Redundancy.

Put a door at someplace that don’t need one.

Can’t think of a place? Perhaps you can take heed and straddle off with these few examples first:


Put a door on your roof.

Put a door on the Karak Highway.

Put a door that opens to a door that opens to an elevator with only one floor button (13) and when you press it the cable snaps and A Whole New World plays on the speakers.

Put a door in the Hulk’s room.

Put a door in a monorail train with the ‘W.C’ label, that opens to nothing.

I think you pretty much get the general idea.

Good ideas, non? Imagine the utter confusion it would cause. An old hobo walks out to the middle of the Karak Highway, and opens the door into a oncoming 16-wheeler (not that we have many of them there). He sees blinding light, and that’s all he will remember.

The point to all this? I’m afraid it’s merely to place my opinion (or rant, if you may) in regards of my dad who, somehow, in spite of all possible explanations except for pure having-nothing-to-do, saw fit to install a door smack between the garden and the new, expanded porch.

Before you start getting impressions of a 7-foot mahogany double-door with brass handles, let me first inform you that it is merely one of them bar-counter doors that opens and flaps back with ease (my father refers to them as ‘cowboy doors’; the ones that open into western saloons and clatter back into place after someone walks through it, which I think is for the ease of the excessively drunk). It is now installed on one of the metal bars that hold the canopy and flaps out into the garden.

Sounds sensible, yes, if we have a wall that specifically would spell “Door here, please”, or even a proper picket fence. What we have is flowers and pots and plastic flower-bed Just Stick it on the Ground and It’ll Look Like you’ve Built It mini fences.

That said, the door now stands so out of place I wouldn’t be more surprised with one on the Karak Way.

I looked at it this afternoon and realised that it’s not really a sore to the eye; it’s just out of place. Not door-on-the-roof out of place, which is downright bizarre. Just… weird. Needless. Yes, that seems to sum it out right.

I believed my father thought it as a means to successfully keep the dogs away from the garden or vice versa, but the dogs have worked it out now and the father is… well, just passive about it.
I just think that it’s uselessly there, like a door to a door to an elevator express to death. Just give me a hole with no “Beware! Hole ahead” sign, and I will gladly (accidentally) fall into it.

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

I’m bored.

(This is holiday boredom, by the way, and not to be associated with other forms of boredom that are inexplicably and inevitably existent in everything else).

Somehow this shouldn’t be, because I have the stack of books I got from the Book Fair Thing that still sits on my table, staring at me glumly and catching dust quick. I haven’t gotten to the rest of them because Danse Macabre proved to be a long read, and somehow I don’t want to start on something else until I’ve finished it.

I also have Chrono Cross on the laptop (EPSXE emulated, with the complete two-disc ISOs), which I know I can get lost into for hours on end. And Tekken 5 is fun fun fun.

Across the Universe is still in the laptop, which I haven’t gotten to watch while at work, and now still haven’t gotten to watch yet. There’s that huge pile of DVDs in the living room cabinet and I might just actually watch the entire Heroes season 1 on DVD.

So why am I bored? What unexplained, incomprehensible, illogical force is holding me into this stagnating and dourly unmoving limbo?

Great skies above! Give me an answer!

Maybe it’s just me. Maybe I’m innately one who seeks the boredom, because being stoned by inactivity is in itself a form of unrequited pleasure, refined, possibly, by dancing away from the other temptations that bid themselves as ‘cures’ for it. That’s right, like a strip tease or a carrot dangling on a pole; pleasures heightened by refraining from it, kept at a distance not too far to whiff but not too near to taste.
Or maybe I’m just being stupid.

The Day Something Bad I Ate Turned into A Swirling World of Crazy that Almost Led to a Puke-Fest.

That was Tuesday, and the food in question was Maggi Mini in a cup. After regurgitating it into the toilet sink, the world was spinning as though I just got out of a carousel after three hours, and it even spun while I closed my eyes. Somehow I managed to tell the people I was chatting with online that I needed to go, and fell asleep until 7.

And then the mother came and woke me up, insisted that I ate plain porridge for dinner (with canned Fried Mackerel and Black beans, so I didn’t protest) and then go rest up. I was pretty alright after that; everything was still tilting from time to time, and when I walked I was pretty sure I was swaggering (“Yarr… is it the boat, or the rum?”). I felt like puking sometimes, but heck; puking takes the worst out of me, so I held it back by eating mango (it helps, really, especially if it's sour).

Somehow I managed to type down a huge remainder of my final report, the ones I left out of procrastination and a stalemate battle between Do or Do the Tekken. The next morning I rushed out the parts that I left purportedly, edited it quickly, printed it out with the appendix and then flew down to PJ to hand it up. All done without breaks; I was still pretty proud of myself, until it happened to me that I could’ve avoided this and gotten it done last Friday.

Well, done is done, and now the swirling has ended and I’ve safely discarded the other packets of the Maggi Mini. I’m free and nothing else should be bothering me unless I saw myself to be bothered.

In all the mess, I even forgot to wish Vic Happy Birthday on Tuesday. Happy Birthday!

(You’ll forgive a friend who had a final report to rush and a massive headache to boot due to some instant noodles, thus forgetting to wish you, would you, Vic? Non? Please?)

(Please?)

(Please? =P)

(Thanks for this pic by the way =P)

Ah, as they say, freedom is felt by the sense of weightlessness on your shoulder, as though the strains of gravity and the worldly power of depression is vanquished by the heavenly wings that spout from your back, bearing you into (temporary) bliss. And somewhere in the clouds, the air with fill your lungs with sweet, Soda Pop tangs and momentarily the angel harp will play in serenading harmony. Oh, Bohemia!

Yeah, well, freedom is dependant, obviously, on the state of what you have just escaped. For me, and for this moment, it just meant that I have more time for myself. And time is all that I need.
I think I’ve had the holidays planned out well enough; I have days for complete leisure, days to take care of some unfinished business and days reserved for freelancing gigs and unplanned family thingies. Ah, there’re a few days, perhaps, for some planned family thingies, which should involve going for a short vacation, and heaven knows we all need that to clear our systems.

Something brighter looms ahead, and being just the good shipmate on board, I steer right towards it.

Water in the watering can; “I’ve made life easier for you…”

My dad can be both ironic and unknowingly hypocritical.


He made me break my back Thursday morning until afternoon, helping him with the plethora of chores that involves the massive pile of animals he had decided, many years ago, to share residence in our humble abode as means of promoting responsibility and a sensation of Zen. It pretty much made my life crappy and burdened with irrelevant workload and worries.


The Rastafarian Pup bathed, the aquariums washed and the turtles fed later, I moved to refilling the rabbit’s water-bottles. Unknowing to me, he had actually placed a watering can full with water near the cage, for me to fill the bottles with.


I didn’t notice, of course, and when he saw me heading (trudging) towards the pipes, he said to me; “There’s water in the watering can. I’ve filled it for you.”


“Oh,” I said, and walked back to the cages.


“I made life easier for you. What do you think I’d do?”


“Ah.”


I was crouching on the ground, refilling the bottles, when it hit me like the boulder from Raiders of the Lost Ark. I laughed grimly, flushing away the rabbit droppings.


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


A note to all:


If you’ve heard about the infamous Orson Wells War of the Worlds radio broadcast that caused nationwide mayhem because people actually believed martians were invading with heat rays and tripods, it’s now available for you to listen.


Part one of the broadcast is here: http://youtube.com/watch?v=4wf5TPVz56A. You can find the remainder of it there as well.


One part of Stephen King’s Danse Macabre (a study of the horror fiction genre by the King of macabre himself) talked about horror on the radio. He harkened back to the time where radio drama was just as staple as Heroes and Desperate Housewives are to us; a fusion of dialogue and narration (by 1950’s radio spokespersons, which can say “Ladies and Gentlemen, we interrupt this broadcast to bring you…” in such perfection you wonder what evolutionary pandemic had caused our voices to degrade) that played on our imagination, giving us the canvas to draw on rather than a full picture.


I’ve read that part, which has Arch Oboler and Orson Wells and some interesting measures of horror voices and sound effects can give you, and went to try the vast ocean of Youtube for some samplings. I wasn’t disappointed.


Orson Wells’ War of the Worlds, I’d say, is ingenious. The things they can do before the tube of images and sounds turned into imagination itself.

73 Days Later…

And I was liberated.

But liberation, I believe, depends on how you look at it; three months and a half had been both long and brief, but after the liberation -- the act of walking past the prison gates, towards the waiting car, nary a look backwards -- it is back to the old humdrum monotony of having nothing else to do.

I don’t have to go to work now, I tell myself in the morning (not yet anyway, not until I’ve graduated and got lucky). I have to wake up and do the chores and make sure that the pets don’t die. That, coupled with afternoons with nothing to do but Tekken (fun, but short-lived fun), it’s just like getting out of prison and going back to the drug-infested alleys.

But still, because I don’t have to rot in the office, as opposed to having to rot at home with all of its humble comforts, things are definitely better. *Confetti!*

The internship has ended. I only have a report left to finish, which I haven’t started

(recuperation is a delicate matter), and after that I shouldn’t be pestered by things that I do not deliberately pester myself with.

I looked back, as usually as one might, and I think I remember the past three months half as something of a mixed nuts. I didn’t hate it, but I never liked it. I’m grateful I landed there, perplexed and disorganised, but safe, and yet I’m disgruntled that I was involuntarily kept away from knowing what being unsafe meant. I remembered little, forgotten too much (rotting for a good month or so can do that), and found things to be new and fresh but utterly monochrome and dull.

It’s a like a movie with the good and bad bits blended, turning into a multi-coloured slush of so-so tasting slurpy.

Still, when I left the office Wednesday evening, I don’t find myself looking back. I may be back, though, but that’s for the future to show.

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

Oh baby… baby!

I was having dinner with the mother last Friday, and just as the bill was safely settled my mother’s phone rang.

It was a call from the grandparents, down in Johor for some babysitting. They had called to mom that Aunt Shirley (or Aunt Five) was in the hospital. She went in for a bout of food poisoning, but what the doctored discovered during the check-up was the she was a month pregnant.

We drove to the hospital in relative silence, discussing only a little, and mostly this was because I was pretty much occupied with my thoughts, and I could tell that mom was, too. I was sitting in a mish-mash puddle of anxiety, and -- what I remembered repeating to myself during the journey home -- a sense of childish excitement.

The aunt is fine, now resting at home. Come December or next January, she would be having her baby.

A baby!

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

What I have gotten myself during The Book Fair thing:

And the titles, from bottom to top, are:

Danse Macabre and Cujo by Stephen King (both in their 1993 publication covers by Warner Books, which feature a lot of red and a picture of the King at the spine and the back of the book).

Black House by Stephen King and Peter Straub. I wonder how two horror-filled heads are better than one.

The Naked Face and Morning, Noon & Night by Sidney Sheldon, which is in the same cover collection as my copy of Best Laid Plans.

The Chamber by John Grisham, which looks sparkling brand new, as well as Skipping Christmas, which is hard-cover.

Jurassic Park and The Lost World by Michael Crichton; I’ve watched both movies and I hear the booka are completely different.

Thief of Time by Terry Pratchett, which I’ve read and loved and now turned into a fan.

And finally, Galilee by Clive Barker. This is about the only paperback of his I’ve seen which doesn’t price above 50 bucks (well, I found this in the bargain bin, but I assume that it’s the sort of paperback that you can find for about RM35).

(Propped on top of them is my Alkem Cap, and below is my Capstone Books malleable star).

I’ve also bought two non-fiction books as gifts for my dad, and they are 45 Years Under the ISA by Koh Swe Yong and Merdeka!: British Rule and the Struggle for Independence in Malaya 1945-1957 by Khong Kim Hoong.

All of them tally to RM195; the most I’ve ever spent on books, and the best I’ve ever spent.

A lot to do with standing.

(My internet’s been down for the good 5-6 days, and I’m glad that no one really thought me as dead, missing, severely incapacitated or just simply gone macadamia at the local hospital.)

I’m currently at The Book Fair thing, which is held at the PWTC for 10 days starting from the 4th to the 13th of April.


I’m having fun. I don’t think I’ve ever felt more refreshing for, well, the whole entire Industrial Training, and mostly this is because I’m more often than not so immensely busy that I barely have the time eat, and that is a good thing. I’m also learning. Loads. And publisher contacts! Somewhere closer to actually having to build your own contacts and getting the huge know-how.


Every morning now I tend to lecturers that flock in in the throngs (the theory, devised and written with much observation from both I and Asman my book-fair colleague, goes that lecturers and their respective book dealers will only enter our booth in numbers made to clog and confuse, so that we have to rush and be miserable). They will pick their books and place them on the floor, tell me which institution they belong to, writes them in a slip, and then leave me to scan the barcode which will later go into a book listing that they collect sometime later.


Mornings are hell. The pandemonium type, with lots of ducking down and saying Excuse Mes and How May I Help You Sirs and replacing books. After lunch hour things generally die down, but it can get hectic sometimes, with last-minute crowds.


All in all, I’m feeling great, albeit a little tired and sleepy.


My bosses are Melvin and Adrian (they are, to say, bosses for this particular book fair, because I was transferred from my company to a sister company and later to this one, which is a partner-company, and it’s not really confusing if I’d said it right), and they’re Singaporean. Really nice people. Melvin is the son of the company’s owner, apparently, who looks young, eager and experienced for his age. Adrian’s the senior worker who is a nice man, and generally jovial.


No Singaporean stereotyping here; these are good, able people who are good to people.


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


The trouble with ending the day’s work at 7 daily is that I don’t really have the time to go explore the fair, and when I finally do I realised that I regretfully managed to bring insufficient cash to properly fulfil my book-buying needs.


There is this booth at Hall 1, Selvan Holdings, I think, which sells best-sellers novels for a price of RM15 each (old copies or prints, the type people forgot and found as overlooked stocks in dusty boxes). I was there on Day 2 or 3 and thought it was heaven; you get Sheldon and Ludlum and Cussler there, in larger numbers, but what’s best is the few hidden gems that needed some patient scanning. I’ve snagged a Stephen King novel and a Terry Pratchet on sight; I didn’t even bother looking at the title and cover until I paid and left. Now I’m the owner of a 1981 copy of Cujo by Stephen King (with an interesting cover image of a sun with a dog’s face in it, menacing on a blue SUV) and Terry Pratchet’s Thief of Time (a Discworld novel, and my first Terry Pratchet without counting Good Omens, which he wrote with Gaiman).


Next stop: Selvan’s for the few Sheldon novels and whatever gems I overlooked, and also the PayLess Books stall which I heard has a Buy-1-Free-1 offer.


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


Maybe if I went to talk to her, she’d talk back.


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

I predict that my internet will not persistently and relentless continue its normally good and workable service after tonight, due to reasons of self-observation, so I think it’s fair to say that I might just go back into disappearing for a few days without much word or notice.


Not that I’ll be much missed, but I figure a friendly note in regards to my (sudden, if not usual, if you’re usually here) disappearance should justify my reasons to be unavailable and very well work as to not give people impressions that I might’ve cracked and taken the quickest route to see hell.


I should be getting these darned internet fixed, as soon as internship ends and I’m back to idling life at home.


(I’ll also take this opportunity to apologise to a few people whom I’ve forgotten to contact or reply their calls/messages/texts/e-mails, and also to people whom I contact regularly but is unable to do so these days. It’s been really busy and tiring, plus with the internet acting up it’s really frustrating.)


Well, I hope everyone’s okay. If you happen to drop by the book fair, look me and Ji Lin up in Hall 4. We’re under EMO and Alkem.

Cheers, and goodnight all.