Miss Cat

You cheer me up!! 

Home Alone

Today I am home alone, and many bizarre things (to my reckoning) happened. Guess what? I did house work all day!!!

To the initiated, yes, I am a lazy bastard. I have been and am still one. It’s a selective kinda laziness which only (coincidently) involves housekeeping. Friends who know me well KNOWS that I was never a neat freak.

Please don’t be misunderstood here.. I do keep my pad clean (once in a while) when I have to i.e. Chinese New Year’s Eve emmm… that’s basically it. Ahah, I also do clean up when the chaotic messiness that was my doing became too much for me to handle and was choking me up with a vengeance.

I love the feeling of a clean room though especially when its 2-3 days after a major spring cleaning. It gives me a relieving thought that hey, even a person as complicated as me can have a moment of “coordinated” peace. Alas, this does not last very long *sigh*

No matter how much I reshuffle my things in my pad, it was never 100% neat and tidy. TIDY is the word! Oh yes it is. During my very sporadic spring cleaning sessions, I could never place everything in where it was “supposed” to be. The result? The whole room would appear incredibly presentable but “at least” one drawer would be in a complete mess.

Like they say: Out of sight, out of mind”.

Guess I am just not a person who can stick to his/her quest till the very end…

So, today turned out to be a day that the urge to clean up sneaked up on me. Laundered all my clothes according to color coding (!!!) so that I could set aside some to be donated to the local charity body that redistributes these to orphanages. While that was going on, I even cooked up some seaweed soup to reward me after a day of toiling. Cleared out the cat’s litter, fixed some edible stuff for them and at the same time, read Hillary Clinton’s Living History memoir. I don’t know why I am reading this, but I guess I am just a typical busybody…

I even washed all my shoes for fun and shined them up with Kiwi shoeshine. After 4 hours of hard work, I finally had a chance to sit and gulp down an ice-cold can of Mountain Dew (and my seaweed soup) and it was the best feeling ever!

When I think of it, this day did not turn up bad at all! I suspect that I have developed a liking for the acrid, pungent, bitter, headache-inducing smell of tar in the shoeshine too! I might look forward to chores, who knows?

The Day My Soul Died..

This is undeniably the WORST day of my life. I have never been humiliated in this way before. No words can ever describe the degrading humiliation that I have been put through, the brutality, the cruelty… it had taken away what little dignity is left in my shaken self.

Have you ever been locked away against your will? Have you ever been in a situation where you were not given your basic rights of choice and were pushed away without a single explanation despite having voiced out your protests and plead when your basic rights were violated? Am I not worth some respect, though I am not a person of the greatest importance? Is my existence not significant in this world in which I share with you too? Am I relatively unimportant compared to the people currently reading this, who might appear to be more worthy of love? Why am I not loved like everybody else?

This very day of my life, I have lost my dignity and my basic rights of my body. Nobody has touched my physical form so coldly and without a single regard for my obvious unwillingness.. It was degrading enough after having my whole body touched without my least bit of consent. Having a thermometer stuck up my bum is definitely too much for my already broken soul to take!

I hate being the Rambling Chicken’s cat! This virgin visit to the vet had killed me inside, rendering me incurable for the rest of my life from this traumatic day. You can take away my body, but you will never, ever take away my soul,, no matter how small it is.

A Slumber In Paradise

I have just spent 4 gleeful days away from everything! Went to a Redang Island; which is equivalent to paradise. Had lazed away the weekend. After I came back to reality and after a long thought, I realized that the place is not in reality a paradise at all. I have been to lovelier islands, more pristine beaches and to be truthful, the corals on my last visit 2 years ago were much more beautiful. An inappropriate development of a new airstrip which is sorely visible the moment I stepped out of my humble tent, which overlooked the sea (and the airstrip) had robbed away some of its beauty.

Having explained to you about the physical characteristic and having assessed the visual of the so-called paradise, I still found a deep inner peace the moment I stepped my foot on this commercialized holiday destination.

Call me a paranoid freak or whatever. Since yonks ago, I have never been able to sleep well when I leave the familiar comforts of my own bed. Don’t get me wrong! It’s not that I always sleep in dingy rooms with which smell of damp mattresses, with dysfunctional HVACs, mosquitoes overload… (but yes, I have had my fair share of these). I have never been able to sleep superbly sleep-inducing air-conditioned rooms with oh-so-warm wool blanket. I was never peaceful when sleeping in the bus, train, my good friend’s room.. so much that it had been a curse.

As I write this, the image of my friend Chai Fong pops up. She has always had it good. She could sleep everywhere! Whenever we went on trips, she would always be in a static log state, snoring away (okay, sorry.. she doesn’t snore, but hey I am making a point here!) while I tried my very best to nap. Well, I never managed to. Every little thing could wake me up. The sound of someone coughing, my next-door neighbour’s wind chime, the stray dog, my cat barging into the house (downstairs…) and of course, when a friend moves while sleeping during her sleep during trips. There you go, I am awake! So dear Chai Fong, you are a very lucky gal indeed…

This brings me back to the commercialized so-called paradise that is Redang. After a gruesome week of assignments and round-the-clock working sessions, I went to Redang with 2 friends and a bunch of strangers. Not being able to sleep even with close friends, I thought this was going to be a disaster! But surprisingly, no, I slept like a pig and (embarrassingly) I have gone overboard.

Hold your breath! I slept in the bus (only waking up to pee), in the speed boat (quite turbulent), in the oven-hot tent in the afternoon, pre & post breakfast, dosed off a bit in the open sea (snorkeling), late afternoons and before dinner! This cycle repeated for the following 2 days! And before I forget to mention this, when not in the tent (at night), I slept on a chair in full view of friends, lecturers, tourists and local people!

What had got into me? Must have been the sea breeze (or was it the fact that I was away from all that had been bugging me?) Or was it because of the absence of the familiar stressful faces of the people around me everyday? Are they robbing me of my peaceful nature?

Having the ability to eat as much as I can and sleep well is indeed a blessing. Now that I am able to shut-eye in a quick while (I am behind CF in this, she does it in a split second!), I am now a complete person!

The Importance Of Staying Genuinely Me

Living in a world that consists of various races, religions, gender and language is to me very amazing and inspiring. In terms of skin colour, it is so diverse : white, yellow, black, olive, olive-black, black-white, yelloe and white and at the same time all can cross each other to create another brand new colour-combo. We have straight guys, straight women, lesbians, gays, homosexuals, metrosexuals, cross dressers (straight), cross dressers (gay).. the list is endless. Everyone has a specific niche in which they live and thrive in. The so-called niches are ever expanding to create newer ones. Categories are running out, not being able to label those groups that are existing and those that are still in formation.

The beauty is in diversity. That is what makes the world a more colourful place to be in. So what is the thing about having to conform to a certain in order to survive the cruelty of cliques? Isn't it beautiful to be different, have deffering opinions, to be more colourful, to not stick to the herd?

In this Asian reality that I live in, I find that the "we" word is taking too much of our everyday life: which includes decisions that need to be made, opinions, actions... The huge influence of Confucius's thinking on our upbringing and mindset is making sure that the collective "yes" and that "yes" of the elders are ever important and inquestionable. What will then happen to us (as I am writing here, I notice that I too, write in a collective-voice way) and do we not have a choice to for once NOT say "yes" as a part of a majority or "yes" to an elderly's wishes without regard to our own personal point of view?

For a change, isn't it better to at least say a stern "no" at a decision done by the Herd or the Elders when it doesn't seem to be logical? And is it possible to live in harmony despite being at opposing sides with the Herd? In a Herd dominated part of the world, is it easy to live alone or with only a small non-majority group of lik-minded people?

The reason there is such a diversity in terms of gender classifications is that people are not afraid to speak up and defend their rights as a human being despite how different they are from the majority of "normal" people. As for me, no matter how different a person is, he/she CAN choose to be different and have the right to a niche of his/her own.

Is it also a sin to have different skin colour, speak in a different language, laugh at jokes that only particular people can understand? Is it also wrong to come from a diverse cultural background different from the alpha herd? Is the "togetherness" value too strong in our society that it makes us unacceptable to people who are not of the same wavelength as us?

Sometimes, everyone needs a breathing space and also freedom to be his/her own self, regardless of matter be it a space to be happy or to release, to able to interact with friends that he/she really want to, to say what is on his/her mind without any hindrance from other groups (majorities) and to express his/herself in a special way.

So friends, love your fellow human beings as much as you love yourselves despite how different they are. For those who have been hurt by the herd for being who you are, it's okay just love yourself too. It is okay to be an outcast sometimes. Being in the main herd or being on top of the popularities stakes is great as well as long as deep inside you, you know that this is you at your most genuine.

For the time being, it'll suffice that I keep being me.

Hmm. rambled quite a lot today...