RACONTEUR-ESQUE SCRIBBLINGS

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...