about today

after months of illness, my grandmother finally passed away at 8.42pm today (Malaysian time). i don't know all the details yet, but she apparently went into a coma and died in her sleep. i'm glad she wasn't in any pain. when my mum called from my aunt's house, she was in tears and i could hear my aunts and cousins crying in the background. and then my dad called, and he was crying too. and that made me sad, the fact that my dad has just lost someone he must feel very deeply for. i was close to my grandmother when i was little - she used to visit with us when i was little, and sometimes stayed for months. so i'm attributing the lack of effect that her death has so far had on me to the fact that throughout her illness i've been somewhat detached from the roller-coaster of emotions that the rest of my family have been feeling because i'm far away from home. or maybe Prozac. anyway, God should be so lucky to have my grandmother in heaven... she makes kick-ass tuak*!

*tuak rice wine

the joy of layzing

yesterday morning, i got up at 7:45am. i had to pee, and so i did. i looked at the clock on my cellphone and patted myself on the back for getting up so early. then, i went back to bed.

at 8:25am, Jules called to wake me up. the night before, we had planned on watching the re-run of Big Brother together. i switched on the TV, arranged my pillows just so, and we commented on Lea's big boobs. Jules was annoyed that Pete wears eyeliner because he thought that he (Jules) was the only man who did that, apart from maybe drag queens. i told him to wake up and get his head out of his behind (in a much politer way, of course). after the show we hung up. i had a bowl of cereal (all-bran mixed with Crunchy Nut) and watched a very old episode of Frasier. then, a show called Don't Get Done, Get Dom came on BBC1, and i watched that too. it was all about a loud, bald man named Dom, fighting injustice against the common (wo)man like your average-looking modern-day superhero. he helped a middle-aged woman haggle for a large MPV, and he harassed a land-lord and made them return the deposit of a geeky young couple. after the show was over, i went back to bed.

i woke up from my nap at 2:30pm. i switched on my computer and watched a few episodes of Will & Grace. then, i had some orange juice, and some Cadbury with turkish delight. i looked around the room, and admired my model.

at 6:00pm, i watched The Simpsons. it was a double-bill; one episode on Channel 4, followed by another one right after on S4C. after The Simpsons, i read a chapter out of a book called The Life You've Always Wanted.

my dad called, and told me that the US PGA Tour was on TV. i told him that maybe it is back home, but here in England where everyone is crazy about ze fussball, nothing is on TV except bloody football matches.

i took another nap and woke up at 8:30pm. then, i had a bath. i watched Sugar Rush on TV, and after that, My Best Friend's Wedding. while it was playing in the background, i returned Jules' call - he called while i was in the bath - and we spoke for about an hour and a half. he told me about a dream he'd had where he made out with his tutor and woke up feeling disgusted (i think he secretly meant excited). i told him that the night before i dreamt i was riding a horse at a funfair. he said that he'd probably come to Liverpool on Sunday, if i promised to buy a shower adapter for my bath. i said okay, maybe.

then it was 1:00am and he went to bed so i attempted playing Shadow of the Colossus again. this time, i felt the pad vibrate when it detected the colossus, and so i headed towards the area that made my pad vibrate (hehe). i ended up in some kind of valley with ruins and had to work my way around to get to the top of a cliff. there was nothing around the cliff, and so i threw myself off of it and landed in a shallow pool. i called for my horse, Agro, and we trotted around but i still couldn't find the colossus. i got sleepy and decided to save my game. but instead of saving it, i accidentally quit without saving. i think i'll go back to games that don't require much thinking. this is too hard.

i went to bed at 2:15am, but didn't fall asleep until it was almost 4:00am... partly because it was kind of cold last night and instead of closing the windows i just threw another blanket on the bed, and partly because (maybe) i had been sleeping all day and not doing very much else.

this morning i woke up at 10:43am.

unfinished business

half-read books that have been sitting on my shelf for the past year:
Mythologies, Roland Barthes
The Bear and The Dragon, Tom Clancy
War and Peace, Tolstoy
The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir
Delirious New York, Rem Koolhaas
Emma, Jane Austen
Early Socratic Dialogues, Plato
Backlash, Susan Faludi
Feminist Interpretations and Political Theory, various people writing various articles
The City of Tomorrow, Le Corbusier

what can i say, i'm a total sucker for second-hand bookstores. on the other hand, yesterday evening i finished the last book from the Tales of the City series... most satisfying!

this n' that

i broke my digital camera at the beach last week. there's sand in it so the lens doesn't come out anymore, and according to the guy at the shop the cost of repairing it wouldn't be worth it since it's such an old camera. i am really bummed about that. on the plus side though, i guess it is an excuse to get a new one, although i'm lacking the funds to do so. so it's back to good ol' manual for me. and i do have a good manual camera - it's an M-gen Pentax SLR... only thing is i don't have the skills to use it well.

i found out recently that my old friend Davina has moved to London from wherever it was that she was at before... Melbourne, i think. so, i guess i'll be meeting up with her soon-ish - as soon as time and money allow!

man it is so annoying moaning about money...

i love that it's summer. it's not stifflingly hot... well, not all the time anyway, and because it isn't freezing cold, it makes me drink more water, which is good. except, it also makes me pee a lot.

i had a scary dream the other night. because it's now warm, i sleep with the windows open (brings a nice breeze into the room) and i dreamt that a man took this really long ladder and used it to climb into my room. he climbed right in, crawled under my table, then walked across the room and stole my TV and Playstation, and a bunch of my DVDs! it seemed really real, and it was as if i could almost sense a presence in the room with me, which was the scary part.

i miss driving. my dad has this old Austin Vanden Plas Princess in the garage, and when i was a kid he used to take me out in it sometimes, just to run the engine. parts of the floorboard is rusty, and the floor on the passenger's side has a little hole in it, which i thought was pretty cool because i could see the road whizzing by underneath the car. anyway, i dreamt i was driving it one night, but i couldn't get it to brake, so i had to kick my way through the floor and stop it Flintstone-style.

my grandmother is really sick. late one night i got a call from my mum, telling me that my grandma wanted to talk to me before she "went". so we had a little chat, said our goodbyes and before i went to bed that night i prayed that she would have a nice peaceful death. next morning i called home and it turned out that she didn't die after all. well that was almost a month ago and she's still hanging on, which i suppose is a good thing? the thing is that she's so ill that it's just a matter of time and if i were her, i guess i'd rather get it over with than lie around in discomfort waiting to die.

anyway. i watched The Da Vinci Code during the weekend and i have to say that i enjoyed the movie more than i did the book. mostly, perhaps, because i went to see it expecting it to suck like the critics said it would. which is kind of how the book really disappointed me... there was so much hype about how great it was that i read it expecting to be blown away. i think one thing i really liked about the movie was that it didn't start with a disclaimer from Dan Brown about how all the facts in it were true. plus there were some really nice shots of the glass pyramid in the Louvre and, unlike the book, nobody claimed that the glass pyramid was made out of 666 panes of glass.

these days i'm busy with job applications and updating/spoofing up my portfolio, which i've recently realised, kind of sucks. also, trying to clear up all the mess that has accumulated in my room.

Mean Moms

it wasn't until a recent comment that i realised how long it had been since i last posted. i checked my e-mail today (which is something else i haven't done in a while) and saw this mail that my mum sent to me for Mother's Day (which i forgot... Queen of Passive-Aggressive Land, my mum is). anyway this one's for Eatmisery... through her journal, i have come to realise that it isn't easy being a mother and well, appreciate my mum a bit more. (although i did still forget Mother's Day)...

Someday when my children are old enough to understand the logic that motivates a parent, I will tell them, as my Mean Mom told me:

I loved you enough . . . to ask where you were going, with whom, and what time you would be home.
I loved you enough to be silent and let you discover that your new best friend was a creep.
I loved you enough to make you go pay for the bubble gum you had taken and tell the clerk, "I stole this yesterday and want to pay for it."
I loved you enough to stand over you for two hours while you cleaned your room, a job that should have taken 15 minutes.
I loved you enough to let you see anger, disappointment, and tears in my eyes. Children must learn that their parents aren't perfect.
I loved you enough to let you assume the responsibility for your actions even when the penalties were so harsh they almost broke my heart.
But most of all, I loved you enough . . . to say NO when I knew you would hate me for it.

Those were the most difficult battles of all. I'm glad I won them, because in the end you won, too. And someday when your children are old enough to understand the logic that motivates parents, you will tell them.

Was your Mom mean? I know mine was. We had the meanest mother in the whole world! While other kids ate candy for breakfast, we had to have cereal, eggs, and toast. When others had a Pepsi and a Twinkie for lunch, we had
to eat sandwiches.
And you can guess our mother fixed us a dinner that was different from what other kids had, too.

Mother insisted on knowing where we were at all times. You'd think we were convicts in a prison. She had to know who our friends were, and what we were doing with them. She insisted that if we said we would be gone for an hour, we would be gone for an hour or less.

We were ashamed to admit it, but she had the nerve to break the Child Labor Laws by making us work. We had to wash the dishes, make the beds, learn to cook, vacuum the floor, do laundry, empty the trash and all sorts of cruel jobs. I think she would lie awake at night thinking of more things for us to do.

She always insisted on us telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. By the time we were teenagers, she could read our minds and had eyes in the back of her head. Then, life was really tough!

Mother wouldn't let our friends just honk the horn when they drove up. They had to come up to the door so she could meet them. While everyone else could date when they were 12 or 13, we had to wait until we were 16.

Because of our mother we missed out on lots of things other kids experienced. None of us have ever been caught shoplifting, vandalizing other's property or ever arrested for any crime. It was all her fault.

Now that we have left home, we are all educated, honest adults. We are doing our best to be mean parents just like Mom was.

I think that is what's wrong with the world today. It just doesn't have enough mean moms!

well, although 75% of what i talk about at therapy are "Mother Issues", i guess sometimes i am glad my mum was mean. heh.