BUG

Whoever would have thought watching 1/3 of a movie with a 3 letter title could inspire me to write... but it did. Inspiration comes from the most unexpected venues sometimes.

A few nights ago, I came across this movie, bug - the summary of the movie provided by the channel was: a chain of events that began from the killing of a bug... hence the title I suppose ;-)
I missed the beginning, but the little that i watched (1/2 hour) is sufficient for me to dedicate time and space to the movie.

There was a cook/chef cooking some food in the kitchen, when a song plays on the radio and the deejays requesting listeners to call and guess the song. The cook knew the song and turned off the stove to go make the call... the food in there was less than 1/2 cooked. Then, a customer walks in, and the boss sees the cook missing, and just scoops up the half cooked dish to be packed for the customer.

The next scene was the said customer vomiting, and the health inspector checking the premises of the diner... and telling them to check the refrigeration systems and all. (No one knows about the half cooked dish except for those watching the movie, i think). The boss turns in to a mad guy, and locks the door and makes the cook (actually i think he is his assistant) throw out all the meat and stuff. The cook refuses as he has to leave early, but the boss forces him too. And then this other guy pops his head into the diner and gets chased off by the boss... but the assistant calls him back and gives him baseball tickets to the dodgers game.

So this guy goes back, and his wife is preparing dinner... she tells him that dinner will be ready in a while, but he goes out for the game anyway. The wife is so upset that her husband didn't even bother eating her food, that she drove herself to a pub/male strip joint and got unbeliavably drunk... as she was driving, she happily hit a stationary car.

The next day, as her husband was driving to work, his way was bloked by the hit car, so he took another route which was blocked by a dog. He wanted to get the dog out of the way and instead he got a summons for illegal parking. The guy at the restaurant cannot bear it anymore, and decides to quit (after giving up his tickets... poor chap) On the way, he throws something and it hits the glass of another shop. Glass shatters.

A man sits quietly by a cafe and sees the scene between the dog and the man, and gives a talk about it in the evening, coincidently watched by the man the story is about... he calls his wife who is again preparing dinner, and asks her what she'd do if he became all helpless... (this had sthg to do with the talk show)... and she was obviously not ready for that kind of a question and this man started accusing her of having someone else and even gave the guy a name.

In another totally unrelated scene (at that moment), a restaurant gives a reserved place to this couple because the person in charge and the guy from the couple know each other... and then when the ppl who made the reservation arrived, they were informed that no reservation had been made, and the poor man in charge to book the reservation was fired, because the meal was for an extremely important person who insists on eating there and there only.

The fired man is then talking to his wife and they decide on steps to reduce expenses until something is done, one of which includes stopping his daughter's dance lessons... next scene, another family, with the father happily talking to his daughter who was chosen to have a solo act in a dance recital because; "katie quit class". - katie; the girl from the family above.

The story ends here, for me because I had to give the tv to my father who wanted to watch wrestling... sob sob... so i never found out how the story ended and how the ppl in the show had their events related to one another.

Makes you kinda think about how one small event, ie; killing a bug - which i also missed, by the way could lead to so many changes in the lives of the ppl around the incident. Thought the idea was quite interesting to ponder upon

A reason why dreams should never come true

Yeah, I had a dream again, but this one was kinda scary, a bit of adventure and something supernatural. As usual there was a whole bunch of people around me, and somewhere in the middle we had a nice picnic (at the dinner table) of finger sandwhiches, and salad and other stuff.

Back to the dream; there was this place which folks believed to be haunted, or something sinister like that, and whoever who investigated the area was doomed to some pretty shitty luck after that. For instance, there was one latin american woman who lost her fiance after doing some investigation - (my dreams have apparently become international)Anyway, all of us there were investigators of the paranormal, where in real life all of us had different jobs.

Four of us were the latest to arrive at the site, and we were kinda given a tour by one of the 'seniors' there (the latin american woman) and she was sadly explaining that once there, you'd never want to leave the place cause there's just too much sorrow elsewhere (the bad luck thing), but not so normal things also happen to you when you are there.

As we were checking out the area, one of my teammates pointed out that the paths in the area, (secondary jungle) suddenly stopped, as though no one had dared to move forward and make the path, or the growth which grew back after being cut didn't look any different from the original sides. That looked pretty frightening in the dream as everything was a blur... and the whole area was sort of elevated, as though someone had cut circular pieces of rock and arranged them one on top of another like a rough edged mountain.

After checking out the area, we went in for lunch, ate and I went off to get something in the room I was in. There I saw one of my team members sitting crossed legged and offered me a tall glass, and said that i forgot to have their special drink. Going nearer, I reached for the glass when i saw that it was filled with some yellowish liquid that looked inedible - I asked what it was and the fella said that it was a mixture of plasma, and that I must enjoy it.I ran out (thankfully I was near the door) and met a bunch of people outside... one of them the fella who offered the gross thing, looking inside tha room, we could still see the same fella holding the glass. When he saw us he vanished into thin air.The Latin woman came forward and was about to say something when I woke up - damn; but i figure that what she wanted to say was that I was doomed.

The jinxed ex-roomates and other coincidences

This story goes way back to 5 years ago when two 20 year olds were made into roomates (by some higher forces known as the residential college management)... and the trials and tribulations that followed :)

How many of us would have had roomates who were born in the exact same year, and same month albeit 9 days later, and while 1 roomate was born on a single digit date, the other roomate was born on a 2 digit date, but adding up both those digits, you'd get a single digit which is the exact same date as the first roomate?

However, their story begin a little earlier than 5 years ago... after becoming friends due to being in the same course and for the same reason why ppl actually become friends in the first place, these two ppl were faced with quite a number of occurences that would one day make them look back and realise that they were probably jinxed.

See, what used to happen back then was, (this was a year before they became roomates) having the same classes, they used to have some of the afternoons off - nice sunny weather to do the laundry. The sun would be shining brightly, and beckoning ppl to go and hang their laundry until the clothes became 'crispy'. Well, not long after the clothes were washed and hung out to dry, dark clouds would appear and it would rain - extremely heavy at first followed by prolonged drizzling. But this strange weather pattern only happened IF and ONLY IF both of them did their laundry at the same time. It happened every time, until one of them decided that she'll not do her laundry if the other friend did.

There were also other incidents that made the girls wonder if there was something not quite right going on... like when they passed under this one particular street light, the light would go off, just like that... and all the other things they had to face when taking classes with scary lecturers and then jumping from the frying pan into the fire, because things always managed to end up being worse when they have changed sections.

You would also think that five years down the road, they couldn't possibly be jinxed anymore... although they do keep in touch, they are now both working in different states, doing totally different things and hanging out with totally different ppl... but it was not meant to be so. It so happened that one of the roomates called the other and they were talking for an hour or so about things in general, including who has heard from whom and the problems plaguing the community, such as the ever increasing petrol prices...

Roomate A said that ever since she got her own car late August last year, the price of petrol has gone up thrice... silence on the other side... Then roomate B said..."August, yeah, i got my car back then too... looks like when we only had our OTF's (Own two feet), the petrol prices remained quite stable... this definately has got something to do with the fact that I bought a car" Roomate A was surprised to find that roomate B still thought that way... that things would go WAY out of hand just because the world was against them.Roomate B replied..."yeah... of course, makes you feel much better doesn't it?"

And the 2 ex-roomates continued their conversation on other things...

the imaginary sister

Dedicated to the real sister :)

Being an only child for ever so long, (almost 5 years), all I wanted really badly was a sister. Am I to be blamed here? My aunts used to have tonnes of fun with each other, and 2 of my best childhood friends happened to be sisters!

And then she was born! I guess I forgot to ask my parents for a walking, talking sister... not a baby.Being someone witha somewhat wild imagination... (I blame it here on the lonely years), one day (after she started talking and walking) when my mom was doing some spring cleaning, I decided to 'entertain' my sister with a story.

See, what happened was, mom brought out this bag with a "melbourne" tag on it... (think someone got it for her from there). Being 6+ at that time I obviously could not pronounce the word 'melbourne' but read it as 'malboro' (definately more pronouncable!). And then the wild imagination began...

I told my sis, (naive lil' thing) that we once had a sister called Malboro (elder sister) who went to live in Australia, and that the bag belonged to her once and she left it at home before she left. (there was also a whole lot of other stuff that I told her but can't seem to remember them now - apparently she can't remember them too)

Anyway she believed that we had another sister until someone had told her otherwise (I think!). Well, that killed our imaginary sister (though her memory remains till today... I fashioned her after my mom's cousin, whom I thought was very pretty), but a real sister is better than an imaginary one anyway.

The cool part is that Geetz remembers this story till today. (She was only 1 at that time) Must've been pretty convincing, huh?

God Knows (the book)

Recommended by a friend as a book I should read, an attempt to summarise it as requested by another friend, and a need to remind myself why I enjoyed the book (3 good reasons to write this post after 3 years of reading it once)

The story is unlike any other book that I have read. Set in the Phillistines, I guess it touches on the eccentricity (until I get a better word) of King David. Seen through the eyes of the good old king himself, it is like perusing his secret diary.

Firstly, he has (I forgot the number, but I'm not exaggerating when I say many) wives, and he has a fantasticly positive (and humorous) outlook towards his life, his wives, and (his harem, kids and kingdom, etc)

He mentions how he got hold of wife (No 2), the (former?) wife of his army captain... He sends the guy out to war; checks her out and decides to get her for himself. Sneaky guy, this David.... :)

And then of course there's Solomon, one of his kids. There's this old story about how a KIng Solomon solved a problem of 2 ladies fighting for a baby by suggesting that they cut the baby in half- the logic being the natural mother will never allow such a thing to happen. However, according to David, Solomon actually did think of cutting up the baby (David sighs as he narrates how silly some of his kids could be)

Hmmm... looks like Solomon isn't as wise as ppl used to think.
What I found particularly endearing about this book is the perspective each incident is seen by david, and at times, you do feel sorry for him when he shares with the reader the problems he faces while performing his duties as king and/or father, especially when he has to bear with his kids trying to kill each other to become king and some other forms of sibling rivalry/animosity (putting it really mildly there)

I'd read the book again if I ever come across it (again) ;)

Overused phrases and their consequences

When you hang out with ppl long enough, you tend to use the same type of language especially when speaking. In the course of "hanging out" with my friends from university, i noticed that one of the phrases overused was "jump off a lake". Logically speaking, it doesn't make any sense jumping 'off' a lake, when the lake is actually a body of water with nothing to serve as a platform for you to 'jump off' unless of course you're a toad idling it's time on a lilypad.

Some time later, the phrase " my foot and a half" was extensively used to address never ever cases... cause "my foot" was not sufficient enough to emphasise the feelings expressed during those times. Whenever I got home during the holidays, my sister would give some comments about the phrases that I picked - and for this she said; "you better be careful or else you're really gonna have a foot and a half" - which obviously fell on deaf ears.

Sometime during that break, when I was hopping out of the bathroom ( i hop out of the bathroom, not walk - a very bad habit if i may say so. ;-)), i skid forward (slippery floor- i'm not to be blamed) and hit my right foot on the washing machine nearby and broke my toenail in half. It split right across the middle and was bleeding for a couple of days.
Looks like "never ever" is a much safer phrase to use.

How many have been fooled?

April 1st. April Fool's Day aka All Fool's Day. The parents' wedding anniversary.

1992: The big tree between the year 1 block and the year 6 block fell down and damaged part of the year 1 block the night before. No one was hurt, but there was 1 less tree in the world to save the environment :( ... The good thing out of it, me and a classmate had a conversation topic for a dialogue assignment for BM.
1995: The wonder years! A few of us planned a trick on an unsuspecting friend. A poem with corny lines such as:
Your eyes are like the stars in the sky....
Your hair is black and silky like satin.....
Unsuspecting friend humoured us by replying....
My hair looks like a mop!
On April 1st we gave her a flower as a token of appreciation for being such a sport.

1996: At my most mischievous:
It was fun playing with people's most valuable assets... but utterly mean. The victim was the president of the English Language Society at school. Wrote her a letter from a guy who proclaimed himself to be casanova. Cool part was that she actually believed it. The problem started when started asking questions... she suspected it to be someone she knew, " some horrid 'perasan' guy that thinks he is hell of a good looking prince charming..."
In the end, she took the joke pretty well, a bit too well in fact, I have a feeling she was mostly relieved. I wish I had the letter to be able to post it here, but it is now unfortunately history!

2001: Told my friend who was reliant on his phone that the network we were using at that time was closing down. He believed it! Weirdly enough, in 2003 the network was bought over by another network... Be careful what you say....

2006: Got fooled big time this year. Received an email attachment from a friend, inviting the friends to his engagement. Was all geared up to reply a big hearty congralutory mail, when the attachment revealed it's true content....