Examiner

Yep. In search of one for a doctor for my baby due Oct/Nov.

I finished reading this book the past week and this ushered in an ultimate Unagi moment.

This author agreed.

One down. One more to go.

Salam Merdeka.

Dear Malaysia,

I thought about you a lot when I was away.
I thought about what you offered and what you had that I didn't at where I stood.
I stood at dark cobalt stone alleys dipping my boot into dew.
The chill engulfed me with the wind and yet the sun was shining.
I hopped off from tram to tram.
I rushed from train to train.
This life was one I technically could live with.
With facilities to make sure my comfort,
and meals to make sure I would eat.
But what was there that made me feel incomplete?

I love you too much to watch you crumble.
I wished I loved you enough to hold you so you wouldn't.
Would I be too docile to conform?
Or would I be too antagonistic to react?
Would I be too selfish to wait for someone else to keep you intact?
How should I declare my love for you?
However I do it others won't approve.

And like unrequited love, here I am. Living in limbo of the worst kind.

With Love,

Your Citizen.

Happy Birthday.

I hope everything falls into place.

Positive qiii.

When I get my own income, I am going to sign up for a gym membership. This maggi lifestyle will NOT do!

The pains of growing up.

My course has made me quite nihilistic than I was as a child. I frown and throw around ramblings yadayada 'Life sucks' at the age of 12, a pseudo-emo phase I shared with my friends, when at that time I was actually living without a care, or meaningful purpose apart from pleasing my friends who I no longer contact anymore and doing well for my exams.

But how can 'life suck' at the age of 12? Seriously?

Sure you're under the authority of the adults, but you get to rebel and get away with it. You get to negotiate your 'lack of power' and turn it against the adults. You get to say something hurtful and forget it the next minute. You get to essentially behave like a child. At 12, you are actually having a time of your life.

At 12, I had a functioning family. I had parents who didn't throw plates at each other. I had a computer which my brother and I compromised (after much effort) and shared. I had food on the table. Junk food in the cabinets. At 12, I was smart enough to stand on a chair to reach for it. I was obese but weight was never really had an issue with me that which seriously seriously disturbed me the way it disturbed Lindsay Lohan. I had metaphorical bruises along the way, but never felt the need to cover them up because they eventually disappear.

Growing up was HARDLY painful. You wanna know what's painful?

Politics is painful (or at least what they say is). Government controlled media is painful. Censorship is painful. Racism is painful. The NEP is painful. KL traffic is painful. Being broke is painful. Watching the homeless people in streets of Melbourne was painful. Fake people are painful. Assignments are painful. Unrequited love is painful. Failed love, even worse.

The seriousness of these emotional pains, the intensity, the uncontrollable circumstances that only arise when one becomes aware of bigger things in life. These are authorities you CANNOT rebel, NOW THAT IS PAINFUL.

The next kid who says life sucks just because he didn't get a toy he wanted for his birthday will get a slap some advice from me.

"Deal with it, bitch. Or go to Afghanistan."

I'm 22. And I still bruise myself. I know some bruises like this stay and essentially make you what you become. Perhaps that's life's purpose.

Stalker

My best bud has a stalker.

If that person stalks her far enough, he'll see this.

Intensity.

The intensity of your pain I feel is equivalent my empathy. Hopefully everything falls through.

Heat.

So in the midst of the discussion of hot dudes.

Person 1: *to me* So who do you think is hot?

I: Hmmm... I think-

(hesitant)

I: I think-

(hesitates)

it must've been at least twice it happened.

Him: Farish Noor right?

LOL. *Ruckus*. Drama. Objections. LOL.

I never had a problem answering this question. I wonder what this means. Awkward. :S

Farish Noor wouldn't have been my first choice though even if he was oozing with intellectual hotness.

I hope by the end of this post.

I hope by the end of this post I will feel sleepy. I miss sleeping. I miss sleeping without having to wake up in the middle of the night. And this is just one of my futile attempts to put myself to sleep in one such occasion.

The stress is settling in harder than ever now and it seems to me it's going to be a permanent resident until the end of the semester. I kinda get that big looming cloud of dread hanging over me when I sit on my mustard-yellow chair in the Honours room. It is very unsettling it is affecting my number 1 (or number two :D) love in life - Sleep.

The schedule is just getting more and more packed I have less and less time to spend with people I want to spent it with, more and more things to do and the worst part is it comes one-shot due one day after another. I know it'll benefit me in the long run and train me to be able to handle more than one thing at a time (something I'm rarely successful at as an undergrad). I'm losing my ability to focus. OMG.

Tutoring has been pretty much fun and fulfilling and as much as I hate to admit it, it's probably the only thing right now that I enjoy of all the work I have to do in a week. LOL. Glad I signed up. Don't get me wrong. I wouldn't consider myself a particularly brilliant student as an undergrad. I never pictured myself to be taking honours, let alone tutoring but here I am. Nervous at first, but getting the hang of what I do. The people I teach are more responsive than I initially thought as well. And like myself 3 years ago, they don't do their readings. Hahahaa. All is good.

I remember vaguely how the possibility of Honours came about. The possibility of Honours just popped up as I was finishing my last assignment in Melbourne. What do I do now? That dreadful question that looms above all our heads. The possibilities of making it in the working world, parting with good friends and all these comfort we once had was going to be taken away just like that no matter what path you choose. But new comforts that come after that reinstates how adaptable humans are.

I chose to pursue this only because I felt I didn't know enough. And pushed towards new boundaries slowly out of our comfort zones, I surprisingly made it. I don't feel like how I did 5 months ago. It's quite funny seeing myself stumbling my way here and there to where I am now. But when I look back and see how much I've developed from all these harshness, I am content. With all the wonderful support I get, the journey is worth walking.

James Morrison

HOLY COW NEW FAVOURITE JAMES MORRISON SONNNNGG. AACCKKK!


Old favourite but still a favourite.



Remind me to thank Youtube in my Acknowledgements section in my thesis.

Flashhh backkk

Common daddy-song in the car when I was a kid.

Docile.

It's not about what you want but it's about what you need.

I sat at the cafeteria pondering back and forth as my friends animatedly debated about this question:

Is love a need or a want?

Surely this question has been the food for many chic lits available in MPH.

Being in a rather awkward situation I was in, leaning against my bomb shelter, his hand in mine, when they were talking about it. We watched.

On the left hand corner, she harped about how one person could not live without food or water, and if love was a need one would die, literally, if he did not have it. Hence, love was a want. Something to have that would make a day feel complete but without it, you would not be any less complete. Technically it's possible to live on your own. You can eat on your own, you can sleep on your own, and you can even literally fuck on your own. One would not die without love.

However, the other argued from a more metaphorical sense in a way death was seen as a life not worth living. A life without love is one filled with sadness and lesser meaning. How can anyone live without love?

I argued there isn't necessarily love in a marriage pointing out arranged marriages and such, however, one interjected. 'Love and marriage is two different things.' One doesn't necessarily lead to another.

The debate was long but these were the main premises of their arguments. Being in a position where I'm in, I think this question is difficult to answer.

There were times I would've loved to have love. Times when I felt my life was incomplete that it no longer was a want but a need. How I thought how perfect my life would be just to have someone to depend on when times were hard. And at that time, perhaps, emotionally it was. And as much as I hate to admit it, this reason for so-called 'love' was a very selfish one.

Fast forward in time, presently. Now that you have it, you fear of losing it. And like how at that time I couldn't picture myself how it would be like actually being with somebody, my thoughts could never go beyond saying 'I like you too', I cannot picture myself having to live my life without that special person around anymore.

But in both situations, love doesn't only lie in a person or romance you desire. There you are in a foreign place thinking you need love when you were actually living pretty comfortably comparatively to other migrants, love was actually already there because love comes in many forms. Friends for support, family to ramble to. These are the people you connect with.

Even so, having felt different kinds of love... this is probably one questions I cannot answer.

Love encapsulates too many things which is why it is so hard to define.

Sledgehammer.

As nerdy as I sound, I really like my thesis topic.

I'm writing about dressing. Something so ordinary that people take for granted. I'm writing about dressing in the context of expression of faith. The visual-ness of Islam in Malaysia doesn't exist without the subjective-ness that lies beneath. Having said that, the fabric being part of the gender dimension of ethnic ideals as well patriarchy which cuts across all Asian civilizations. And how despite that, it can also be seen as a fashionable, current, modern piece of attire that can forges tradition and modernity presented as such in multiple media texts and cultural markets that solely dedicated to the female Muslim market.

Ok. So I need to expand this into 15000 words with Goffman, Foucault and some other theorists by my birthday. And I'm thinking to myself. Maybe, just maybe I can hit my hand with a sledgehammer and get an extension. Sounds like a plan.

One Big Circle.

KL is one big scary circle. Everybody is connected in someway. Holy crap.

*jaw drops*

The book of face.

Like wow.

I was surfing fb compulsively like I always do when I have work to do and I wished I hadn't because a) work is not done, b) you find out the darnest things on the Book of Face. At the homepage, where we get to see feeds and what not, I saw an update of a classmate, whom I am not friends with on fb, through congratulatory comments written by schoolmates who I am connected to. Normally once you have like more than 3 friends that comments/'likes' this status of someone you're not connected with, FB still shows it on your homepage anyway. Quite scary if you think of it this way. Dodgy.

But anyway, her update went - "I'm Pregnant, OMG! blabla etc" along the lines of thanking God.

First thing that came through my mind was, 'Was it out of wed lock?' And no, I'm not being mean, I just didn't know (but i found the next 2 minutes later) that she was actually already married for a while.

I k-po-ed through the comments. (28 comments and counting, 15 likes) First of all, it seemed like it's true, she really was pregnant and damn happy about it. And second of all, it didn't seem like it's out of wedlock. (Yes, i went to her profile page and saw her relationship status).

And I thought to myself, "What? She's married?!" Of course she wasn't the first of my peers that I know who are married or mothers really. There has been a couple of them. I don't know looking at us all 4 years back, I wonder how years after our delinquent days (not this particular friend. She was a prefect and a pretty friendly one at that. Don't remember getting trouble with her. She was nothing else but nice.) and that the possibility of us being mothers and bearers-of-the-nation and nurturers of a new generation and all that constructed social humbug that are imposed on women.

But still, I don't see myself at that age where I have peers flashing their 'married' (or pregnant) statuses on facebook. I'm not very old, the last I recall. In fact, I'm damn young. Too damn young to be a mother. I've only started dating. Handling a family of my own is the last thing on my mind. Or going through 9 months of bloating, hormonal imbalances and childbirth and what not and later nappy changing...

Wow. It's a big responsibility. HUGE I tell you. I don't see myself wanting to handle that when there is so many things in life that I haven't gone through, so many things I haven't seen. The last thing I want is a baby to tie me down. Just thinking like that makes me a bad woman, no?

The feminist in me say I should aspire to do more in life instead of making babies, hence the Honours and hopefully a decent pay cheque that accompanies it. Of course occasionally I would mentally gush at the thought of how I could go through 9 months of pregnancy instead of grueling 9 months of writing a thesis. BUT that's strictly partly because through the process of writing a thesis can make you feel like that.

OR do I subconsciously want to be a stay-home mum and conform to this tyranny of nurturing and all that fetch kid to school fetch him back, cook, clean, do homework, yell, get messy hair, age a bit, displace discontent of husband's depleting affection by focusing on children?

It's pretty conflicting when it comes to this. I used to be the little girl who thought of marriage as an the epitome of happiness in life (Thank you so much, you anglocentric racist brainwashing Disney) but despite being at a marriagable age now, I don't know what to think. I am surprised by my own reaction towards this.

I am wavering between 'omigosh poor girl missing out on so much' and a wholehearted 'congratulations!' immediately after seeing it, which became more like 'Hah~'. But for all I know, she may be the happiest woman alive right now while I lead my life of a pseudo-feminist 'apparently' emancipating myself from male domination but still live in the world where sexism and patriachy exists in my consciousness. I'm trapped in the big box as they say. A big fking unpenetrable box.

I was rambling about this to my classmates there are stories.

One of them just recently got back from a wedding and the bride is 20 years old. Another friend of hers who got married in Sem 1 is currently already pregnant, and not-so-happily ever after, another got married after highschool had a baby and is now going through a divorce.

So one of them commented (after i admited to mental gushing) "I'd rather do honours, man! Honours is only until October. A baby is for the rest of your fking life."

I stare at the empty comment box. Do I congratulater her?

She has 31 comments now.

Though, I cannot imagine myself in her position right now, do I subconsciously envision myself as her someday?

And I'm back to work.

Bombshelter.

'Twas the day after an overwheeeelming month, bomb scares and bad hair, ginger ale and big grand sales, deadlines and landmines. And we scraped through.

*

I met an old friend again, after 4 years. Her afro still screams out awesomeness. But talking to her, I know somethings have changed. I know, it's been 4 years since I last saw her. And 4 years is an awfully long time when a lot of things can happen. The last I heard she was in the UK because she was bitching about potatoes on fb. I imagined that insane quirky ketua-pengawas (the best ever) prancing around etc. In school, we were without a care. And when we're thrown out into the real world, in a foreign country, we see so much, we scar so much. We had greater ideals as a child that shatters as we grow up.

Truth be told, I am disappointed at how we can't be kids anymore. It's not only her, I too find that it takes effort to be a child again.

I hope everything falls in place for her.

Side note, some people change, some people don't.

Another friend of mine got pissed drunk before the birthday boy got wasted heck. Tsk tsk tsk. I don't drop names, people also know who lah har.

:)

When in doubt, Google.

Lucky.

It feels like I struck lottery but I don't get a million dollars. And it's actually a good thing.

Self definitive.

Someone once said to me, misery is self definitive.

My parents tell me 'count your blessings'.

Another tells me to look at the silver lining.

Things don't always go your way, but certainly it is possible to make the best out of what there is.


*

I'm quite hyped for this semester to be over. The work load is insane, but I'm hyped. I know how I'd feel when I'm done with what I'm writting.

Priorities.

It's not easy to find a balance.

I think I kinda get it now.

So true.

*sigh*

Speechless.

Describes the fate of Malaysians, literally.

End of July.

August will be awesome.