send a man off to space’ haha!”

    One of the best lines I’ve heard whilst eaves dropping.

    * * * * *

    Oh and my performance on Sunday was alright. I was the first open mic on stage and nervous as hell! Did alright with ‘Car Crash Hearts..’ but screwed up the ‘myspace’ song. It was a fun night nevertheless 🙂 Thanks to my roadie Jason for being the only one showing up. LOL

    Looking forward to the next gig!

  • Breaking Barriers

    As I was having dinner with my colleagues yesterday, my mind wandered off for a moment. I got lost in all the multiple threads going on at once. Everyone was speaking in either Cantonese or English.

    My friend asked me, “do you understand what they are saying?”
    “A little here and there..” I replied.

    Over the past year working in Inspidea, my skills in non-English language have tremendously improved. I am now able to pick out the main words and key phrases from Cantonese and Malay sentences and decipher the meaning of the whole line. Communicating with my colleagues isn’t much of a problem now.

    Language has never been my strongest point. People shit on me for having a bad command of Malay and Chinese/Cantonese. So how come people think its wrong for me to shit on other people who have a bad command of English? What kind of one way street is that? Not that I do it anyways. The only time I ever rag on people with bad English is when they bring it up first. I’m pretty tolerant towards non-English speakers, I know just how they feel whenever I try to speak in Malay/Cantonese to them.

    But I hate the fact how the alot of people think that locals who speak English as their main language, and by English I don’t mean Manglish, (as opposed to speaking in Malay/Canto) are snobbish, disrespectful, and uncultured people. Those people aren’t snobbish- they just happen to communicate better in English! If you’re gonna criticize anybody for speaking a ‘foreign’ language well, I think you should start pointing fingers at yourself for being so narrow-minded in the first place. Who knows why they don’t speak with their mother tongue.

    It wasn’t a choice to choose what school you attend or the people you mixed with. You couldn’t choose what language your family used to communicate with each other. Its not like you purposely chose not to speak the local language. These things can’t be decided by you. Why don’t people look at it the other way instead- “I was unfortunate I did not get the chance to learn our local tongue” instead of “I’m too good to speak other languages besides English”.

    I was born and raised by an English speaking family. I didn’t grow up on Hong Kong movies or TVB serials. Neither did I watch the locally dubbed cartoons. Does that make me any worse or better off? No it doesn’t.

    And despite speaking only English, I was never really good at it. I was in the top English class for year 7, then going down to group 2 in year 8, group 4 in year 9 (i think there were 6-7 groups then), and the group 4/4 in year 10 and 11 (the lowest non-ESL group). I was in the last Malay class as well. For my IGCSEs, I didn’t get any As for English Language, Literature or Malay.

    So I know my place, and I don’t act like I’m some bigshot just because I speak English. I am who I am because of everything that’s happened to me, and the result of my actions.

    I’m grateful that I went to a prestigious school and met the people whom I know as my friends today. If not for this life, things might have turned out differently.

    The very same night I had that conversation, I bumped into an Ah Beng in a petrol station. From the way he looked to the way he talked and walked, this dude was the real deal. And when he got into his car and sped off (you know how ridiculous cars move in real life when they’re driven by people who think they’re the stunt driver for the next Jason Bourne movie)- it was how I expected it to be. Now it was probably wrong of me to judge someone by their cover. But from what I observed, it was like skimming through his book, I had him figured out. I wonder if everyone else looks at me and stereotypes me the same way as I did to them? Of course they do.

    “thick framed glasses..black hair..t-shirt and jeans..this kid must listen to Taking Back Sunday..”

    The encounter with the Ah Beng made me think about my past. Imagine if I was brought up in another school (no I’m not saying that kids in non-international schools turn out to be delinquents, this is just an example), and I mixed with Ah Bengs and ‘gangsters’. I could be a pedlar parading the mamaks of kl selling dvds and vcds or even pushing drugs. I might be ‘pimping’ out my Wira with unnecessary spoilers, headlights and chrome rims. Life would’ve turned out very differently for me.

    So if I got the chance to do everything again, like most people would say, I wouldn’t change a thing. It’s the very same reason why I am where I am right now. It might not be where I want to be or what I hoped or wished for. But who I am is who I am now, and the only way is forward. Sure we can regret things that we did in our past, but don’t dwell on them. Just because you did something wrong in the past doesn’t mean that if you did it right back then, things would be better now. Life is unpredictable. And change is the only constant.

  • Traffic cops are a menace.

    Traffic cops are a fucking menace. Never in my life have I ever exclaimed to myself, “thank God there was a traffic cop!” When are they ever helpful? NEVER!

    Why are they there to replace perfectly working lights? I understand the reasoning for them to be there when the lights are broken. But when they’re not?! Since when can a man do a machine’s job better? The fucking machine was built for this very purpose. A machine that doesn’t know anything other than to regulate traffic flow. Its very reason for existing is to guide cars! And this cop can do it better?!

    It would be funny to see a traffic light kill a traffic cop. Even if I was the one who rammed into the traffic light and made it fall onto the policeman. Serves him right for trying to ‘ease traffic flow’.

    Everyone knows that traffic police are rookies anyways. These guys should be given better things to do– like patrolling the streets looking for mat rempits to strangle rather than wasting their time breathing in carbon monoxide in the middle of rush hour traffic.

    I realized I wrote about traffic cops awhile ago as well. See how much they infuriate me?! Even now, 5 months later, things haven’t changed.