Trimble Tramble
[Monday, April 9]
I'm wet. I'm in an air-conditioned room. The air conditioner is on Oscillate, so it sometimes blows me and sometimes blows other places. I'm cold. I don't like being cold. It's my own fault anyway for running in the rain...
OK, maybe I should explain. Remember a few posts ago when I mentioned one of my tasks being fetching cousins from tuition or school? Well, I just ran one of those errands. Now cast your mind back to the last post, where I mention the weather being unpredictable. Now you probably get the picture: I went out of the building and it was cloudy. (Fortunately my colleagues insisted on me bringing a little pink umbrella along.) By the time I got to my cousin's school (where she was waiting because she'd finished school), it was drizzling lightly.
We went twenty paces away from school, and the wind and rain increased exponentially. I do declare the rain was almost horizontal by the time we had gone one hundred meters--and do remember she'd just finished school and so was carrying a (non-waterproof) schoolbag with (non-waterproof) papers and books, etc, inside. So we used the umbrella to cover the bag and I thanked God that human skin is waterproof. All the same, we arrived at the office quite soaked.
The bag was soaked through too, due to the wind speed being great enough to turn the umbrella inside out several times, as well as driving the rain in too many directions to block at one time. And anyway, one doesn't really bother about bags when dashing through rain across roads.
Fortunately there was no traffic.
In any case, running around in the rain was quite exhilarating. Very, very fun, and it very much reminded me of my younger days. Yes, I'm not that old yet, but I'm at that age when people expect one to eat slowly and speak nice words and start growing a beard and look (and sound) wise and all that, as well as running only when on a field, and in sunny conditions, and even then one must be chasing a ball. Well--I suppose I garnered a few strange looks from the middle-school kids who were cowering under the awnings of the shops. They were male, too, heavens! and still shying away from the wind and rain as if they were made of sugar, spice, and everything water-soluble.
I am, I think, beginning to have a decided disregard for the opinions of most middle-school students when it comes to behaviour. For one thing, I don't see anything wrong in running through rain and laughing all the way. I also don't really see what's wrong with dragging a laughing girl (she's 12 years old and very hyperactive physically) across with me. Unfortunately her father (my uncle) would probably rather have my head on a platter than have her wet. He's a bit strange that way--I think selling herbal medicines for as long as he has does something to the brain where illnesses are concerned, because he seems rather paranoid about such things as wearing damp clothes, drinking cold water on hot days, and not changing socks every two hours.
Well... I'm cold. I'm still cold. My clothes have been drying on me--I guess I throw off rather a lot of excess body heat--and unfortunately they're starting to get itchy. At least I have the consolation of being able to bathe and change once I get back to the house. I've been shivering every few seconds (when the air conditioner blows me) for the last half hour or so, so I guess I've been burning even more calories than usual. (Claus would mutter "nonsense!" if he saw this. It's what he seems to mutter every time I go off on one of my little theories.) I read somewhere that people who fidget burn about 36 calories an hour, and I think shivering counts as fidgeting of a sort...
Oh, and I ought to add this in before I forget, just to make sure I manage to do a properly objective comparison later. You see, my team from RBS has decided to hold a little competition amongst the bakuteh stores around the place. Apparently we're a team of food fanatics, because everybody apart from me has a favourite store that they insist is The Best Store in the Klang Valley. So whenever we have an opportunity to meet (which isn't very often, mind you), somebody inevitably proposes a bakuteh outing. Well, actually it usually is me. As anybody will tell you, one of the few things I work up a lot of enthusiasm for is eating. Sometimes I worry that it's getting to be an addiction, but while I can still fit into generic store clothes, I won't need to worry. When I need to custom-order 'em... then maybe I'll have to cut back a bit, because it'll be expensive.
Anyway, last Saturday was the first outing of that sort, and we visited a store in Subang (I have to record the accurate place name here so I don't forget). I think it's called Ah Ping or something like that. And here are the stats...
Average price of meal per person: RM 9
Time taken for food to arrive (after order was placed): approx. 20 mins
Size of rice serving: Medium small
Time that garlic taste remained in mouth: approx. 8 hours (from 7pm to 4am)
Size of meat serving: Large
Taste of soup: Strongly savoury, somewhat salty, but may be due to mingling of saliva due to no serving spoon
Taste of chrysanthemum tea: Vaguely bitter with sourish aftertaste
Size of shop: Medium
Packedness of shop: approx. 85% to 90% full
Predominant language of shopkeeper: Cantonese/ Mandarin
Cleanliness of table: Medium oily, but may be due to humid weather
We're planning the next one to be next month, in Klang. Apparently it'll have to be a breakfast, since Klang shops don't open at night--they must all be very diurnal or very afraid of the dark. And since I don't usually gorge at breakfast, I'm going to have to wake up a little earlier, eat something first, and then call the bakuteh a brunch. (Labelling is very important when eating. For a long time I didn't eat bakuteh because the literal meaning of the words is "meat bone tea", and at the time I hated tea in all its forms.)
I really liked that outing, though. It's been awhile since I met anybody from the team, and it was nice to resurrect all the old lame jokes and (pretend to) complain about each other's little quirks. But at least they did say I talk more slowly now--I've been trying to work on that for awhile, ever since that horribly embarrassing fiasco at the end of RBS. (I've already posted about that.) The weird thing is nobody else thinks it was embarrassing. At least nobody else that I've talked to... But apparently I still garble my words wonderfully, so now I have to work on (as Desmond says) clarity of speech, otherwise known as biting words. (The verb, not the noun.)
[Thursday]
I have taken it upon myself to begin Project Improvement of Cousins. Well, everybody needs a pet project, and I have decided that by the time I stop working, one cousin will have learned to play chords (basic ones, of course) on the piano to accompany the pop tunes she seems to be obsessed with--I guess a lot of 12-year-old girls are obsessed with pop tunes--one cousin will be deathly frightened of attacking me with fists, and the 5-year-old kid will scream in fluent English or Chinese--not Manglish. It's just annoying when he wants to scold people, and it comes out half in one language and half in another.
Also, it rather takes the momentum out of his tirade, such as it is, when I tell him to start repeating grammatically correct insults after me, which is really the main point. I am still not a morning person, despite the effusive daily wake-up call from my uncle; so coming downstairs to some little brat with a foul mood really doesn't amuse me, yet. It's only after a cup of Milo and a bit of bread or something that I can sic my tongue on him--and goodness knows I'm able to put holes in a lot of things he says.
(5-year-olds aren't really given to detail or logic.)
Anyway... the Pig has taken up work, and I'm starting to get rather worried. Not that I want to meddle in his affairs or whatever--if it keeps him busy and rich and he doesn't mind, whatever. But I don't think a daily routine of work-go home-crash-skip dinner-skip bath-wake up-work is going to do him any good. Still, it's his body. (And I wouldn't want it anyway. 75 kilos of blubber wrapped around 5 kilos of bones is somehow rather unappealing.) But I don't think it's very healthy... In fact I'm starting to bet with myself on how long he's going to last. I've got a couple books that say he resigns or has a breakdown sometime in the next week or so.
I think the mothering habit of Claus is starting to rub off on me. If I don't watch out I'm going to start carrying napkins and diapers around for wayward kids or something, and goodness knows when that happens, my pockets will begin bulging like nobody's business. It won't look pretty, that's certain.
Well, I guess what I really don't like is that he crashes after work--I've gotten into the habit of periodically phoning him up every now and then, ever since he started bugging me to do his letter for him. It seems I do quite a bit of this sort of work these days, I've done at least 3 other people's homework for them so far. (And at least 2 of them, that I know of, have had their lecturers praise the quality of the work. Apparently I both type good English and somehow still make it look like that person's work... or at least enough to fool the lecturer, anyway.) Anyhow, I got into the habit of occasionally calling him up. A good chat in English is rather hard to find these days, since the office is populated by people for whom English is a second language, and I haven't got Net access yet.
(I've been nudging my bosses along that direction, though. Little hints here and there. My uncle--he's a Sanguine, remember?--simply jumps on whatever comment I make and off goes the bandwagon. It's really easy.)
And these days, whenever I try calling him, he answers with a snore. Not exactly the kind of thing conducive to discussing university applications or future travel plans. (He wants me to visit Patience at least once every blue moon, while I insist on him coming here, and paying for it too.) It's also how I found myself displaying signs of mothering--when I told him to go take a cold shower and drink a couple gallons of extra-strength coffee so he could at least talk normally. Half-dead people tend to slur their words. He simply snored. It's annoying, you know, when
people snore while you're talking to them.
(This doesn't count when you're giving a wake-up call. In that case, a snore would be highly appropriate--I do it all the time when I don't think I need waking up yet. I think I kick people too, but that's just what they say. I don't recall anything. I was asleep, after all.)
Hmmmmmm. It looks like my mom's family has some communication issues. Well, that's just according to the opinion of their kids and their spouses, so I guess it doesn't qualify as a valid observation or whatever. Because, you see, my mom's family seems to enjoy speaking in superlatives. Very extreme language, for one thing--and, unfortunately, I'm a rather too literal person. Flowery language turns me off... but flowery language is their mother tongue.
No wonder my mom and I had so many arguments. I think the next time I talk to her, I'll filter out all the adjectives so I can understand better. I think I ought to do the same thing for all my maternal relatives... well, I already do that with advertisements anyway, so it won't be too hard. Just a bit rude, maybe. On the other hand, I ought to go memorise a few one-fits-all adjectives to sprinkle around my own conversation so it's more palatable to them. I'll just call all colours "brilliant" or "florid", all sounds as "noisy", "life-threatening", or "Christian", all people as "stupidiots" or "humanoid" or "good", and so on. Maybe I'll even write 'em on my wrist and on occasion, read the whole thing off in a go just to see how happy it makes them.
In fact, I think Gene had the same problem... but then again I don't keep in contact with him--or with anybody from A-levels, for that matter--so it doesn't affect my blood pressure any more.
...actually, I wonder if the real problem lies in their opinionatedness. (That's a real word. I think.) Because it seems that the flowery words only come out when they're expressing themselves, usually rather too loudly... but if so, then they'd probably be more Choleric than Sanguine... of course, they could be both. It also explains the preponderance of Melancholies and Phlegmatics having married into the family--in fact, if I'm right, my dad might be the only Choleric in-law in the place--and even he's ChlorMel, I think. He's not likely to be Sanguine since I don't recall mood swings.
(For mood swings, read Chronicles or God's Pencil. Pencil is very, very, very SanMel; I'm not sure about Chronicles, but he's at least part Melancholy. I'm not sure about the other part. I'm not particularly prone to mood swings, I think.)
It might explain my fondness for vague words--"I think", "maybe", "perhaps", "might", "not sure", "likely", "if", "seems", "apparently", "guess", "possibly"--I keep as few opinions as I can to keep life simpler. Also this way I don't have to get offended every time people blow smoke in my face or whatever. (Actually, the best way to tolerate smoke is to take a deep breath. After a few seconds, you go into nasal ennui and you hardly notice anything.) This approach rather turns some people off, I find--I suppose I do tend to come across as a bit wishy-washy on some matters that seem important to other people. But frankly, why pretend to care about which team wins the World Cup when you've got no bets riding on it? The only reason I watched was so I wouldn't be too left out of gossip.
(And I did have a small wager going on--I was betting that the team I betted on would lose. I won--they lost.)
Opinions... hmmm. I suppose having a few wouldn't hurt, once in awhile... and besides, I do have some. I just try not to express them too loudly or too forcefully, except on occasion when I can't resist trying to shred someone else's opinion--and my uncle has plenty of them. Opinions like "rain is not for playing with" or "all animated shows are funny, even when they involve swordfights and blood"--seriously. He was (forcedly) laughing while watching a fight scene in Ueki--or "if it has drums in it and it's secular, it's evil" and a few others that I'm not going to tell you about so I can preserve the family honour.
That's something worth having opinions about, I think.
Oh, I forgot to mention this before... the day we went to bakuteh, Mike L and I were having a
little discussion on luxury and necessity and so on. He wants the whole world to have a certain standard of need, beyond which all is luxury; I thought (and still think) that the standard rather varies according to each person. And so we tried (and failed) to come up with a workable definition of "need"--and then we found that the definition of "luxury" depends on that--and then of course, "personal" is a little hard to pin down too.
But I've now got time to ponder it over... "need", biologically speaking, means to require for survival. In other words, you only need things you would die (physically!) without, like oxygen or water or certain minerals or food. I think perhaps, for the purposes of discussion, I shall define "need" thus:
need: (verb) 1. To require for continued survival, eg The dog needs to eat. 2. To lack certain objects, facilities, or faculties without which the person would not develop normally, eg Newborn babies need lots of touching. 3. To be without certain objects, facilities, or faculties that would enable a person to do things required of them, eg I need money to go to university. 4. To be required to perform a duty by a recognised authority, eg I need to go water the plants now because Mom said so.
This definition seems to be workable... it doesn't seem to allow for misuse or abuse of the term--no more "I need a nicer car!" for instance, unless your boss is about to fire you for not impressing the new client enough, which would then put you under the definition; and it prevents people from saying they "need" something because some other friend said so. But then "luxury" would therefore be:
luxury: (noun) 1. Any object or facility beyond what is needed.
which wouldn't quite be workable, since some things may not be needed, but are important to have anyway for convenience. One might "need" a pencil, but that would be satisfied with a stick of graphite--and most kids these days insist on mechanical pencils, which are admittedly more convenient, and on occasion even cheaper. The same goes for almost anything-- you may "need" food, but what of three meals a day (when most people probably could survive on two)? Or "need"ing to breathe much more than 3600 times an hour? Which is why I came up with the term of "favourable conditions"-- when something goes beyond basic need but hasn't quite reached the level of luxury yet.
favourable condition: (noun) 1. A condition in which a person possesses objects or facilities that satisfy the requirements of need, but are still used mainly to perform the same functions as those required by need. 2. A condition in which "need" is more easily satisfied.
Take, for example, food. You "need" food to eat, but anything would satisfy that condition: say, the bark of a tree. However, you happen to go to a restaurant and order something more tasty. It would still be a favourable condition since you'd mainly be using the food for eating. The restaurant would equally be a favourable condition, since it would make your need--eating--easier to satisfy. On the other hand, if you happened to be visiting an expensive restaurant and ordered their best dishes, not to eat but to try to make a fashion statement to whomever happens to be dining near you, you would be passing into the realm of luxury.
luxury: (noun) 1. A condition in which one possesses objects or facilities in excess of what is needed, and does not use said objects or facilities for their original purpose. 2. A condition in which one possesses objects or facilities that do not fulfil any condition of need.
Here is where we get into the twsting world of personalisation, because "need", and therefore "favourable condition" and "luxury", applies to everybody differently. Different people, for example, need different quantities of various minerals, or have different ideas of required duties, and so on. A businessman, therefore, might "need" an expensive watch to both tell time and to impress clients (in a world where watches have got sucked into the fashion industry, Impressing People has become one of their many functions, along with the traditional Stopwatch, Glow-in-the-Dark, and Alarm) or, at least, it would be a favourable condition.
On some peddler, however, the expensive watch becomes luxury, because really, who is the peddler going to impress anyway? And somehow one doubts if peddlers have anywhere to be on time.
Makeup and nice shoes, then, would fall under any of the three categories depending on who was doing the shopping and where. Guns and anime and manga, unfortunately, would all fall into the "luxury" column, unless you happened to be a mangaka or a producing studio of some sort. (I wouldn't really care too much if all firearms turned into plasticine overnight. It might give police a bit of a hard time, but then again they're supposed to be fit enough to subdue crooks so there. And anyway there'll still be knives and other sharp objects.)
[Later]
I've been running in the rain again, and again it's because I went to fetch the cousin from school--and again, it's happened while I was wearing the shirt the Coconut gave me. I wonder it it's just coincidence or something. Well, at least I can be sure of associating good memories with it. The difference is that this time I was with the 5-year-old cousin and the maid (we'd gone to fetch them from tuition and school respectively) and a couple umbrellas that we'd bought at the cheapest place on the street. (We found out later why those umbrellas were so cheap--they bent and went out of shape at the slightest touch.)
However, this time the rain was so heavy that it made the maid shiver. (Cold, not fear.) And then my aunt phoned me and said we ought to go hide in some restaurant until the rain got less, so we visited a McDonald's for my first time in a few months. We also spent RM23 on feeding ourselves... and I'm getting hungry. But we did dry off there, more or less, and I'm sure I attracted some more stares from the middle-school students scattered around the place. It looked as if the place is a favourite haunt of theirs after school--and well, I suppose it's not every day you see a guy of uncertain age (I never seem to manage to look 20 years old. So far most people seem to think I'm 17 or 18 and recoil in horror when I tell them the truth. Obviously I'm not behaving old enough) leading a dark-skinned woman (the maid), a little tyke in a shirt 3 sizes too large (the 5-year-old), and a girl in school uniform (my other cousin) into a restaurant--with the guy and the girl both dripping wet. (Well, I gave my umbrella to my cousin, who used it to cover her schoolbag and left half her self out in the rain. I think she did it on purpose. So did I.)
[Friday]
I have decided that of the entire financial recording process, my definite favourite is the bank reconciliation. Sure, it involves staring at the screen and hunting numbers, but it's so relaxing compared to the other aspects. Plus one does get a certain satisfaction out of knowing that one's financial recording has been utterly perfect, at least as far as the bank records are concerned.
And in the end, that's probably all that matters to the bank and the client...
I think the other gratifying thing about it is that I can do it really quickly. Not to brag or whatever, but bank reconciliations are (what I think of as) the easiest bit of the thing to get done, since they print the statement out on nice clean paper and you don't have to read somebody's scrawling on torn paper. So the reading is so so much easier...
Drat. I'm so hungry... I suppose from now on I really ought to wake up in time to have a bit more breakfast before work. But then I always find it hard waking up... well, usually my uncle does wake me up for breakfast, but how was I supposed to know he meant me this morning?... I suppose this is where you get a whole load of background history dumped on you.
My siblings and I used to share bedrooms. We also went to this Chinese school where Standards One to Three (look a pun!) go to the afternoon session and the others go to the morning session, or something along those lines. The two halves also switched sessions every year, so my sibs and I (since they're all two years apart except myself and my big little sister) were always rather out of sync in a way--I never went to the same session as they. (Of course, at that time it was just the three older ones.)
I suppose this gave rise to the habit of only responding to my name when being woken up--either my name or any spoken word that unmistakably referred to me. I think my family already knows anyway, since it seems to apply to them too--as far as I can tell, they respond to either shaking, calling of their names, or the ringing of their handphones. The alarm works too, but not as well. And it definitely applies to me.
That, I think, is why I only rolled out of bed ten minutes after my uncle stormed into my bedroom (well, I didn't see it, but I assume he did) and clapped his hands about ten times. I heard him, assumed he was applauding me or something, and displayed a complete lack of response to him. Some time later, I felt the bed shake. (It's one of those flimsy bunk beds made out of painted hollow metal rods.) That got my attention, but only for twenty seconds before I decided it wasn't anything likely to be fatal.
When I woke up, I wondered how come he hadn't called me to breakfast. But then I eat very quickly anyway. The Gorilla has theorised that it stems from years of competing with 4 other hungry siblings for food. I rather agree--with the added factor of rushing to school and having to chow down breakfast at record speed every morning. Plus I can do a lot of stuff one-handed by now, from years of balancing bread-and-butter in one hand and unlocking doors, pulling on socks and shoes, and assorted other things related to rushing onto school buses or parents' cars. So it really didn't bother me apart from now being rather hungry.
I do hope he doesn't try and keep this up, though, because once he gets my tolerance level up, I won't respond to anything short of a cold shower--and that is something I would very much like to avoid. My siblings say that once they were trying to move the shared bed into a nicer position--with me asleep on it--and I have to take their word for it because I certainly didn't feel anything. (They say that I told them about dreaming about being on a boat, however.)
It hasn't been very nice around here, emotionally speaking. There's a lot of crying and yelling floating around the place, and it looks like I'm completely powerless to stop it. However... well. the Pig told me last night about some interesting properties of duct tape. Such as that it's airtight, waterproof, and extremely sticky. Also it's quite easily available in hardware shops.
Also that it comes off by itself only after a minimum of 1 hour. I suppose my maniacal laughing disturbed him a bit. But the possibilities that present themselves are, indeed, delightful.
In any case I've got a bit of a personal grudge since the 5-year-old brat insisted on playing with a computer yesterday. More background information coming up here: the brat (that's it, I have decided that from now on, Brat refers to the 5-year-old kid. It's tiring typing so many hyphens. And whaddaya mean I'm being mean?) screamed several weeks ago that he wanted to play games on a computer. So I installed a few games on my aunt's laptop to divert him from mine. (Her suggestion.) And then, when she wanted to use it, I had to put the game on another computer... an so on until pretty much all the computers in the office had those games on 'em.
So it became a kind of habit for us to play those games after work, and for the Brat to scream daily about wanting to play games. Then last night, he screamed so loudly and decided to jump off the chair--which, obviously, landed him on the carpet. Then he burst into tears for the 2,537, 350th time that day. I ignored it, but my uncle began screaming about people who don't take care of children who jump off chairs and instead play games on their computers, which led to more screaming back about not being able to catch people who fall from heights of 1.2m, and crying from the Brat, and so on until all the games had to be deleted. It's a pity since I was rather advanced on my own copy of the game.
So I'm going to buy myself some duct tape. Then I'm going to stick the Brat in the stairwell. Literally. He can scream all day and all night if he wants, but I'm betting he'll find it difficult to attract attention if he's well hidden and has a bit of tape on his mouth. I'll go let him out around lunchtime if I'm feeling generous.
I'm wet. I'm in an air-conditioned room. The air conditioner is on Oscillate, so it sometimes blows me and sometimes blows other places. I'm cold. I don't like being cold. It's my own fault anyway for running in the rain...
OK, maybe I should explain. Remember a few posts ago when I mentioned one of my tasks being fetching cousins from tuition or school? Well, I just ran one of those errands. Now cast your mind back to the last post, where I mention the weather being unpredictable. Now you probably get the picture: I went out of the building and it was cloudy. (Fortunately my colleagues insisted on me bringing a little pink umbrella along.) By the time I got to my cousin's school (where she was waiting because she'd finished school), it was drizzling lightly.
We went twenty paces away from school, and the wind and rain increased exponentially. I do declare the rain was almost horizontal by the time we had gone one hundred meters--and do remember she'd just finished school and so was carrying a (non-waterproof) schoolbag with (non-waterproof) papers and books, etc, inside. So we used the umbrella to cover the bag and I thanked God that human skin is waterproof. All the same, we arrived at the office quite soaked.
The bag was soaked through too, due to the wind speed being great enough to turn the umbrella inside out several times, as well as driving the rain in too many directions to block at one time. And anyway, one doesn't really bother about bags when dashing through rain across roads.
Fortunately there was no traffic.
In any case, running around in the rain was quite exhilarating. Very, very fun, and it very much reminded me of my younger days. Yes, I'm not that old yet, but I'm at that age when people expect one to eat slowly and speak nice words and start growing a beard and look (and sound) wise and all that, as well as running only when on a field, and in sunny conditions, and even then one must be chasing a ball. Well--I suppose I garnered a few strange looks from the middle-school kids who were cowering under the awnings of the shops. They were male, too, heavens! and still shying away from the wind and rain as if they were made of sugar, spice, and everything water-soluble.
I am, I think, beginning to have a decided disregard for the opinions of most middle-school students when it comes to behaviour. For one thing, I don't see anything wrong in running through rain and laughing all the way. I also don't really see what's wrong with dragging a laughing girl (she's 12 years old and very hyperactive physically) across with me. Unfortunately her father (my uncle) would probably rather have my head on a platter than have her wet. He's a bit strange that way--I think selling herbal medicines for as long as he has does something to the brain where illnesses are concerned, because he seems rather paranoid about such things as wearing damp clothes, drinking cold water on hot days, and not changing socks every two hours.
Well... I'm cold. I'm still cold. My clothes have been drying on me--I guess I throw off rather a lot of excess body heat--and unfortunately they're starting to get itchy. At least I have the consolation of being able to bathe and change once I get back to the house. I've been shivering every few seconds (when the air conditioner blows me) for the last half hour or so, so I guess I've been burning even more calories than usual. (Claus would mutter "nonsense!" if he saw this. It's what he seems to mutter every time I go off on one of my little theories.) I read somewhere that people who fidget burn about 36 calories an hour, and I think shivering counts as fidgeting of a sort...
Oh, and I ought to add this in before I forget, just to make sure I manage to do a properly objective comparison later. You see, my team from RBS has decided to hold a little competition amongst the bakuteh stores around the place. Apparently we're a team of food fanatics, because everybody apart from me has a favourite store that they insist is The Best Store in the Klang Valley. So whenever we have an opportunity to meet (which isn't very often, mind you), somebody inevitably proposes a bakuteh outing. Well, actually it usually is me. As anybody will tell you, one of the few things I work up a lot of enthusiasm for is eating. Sometimes I worry that it's getting to be an addiction, but while I can still fit into generic store clothes, I won't need to worry. When I need to custom-order 'em... then maybe I'll have to cut back a bit, because it'll be expensive.
Anyway, last Saturday was the first outing of that sort, and we visited a store in Subang (I have to record the accurate place name here so I don't forget). I think it's called Ah Ping or something like that. And here are the stats...
Average price of meal per person: RM 9
Time taken for food to arrive (after order was placed): approx. 20 mins
Size of rice serving: Medium small
Time that garlic taste remained in mouth: approx. 8 hours (from 7pm to 4am)
Size of meat serving: Large
Taste of soup: Strongly savoury, somewhat salty, but may be due to mingling of saliva due to no serving spoon
Taste of chrysanthemum tea: Vaguely bitter with sourish aftertaste
Size of shop: Medium
Packedness of shop: approx. 85% to 90% full
Predominant language of shopkeeper: Cantonese/ Mandarin
Cleanliness of table: Medium oily, but may be due to humid weather
We're planning the next one to be next month, in Klang. Apparently it'll have to be a breakfast, since Klang shops don't open at night--they must all be very diurnal or very afraid of the dark. And since I don't usually gorge at breakfast, I'm going to have to wake up a little earlier, eat something first, and then call the bakuteh a brunch. (Labelling is very important when eating. For a long time I didn't eat bakuteh because the literal meaning of the words is "meat bone tea", and at the time I hated tea in all its forms.)
I really liked that outing, though. It's been awhile since I met anybody from the team, and it was nice to resurrect all the old lame jokes and (pretend to) complain about each other's little quirks. But at least they did say I talk more slowly now--I've been trying to work on that for awhile, ever since that horribly embarrassing fiasco at the end of RBS. (I've already posted about that.) The weird thing is nobody else thinks it was embarrassing. At least nobody else that I've talked to... But apparently I still garble my words wonderfully, so now I have to work on (as Desmond says) clarity of speech, otherwise known as biting words. (The verb, not the noun.)
[Thursday]
I have taken it upon myself to begin Project Improvement of Cousins. Well, everybody needs a pet project, and I have decided that by the time I stop working, one cousin will have learned to play chords (basic ones, of course) on the piano to accompany the pop tunes she seems to be obsessed with--I guess a lot of 12-year-old girls are obsessed with pop tunes--one cousin will be deathly frightened of attacking me with fists, and the 5-year-old kid will scream in fluent English or Chinese--not Manglish. It's just annoying when he wants to scold people, and it comes out half in one language and half in another.
Also, it rather takes the momentum out of his tirade, such as it is, when I tell him to start repeating grammatically correct insults after me, which is really the main point. I am still not a morning person, despite the effusive daily wake-up call from my uncle; so coming downstairs to some little brat with a foul mood really doesn't amuse me, yet. It's only after a cup of Milo and a bit of bread or something that I can sic my tongue on him--and goodness knows I'm able to put holes in a lot of things he says.
(5-year-olds aren't really given to detail or logic.)
Anyway... the Pig has taken up work, and I'm starting to get rather worried. Not that I want to meddle in his affairs or whatever--if it keeps him busy and rich and he doesn't mind, whatever. But I don't think a daily routine of work-go home-crash-skip dinner-skip bath-wake up-work is going to do him any good. Still, it's his body. (And I wouldn't want it anyway. 75 kilos of blubber wrapped around 5 kilos of bones is somehow rather unappealing.) But I don't think it's very healthy... In fact I'm starting to bet with myself on how long he's going to last. I've got a couple books that say he resigns or has a breakdown sometime in the next week or so.
I think the mothering habit of Claus is starting to rub off on me. If I don't watch out I'm going to start carrying napkins and diapers around for wayward kids or something, and goodness knows when that happens, my pockets will begin bulging like nobody's business. It won't look pretty, that's certain.
Well, I guess what I really don't like is that he crashes after work--I've gotten into the habit of periodically phoning him up every now and then, ever since he started bugging me to do his letter for him. It seems I do quite a bit of this sort of work these days, I've done at least 3 other people's homework for them so far. (And at least 2 of them, that I know of, have had their lecturers praise the quality of the work. Apparently I both type good English and somehow still make it look like that person's work... or at least enough to fool the lecturer, anyway.) Anyhow, I got into the habit of occasionally calling him up. A good chat in English is rather hard to find these days, since the office is populated by people for whom English is a second language, and I haven't got Net access yet.
(I've been nudging my bosses along that direction, though. Little hints here and there. My uncle--he's a Sanguine, remember?--simply jumps on whatever comment I make and off goes the bandwagon. It's really easy.)
And these days, whenever I try calling him, he answers with a snore. Not exactly the kind of thing conducive to discussing university applications or future travel plans. (He wants me to visit Patience at least once every blue moon, while I insist on him coming here, and paying for it too.) It's also how I found myself displaying signs of mothering--when I told him to go take a cold shower and drink a couple gallons of extra-strength coffee so he could at least talk normally. Half-dead people tend to slur their words. He simply snored. It's annoying, you know, when
people snore while you're talking to them.
(This doesn't count when you're giving a wake-up call. In that case, a snore would be highly appropriate--I do it all the time when I don't think I need waking up yet. I think I kick people too, but that's just what they say. I don't recall anything. I was asleep, after all.)
Hmmmmmm. It looks like my mom's family has some communication issues. Well, that's just according to the opinion of their kids and their spouses, so I guess it doesn't qualify as a valid observation or whatever. Because, you see, my mom's family seems to enjoy speaking in superlatives. Very extreme language, for one thing--and, unfortunately, I'm a rather too literal person. Flowery language turns me off... but flowery language is their mother tongue.
No wonder my mom and I had so many arguments. I think the next time I talk to her, I'll filter out all the adjectives so I can understand better. I think I ought to do the same thing for all my maternal relatives... well, I already do that with advertisements anyway, so it won't be too hard. Just a bit rude, maybe. On the other hand, I ought to go memorise a few one-fits-all adjectives to sprinkle around my own conversation so it's more palatable to them. I'll just call all colours "brilliant" or "florid", all sounds as "noisy", "life-threatening", or "Christian", all people as "stupidiots" or "humanoid" or "good", and so on. Maybe I'll even write 'em on my wrist and on occasion, read the whole thing off in a go just to see how happy it makes them.
In fact, I think Gene had the same problem... but then again I don't keep in contact with him--or with anybody from A-levels, for that matter--so it doesn't affect my blood pressure any more.
...actually, I wonder if the real problem lies in their opinionatedness. (That's a real word. I think.) Because it seems that the flowery words only come out when they're expressing themselves, usually rather too loudly... but if so, then they'd probably be more Choleric than Sanguine... of course, they could be both. It also explains the preponderance of Melancholies and Phlegmatics having married into the family--in fact, if I'm right, my dad might be the only Choleric in-law in the place--and even he's ChlorMel, I think. He's not likely to be Sanguine since I don't recall mood swings.
(For mood swings, read Chronicles or God's Pencil. Pencil is very, very, very SanMel; I'm not sure about Chronicles, but he's at least part Melancholy. I'm not sure about the other part. I'm not particularly prone to mood swings, I think.)
It might explain my fondness for vague words--"I think", "maybe", "perhaps", "might", "not sure", "likely", "if", "seems", "apparently", "guess", "possibly"--I keep as few opinions as I can to keep life simpler. Also this way I don't have to get offended every time people blow smoke in my face or whatever. (Actually, the best way to tolerate smoke is to take a deep breath. After a few seconds, you go into nasal ennui and you hardly notice anything.) This approach rather turns some people off, I find--I suppose I do tend to come across as a bit wishy-washy on some matters that seem important to other people. But frankly, why pretend to care about which team wins the World Cup when you've got no bets riding on it? The only reason I watched was so I wouldn't be too left out of gossip.
(And I did have a small wager going on--I was betting that the team I betted on would lose. I won--they lost.)
Opinions... hmmm. I suppose having a few wouldn't hurt, once in awhile... and besides, I do have some. I just try not to express them too loudly or too forcefully, except on occasion when I can't resist trying to shred someone else's opinion--and my uncle has plenty of them. Opinions like "rain is not for playing with" or "all animated shows are funny, even when they involve swordfights and blood"--seriously. He was (forcedly) laughing while watching a fight scene in Ueki--or "if it has drums in it and it's secular, it's evil" and a few others that I'm not going to tell you about so I can preserve the family honour.
That's something worth having opinions about, I think.
Oh, I forgot to mention this before... the day we went to bakuteh, Mike L and I were having a
little discussion on luxury and necessity and so on. He wants the whole world to have a certain standard of need, beyond which all is luxury; I thought (and still think) that the standard rather varies according to each person. And so we tried (and failed) to come up with a workable definition of "need"--and then we found that the definition of "luxury" depends on that--and then of course, "personal" is a little hard to pin down too.
But I've now got time to ponder it over... "need", biologically speaking, means to require for survival. In other words, you only need things you would die (physically!) without, like oxygen or water or certain minerals or food. I think perhaps, for the purposes of discussion, I shall define "need" thus:
need: (verb) 1. To require for continued survival, eg The dog needs to eat. 2. To lack certain objects, facilities, or faculties without which the person would not develop normally, eg Newborn babies need lots of touching. 3. To be without certain objects, facilities, or faculties that would enable a person to do things required of them, eg I need money to go to university. 4. To be required to perform a duty by a recognised authority, eg I need to go water the plants now because Mom said so.
This definition seems to be workable... it doesn't seem to allow for misuse or abuse of the term--no more "I need a nicer car!" for instance, unless your boss is about to fire you for not impressing the new client enough, which would then put you under the definition; and it prevents people from saying they "need" something because some other friend said so. But then "luxury" would therefore be:
luxury: (noun) 1. Any object or facility beyond what is needed.
which wouldn't quite be workable, since some things may not be needed, but are important to have anyway for convenience. One might "need" a pencil, but that would be satisfied with a stick of graphite--and most kids these days insist on mechanical pencils, which are admittedly more convenient, and on occasion even cheaper. The same goes for almost anything-- you may "need" food, but what of three meals a day (when most people probably could survive on two)? Or "need"ing to breathe much more than 3600 times an hour? Which is why I came up with the term of "favourable conditions"-- when something goes beyond basic need but hasn't quite reached the level of luxury yet.
favourable condition: (noun) 1. A condition in which a person possesses objects or facilities that satisfy the requirements of need, but are still used mainly to perform the same functions as those required by need. 2. A condition in which "need" is more easily satisfied.
Take, for example, food. You "need" food to eat, but anything would satisfy that condition: say, the bark of a tree. However, you happen to go to a restaurant and order something more tasty. It would still be a favourable condition since you'd mainly be using the food for eating. The restaurant would equally be a favourable condition, since it would make your need--eating--easier to satisfy. On the other hand, if you happened to be visiting an expensive restaurant and ordered their best dishes, not to eat but to try to make a fashion statement to whomever happens to be dining near you, you would be passing into the realm of luxury.
luxury: (noun) 1. A condition in which one possesses objects or facilities in excess of what is needed, and does not use said objects or facilities for their original purpose. 2. A condition in which one possesses objects or facilities that do not fulfil any condition of need.
Here is where we get into the twsting world of personalisation, because "need", and therefore "favourable condition" and "luxury", applies to everybody differently. Different people, for example, need different quantities of various minerals, or have different ideas of required duties, and so on. A businessman, therefore, might "need" an expensive watch to both tell time and to impress clients (in a world where watches have got sucked into the fashion industry, Impressing People has become one of their many functions, along with the traditional Stopwatch, Glow-in-the-Dark, and Alarm) or, at least, it would be a favourable condition.
On some peddler, however, the expensive watch becomes luxury, because really, who is the peddler going to impress anyway? And somehow one doubts if peddlers have anywhere to be on time.
Makeup and nice shoes, then, would fall under any of the three categories depending on who was doing the shopping and where. Guns and anime and manga, unfortunately, would all fall into the "luxury" column, unless you happened to be a mangaka or a producing studio of some sort. (I wouldn't really care too much if all firearms turned into plasticine overnight. It might give police a bit of a hard time, but then again they're supposed to be fit enough to subdue crooks so there. And anyway there'll still be knives and other sharp objects.)
[Later]
I've been running in the rain again, and again it's because I went to fetch the cousin from school--and again, it's happened while I was wearing the shirt the Coconut gave me. I wonder it it's just coincidence or something. Well, at least I can be sure of associating good memories with it. The difference is that this time I was with the 5-year-old cousin and the maid (we'd gone to fetch them from tuition and school respectively) and a couple umbrellas that we'd bought at the cheapest place on the street. (We found out later why those umbrellas were so cheap--they bent and went out of shape at the slightest touch.)
However, this time the rain was so heavy that it made the maid shiver. (Cold, not fear.) And then my aunt phoned me and said we ought to go hide in some restaurant until the rain got less, so we visited a McDonald's for my first time in a few months. We also spent RM23 on feeding ourselves... and I'm getting hungry. But we did dry off there, more or less, and I'm sure I attracted some more stares from the middle-school students scattered around the place. It looked as if the place is a favourite haunt of theirs after school--and well, I suppose it's not every day you see a guy of uncertain age (I never seem to manage to look 20 years old. So far most people seem to think I'm 17 or 18 and recoil in horror when I tell them the truth. Obviously I'm not behaving old enough) leading a dark-skinned woman (the maid), a little tyke in a shirt 3 sizes too large (the 5-year-old), and a girl in school uniform (my other cousin) into a restaurant--with the guy and the girl both dripping wet. (Well, I gave my umbrella to my cousin, who used it to cover her schoolbag and left half her self out in the rain. I think she did it on purpose. So did I.)
[Friday]
I have decided that of the entire financial recording process, my definite favourite is the bank reconciliation. Sure, it involves staring at the screen and hunting numbers, but it's so relaxing compared to the other aspects. Plus one does get a certain satisfaction out of knowing that one's financial recording has been utterly perfect, at least as far as the bank records are concerned.
And in the end, that's probably all that matters to the bank and the client...
I think the other gratifying thing about it is that I can do it really quickly. Not to brag or whatever, but bank reconciliations are (what I think of as) the easiest bit of the thing to get done, since they print the statement out on nice clean paper and you don't have to read somebody's scrawling on torn paper. So the reading is so so much easier...
Drat. I'm so hungry... I suppose from now on I really ought to wake up in time to have a bit more breakfast before work. But then I always find it hard waking up... well, usually my uncle does wake me up for breakfast, but how was I supposed to know he meant me this morning?... I suppose this is where you get a whole load of background history dumped on you.
My siblings and I used to share bedrooms. We also went to this Chinese school where Standards One to Three (look a pun!) go to the afternoon session and the others go to the morning session, or something along those lines. The two halves also switched sessions every year, so my sibs and I (since they're all two years apart except myself and my big little sister) were always rather out of sync in a way--I never went to the same session as they. (Of course, at that time it was just the three older ones.)
I suppose this gave rise to the habit of only responding to my name when being woken up--either my name or any spoken word that unmistakably referred to me. I think my family already knows anyway, since it seems to apply to them too--as far as I can tell, they respond to either shaking, calling of their names, or the ringing of their handphones. The alarm works too, but not as well. And it definitely applies to me.
That, I think, is why I only rolled out of bed ten minutes after my uncle stormed into my bedroom (well, I didn't see it, but I assume he did) and clapped his hands about ten times. I heard him, assumed he was applauding me or something, and displayed a complete lack of response to him. Some time later, I felt the bed shake. (It's one of those flimsy bunk beds made out of painted hollow metal rods.) That got my attention, but only for twenty seconds before I decided it wasn't anything likely to be fatal.
When I woke up, I wondered how come he hadn't called me to breakfast. But then I eat very quickly anyway. The Gorilla has theorised that it stems from years of competing with 4 other hungry siblings for food. I rather agree--with the added factor of rushing to school and having to chow down breakfast at record speed every morning. Plus I can do a lot of stuff one-handed by now, from years of balancing bread-and-butter in one hand and unlocking doors, pulling on socks and shoes, and assorted other things related to rushing onto school buses or parents' cars. So it really didn't bother me apart from now being rather hungry.
I do hope he doesn't try and keep this up, though, because once he gets my tolerance level up, I won't respond to anything short of a cold shower--and that is something I would very much like to avoid. My siblings say that once they were trying to move the shared bed into a nicer position--with me asleep on it--and I have to take their word for it because I certainly didn't feel anything. (They say that I told them about dreaming about being on a boat, however.)
It hasn't been very nice around here, emotionally speaking. There's a lot of crying and yelling floating around the place, and it looks like I'm completely powerless to stop it. However... well. the Pig told me last night about some interesting properties of duct tape. Such as that it's airtight, waterproof, and extremely sticky. Also it's quite easily available in hardware shops.
Also that it comes off by itself only after a minimum of 1 hour. I suppose my maniacal laughing disturbed him a bit. But the possibilities that present themselves are, indeed, delightful.
In any case I've got a bit of a personal grudge since the 5-year-old brat insisted on playing with a computer yesterday. More background information coming up here: the brat (that's it, I have decided that from now on, Brat refers to the 5-year-old kid. It's tiring typing so many hyphens. And whaddaya mean I'm being mean?) screamed several weeks ago that he wanted to play games on a computer. So I installed a few games on my aunt's laptop to divert him from mine. (Her suggestion.) And then, when she wanted to use it, I had to put the game on another computer... an so on until pretty much all the computers in the office had those games on 'em.
So it became a kind of habit for us to play those games after work, and for the Brat to scream daily about wanting to play games. Then last night, he screamed so loudly and decided to jump off the chair--which, obviously, landed him on the carpet. Then he burst into tears for the 2,537, 350th time that day. I ignored it, but my uncle began screaming about people who don't take care of children who jump off chairs and instead play games on their computers, which led to more screaming back about not being able to catch people who fall from heights of 1.2m, and crying from the Brat, and so on until all the games had to be deleted. It's a pity since I was rather advanced on my own copy of the game.
So I'm going to buy myself some duct tape. Then I'm going to stick the Brat in the stairwell. Literally. He can scream all day and all night if he wants, but I'm betting he'll find it difficult to attract attention if he's well hidden and has a bit of tape on his mouth. I'll go let him out around lunchtime if I'm feeling generous.
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