Why Would I Write

  • Eighteen

    “Come on!” yelled Sobia. “What does it say?”

    “Yeah!” said Farez. “Tell us!”

    It was my eighteenth birthday and I had just blown the candles out on my birthday cake. Fortunately I didn’t get saliva all over the cake this year. For the past few years, my friends have been calling me ‘The Spitter’ for that very reason. I breathed a sigh of relief. I had made sure I swallowed all my saliva before attempting to blow the candles this time. However, this year my friends didn’t really care about the cake. They were more interested in my final words.

    They would have appeared somewhere on my body, but I had no idea where they were yet. As far as I could tell the words didn’t appear on my face or my arms, if not my friends would have seen them already. Oh dear, I hope it wasn’t on my ass. That would be a pain to read.

    I was the youngest of my friends in the group. All my friends had their last words appear on them last year. Most of them had typical last words like, “Goodbye world.” and similar variations. Some of them had more amusing ones like, “I told you so.” Which led us to speculate how they would be leaving this world. As for me, I had no clue yet.

    “Come on guys, can we just enjoy this cake? I didn’t spit on it for once!” I said trying to change the topic.

    “Don’t leave us hanging! We’ve waited all year for this!”

    “Fine, let’s finish the cake and then I’ll go check it out.”

    Tanzeel was ahead of me. He grabbed the knife from my hands and started dividing the cake for all of us.

    I sat down there, waiting for the cake to be served to everybody before I started eating my own piece. It was a silent occasion and nobody hesitated to wolf down their helping of the delicious chocolate-flavored dessert.

    “For fuck’s sake, guys! Are you serious? Did you guys attend my birthday party only to find out what I’ll say before I croak?”

    “Yes,” Farez replied sheepishly.

    “You guys are assholes.”

    “Come on, we’re done with the cake, now go find out what your last words are!”

    “Did you know birthday parties are a celebration of life? Not a ritual to find out what someone is going to say before they die?”

    Nobody listened to me. They just stared at me, waiting for me to get out of my seat to look for my last words.

    I grumbled and got up and headed to the bathroom. A couple of them followed me to the door. I could hear them from the outside talking among themselves. “What do you think it’s going to say?”

    “I bet it won’t be as epic as yours, Sobia.”

    “What if it’s something sad?”

    “Oh shit, I never thought of that.”

    I put their voices out of my head as I removed my shirt. There was nothing on my body. Craning my neck around, I checked out my reflection. Nope, there was nothing on my back. Hmph. I guess I’ll have to check my lower body. I took off my shoes and my pants. I noticed some letters trailing out under my boxers. It was on my thigh. Not too bad I guess, it would be easy to keep concealed. I pitied those people who had messages on their foreheads. Nobody understood how these last words appeared or where they appeared. It was just an accepted fact of life. We all just learned to deal with it.

    I pulled one leg of my boxers up to reveal the full message. Oh fuck. Is this some sort of joke? I stumbled backwards and fell to the floor on my ass.

    I heard banging on the toilet door. “What’s up man? Don’t leave us hanging!”

    I took another look at the message on my thigh. I rubbed at it, to make sure that it wasn’t some sort of marker pen joke. The words remained, as clear as day.

    “What are your last words? Do you need help in there?”

    I tuned out their voices again as I sat on the floor, pondering my last words. No, this can’t be real. Why the hell would I say such a thing? I remained speechless. I didn’t know what to say. I couldn’t tell my friends what my last words were. Nobody could know. I broke down and cried.

    “Are you alright? What’s wrong? If you don’t reply, we’re coming in!” yelled Farez.

    I couldn’t reply. My friends kicked the door in and found me on the ground, a whimpering mess.

    “Holy fuck, Zoraiz. What the hell are your last words going to be?”

    I didn’t reply. They inspected my body and saw the words on my thigh, still revealed for all to see.

    “There is no God but God, Muhammad is His messenger.”

    Writing Prompt from Reddit: When a person turns eighteen, their last words appear somewhere on their body. Yours frighten you intensely.

  • How’s it going?

    When white people say “How’s it going?” they don’t really care about your day. It’s just a greeting.

    This was a note that I saved on my phone in June last year. I realized that when I was traveling a lot for work and everybody would say that to me. Initially, I’d respond by telling them how it was going. “Oh, I’ve been very busy.” “Oh, life’s alright.” and so on. It took me to realize that it was just a greeting and people didn’t care about how my life was going. I thought that was pretty funny because nobody does that here in Malaysia. In my experience, if people ask you how’s it going, they want to know how things are going with you.

    Not many people in the remainder book industry that I met were smokers. The handful who smoked, I got along with pretty well, sharing cigarettes and conversation out in the cold weather after meals. Not sure if that helped with lowering the prices for the books we purchased, but I’d like to think so! Smoking gave me time alone which was good. It was nice to take a break every now and then, especially when you were traveling with the same people for a month straight. I cherished the breaks I had. It allowed me to recharge. Dr. Pepper in one hand, cigarette in another.

    Driving a car in the UK was also a fun experience. For the first few days, I was worried about my car stalling whenever I had to stop. Eventually, that fear went away and operating a manual car became second nature. Except when it came to roundabouts. Man, I clenched my butt cheeks every time we arrived at one. Fortunately, we did a lot of night driving so traffic wasn’t a big issue. I used Google maps to navigate, so I never got lost getting anywhere. I was definitely a much slower driver than my boss then, but I guess it was expected – I don’t even speed when I’m in KL.

    No idea when I’ll drive again in the UK, but for now I’m content with KL’s roads. Especially for the next week, when all the immigrants go back to their hometowns for Chinese New Year. Kek. I’m probably going to lose money gambling, but sitting around a table with friends is worth the entrance fee.

    Isn’t it great living in Malaysia? We get way more public holidays than we deserve – but I’m not complaining about it.

  • The Magic of Layers

    The Magic of Layers

    It has been two weeks since my initial post about the Vortex Core, and I’m pleased to say that things have improved a lot for me. I’m hitting at least 70 wpm when I don’t have to type too many symbols. I decided that the default layout was not the best for me so I made some changes that have made life much easier for me.

    First up, I noticed that I was only hitting the space bar with my right thumb. Since the right space bar was mostly untouched, it made sense to rebind it to something useful. The right space bar is now my Fn key. I moved the directional arrows to Fn + WASD, and I changed the default Fn key to ‘. I put volume up and down on Fn + Q or Z. Page Up and Page Down are now Fn + L or ;. Home and End are now Fn + O or P. My brackets are now on Fn + Del or Fn + Backspace. Fn + X or C is Ctrl + Left or Ctrl + Right.

    I noticed the improvements immediately. Using the Core was so much more pleasant after the adjustments I made. I still can’t type numbers without looking at the keys, but I don’t hesitate so much anymore when hitting Fn + Tab to get 1. $, %, ^ and & still require me to look at the keyboard, but I can hit ? with muscle memory more than 50% of the time.

    I’m sure there’s a lot more I can reprogram to be more efficient but this is working for me so far. I also read that there’s a Vortex Core layout editor available online that allows me to rebind every single key on the keyboard, so I’ll be looking in to that in the future.

    I’m still in love with the form factor of the keyboard. It slips easily into this soft case I have, which takes like 2 seconds to pack, and it allows me to bring it with me everywhere I go. I’m waiting for my magnetic USB cables to arrive from China so the Core’s port won’t be damaged due to my frequent plugging and unplugging.

    I’ve already replaced two keycaps (Esc and Enter) since I’ve already got those keys memorized (`~ and =+). I can’t wait to get everything in my head so I can go ahead with a full replacement of the keycaps.

    Speaking of keycaps, there’s a set that I’ve been eyeing for some time now and I’m trying to decide if I should pull the trigger. They look so damn good. Just picture them on a HHKB layout 60% Kreygasm.

    Anyway, I think this post concludes my successful transition to 40%. I’m really happy I stuck with the keyboard and managed to get over the initial hurdles of using something this tiny. In the future, I’d definitely be keen on picking up more 40% boards but for now I’m content (even though the MagicForce 48 running on massdrop now looks quite tempting haha). I haven’t used my Anne Pro or AK33 in a while, I wonder if I’ll have issues going back to them next time.

    Also, MX Browns aren’t a bad switch. Sorry, just had to put it out there because I don’t think they deserve the hate they get.