Saturday, April 28, 2007

The old-fashioned way

R: You're sending it by mail? Won't that cost you? I could just get it from you
S: It's ok, say if the postage costs $1 plus, isn't it just the same as your bus cost, minus the travel time waste? If you mind it so much you could pay it back over lunch?
R: Huahaha whatever you think is best. Anyway I think posts are more romantic.
S: Sure didn't mean to be romantic, but ok... sorry I can't hire a dove

Darn.

A dove would be nice. With a ribbon on its neck.

Grinning Goat at 4/28/2007 12:02:00 AM pontificated

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{buzzz out}

Thursday, April 26, 2007

A clap for clapton

If I could reach the stars I'd pull one down for you
Shine it on my heart so you could see the truth
That this love I have inside is everything it seems
But for now I find it's only in my dreams

That I can change the world
I would be the sunlight in your universe
You will think my love was really something good
Baby if I could change the world

If I could be king even for a day
I'd take you as my queen I'd have it no other way
And our love will rule in this kingdom we have made
Till then I'd be a fool wishin' for the day

That I can change the world
I would be the sunlight in your universe
You will think my love was really something good
Baby if I could change the world
Baby if I could change the world

That I can change the world
I would be the sunlight in your universe
You will think my love was really something good
Baby if I could change the world
Baby if I could change the world
Baby if I could change the world

Shirleen, yeah this song I like. Clapton sounds better live, this has more kick than his album version. You should listen to Layla. Love that one too.

Grinning Goat at 4/26/2007 11:56:00 PM pontificated

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{buzzz out}

The new and the old

Biwi: yes I heard the IT SUCKS before it got cut off...I'll try again when I'm out of the train
R: huahahaa how come you seem to always be able to catch the bad part

::
Biwi: eh I'm gonna get cut off again
R: Whoaaa you can tell when you're gonna get cut off? So high-tech ah? except of course for the fact that it cutting itself off is low tech hahaha

::
R: Change your bloody phone would you, or use the pink one
Biwi: I like the looks of this one
R: aye it looks good but it doesn't work. Man, your phone is a bimbo

Grinning Goat at 4/26/2007 05:25:00 PM pontificated

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{buzzz out}

Just a short message

Del get your ass back here. Or rather get your other parts here, you can leave your ass there for the snobs huahahahaha

Grinning Goat at 4/26/2007 12:52:00 PM pontificated

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{buzzz out}

Wednesday, April 18, 2007

I bow in respect

Good friend, good book and a sleepy conscience. That's the ideal life.

Mark Twain may be a morose pontificating pessimist but he's right on this count.

Grinning Goat at 4/18/2007 09:50:00 PM pontificated

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{buzzz out}

Sunday, April 15, 2007

Macho brouhaha

I have a crazy class.

There is this girl. She was wearing sleeveless shirt the other day. She lifted her arm and slanted her head so her hair fell right behind her arms so you can see her hair appearing from behind her arm. Then she said, "teacher teacher look I have armpit hair,"

In truth I was too shocked for any coherent response and anyway before I could say anything someone in the class noted, teacher you can do it too and yours will be brown.

"and when people ask me what do I tell them? I dyed mine?"

The class then got crazier and noisier. If they were not shutting up I think it was for my lack of trying. I was more for saving my voice and listening to their gossip. Unecessary information that inadvertently got passed around. Well not around around exactly, because it got into my ears.

Like say, do you know that Betty Boops was not a person initially? She was a dog.And I correctly guess she was a poodle at that. Never thought much of Betty Boops anyway. Which is why it's such a horror that I almost ended up with the name Betty.

Then this girl with the split tongue (reminiscent of a lizard) doodled on the wall and coloured the whole thing green. She claimed it was a dragon but it looked like a goat to me.

I know how unteacherly it is not to stop them from vandalizing the wall and all, but then again better this goat-dragon than some other graffiti, right?

To make my point, there was this doodle in the wall that says "ai yi ge ren shi dui hai shi cuo?" (translated to "loving a person is right or wrong?")Obviously you agree that this kind of graffiti is crap, right? So I let my student drew on the wall on account of her artistic merit.

Oh and she gave me a sticker of her goat-dragon today which I pasted on my text book.
I was wondering if I can order the poster form of it since it looks so commercialized and all.

I was telling this guy to do a chemistry question on the board and he was standing there totally clueless but with looks of absolute intensity and seriousness, then he said half-laughingly that he's from harvard.

If he's from Harvard that makes me a Harvard lecturer so I didn't mind. Yes, Daniel is a Harvard graduate.

They moved us down to the classroom on the first floor and I had this sneaking suspicion that they noticed the green goat-dragon and wasn't too pleased with it. I turned out to be wrong because when I went to the photocopying machine this fellow teacher that I didn't know (except for the fact that he always borrowed my air-conditioner remote control) suddenly complained to me that they were doing a re-shuffling of classes today - the point of which totally failed to grab my attention. Ok, actually he did blabber something about the reason, something that involved the word "half and hour" and "ridiculous" which i didn't quite catch but since he was nice enough to let me use the photocopying machine first I just nodded obligingly and smiled (hopefully at appropriate times).

I have also been made familiar with some corny jokes- the corniness of it prevents me from writing it here.

Looking at them gave me a new perspective about myself. Gosh, I am old.

Grinning Goat at 4/15/2007 07:48:00 PM pontificated

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{buzzz out}

Tuesday, April 10, 2007

The itch to kill

They stood motionless and if silence was a piece of music they were playing a beautiful tune. Every one of them smelled sweet. Saccharine sweet. It was not that of a natural pheromones but it was a mark of territorial boundary not to be breached. A smell to repel. It was odd the way they want to avoid and look at the same time.

Their eyes strained in the dim light. Trained to be attuned to every movement,to the stir in the air and the sillhoette of black against white. There was a glint of malevolence in their roving eyes. The thirst for blood that needs to be quenched. An eye for an eye and blood for blood even if it was their blood they were spilling.

One of them stepped forward, bent low. Ready for an ambush. His eyes searched the others for confirmation. The unspoken traffic of idea.

They must not be too slow, for fear of escape and yet they must not be too fast. Because haste breeds defeat. A wreck of nerves would be betrayal because impatience is the signal of impending danger, it stirred the air and roused the enemy. An insidious plan. Archaic but not obsolete.

With the flick of their wrist, they slashed through the air. There was a loud sound and for a moment they were quiet as the reality sank in. Looks passed between them. A shared understanding.

And then just as sudden, there came a raucous cackle, resonant and deep. It pierced through the air. A herald of triumph and a task accomplished. Submerged with gratification, they howled and howled. The sound shrill. Tribal.

--------------------

On a side note, in case you don't know what I'm talking about, my sister summarised the experience in one line: "during the holidays we should ALL go back so we can starve the mosquito".

Grinning Goat at 4/10/2007 12:46:00 PM pontificated

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{buzzz out}

Wednesday, April 04, 2007

Haunted by Name
Our Ignorant Lips

By Jack Matthews from Crazy Women.


Chapter III

We have two grown daughters, my wife and I. One (Nanci) is married to a complete fool who is so totally and commitedly a fool that he'll never be able to suspect that he is one. He and our daughter live in a Chicago suburb, and he works as a clerk in a men's clothing store in one of the big shopping centers there.

My wife and I have visited them several times, but so fas as I am concerned, I'll never go back. When our daughter married that son of a bitch, it was like she committed suicide. The fact is, she was a smart girl - really smart and talented- except for this one thing of mistaking this straggle-faced idiot for a man. The tragedy is, she could have sacrificed all her other talents if she'd been able to see through him, and she'd be ahead. It's enough to break a father's heart.

This half wit sits around and reads the paper and comments on world affairs, and she waits on him hand and foot, thinking everything he says is luminous with truth. He picks his ear with his index finger. He makes two hundred dollars a week, more or less, at his clerking job, and she makes half again that much as a secretary, but neither one of the damned fools seems to consider this a barrier in his assuming omniscience on any topic having to do with worldly success...and any other kind of success is as beyond his comprehension as Aztec phonology.

ANyway, we have another daughter (Marilee) who's smart enough, and makes pretty good living as a lab technician in Pittsburgh. But she lives alone and wears men's sweat shirts and tennis shoes. She wouldn't be bad looking if she could unsquint her eyes (she wears the expression of someone bare-faced in a wind storm) and understand something of the implications of her gender. She's not a dike or anything (I honesly believe this, because you can be sure I've wondered); she just doesn't seem to give a damn for men as men or women as women. One way or the other. I mean, the poor looney little bitch just bops around, living in a world of people. Neuters to be nice to and take an interest in.

I bring this up for a reason. This information is material. MY wife and I sit side by side, rocking back and forth, watching television (I sometimes get a flick way back in my mind of old Birdie, watching the same things, maybe rocking right in tune with us), wondering where in the hell we went wrong in raising two girls like these. Just what in the hell did we do? Or what did we neglect doing, that we should have?

No, there's no hope of grandchildren, either. The damn fool son-in-law comes from a family that is riddled with everything from mental illness to premature senility, from diabetes to hickies and glaucoma. They are a race of idiots and dwarfs and nonachievers. Somewhere, deep in the back of his lineage, I sometimes get the echo of laughter at the fact that they've secretly conspired to empty the sewers of their blood into ours.

So far as I'm concerned, they've stopped my heritage, that blood, as with an embolus. Killed my line, because (I swear, through no fault of mine) our other daughter will never conceive, or even conceive of the desirability or even the possibility of doing so. This pontificating half-wit has done it. He's had the minimal sense to have a vasectomy, and I sometimes hope out loud that our daughter gets knocked up by an itinerant genius (hush, my wife says); but the poor dumb girl has been insidiously schooled in fidelity, if in nothign else, and our line ends in a pompous whisper, mocking my ancestors who achieved, goddamit, and built this valley.

You think this is irrelevant to the issue (yes) at hand? Oh, no. You do not listen, if you do. Or you do not forehear (as in foresee, but a subtler, more elusive art)

What a vicious, unconscious revenge for what an inscrutabl crime!

Do you hear, now? For the Braines were coming to an end, too! Yes. This is the fear that dear Birdie felt rising like floodwater in her life. Old Wendall had possessed dynastic prejudices, without doubt. Old Wendall named his son in his own image (like God naming man with the jealous egocentric impress of selfing form). Wendall continued the madness, repeated it. Be thou me, my son! Take unto thyself mine own name. (Yes, I can hear it as plain as day).

::

Old Wyandotte

Hark, hark to the falling leaves
Shuddering down from the highest limbs.
Summer pleases, but light deceives,
Autumn is truth as the light dims.

Most of the world is past, is past!
We the flurry of small moments
Join we soon the eternal cast
Attired eternal in earth's garments.

Now our civilised confusion
Into the present valley seeps;
But the ancient Indian nation
Haunts by name our ignorant lips.

Wyandotte, oh Wyandotte!
Lost land of forgotten folk!
As your Fate, so our lot;
For we are teamed in the ghostly yoke!

Grinning Goat at 4/04/2007 12:19:00 AM pontificated

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{buzzz out}

Tuesday, April 03, 2007

Stereotypes

Amy. The whiny girl with pitchy voice. Wears and says all the wrong things
Kenny. Pimply-faced boy.
Benjamin. The religious boy who went to mass and sunday school. Attend cell group and discuss his feelings a lot.
Dewi. demure. prim and proper.
Tammy. A pushover.
Budi. Budi baca buku. Ibu pergi ke pasar bersama Budi. Budi makes it to a primary one textbook. He's the good boy. Not entirely good looking but decent and proper. Hair has a side parting.
Marvin. A pompous ass.
Royston. Short man (guys with fancy names are almost always short). He has stomach where a leg is supposed to be.
Summer. Dumb blonde.
Timmy. The guy whom the teacher made you stand with outside class because you guys chit chat too much.
Sharon. Tall, with long hair that's jet black and bossy in a subtle way.
James. Gentle good natured man.
Ricky. Screwed up boy who loves soft toys. Probably grows up to be gay or a narcist or metro man. Either one.
Harry. An average Joe. (this is probably the only instance where a harry can be a joe at the same time)
AJ/JJ/MJ or equivalent abbreviation. The one who pulls his hair down over his ears to mimick a non-existent sideburn.
Deborah. An annoying preachy know-it-all.
Rhonda. Big woman with big chest and curly fluffy hair.\
Zerdy. Nobody names their kid Zerdy. Well except for my classmates' parents. So Zerdy has got to be this destructive boy who suddenly gets elected class monitor.

Grinning Goat at 4/03/2007 02:31:00 AM pontificated

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{buzzz out}

Monday, April 02, 2007

More haste less speed

Vonka: one day you'll see things from a different perspective
R: can you make one day tomorrow or something?
Vonka: patience is not a virtue everyone is priviledged to have
R: more haste less speed, eh?

Someone with a negative framework of mind would grasp this " the secret to having less problems in your life is to concentrate less on you and more on others" as "don't be a narcist, be a busybody"

Grinning Goat at 4/02/2007 09:19:00 PM pontificated

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{buzzz out}

Sunday, April 01, 2007

Bits and pieces

We can't get everything in and it's good to have people acknowledge that, that we can't get everything in and that 10% is good enough.

We can't get everything in because we're not a recorder and neither do we want to be . So that 10%, these bits and pieces, just have to be enough to carry us forward. Because we don't want to be stuck in a limbo until our hair is all grey and we have to dye it black. Because dyes aren't cheap and they smell bad. But mostly, we want to move forward. Because a video that gets stuck in the middle irritates the hell out of people. It irritates the hell out of me.

I wanted to start with a knock because it's the polite thing to do and because there's that brief period where you face the door and there's time for you to pre-inject an adrenaline boost if need be. But nope, I didn't even have the luxury of knocking because the door was open.

I guess I should count my blessings that I discovered that he is a she just the day before. That he, is never a he but a she all along. Which is good, right? Because if not, not only would I not be able to knock, I wouldn't even get to the correct office even if it's open because a woman is inside and I'd have thought, surely that's the wrong office? I could of course get to the correct office but ended up asking, are you his wife? which is worse, right?

Anyway I apologised for the intrusion and explained that I was the one who emailed her last week. She said oh yeah you're the one, have a seat.

I'm the one. She has a fine memory.

Then she set a piece of paper in front of me. A tiny pencil. The smile would've been friendly and everything would've been fine except for this piece of paper and what she asked next.

Tell me what you know about mobile DNA.
I'm sorry?
Mobile DNA.

DNA that is mobile? Ok I know transposon is a mobile DNA but that's a far stretch from writing an essay about it. (which was the very reason economics freaked me out, because when the question was flashed on the screen all I could think about as an answer was a single line and not a very long one at that and how am I supposed to puff it up to 4 pages? So I dropped econs and took physics because numbers are better any time of the day than stretching my imagination for a full 4 page out of nothingness)

Erhh I'm actually not prepared for this.
That's ok. Just write what you know.
erhhh ok.
And show me your ID.

And a good thing I did, because showing her my ID was what saved me. so,no I'm not saved by the bell or the CPR or anything cool like that. I'm saved by an ID. Well since it saved me I guess the uncoolness of it doesn't really matter.

Ohhhhhh you're not Tammy. I'm really sorry. I just thought that..well because she has an appointment at 2
Should I come back later?
No no it's fine. I'm so sorry to put you in a shock... it's just that you guys... everyone of you just looks the same.

Everyone just looks the same. I like her. She's like the older version of me.

So it turns out, I'm not the one and she doesn't have such a fine memory. She just meets a lot of people who look alike.

She had thought it outrageous that for someone who had to take a test, I admitted out loud and with such non-chalance that I was not prepared for it. Come to think of it now, I guess it's a good thing that I didn't ask if I could bring the paper and the question home to think about - because I was about to. And if admitting I was not prepared didn't kill her, asking if I could answer the question at home would probably do kill her.

Anyway when all that's straightened out, she told a story. A long one.

And in the middle of it all, I kept remembering how I called her "Sir" in my email and silently thanked God that she didn't remember (well by now I know that faces don't stick to her mind so what more a mere word) but mostly I just wanted to laugh.
There was just this bubble of delirium threatening to surface, this muscle twitch which was a dangerous sign of a racuous outburst of good humour except that it's all totally wrong because it certainly wasn't a joke she was telling me. Do you know how hard it is to mask a muscle twitch? I'd need a botox. Or some form of local anaesthesia. Or a plastic surgery.

I guess this meeting was not designed for grace and propriety. There's nothing gracious about the way I entered the room. No door knocking and all. The ending was somewhat a joke too. The real Tammy came poking her head in. I was thinking if maybe I should catch her eye, use my psychic power to communicate to her the question.

I hope she knows more about mobile DNA than the fact that it's mobile. I hope she could puff it up-whatever it was, in her head- to 4 pages.

When Tammy came, I left. And that's how it ended.

I got 10% of her story. Maybe. You incorporate mistakes into that and maybe I'm down to 5. That has to be enough to carry me forward because life has no pause and rewind button.

Do you know why? What's the point of having a rewind button? Ask anyone who has watched NUS webcast, it has a rewind button; they'll tell you that they'll rewind and rewind until they get sick of the lecturer's voice and you certainly don't want to get sick with life. They'll also tell you that a rewind button is useless if you don't get what the lecturer's saying because proficiency in english isn't his strong suit. They'll tell you that what you need is not a rewind button but a subtitle.

Grinning Goat at 4/01/2007 01:14:00 AM pontificated

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{buzzz out}