RACONTEUR-ESQUE SCRIBBLINGS

Long ago, I once told an old friend of mine that tradition is an inconvenience. At that time we were talking about the chronology of a Tamil wedding, which I believe inconveniences the bride big time. Right now, I'm beginning to feel that this tradition of recapping the end of the year before the year ends is a big inconvenience, because part of me is just too lazy too do it, and yet another part of me insists that I should do it, just for the sake of making sure that 2012 is all fresh and new. Weird? Yeah. 2011 must have been one of the shortest years ever - if that's even possible. On the very first day of the year, I sat down and wrote a story called "The Torch of Time" which describes how the years sprint and how they do that on purpose to make us feel as though our lives just fly past us without a pause. I wrote and edited the 800 words under 4 hours and duly submitted it. One and a half months later, the editor of the paper e-mailed me and told me that th...

I was browsing through John Ling's blog just now and found out that his publishing company is helping out a girl suffering from neurofibromatosis , a disease currently without a cure. What they are doing is selling her e-book ( I'm Not Sick, Just A Bit Unwell) on Amazon , and the proceeds (all of them) go to her surgery, and this being their first release and all. The book is free for download until boxing day (yes, this post is out a bit late) I actually figured I'd purchase it but just my luck that Kindle and Malaysia do not have a good relationship with each other. Her website is here: http://www.yvonnefoong.com/

It's been a long, long week at work. Insane is the only way I can describe December (and the number of posts in December, and how delayed I am in commenting and answering comments on the blog can attest to that). What made it all worse is people mentioning long breaks, and about how December is a pretty easy going month and all while it was the complete opposite for those of us who work in my place.   But then, it's Saturday now, and all the effort we put in during the last two weeks means that at least Sunday and Monday should be relatively easy going and peaceful. Fingers crossed.  With that, I figured I should join in the bandwagon and wish everyone a happy (insert name of appropriate festival here) List of festivals: i. *Festivus (Dec 23) ii. Hanukkah (Dec 20 - 28) iii. Christmas (Dec 25) iv. New Year (Jan 1) v. Anything I missed out *Remembered this from a gchat conversation with a friend last year

Note: A possibly pointless post ahead.  There was a time when I used to be an optimist. These days, whatever optimism I have seems to be laced with a certain degree of cynicism. I do not know how (or even when) this happened. About two months ago, I met up with someone I knew from university. I haven't spoken to him since 2000 (I think), so we had a lot to catch up on, mostly working our way from the last time we spoke to what we're doing now, and in the few hours we hung out that day, there was one very obvious thing about him that stood above all others. His optimism/positivity. This made me realise that I was a bit too cynical for my own good, and it was even worse when I started paying attention to his status updates on Facebook. The optimism just oozed out and made a grab for you with invisible fingers.  So, about two weeks ago, I decided to inject a bit of optimism (have positive thoughts) to my life instead. I didn't know how to make such a big change ...

Courtesy of Sunday Stealing The Bud is Back Meme Every now and then, the narcissist in the blogger decides to surface and tell all and sundry about themselves. While yours truly is not really willing to divulge everything about herself (real name for one), she happens to like talking about her blog. A lot. She saw this meme, liked it and decided to honour it by stealing it. After all, that is what Sunday Stealing is all about! 1. Why did you sign up for writing your blog? It happened on a whim - I had stories to tell, and the blog kind of took them in without telling me that I'm crazy. 2. Why did you choose your blog's name? What does it mean? You know how sometimes when you convince yourself enough about something, it may just come true? The same goes for the name of this blog. According to the free dictionary, raconteur means : One who tells stories and anecdotes with skill and wit. Someday, I hope that the blog will live up to it's name :) 3. Do you ever had...

The thing about catching snippets of news on the radio is that you usually only catch the end of the news, mostly after you've heard a word or two that catches your interest. Yesterday evening, those few words were eclipse, Malaysia and seven-ish pm. Of course there were other words such as *climate change to which I raised my eyebrows to an invisible audience as I was driving alone at that time. As eclipses excite me as much as prom night excites a high-schooler, I thought to myself that I will be catching the eclipse - after all it was a Saturday evening, and I had no plans, and I felt a pang of regret when I remembered that I had not bought a DSLR camera as I had planned to earlier (My carefully honed procrastination skills knows no boundaries, ha ha) How part of the eclipse might have looked from some part of the world - 'artist's' (snort) impression Sometimes plans have plans of their own. With an overcast sky (from 3 pm right up to the time when I start...

Otherwise known as why you shouldn't delay posting blog posts when you think you've got a good title for it. It all started with a conversation with my aunt - concerning the brain drain issue plaguing our country. I will not go into the details of the conversation because it's irrelevant to the topic at hand, but we somehow started talking about maids (domestic help) - don't ask me how the conversation took this path, because I can't remember. All I can remember is that when I got back home, I opened Blogger, and typed out at the title box: Maid in Malaysia (Yes, it is unoriginal - no thanks to Maid in Manhattan :p) I never finished started the post. A few weeks later, which is today, as I drive home from work listening to the one and only radio station I ever listen to, what do the radio deejays talk about? Maids (and the issue with Indonesia banning their women from working here due to several incidents) And what do they decide to name this particula...

Ahem. It's how to save your blog actually, from whatever it is that may attack it someday. Some time ago, an old blog of mine got deleted by whoever was hosting it - and, they didn't even bother informing me. I whined about it in a post, and a comment left by Secret Agent Woman got me thinking. It was time to back up this blog too, although Blogger is currently hosted by Google - a huge company if there ever was one. But like everything else in this time and age, you just never know what is going to happen, and no one has guaranteed that your blog is going to be there forever, and what will become of the posts you slaved over the years - spelling mistakes and all? After listening to the podcast in the link below last week, the urge to backup is now stronger than ever. http://bfm.my/assets/files/TED%20Talks/2011-11-27_TEDTalks_SixWaysToSaveTheInternet.mp3 These are a few methods I use: Save the Blog! 1. Blogger's backup system. (found via blogger ...

continued from here How on earth do you make a three day trip stretch to 5 posts and you're still only on your second day? Easy. Firstly, make sure that you had your trip more than a year ago. Secondly, because you have forgotten most of what you did (unless you took notes, which you didn't because your initial plan was to actually complete the write-up as soon as possible), you try recalling what you did by looking back at your photos. Thirdly, because pictures scream a thousand words than actual thousand words do, you end up posting pictures (after cutting yourself out of it, or putting a black box on your face first - if you're in it) and caption them with not so funny captions that they are sufficient to tell everyone about what you did or how your trip went. Fourthly, because the posts are loaded with pictures instead of words, when you preview them , they tend to look extra lengthy, and you don't want that because your aim is to actually share your expe...

1. Why is it that some people always manage to say things that rub you the wrong way in almost every conversation you have with them, although deep down inside you kind of know that they don't mean to be mean to you? 2. I recently noticed that some friends at work have started to refer to me as an English walking dictionary/grammar book. It's strange yet fascinating as my 'knowledge' on grammar is basically based on what I usually refer to as 'it sounds right, so I'll use that' 3. Football (or soccer if you're American) is the only thing that unites the Malaysian people. Politics just do the total opposite. 4. I've been using glasses since I was 7, and while deep down inside I was a nerd to the core, I hid it as best as I could by getting non-nerdy glasses, and using contact lenses whenever I went out with friends, although they all knew I was a nerd. I checked my eyes again recently (the yearly one) and now I've decided to embrace m...

They never sent a warning beforehand although they had our e-mail addresses. One day everything was there, intact, and the next day everything had suddenly disappeared. All those words, all the friends, and all those memories.  Long before Facebook was shoved in my face by a close friend back in September 2007 in which I rather reluctantly embraced it, I belonged to a similar social networking group called Friendster, where I was reunited with a few old friends, some who go back way into the crazy days of pig-tailed childhood (one of them, at least - my hair was always kept short as a child) Such good times. A little later into the social networking bandwagon, they came out with a feature known as Friendster Blogs. As I only had a miserable and erratic dial up connection back then (2005), knowledge about what the internet had to offer was rather limited, so I had no idea that Blogger (then known as Blogspot? - apparently not) even existed.  I had lots of stories to te...

First of all, they are confusing, because they are probably a confused lot themselves. And due to their tendency to be confusing, they end up causing a whole lot of confusion! Juvenile as it seems, and unlikely as it is to have a thirty-something lamenting about something like this, here I am. P.S: Nope, this is not one of those girls vs boys posts, I just had the need to let this out due to some personal reasons and I had nowhere else to put it. PPS: Title of the post modified from the lyrics to the song "I don't like Mondays" by Boomtown Rats.

continued from here: http://raconteuresquescribblings.blogspot.com/2011/11/getaway-to-wettest-town-in-malaysia.html Kuala Sepetang Mangrove Park aka Matang Mangrove Forest Reserve After the jaunt in the museum, where we took a few *illegal photos (see part 3), we drove on towards the mangrove forest, missing the entrance several times before we finally found it - yes, even with the GPS because we had the wrong name - don't ask. Entry was free, and so was parking. Again! The forest reserve is an educational park of sorts, peppered with signboards indicating the different flora (and fauna - but fauna are a bit harder to spot) you could find around you, a platform you could walk on so that the mud didn't damage your footwear, but unless you have enough foresight to think of mosquitoes, without bug repellent, you'd be contributing to a free blood festival for said mosquitoes. You can also choose to stay there overnight if that is your thing - there are chalets there w...

Umbrellas doing a waltz of their own There is a place where government officials carrying colourful umbrellas would waltz around to offer to walk petrified looking students stuck in the rain (one official per student) to their examination centres. No, I have not watched any musicals in awhile, but come on, what else are you supposed to imagine when you hear the words 'Operasi Payung' (Operation Umbrella?) on an otherwise mundane Monday? For some strange reason, the rainy season (yes, although it does rain most of the time, there ARE periods with even more rain than usual, especially around the east coast where it floods like crazy) always seems to coincide with the SPM (equivalent to O-levels) examination so much so that at one point while I was still in school the government decided to tackle the problem by shifting the school year from January to December so that the exam season was just slightly ahead of the rainy season. That didn't work either as the rainy...

Continued from The Wettest Town Part 2 (Note: This trip happened waaaaay back in July 2010 - no kidding, but I had forgotten to continue with the write-up for so long for so may different reasons. A friend's recent trip to Taiping reminded me of the place and here is the continuation - scheduled post) By the time we got back down to sea level after another stomach churning ride down the hill by land rover (and going down is scarier by far, I think), it was almost time for lunch. We headed out to Taiping town to our hotel to chuck our stuff, and freshen up just to head out again for lunch. This time, we picked a Thai restaurant recommended by the GPS. The food was OK, but extremely hot - good for the taste buds (mine), not too good for the digestive system (my sister's) We drove out of Taiping after that heading towards a town called Kuala Sepetang because it was recommended by the caretaker of the bungalow up at Maxwell Hill. Kuala Sepetang was once also known as Port...

Why so cruel?

Someone got stuck in the passenger *lift the other day. Despite the 'unfortunateness' of the incident, he was rather fortunate because he had a walkie-talkie with him and could therefore call for help. Yes, the glass is always half-full, probably because it wasn't me in there, stuck in between floors in a dark and stuffy cube - alone. I've always been worried about using that particular passenger lift due to it's uncanny ability to trap unsuspecting users time and again - sometimes right after it's been serviced. Give me the stairs anytime - plus there's always the promise of nice looking legs with the stairs. The passenger lift  gives the vibes of something lonely and desperate which will decide to force it's company on you whether ypu like it or not, until one of the maintenance guys set you free. I had a dream about it last night. (Edit: Last night was actually Tuesday - I wrote this on notepad during lunch and managed to post it up only today - ...

My mom is a semi-firm believer in the art of fengshui, and she also happens to care way too much about her already grown up kids. When we ask her about it, she says she'll always be our mom no matter how old we get, so that was that. Due to her caring way too much attitude,  a few years ago, she got me a monkey on a horse bronze statue, a small one similar to size of a tightly balled up fist of a 5'3" female - something which fengshui believers believe will help improve our career prospects. The Monkey on a Horse Now, while I'm not much of a believer in anything at all - except maybe for science, I took the statue and duly placed it on my work desk. However, as time went by and I changed office, I ended up putting it and locking it inside my desk drawer. Prior to this, I've had a few things missing from my work desk, from packets of emergency food supply such as the 3-in 1 sachets of cereal or coffee. I brushed it off as co-workers being a hungry lot who...

So, you meet someone in person for the very first time, and instead of going for the tried and tested (but incorrigible) "Nice to meet you", you can now compliment their socks while you shake hands with them. On condition that you can actually see their socks. An excellent ice-breaker if I may say so myself. ;)

Although we do not celebrate Halloween here with Jack O lanterns, trick or treating or even crisp autumn evenings, last Saturday when I was out with a friend, we saw a whole bunch of people dressed up in costumes for a Halloween party at the mall. As a person who is a fan of all chilling tales, and seeing that I have been a bit busy to dig up the rusty old brains for something new, I decided that I'll just repost one of the stories I put back in 2008:   What I'm about to share is creepy enough that I'm only brave to type this out in the broad daylight. This story was told by a friend of my sister's, and apparently happened in a location not too far away from where I live (and the sister was under the impression that I used that route to work and told this story so I'd be careful - but how, I don't know) The place in question was once an oil-palm estate. Today, oil palm trees still sway in the wind in a patch of land which goes almost as far as y...

We pick up books for various reasons. A few weeks ago, my sister and I went crazy in a bookshop named Bookalicious, which had titles you don't often see in the bigger bookstores. After Catcher in the Rye, I had wanted to read Franny and Zooey but just never got the chance because I never found the book. That day we found it, and neatly tucked next to it, was this book, by the same author. Needless to say, we picked both up among various other books.  Now, for some strange reason, at the beginning of October, I had decided that I'd only read horror related books for the whole month - this was after that dream about scary children I had. I only managed three - Let The Right One In The Shining  Abarat (I picked this assuming it was horror because the author was Clive Barker - but it was actually fantasy. Oh well.) I gave up on horror after that, partly because I suddenly didn't feel like reading horror anymore, and also I had ran out of books on horror and ther...

Festivals.... You can't really run away from them even if you wanted to, and in Malaysia, there are just so many of them that it keeps us happy - happy enough to occasionally forget that we are actually angry at the government. There! I have just gone and sullied a festival by referring to politics. Anyway, come tomorrow, will be a festival I celebrate, and while all the excitement I had for festivals when I was a child has been squeezed dry by cynicism and genuine disinterest, I somehow hope that writing about it will at least spark some interest, although I'm pretty much convinced that I'm going to spend tomorrow afternoon sleeping - just like the years past.  The festival is known as Deepavali or Diwali and is commonly also known as the festival of lights, as it was all about good winning over evil. This explains the picture above, an interesting twist to symbolise 'light' which was made by my sister a few days ago... We could just turn off all the ele...

Some time ago, I made use of a children's folk story to poke fun at a certain Malaysian whom I thought was in the news for all the wrong reasons. Turns out, my reference to the folk story has earned  the top spot on google Malaysia when people took the trouble to search the following: click to enlarge Now, while I'm cool about being listed on google and all that (I don't earn money from the blog, so ratings are not and have never been of any particular importance), I can't deny that I'm a tad bit embarrassed about the content of the post (funnily, the thought that the post would be embarrassing never occurred to me when I clicked 'publish') despite the fact that I think the person (for once) may have found what they're looking for. In the initial stages of blogging here on blogspot, and because everyone else was doing it too, I paid a good deal of attention on the blog statistics, and with all the tools out there which are available, it's...

This morning was the first time in over a week where I had a good look at my face while brushing my hair. My eyes seem to have sunken in, my bangs are covering my face right up to the tip of my nose, my skin looks pretty dead and I cannot even begin to explain what my eyebrows have become. I only thought I felt like crap, but it now looks like I also look like crap. And as I am writing this, I'm beginning to feel as though I have written all this before, a long, long time ago. To make it all worse, I have a wedding dinner to attend tomorrow, and I don't really feel like it. In a typical womanly way I'd say that I have NOTHING to wear - which is rather true in a way.

You lie there, awake, your eyes closed but just barely so, your mind refusing to shut down. You shift positions, hoping against all hope that it will help. Instead you repeat the whole process again and again only to be able to fall asleep about 15 minutes before you have to get up and begin a brand new day. This used to be how my life was some time ago that I had actually dedicated a 'label' on this blog to the word ' Insomnia ' Without me realising it, the inability to sleep slowly disappeared over time. Of course it would occasionally creep up on me every now and then, but it was nothing that made me worry endlessly about ending up like The Machinist . Over the last two weeks however, the inability to sleep or insomnia, as I'd rather call it (lets face it, insomnia is just one word that describes the situation instead of the three words used in 'inability to sleep', making it much more convenient!) made a comeback. Being sleep deprived after a long, ...

There is a very talented lady out there who is of the opinion that " Childrin r Skary ". I was first introduced to her wonderful animated works through my sister, in which our talented lady, Katy Towell tells interesting horror stories involving children. I personally find little girls or little boys that make an apperance in my dreams to live up to the opinion that childrin R skary. Take last night's dream for instance. Now, the floor where the office I sit in is located is already full of horror stories that could fill up a short collection of short stories if anyone was interested to take up the challenge in the first place - come to think of it, I could, but knowing me, I'd just scare myself even more, something I'd not want to do seeing that I've been working late the past few weeks. Anyway, back to the dream. I was alone in the office, looking out of the window which is behind my seat due to some noise I heard. The place looks empty enough u...

We all know what happens when we begin to lose momentum. Last month was my blogging month of 2011 after an extremely slow start in the beginning of the year. In fact, I almost wrote a status update on how I thought I got back my momentum, with all intentions of being cryptic about it, so that only people who knew that I blogged would get what it meant. The status update never got the chance to go up at all, and a good thing too. A few things ran a couple of short distance sprints across my mind, and as much as I am all for quality over quantity, for the time being, quantity is of a higher priority, just because it helps keep up the momentum. I don't know if I'm making any sense here or not as I'm practically nodding off as I type this. Anyway, here's a post to just keep up with the momentum.

Burnt socks! The skies were supposed to be clear. Yeah right. Instead, the skies opened up and literally poured water all over us, in varying degrees of showers, drizzle and plain old rain of the cats and dogs variety. Without water proof raincoats, we were just wet and miserable. And cold. I can assure you that wet shoes and socks are not fun at all. The only other not so fun thing I can think of, which is worse than wet socks and shoes is a wet jacket which is supposed to protect you from the cold. Wet jacket, cold wind - totally beats the purpose. As they say, necessity is the mother of invention, and through previously successful rain soaked garb (my sister and I always end up in mysteriously rainy destinations) drying endeavours in other hotel rooms, we decided to follow the tried and tested formula of drying the wet socks on the lamp. It works like a charm and leaves your socks all warm and toasty.  Not this time, though. The socks were left to dry on one of the ...

An *unintentional act of mischief was committed yesterday, somewhere in the afternoon, while a whole bunch of us were seated in a room presenting some reports. I had completed my presentation, and had ceased being worried about it and sat listening to the final presenter - lets call him Arofsky. He was talking about a few activities which he labelled as **3R, and my mind immediately drifted off towards the 3Rs related to the environment - Reduce, Reuse and Recycle . Someone of importance then chose that moment to ask Arofsky what his 3Rs were, and although he's one of those really smooth talking guys oozing with confidence most of the time, he sort of fumbled with the final R, and without much thinking, I prompted him with the word "Recycle" - a bit too loudly, I guess - and he took it as an actual prompt and said 'recycle' to which everyone burst out laughing.   He rectified it with the correct word almost immediately afterwards, but I was too busy being em...

Sometime last week, I found out that R.E.M had decided to disband after 31 long years of making music. Though I knew they've been around for a long, long time, the knowledge that it was 31 years actually took me by surprise. I got to know R.E.M back in 2001 when the song Imitation of Life was repeatedly played. The video, a pool side party in a reversed sequence was equally fascinating. I suppose that song made them popular in these parts, and two years later while Bad Day was receiving lots of airplay due to In Time, I actually won this CD of theirs in a promotional contest organised by a music TV station, which I listened to a lot back then due to my *limited CD collection (Channel V - which for some strange reason has ceased airing it's programmes here since last year) In a freak accident while cleaning up, the CD fell off the shelf and broke into two. Eventually, over the noughties, I ended up being exposed to a lot of their stuff to the point that at one time, m...

continued from The Big North Sumatera Adventure Part V Although I had not mentioned anything about geothermal activity throughout any of the past posts from the Big North Sumatera Adventure series, Lake Toba and the areas surrounding it was actually once a very active area, so active indeed that whatever it was that formed Lake Toba was a supervolcano that erupted over 73000 years ago.  Mount Sibayak and Mount Sinabung are both located near Berastagi. While Sibayak spews out sulphuric vapour every single day, having last erupted in 1881, Mount Sinabung had erupted just slightly less than 2 months before our visit. There also happens to be place where they had pools of hot water from the geothermal activity in that area. It looked like it was an extremely popular thing to do (so many people!), but we didn't take a dip there.  We went back to the now cleaned up hotel, and stayed in for the rest of the night after dinner. We found a creepy looking 'mini house' wit...

Over the past twelve to thirteen years, I've mostly been a light sleeper, unless I'm not feeling well, where I could sleep *like a dead log for hours and hours. I also happen to wake up with the sun - even in a darkened room, alas, although this makes waking up in the mornings extremely easy, much to the envy of those who often oversleep. On Friday morning, however, I found it incredibly **difficult to wake up. The gentle tune of AC Newman's Prophets woke me up with a start at 6:15 am. I groaned as I hit the snooze button. (I do this every morning, but on most days, I'm usually really awake by 6:15 am. I hit the snooze button to fool myself that I'm getting an extra 10 minutes of sleep. Somehow, this actually works wonders) Reluctantly, I got up, but found my toothbrush missing from it's holder. I looked under the holder, behind the place where the toothpaste was kept and even inside the bathroom sink to no avail (I had once lost a toothbrush, and it wa...