Of Snakeoils and Wolftickets

It’s a tiresome week.


I didn’t have a day off; I worked on Thaipusam, and the best thing is that I went there in work clothes at the usual time only to find out that work starts at 10, where non-formal clothes are allowed and it’s actually a half-day. So I was at work dressed like Napoleon Dynamite at prom dance, sitting with people in jeans and t-shirts and Hawaiian shorts, working hard on a day I shouldn’t be working, and then working past what we constitute as a half-day.


That morning Pei Ling dropped me the news that Heath Ledger is dead, and I remembered being stunned on the way to McDonalds for lunch, repeating the news to anyone who asked and realising that I was talking like I was shell-shocked and traumatised (I wasn’t; I was just very surprised, but I think I looked completely despaired).


I just wished the church in Australia will bury him; I heard from someone he was refused burial there because he acted in Brokeback and it was a “blatant promotion of gays and the rights of homosexuality”. He’s not gay. Give him a break, and let him rest in peace…


Leeching off the free internet at work (until recently, when it refused a connection to my laptop as though in determined retaliation), I found a very neat song titled “Mad World”, sung by Gary Jules doing a cover for Tears for Fears (an 80’s band). If you’ve heard of it, you’ve probably heard it over Donny Darko or in the first Gears of War teaser. It’s a sad song, about the world and how normality is madness mostly, only that we don’t see it that way, but I don’t do it justice so listen to it if you can.


Downloading Gary Jules meant that I would subsequently get his entire album, which I did, and it was a pleasant collection of gentle songs titled under the album name of Trading Snakeoils for Wolftickets.


I don’t know what it meant, but I like how it sounds. And mostly the songs sound great too.


*******


I’ll be heading down to Segamat for my aunt’s wedding tomorrow and will be back on the 28th. Maybe I’ll blog about it, with pictures and videos and stuff.

Dinners,

Which now happens with me feeling so utterly exhausted that they seemed to have turned into a state of otherworldly affairs; I’ve been dining with aliens and dragons and King Tutankhamen himself (who, after a couple of mouthfuls of coke, told me he wished that everybody should stop making a fuss about his cursed tomb, which wasn’t cursed in the first place, only booby-trapped and clogged with unwashed sewage), and that wasn’t even the weirdest sensation; there was one dinner which I remembered ordering a plate of tom-yam chicken rice only to get a plate of rice with chicken and no tom yam but some really bad tasting sauce like Bolognese only burnt and too salty.

But the sad reality is that I’ve been dining pretty much alone most of the nights, which can be somewhat dull, and it came to a point where I quoted this to a girl at work; “Like the song, ‘I don’t like to sleep alone’, I don’t like to eat alone. Let’s go for lunch.”


She didn’t know the song and thought I meant that we should sleep together as much as eat together, which would’ve gotten me a sexual harassment suit, only that she must’ve thought I was making a very bad hit-on and decided to brush it off as a cold joke. Thankfully and sadly.


But there are some nights in which I didn’t eat alone; one dinner I managed to give the work an early slip and found myself at grandma’s eating a heavenly dinner with the parents. Heavenly, which is just about what orgasm could get you, on the right circumstances, and having eaten nothing but MSG coated meals over the past months, home cooked food probably beat whatever it is a bed and a lady would get me.


And then there was the dinner with friends; Pauline, Vic and Kelv-ster, at Nando’s Mid Valley, where the food came fast and the company great fun, and there was a lot of catching up done. And it was like the reunion of the nonsensical study-group. A very noisy, very funny one.


Friday, I was at grandma’s again, and what was supposedly a short trip to take a trough home ended with me washing down a miserable dinner with a supper of Lap Chap Choy, which meant A Mess of Vegetables; one of grandma’s specialty.


Work is all same-same. I didn’t even feel like I was doing any work at all; just type, call, type, call, talk with Ji Lin (which I will now refer to as Mademoiselle Escargot) and go to the rare meeting, in which I try to take in anything, fail, and end up nodding like a very attentive fool.


The garden is now done; the cement is on, the roof thingy up, and whatever modifications and placements my dad wanted was pretty much taken care of. There’re only grass to mow and aquariums to clean, to which tomorrow will be occupied with.


The Rastafarian pup is now placed outside, in which he now experienced his first feeling of neglect, the bitter cold of a thundering rain and the lack of company. Now he looks at me with all the sadness any puppy-dog eyes would generate, but dad never considered having a dog in the house, and he now has a very big kennel with a makeshift bed to sleep on.


*****************************

Stand at the edge, and know that you’re alone.

I read that somewhere, forgot about it, remembered it but not who wrote it; anyone know?

Work is Monochrome







There is no wait.





No knowing where it falls






No room for patience.





No end.

***********

I was bored at work.

Flash makes a very good substitute for paint.

I think there is a large percentage of people in the world who proclaim (with much integrity) that Life’s a Real Practical Joker; the way it leads you down to somewhere only to constantly steer you towards the marshlands, or pot-hole pedestrian, or sometimes the guillotine museum while at essence you’re pretty much going to end up in the same place as everyone. Why make it so taxing?


Then there’s another percentage of people who says that Life’s Full of Raillery and it’s pretty much all harmless stuff unless you think it is otherwise. Mind over matter is the key, and to quote the common term that they roll around with their tongues in cheerful-spouting sweetness; When life’s getting you down, just smile, smile, and you’re not in frown.


Then there’s the other percentage who says everyone is a hypocrite, even themselves, and they live a life in abject hate of everything.


I, for one, don’t know which percentage do I belong in. I would like to say I’m in the Life’s Raillery bandwagon, but sometimes I feel that choosing that makes me one of the Everybody’s a Hypocrite club. Either way, does it really matter? I think life’s pretty much where everyone lives and dies and try not to suffer so much in the process. And making sure they have offspring. And that’s why most people think gays aren’t really ‘living’, but that’s their problem to ponder, and to peace with them.

It’s an Oh Noes! Week. You can imagine me going Oh Noes! so many times now I’ve close to turning into Edvard Munch’s The Scream, and I thank that to the fact that I’m now probably going to be twice busier with triple the things to worry about.


It feels like exploitation. It feels like the cultural creations of the world is in conspiracy against me. It’s filial piety and workmanship abuse. It’s the obdurate over the friable, where I’m the cookie and someone’s very determinedly threatening to crumble me unless I do what they want. I’m the lesser individual here, and there’s nothing I could do without suffering the consequences, and while I don’t believe that there is ever too high a price to pay, there is a price so high it will make you penniless and in eternal torment under some sort of relentless loan system.


There’s nothing else to do but to play along, and at most, make the best out of it, I guess. Yup, I’m in the Life’s Raillery bandwagon, with a cartful of hippies, singing Raindrops keep falling on my Head.


My back hurts. I think I overworked it. Either that or I’ve been bending down wrongly while doing the garden reconstruction. We’re having one part of the garden cemented and dad saw to himself to use whatever we have to relocate to turn another, more desolate, part of the garden into an oasis. I’m already so wasted over Industrial Training and now my weekends are a part-time construction worker. I’ve done my fair share of hoeing, brick transferring and soil disposing. I want my rest back. Give me my rest.


And my job seems to have taken a turn towards the troublesome; now Ji Lin and I have to work on a bunch of nonsense that’ll take the whole 3 months and I’ll have to go around researching and doing meetings and stuff. To cap it off I’m (supposedly) group leader, which sucks, and I’m already at riff with the fact that I feel like I’ve been misplaced for this internship crap. Oh noes…


The only good thing this week was Kelv-ster dropping by on his off day for lunch, and while it was short it was good to catch up on stuff. Everyone seems to be doing fine working at the papers. Makes me wonder and wish.


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I’m sorry if the post didn’t make any sense. The sleep gnomes have raided my brain terminals and are now launching a full-scale assault of the left cerebral bunker. Which means it’s only moments before I dddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddd
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Running the cogs.

Maybe it’s only me but I find it exceptionately easy to fall into routine. It’s only day 6 at work and I’m already going on it like I’ve done it for the past 2 years (excluding the hard and new parts, like going on a meeting with a very lethargic looking person from the insurance brokers or calling a designer who sounded like I’m willing him to commit suicide).

It doesn’t mean I’m doing a good job, though. It also didn’t mean that I enjoy routine and monotony. I don’t. I like things fresh and constantly new, yet it is undeniable that we live on routine and that routine does, at most, bring comfort and peace and consistency.

Work day will begin by waking, packing, taking the 7.30/7.45 train to KL Sentral, grabbing the Klang train at 8.15/8.30, breakfast, work, lunch, work and then the train home, which I use to catch up on my anime on the phone. Then dinner, then chill, then sleep until the next day and rinse and repeat.

I’ve been getting along the days feeling like I’m part Gene Kelly under the rain and part Forrest Gump on a road trip, in the sense that I’m feeling cheerful over things I don’t really know or don’t really understand or just cheerful anyway because it’s the way to be. Not in the manner like I’m having a spring in my step or seeing fraying bougainvilleas as majestic roses; but I’m walking with the sun behind a gentle cloud and humming to whatever song that’s stuck in the head.

I take it as a way to cope with the strain, but well, if it is, then I’m coping pretty well.
I realised today that I didn’t like my job. I don’t hate it, but it’s just this; it’s not something I’ve signed up and bargained for. It’s something I would’ve done in a desperate state of unemployment, but at the whole - especially when reading up or listening on fellow course mates’ exciting and unpredictable ventures - I feel like I’ve registered for the Dead Poets Society and instead got the Campus’ Program for the Future Janitor.

To think that I spent months wondering how it would be to cope with journalism, when now I’m doing anything but journalism. And where I’m sitting now, things are starting to get stale and uninspiring if not for the rather positive outlook I seem to have on it (learn what’s shoved to you, because in the real world where dog eat dogs and corporate leaders are masked alien tyrants, whatever you can get, keep it).

And so I did.

A few people asked why I didn’t apply for a change when I discovered I won’t be doing journalism, the big punch-line is that; I didn’t know I won’t be doing journalism until the end of the exams and I’m starting to get calls from the office. And it’s not like I can completely help it. Ms Sharon said I’ll be going to an ‘online publication company’ (to which I immediately deduced is a HoMag, due to the secrecy of it). Ms Sharon also said ‘online magazine’, I believe, and even at the amended list of where we’ll be sent to, mine was marked ‘online JR co’.

Gee whiz, I sure was expecting some sort of obscure online magazine where the people will work in leather-tight pants and worshipping Hardo-Gay. At least that’s a journalism co, even if it will hurt my heterosexual believes and standpoint. What I got is an IT company that has, at this moment, nothing to do with whatever online publication aside from the fact that it publishes websites. Does that count?

No, I don’t enjoy typing letters. I don’t like calling designers to goddamn send the brochure drafts. I don’t like the sound of grant proposals and hamper fax advertisements and I sure dislike making minutes of meetings. The only thing I enjoy is the little bit of advertising copywriting I‘m tasked to do, but at the end of the day, I wonder why I’m there doing the things I’m not supposed to.

I don’t hate it. I’m learning from it. But damn, I want to write about something that has happened and then let others read it, because even if it’s the most basic, stoic and downright boring piece of writing, it’s still a story.

I want to write stories.

*******************************

Apparently, the kitten I let in from the gutter seem to be treating the place as some sort of hide-out. Or at least, that’s what its mother would prefer to think, and now when I go behind I hear mewing and if I pop the gutter-hole open, a kitten head appears and would seem to want to come inside and tear at the curtains.

Dad’s idea is to flush it away with boiling water.

My idea is to leave the gutter hole open and when the kitten’s in it’ll meet the Rastafarian pup and maybe they can be friends.

********************************

How does this sound for the opening text to a website Client Support page?

“In giving life, God gave the means to live.”

If you see it online somewhere, you’ll know that it was written by a guy half-awake and wallowing in the last bit of his daily-depleting sanity, and know to feel some sort of pity, perhaps, or even feel happy for him, because it’s sadly the only thing creative that he felt he had done over the past week.

And it just got better.


I’m surviving, I think. It’s the sort of week you get that resembles the first days on a deserted island where you don’t have your own calendar and didn’t know that coconuts are strong laxatives. And you get your rain and shine which you try to keep away with whatever strands of palm leaves you can get and you surely don’t know how to make a fire. Yet.


But as surviving goes you adept and surely, just surely, at one point I would know that if you rub a stick over a handful of dry leaves you might just get your fire.


Let’s see; first week of the year, first three days on the job (industrial training) and a weekend with no parents plus construction work (cement pavement) happening at the garden. Lots to talk about, innit? Well I’ll start by pulling a leaf out of my fellow blogging friends, notably The One on a Retarded Journey (Cartoon Chronicals) and the Twisted Trainsistor, and go along depicting the brief details of my past week by categories of events/incidents/accidents/


To which, to start with:

Industrial Training

I have to admit; I woke up on Wednesday morning, took the train, took the LRT and took the bus to the office telling myself that I’ll be at a somewhat small office doing anything but journalism and having things easy in a way but disappointing in another. And I was right, somehow, because the office is somewhat small, and I’ve been doing anything but journalism, but what I didn’t count on was that being one who (currently) has to market himself based solely on his (deplorable) skills to write, I wouldn’t be able to have it easy.


In fact, I have it easy in the certain things that I do, like, what? Typing letters and a daily update? Cake. Not cake when having to do a lot of it.


And somehow Ji Lin and I are put into a few major projects, where there’s considerably more work to do compared to the other fellow interns (from PD block), and it just keeps piling up somehow, and now it feels like there’s too much for me to keep track.


Still, it’s an interesting first 3 days. Friendly senior colleagues, and free wireless to secretly DL songs when no one’s looking. My boss, Joe (which I will now refer to as the Bossman) is a nice person, which I would likened to a soft-speaking, more polite and ambitious Joey Tribbiani (in looks), the sort of people with high hopes and a set way to get things done. But he works us off like we’re slaves (technically, on an RM300 allowance, we ARE slaves). Nice dude, but evil. Sigh


There’s Kiwi, my supervisor (I like to think, though more or less Ji Lin and I are under both Kiwi and Joe), which is… how do I put her? Cute and playful and funny but gets the work done like she’s the roman empress. Not tyrannical, not harsh or brutal, but she gets it done with finesse.


Over the three days I’ve been doing copywriting, letters, webpage texts, minutes of meetings, R & D and a whole lot of typing. There’s a lot to tell, but I’m too lazy at the moment, and also because there’s;


Car Problems:


Tyres busting.

Battery weakling. Two days stranded when I arrived back to town to find my car wouldn’t start so I have to call an exasperated dad.

Side-mirror-a-falling. Someone must’ve clipped it. Drove two nights without a side mirror and it is annoying.

Parked Cars a-scraping. Was giving way to an oncoming car and SCREACHEeee

Shitty guys repairing. Two hours at the repair shop waiting for people to come and fix my car and being treated like I was sitting there making trouble. Way to go.

Five golden rings…


Parents. Not. Home:


No. One. Feeding. Dog. Come. Home. Mess. Shit. People. Cement. Garden. Help. Move. Stuff. Tired. Bye. Rest. Day. Ps2. Controllers. Broke. Damn. Nothing. Else. Dead. Bored. Work. Tomorrow. Rush. Home. Feed. Pets. Sigh.

Grant Proposal.

Something that I have to read over on the weekend but I haven’t, because vista won’t open it properly and it’s all jumbled up. Nuts.



Add all of that to a lot of rain and a couple of bad luck, like going to work on your first day with Milo stains on your shirt, and getting major train delays while feeling tired out because the bossman kept us up late at work.


Ah, but I hate to sound like I’m whining; it’s been an interesting week; I’m tired but I’m feeling lively, and sometimes I can’t help but feel useful. Not bad.


To round this post, a kitten crawled up the drain today and got stuck at the gutter (or, rather, the drain where the water from my washing machine goes), and throughout the morning I heard mewing like it was coming from the walls but didn’t pay too much attention; you get cats at the back-alley behind the house too often to care.


Then it rained and I was cleaning up the trash behind when it mewed again, so cousin Ivan and I opened the gutter hole and the kitten was there, wet but strangely calm. It crawled out of the hole and I wrapped him up in an old shirt. After the rain I was thinking of asking some neighbours if they wanted a kitten, but when I got to the back-alley the mother was there peeking into the gutter, so I placed the kitten near where the gutter was and the mother came back soon after to pick it up.


I haven’t heard any mewing since, so I guess it’s good.

It’s that time of year again.

Day 1. The Big Second. The Pivotal Start to a Brand New Beginning.


Which meant that what’s gone is gone and that I should probably start putting up my New Year’s resolutions, only to forget about it come the start of February. But what’s there to put up anyhow? Same old, same old, I’d say. Be a Person should head my list, the way it led the others into a wild plunge towards the army of Unbecoming. Year after year.


Well, it’s the New Year anyhow. It’s 2008, and it’s just about as big as any passing and coming of years, and I should make the most of it. Even if I’ve somehow caught the cough and a rather exasperating runny nose (the type where you don’t quite have boogers but actual water dripping down like failed waterworks), not to mention having the worst night of yester year. And Industrial Training starts tomorrow. Ah, the well and proper start to a brand new year.


It’s the New Year and I should probably put up a review of 2007, which I would do now.


There wasn’t much about the past year; I didn’t remember much of it anyhow, and the first half went like every semester of college, with much assignments and the fair few emotional problems, most of them typically pathetic now that I think of it.


But at May it was finito; college ends and Uni starts, and I said goodbye to many I’ve now lost contact with, though not quite lost as in completely forsaken; only the window of communication and talk shrunk to just as much as a 20 cents stamp. But that’s the way that I know it; wherever there’s change there’s loss, but there’s always gain, and there’s always those maintained even if it trickled away.


And then I transferred from a prim and proper institution into a factory site they call a university, but it’s all fine. Good teachers, great friends and a sleuth of some very interesting characters, like they’re smack out of bizarre-town.


I’ve learned new pointers in writing, and I think I actually improved in my drawing: not that it’ll help in anything. My old laptop died and I got a new one, and the old laptop got revived and is now dad’s. My steadfast Mp3 player got lost and I bought a new one, which is pretty much the same only with more memory space (and a speaker at the back). I got my first article published in the paper, and while it’s nothing worth commemorating or be proud about, I guess it’s a good start.


And the death of Max. And the arrival of Marley the Rastafarian Pup.


The best part of 2007? I don’t seem to have any. I think, on the whole, as every year had been; it was a good year, and I’m glad that I’m at the life I’m in.


2008. It started with a cough, a sneeze, and couple of hours turning in bed in a futile attempt to sleep. And while it’s shitty, from the popping sounds of fireworks and the passing cheers of people in their celebrations, I guess sometimes we can’t help but smile at the coming of things.


Happy New Year.