The Path of the Righteous

I've been called a liberal Malay by many of my friends and family members, a supposedly pejorative term. Here is the non-exhaustive list of times that I was called a liberal Malay:

1) A family dispute on whether it was appropriate to address the prophet Harun as Aaron. I argued that both names were interchangeable as Aaron was merely a transliteration of Harun, and that both names still carried the same meaning: The Exalted. They argued that Aaron was used in Judaism, so as Muslims we should stick to Harun for all intents and purposes. I disagreed, thus was called a liberal Malay.

2) A petition was circulating on social media, demanding that Aeon Big in Bangi stop selling alcohol. I said we shouldn't sign the petition, as it would infringe on the rights of the non-Muslims who consume alcohol. They said, "...but Bangi is a Muslim majority township! They should respect that! Think of the kids!" Well... Malaysia is a Muslim majority country, so should we sign a petition to ban alcohol in the whole country too? I did not know that in Malaysia, being a minority means you should not have rights, you know, out of respect. Tongue in cheek, I told them, "I won't sign this petition. But if there is a petition for better religious education classes where our Muslim kids are taught not to buy alcohol just because it is there, I'll sign that one." That was when they called me a liberal, just because I refused to let Aeon Big do the parenting for us.

3) At breakfast, my mom told me how ISIS was actually an Israeli agenda to tarnish the reputation of Islam and Muslims. A very plausible theory. Although so long as it remains a theory, we should not rule out other possibilities. "What other possibilities?" she exclaimed. Um, well... for one, the possibility that maybe ISIS are actually self-professed Muslims who are just sick in the head? "What are you talking about? Why are you defending the Jews? And why are you always skeptical when it comes to Muslims? Don't be a liberal." I got strawmanned, and I got called a liberal. The double whammy.

4) I commented on a Facebook article about how taking a cold shower at dawn is good for weight loss. The writer posited that when the skin absorbed cold water, the body would burn fat to keep our body warm. I argued that the skin wasn't capable of absorbing water simply because our skin was waterproof, otherwise we would all balloon up after a swimming session. Someone replied, "So basically you are saying the prophet was wrong?" I said, "No, all I'm saying is your reasoning behind the prophet's habits is flawed because your premise contradicts science." I actually agreed that the body burns energy to stay warm, I just disagreed with the water absorption part. Then they called me a liberal, all because I rejected a flawed post-hoc reasoning of a perfectly good habit of the prophet.

5) Someone told me that women were made of men's ribs. A classic in all Abrahamic religions. I said no, men and women were made of the same matter. He insisted I was wrong, because men are missing a rib. No we aren't. Men and women have the same number of ribs. A simple Google Image search would confirm that. Then they called me a liberal, all because I understood that the Quran should never be taken literally.

These are just a fraction of the occurences where I have been called a liberal Malay. Looking at the trend, I'm starting to see it as a compliment. If you look closely at these 5 anecdotes above, being a liberal Malay actually means:

1. Understanding that Arabic is not the only acceptable language for the learning of Islam and therefore people should be free to use whatever language they please that help them get closer to God
2. Having the intellect to distinguish right from wrong and the willpower to restrain yourself from transgressing without having to force everybody else to remove all temptations around you
3. Being able to compare multiple viewpoints and make holistic judgements based on all possible parameters without succumbing to your own biases
4. Possessing a good grasp of basic science
5. Appreciating the different layers of meaning of Quranic verses and the remarkable quality of the literature. A good author plays with word nuances to allow for different interpretations. A good reader doesn't always take what they read at face value. The Quran is completely lost on people who have the analytical reasoning skills of a guppy.

Now, instead of being riled up when called a liberal Malay, I rejoice. To me it's not pejorative because it makes me a learned man with the ability to think for myself and for my own good. Being liberal helps me walk the fine line between religion and tradition. It allows me to discard prejudices that have made the Malay race as rotten and backward as they are today. It helps me see through the hypocrisy in people and call them out on their bullshit.  It helps me get ahead without having to put anyone else down.

Most importantly, it helps me rid myself of the one confusion that plagues Muslims: why are we so marginalised socially and economically eventhough we make up more than a fifth of the world's population and we are the most "enlightened" and "righteous" ones?

Bullying

I recently read about bullying among schoolchildren. It is amazing how progressive and thoughtful the world has become. I always thought schoolyard taunting and name-calling was just something you have to endure at school. I used to get bullied, although it was never anything I couldn't handle. It usually happened every time I changed school, because it's just so much fun to pick on the new kid. But once they found out how unfazed and smug I was in the face of adversity, they got tired and simply stopped. 

Although maybe my smugness was the reason why I got picked on. I was the pale skinned, chubby faced kid with a permanent smirk on his face, and rolling is the default position of my eyes. I could never answer a question unsarcastically, and I looked down on everybody, even the headmasters/headmistresses. Self-esteem has just never been an issue for me, unless having too much of it is an issue.

Come to think of it, I wonder how I made it out of primary school unscathed because if I had a time machine, even I would travel back in time and beat the shit out of 9-year-old me. 

That makes me wonder: would I be a better person if I had never been bullied? Or did bullying help me build character? Would I turn out to be a weak person if I hadn't had to endure mental torture from my big brother every day growing up? Or am I better off because of it? How did bullying contribute to my present being, and how much of that contribution is beneficial/detrimental? Is trauma inherently bad for a person, or do you actually need at least some amount of trauma in order to excel in life? 

I'm going to find someone to fund my thesis on this subject.

Saya Zahra

Let's talk about Zahra. I know this is old news, at least in internet years, but I keep seeing offhand comments about it everywhere and it's not sitting well with me.

Let's make it clear that when it comes to whiny, entitled Malays, you can count on me to smack some sense of autonomy into these people. I personally know a handful of good-for-nothings who talk shit about the government for not giving enough handouts to the Malaysian "master race" and it annoys me to no end. Incidentally these scums also tend to be the Lowyat-type insurgents who chalk up their failure to thrive as a result of racial prejudice. 

However, I do not find Zahra to fit this description. Far from it. If her words are to be trusted, she's well-educated and hardworking. Her speech, albeit a bit overly dramatic (wtf is up with the accompanying violin track?), is one that many honest Malaysians can relate to. All around me I hear people languishing about life getting harder by the second in Malaysia, what with the GST, the sluggish job market, the plummeting ringgit, the political ruckus, the fall of the high-and-mighty oil & gas industry, the palpable racial tension and the perceived rise in crime rates. This all translates into a weaker purchasing power and a bleak future for the Malaysian lower echelons .

Zahra encapsulated this in her earnest plea, thinking it would resonate with the general public. Instead it was met with a backlash. Even I was taken by surprise. 

"Typical Gen Y, expecting handouts at every turn." 

"Ungrateful little shit."
"Look at this spoilt kid."

Next comes the deluge of anecdotal life stories from people, recounting how they started their career with a shitty job that paid a miserable amount of money, and how they climbed up and out of the shithole they were in only by sheer determination and hardwork. All of these stories were tied up nicely with the snarky message along the lines of "Kids today should stop lamenting and start working hard. We did it alright, so why can't you?"

How in hell do these people not get vertigo from the top of their sky high horses?

'Kids today' come from a paradoxical system where everybody gets pushed hard into the same mould, all the while being promised that you can be anything. We believe the government propaganda that Malaysia is the best at this and that, and we strive to fulfil the country's aspirations. We've got big shoes to fill, after all.

'Kids today' hear that Malaysia is moving forward in all aspects, we are modern, quality of life is getting better, people are happier and healthier. The government promises, PROMISES, us with a long list of goodness we are destined for, so we grew up looking forward to leading a prosperous working life.

Once we tread the water of adulthood, little by little, our hopes and dreams get crushed. The protective veil is slowly getting lifted and we start seeing smokes and mirrors everywhere. Nothing turns out the way we were told it would. The honest persevere. The rest? They take the easy way out and cheat their way through life. You start to know exactly what dog eat dog means, because all around you people are smiling with a hidden snarl and a wagging tail, waiting to snatch that bone from under your nose. 

The jig is up. No one's looking after you because out here, it's sink or swim, baby. And you get scared and frustrated. So you turn to the same people who promised you greatness, and they turn their backs on you. You turn to the generations before you who fucked it all up, and they just smile and say, "Buck up and suck it up. You're cleaning this mess, and will still be cleaning it well after we are long gone." The generation whose survival was purely the product of government handouts and bailouts. Hypocritical old pricks.

"I started working as a miner and I lived in a tiny hut with no running water, and I didn't complain! Kids today are so entitled!" 

So tell me, mister. How is Malaysia a modern, properous and developed nation when the younger generations of 2015 still need to adhere to the same standards of comfort as the late 80s/early 90s? Is it our fault that we adjust our expectations based on our alleged GDP growth? Or is it too much to ask that we no longer deserve to be paid less than you were when Malaysia was still transitioning from agrarian to industrial? Is it entitlement, when all we want is just some proof, any proof, that we actually are better off as a nation now compared to the last decade?

You're so vain you probably think this post is about you

Do attractive people have it easier? I would believe so. But I've never been ugly so what do I know. Ha. No, really. I can't help but smirk every time a beautiful person complains about anything because more often than not, their issues are relatively inane. Beautiful people don't have real problems. They just need to wake up and the world is handed to them.

Case in point: a friend of mine who.. umm.. okay it just occurred to me that this story would be awfully specific and my friend would be easily identifiable. I will hence tweak this story to get the point across, while staying vague enough to protect my friend's identity (and myself from a probable lawsuit for defamation/libel/slander or whatever Najib is accusing Rafizi of).

So a friend of mine is beautiful. Yes yes beauty is in the eye of the beholder and some even claim it's subjective but that's what you'd say when you're average looking or downright ugly. Real beauty is very objective, like it or not. So my friend is a person who would register as beautiful in most people's books. Judging from the tone of his posts on Facebook, he's been through hard times.. I suppose. Well, again, his hard times are starkly different from ours. His hard times consist of having to live in a picturesque, quaint European town by the lake earning an average European salary. Yes, hard times.

Anyway, after years of being relatively quiet, suddenly in the past year he's been reviving his contact list, hollering old friends and chatting people up. He's a pleasant person and we always had good discussions about stuff, so it was good hearing from him again. Apparently he was on a job hunt. The European economy being in a slump and him having only a basic degree, the axe was coming down fast. He needed an exit plan. Like any good friend who isn't in a position of power to hire people, I could only give him generic motivational advice that may or may not have been stolen from cheap posters hanging on the walls of my high school student counsellor's office. "Just send out as many CVs as possible. Be brave. Step out of your comfort zone. It's going to be okay. We've all been there. I remember when I (insert a totally petty and unrelated experience about spilling coffee and try to work it into an inspiring story about courage and patience) and that made me look at life differently, and a better person. You'll get through this. Hang in there."

I don't know what happened to him for a couple of months after that because aside from the sporadical "hey sup? good, you? k dude tc", we didn't talk much.

Fast forward to early this month. He came back to Malaysia. I whatsapped him "Welcome back". Maybe the 'hard times' had caught up to him, and he had no other options but to come back and only return when the European economy picks up. Whenever that is. In the meantime, I had no idea what he was up to in Malaysia and I didn't want to ask. It's something I've learned over the years. When you know a person has been actively jobseeking, you don't keep asking questions about their hunting process unless you have a job offer or you know how to help. Otherwise they might see it as prying or worse, rejoicing in their misery. And I don't do that.... anymore.

A couple of days after he landed, I saw pictures of him leisuring at the beach, on an island, with celebrities. I didn't know they were friends. I took a closer look. Oh. Based on the hashtags, it was for a local movie. He was one of the male eye candies/love interests of the main female character. I know he used to model before, so it didn't surprise me seeing him fall back to his post-SPM career as a model.

It got me thinking: most people, in the face of hardship, would scrape the bottom of the barrel to make ends meet. But most people are not beautiful. This dude, on the other hand, has always known that if all else fails, he'd always have that face to sell. I bet that face has saved him many a sleepless night. If a burn victim's face is saved by his ass, my friend's ass is saved by his face.

Is that unfair? I wondered. It shouldn't be, because everybody is blessed with something and you work with what you have. I have other God-given talents that I was born with, and no one is calling it unfair. Somehow when it comes to good looks, people are quick to ask you to look past it as if it shouldn't count. A lot of attractive people are successful, as reflected by the fact that I very rarely see an attractive hobo. It is no coincidence that the most 'talented' Hollywood actors are also the most attractive. I could get a thousand other women to play Satine in Moulin Rouge, but let's not kid ourselves, Nicole Kidman's face is what won her the Oscar. Is that a problem, though? The face is part of the talent. She worked hard for that body, and her plastic surgeon worked hard on that expressionless face of hers. Her acting chops are an added bonus. She has the whole package. She deserves everything she has.

Okay where was I going with this. I guess I was just trying to dig deeper into our collective disillusion that looks don't and shouldn't count, when they completeley do and should. I've always said Lisa Surihani relies solely on her looks because her acting skills are non existant. But maybe that face is actually skills enough to be an actress, and instead of giving her shit about it, I should realize that skills can be nurtured and polished, so it's accessible to anyone who's willing to work on it. Looks, on the other hand, are completely bestowed upon you. There can only be one beauty like Nicole, or like Lisa. True unadulterated beauty is rare and should be a cause for celebration.

It still irks me though that a dude with barely a degree is having fun with beautiful people on an island, probably earning 3 times what I'm earning, just because he's pretty. Oh well.

Leger malentendu

Aside from my dayjob as some sort of engineer, I also take up freelance interpreting jobs mainly for French to English and vice versa. Apparently the demand for French interpreters in Malaysia used to be quite high back in the 90's, but now it is somewhat dwindling due to the fact that most French expats who come to Malaysia today usually have a decent grasp of the English language.

When interpreting, translating is only one half of the job; the other half consists of conveying the correct emotion and state of mind of the speaker to the listener so both the message and the correct tone get properly delivered. The real challenge is that you don't have the luxury of time; messages  need to be churned out and shot back and forth in real time, leaving no room for double checking. A good interpreter is one who trains his language reflexes rigorously.

What kind of reflexes? Well, grammar is a given. Maintaining proper grammar and syntax is somewhat tricky when translating from English to French because of the differences in word arrangement. French adjectives are generally placed after nouns and, like most Romance languages, French has a particular subject-object-verb word order which in English would mean producing a sentence such as "I it him give", instead of "I give it to him". With due diligence, one should master the grammar rules relatively quickly as the French grammar is very consistently structured.

Now the hardest reflex to train is the false friend avoidance. English has had a long history of borrowing from French since the Norman conquest, meaning that while English is still a mainly Germanic language in structure and grammar, a great many French words have been abosrbed into its vocabulary. However, both languages having continued to evolve separately, most of the borrowed French words have taken completely new meanings in English due to changing cultural contexts. A lazy or inexperienced interpreter, upon hearing the English word engagement (in the context of getting married), would hastily use the same word in French because after all, engagement is also a French word. A good interpreter would translate it as fiançailles instead (and it's always plural in French!). The French word engagement has always retained its original meaning of "commitment", but never in the context of impending nuptials.

The French nevertheless have also borrowed many English words and taken the liberty to completely redefine them. The word footing, by the looks of it, supposedly comes from English and somehow means jogging in French. They also have le smoking which means the tuxedo. The word stop in the French phrase faire du stop means hitchhiking. And my personal favourite false friend is préservatif, which is French for condom. I still vividly remember the shock on my friends' faces when I told them the cake from our uni's vending machine was full of préservatifs. It's the kind of seemingly small mistake that takes you forever to live down.

And these are only some of the many, many examples of false cognates between English and French. Mastering them is an absolute art and I thoroughly enjoy it. If you think math is a great mental exercise, try language. Math has not radically progressed  in the past decade because we've pretty much solved or have postulates for most math problems. Pure math has minimal real world applications anyway.

Language on the other hand evolves crazy quickly. Today's noun can be tomorrow's verb. Catchphrases are invented every day. Grammar rules can suddenly be bent to oblivion and new norms are invented overnight. Through the Internet and social media, cross-pollination between languages are getting more common so interpreters need to keep up with all the new terms and the cultural baggage attached to them.

It's a demanding job, but oddly satisfying. And pays damn well too.

All The King's Horses

As you get older and wiser you start giving less shit about stuff. I found myself singing along to One Direction's Night Changes last week during my morning drive and it made me smirk. Five-years-ago me would have sniggered at how readily I embrace mainstream pop songs these days. What happened to that dude who only listened to British-invasion songs of the 60s and obscure 80s electropop?

From my observation, age doesn't necessarily change what you like. It just reduces the number of peers you have, and less peer pressure means less shit-giving. It's just like how everyone liked Britney Spears' Toxic when it came out, but no guy in my class would openly admit it so they pretended that the half-nude Britney in the music video was the only reason why they were watching it. Yeah okay.

The same thing is happening in my film choices. I used to have several terabytes worth of movies ranging from silent films of the 20s all the way to post-millenial new wave Iranian cinema. I had friends with whom I would passionately discuss Kubrick and Kurosawa, I could quote De Sica's Bicycle Thief from memory, and whenever people asked me about my favourite movie the answer would be a short sigh, followed by "Well there are just so many it's hard to just pick one. Are we talking ficion? Biography? Adapted screenplay? Which era? Which country?" Of course it was not just an act because I was really that into it, and I had new favourite movies every week. Every second of my waking hours outside of class would be spent watching movies, it's ridiculous. Who needs friends when you can have Audrey Hepburn serenade Moon River to you by the window sill?

Somehow life got in the way. I graduated, I started having commitments and real responsibilities, and my free time started depleting. These days I go to the movies purely for the momentary escapism it provides. I expect to get entertained or at least to feel detached from reality even for a little while. It got me thinking, have I changed that much?

The answer is no. I haven't changed. Of course I've seen all the films that "mattered", but only once. I mean Citizen Kane is great and all but I wouldn't watch it again if you paid me. My real favourite movies have always been the same ones: Demolition Man, The Terminator series, Almost Famous, Jaws 4: The Deep Blue Sea, any P. Ramlee movies, and Shaun of The Dead. Simple and straightforward  movies that I really enjoy. Gone are the days where I would pretend to like Run Lola Run. These days I just stick to movies I could just enjoy with my brain checked at the door.

Which is why I loved Kingsman. I actually found it even more entertaining than all the Oscar movies of the past 5 years, combined. No, really. It's outlandish to the point where it almost becomes a parody of itself but not quite, the premise is simple and the execution is efficient and really satisfying. You want a spy movie without the overly complicated plot and several layers of villains from ten different intelligence agencies? Kingsman's conflict is all about Samuel L. Jackson wanting to wipe out most of humanity using satellite signals, that's it. And his side kick has blades for feet, so you know it's going to be good. You want to see an underprivileged kid succeed in life? Kingsman's got it. You want to see spoiled brats fall flat on their faces? Checked. You want to see religious extremists kill each other in a safe, confined environment without bothering the rest of the world? Oh it's got it, and it's glorious. In fact, the church scene alone is worth watching it for. I'd never have thought Colin Firth would be good in fighting scenes but Kingsman proved otherwise. It was uncannily similar to the bar fight scene that I'm very fond of in Shaun of The Dead.

And the most satisfying part of Kingsman is when all the who's who of the world have their heads burst into colourful flames and drop dead. Wouldn't it be nice to see all of the world's cunning politicians just explode and die like that?

I'm becoming a simple man. And I like it.

I'm planning to go watch Kingsman again next week. 

Crawling In My Skin

I used to work with a guy who would proudly and repeatedly tell me he didn't have a Facebook account, like it is some kind of a badge of honour. He also boasted about not knowing what hashtags did and was adamant on not figuring it out because he didn't care about Twitter either, or any other social networks for that matter. "I am old school," he exclaimed.

It was a personal choice, and I completely respected it because I couldn't care less. But after a while he started to annoy me with his constant harping on how people need to mind their virtual footsteps more, how social media is the bane of our generation, and of course, on how perfectly happy and well-adjusted he is as a person since he doesn't have "The Facebook", because he didn't need to worry about his online trails.

I would be lying if I said I didn't freak out a little when Google started doing targeted ads on me based on my search history but on a couple of occasions it actually turned out to be really helpful. My current favourite pair of shoes have travelled with me all the way from South America to Japan, and they are not showing any signs of slowing down. Google was the one who suggested them to me, and I am eternally thankful. 

"But they're siphoning crucial info about you! You should be concerned!"

Well unless you're a troglodyte who lives on shrubs and cave moss, I'm pretty sure you have at least an e-mail address, a telephone number and a bank account (if you don't own any of these you most likely are not that important to spy on anyway). Those contain  enough details about you and no matter how strict they claim their Data Protection policy to be, data theft will always be a risk for you regardless of how much you restrict your online presence. So I say be it. I use Facebook for fun and I don't take social media seriously, so the "crucial" pieces of information I keep on there are ones I am comfortable being leaked. Besides, people who brag about not using Facebook still use Google or other search engines. Your search history is a far better way to spy on you, don't you think? So why the hate on social media when the interwebs itself is peppered with your inane searches of the best latex fetish smut videos or articles on why you're seeing signs of male pattern baldness eventhough you're only 27. Why do you judge Facebook users when your search engine knows every bit about you, you balding perv?

All I am saying is we live in the age where humans are products. We are no longer mere consumers, we are goods. Every one of us, and there is nothing much we can do about it unless we all grow the same pair of humongous steel balls as Edward Snowden's. 

So either you pull a Kate & Leopold and move back to the 16th century, or you can deal with this and stop being so Linkin Park paranoid because that is so 2001.

The Victim Complex

I started this post by writing the title first. I'd never done that before. Usually I'd just let my writing roam around and go any which way it desired, and at the very end I'd swoop in, identify the core issue in my incoherent train of thoughts, and come up with a more or less appropriate title.

But not this time around. I thought I wanted to write about something super serious and that I needed to follow through and not get derailed off topic.

So what about The Victim Complex? As much as I love Wikipedia for a straight-forward, (mostly) unbiased overview of a topic, for this particular issue I very much prefer the Encyclopedia Dramatica's definition of The Victim Complex, and I quote:

The possessor of a victim complex needs some outside authority to blame for their own failures. They can never compensate for their personal challenges in order to do the basic competition necessary to be even minimally successful at life. Those with the most institutional of complexes have created not only an outside persecutor but feel an innate and deep endowment for entitlement, even privilege.

A bit of backstory for context:

I was out with a couple of friends at a new hotspot in town, when suddenly a decent looking young lady with a body sculpted by the Gods walked past us before cozying up to a heavyset, middle-aged Chinese guy at the next table. I jokingly quipped, "That dude must be loaded." Small chuckles were heard, and a friend decided that it was the perfect backdrop for a segue into his dramatic recounting of Bustamam's Woes : How The Whole Universe Is Conspiring To Pulverise The Malays. It's a tale of how the Malays are bullied and humiliated to the point where they become mere shells of their previous selves, all because of the money-hungry villains that are the Chinese. And the Jews. But mostly the Chinese.

Wait how the hell did he manage to segue into that story, you might ask.

Don't you see? We were talking, no, speculating about the wealth of a certain Chinese dude next to us. Whenever the word Chinese and money are said in the same sentence, it is almost illegal not to finish that sentence with "...and the Malays are being oppressed by these greedy Ah Bengs." In fact, the mere mention of the word Cina could spark a lengthy debate on how the Malays should stand up for themselves and give these slanty eyed people a good kick in the ass.

I hate it. I hate it every time someone brings up the issue of the Malay privilege. I hate the word supremacy. I hate the word oppression. I hate the word greedy. I hate the phrase "protecting the Malays". I hate the idea of my perfectly able-bodied and able-minded people needing special attention from the government. I hate the bigoted remarks on my Facebook newsfeed about what would happen if the Chinese ruled Malaysia ("We'd all be eating pork and Allah would punish Malaysia with more floods!"). I hate the fact that every time a race issue is brought up, a dimwit would be quick to play the 13th May card, the Malaysian Godwin's rule.

And above all, I hate how readily the Malays see themselves as stupid, lazy and mentally incapacitated, and are proud of it.

The Chinese stole your land? You don't have any land. You don't have so much as a doormat to your name. No one is stealing from you, but you rob yourself... of opportunities. The opportunity to get education, because when the Chinese were in school, you were playing honky. The opportunity to appreciate how our land is abundant with resources, because you'd rather wait for money to grow on trees than work a menial job. The opportunity to be fascinated by different cultures rather than be repulsed by them, because you choose not to care about others who are of different faiths because they might sneak bacon into your beehoon. The opportunity to travel the world and across the universe on a shoelace, through reading. Because reading is boring, reading is nerdy, reading is for the pussies and the sissies and the losers. The opportunity to see the glass half full, because you expect the glass to magically fill itself to the brim and when it doesn't, it's because of the Chinese.

How is it the fault of the Chinese that when I go to a government's office, the person behind the counter is on his coffee break at 10.30 a.m? How is it the fault of the Chinese that you are jobless when it is crystal clear you are a lazy bumfuck with a shitty personality and absolutely no redeeming values whatsoever? How is it the fault of the Chinese that you have this crippling fear of competition that the mere idea of a public university without a race quota sends shivers down your spine? "But what about our comfort zone? Down with those kiasu Chinamen!"

The Victim Complex provides solace. It puts the blame on everybody else but you. It is a teething cookie to your fragile gum, a pacifier to your erratic tantrums, a mouthful of Listerine on your putrid breath. It's a tudung on your bad hair day, it's ajinomoto on your tasteless wonton soup, a coat of fresh paint on your moldy walls.

It's what we use to escape the ugly face of reality.

The Victim Complex, embodied by an entire people, passed down through generations.

Shit only hits stupid fans

These days people find offense in most everything. I admit, my offense threshold is a little high, if not extremely, so not only is it almost impossible to offend me, it's also hard for me to even come close to understanding what goes through people's mind when they take offense on something.

So Jason Lo went under (mild) fire on Twitter for saying something supposedly sexist. It being a rainy Saturday afternoon, I had nothing better to do than to ransack the entire interwebs to find out what he said. Turns out, his controversial quip was something along the lines of "I also used to go out at night to look for pussies" when replying to someone who said "I used to go out looking for stray cats."

Um.. That's... it? That's it?? Someone got offended over a lame pussy joke? Oh come on. On one hand, I was delighted that feminist issues finally got the attention they highly deserve because Malaysia has been way behind in this regard. On the other hand, if feminists get all worked up over a stupid pussy joke, how are people going to take them seriously on other more pressing issues?

If there's anything I've learned during my 26 years of existence, it's that shit only get to you if you let it get to you. You can't control what people say or do, but you can definitely control how you react to it. I wish I could put it more succinctly so it could be a mantra printed out on a T-shirt that I will generously give out to all Malaysians, FOC.  Loosen the fuck up, people! (Now that's another mantra I cannot put on a shirt but for an entirely different reason.)

I am not a proponent of pussy jokes, mind you. However, I am also guilty of making them at inappropriate moments. In my defence, I also make dick jokes. I also make racial-stereotype jokes, humour noir, dad jokes, I'm-going-to-hell-for-this jokes, what have you.  I use humour as a defence mechanism and a tool to keep people at arm's length. Being funny allows people to feel at ease with you and enjoy your company, but at the end of the day they know nothing about you. 

 I used to just mindlessly crack jokes about anything with anyone, and it got me tonnes of friends and enemies alike. Whenever I offended people, I would be hard on myself for going too far or for crossing some lines. After a while I started tailoring my jokes to suit the different types of people I hung out with.  I studied their characters, I did research on the kinds of jokes they liked, I observed the things they had strong reactions to, and I ran with them. But just when I thought I had it all figured out, someone took offense at some  well-tailored joke I made, and I decided to give up and stop giving a fuck. Take offense, I no longer care.

These days I mostly keep my more controversial thoughts to myself unless provoked. I find people more bearable when they are not stupid, and stupid people are usually the most easily offended, so I try to keep the offense on the down low so I don't bring out the stupid in people. In return, people around me become tolerable human beings and it helps me forget their smaller brains.

So I guess my point was people need to loosen up so I can tolerate them.

The end.

White and its goddamn spawns

I woke up Saturday with a burning desire to repaint the living room and stair walls. I had a thousand other more pressing issues to deal with, but apparently those could wait. The hand stains on the walls, now those needed to go, pronto.

So off I went to the hardware store. For a middle unit shop lot, it was amazing how it had everything you could ever imagine and more, and how helpful the employees were. All I had to say was, "I need all the equipment to repaint my living room and stairwell." Moments later, a paint roller, a small brush for the corners and angles, a roller extension, a paint tray, 2 rolls of masking tape, and a plastic floor cover magically appeared out of nowhere. 

"2 cans of 5L paint will do the job," said the Bangladeshi guy whose command of the Malay language would put most born and bred Malaysians to shame. In fact, the foreign workers I saw coming in and out of the store during the 20 minutes I was there all spoke decent to fluent Malay, it being the only unifying language between them. It is always heartwarming to see your mother tongue being spoken by foreigners while Malaysians themselves look down or straight out despise the language. The difference between the Bangladeshi dude who speaks excellent Malay after living here all of two years and a Malaysian Chinese apek who's lived here all his life but cannot even form one complete Malay sentence? Simple. The apek's livelihood doesn't depend on his Malay fluency. Something to ponder upon.

Back to my story. So the Bangladeshi dude was looking at me with his head cocked to the left, "Nak warna apa?" Such an innocent question. Or so I thought. "Putih," I replied. 

Yes, but what kind of white? He asked, handing me a colour catalogue. This is where things got confusing. I grew up with the basic Luna 12-colour pencil sets, so the only white I know is white, as in that colour pencil I never had to use because who the hell colours white drawing paper with white colour pencil?

"So as you can see here, in the warm white section we have all the off-whites: ivory, eggshell, magnolia etc. In the cool white we have sky white, iceberg, pearl etc." I scanned through the catalogue and saw Mediterranean sand white, Arctic white, waterfall white, smoke white, vanilla white and all other kinds of ridiculous appellations. As the most basic colour in the universe (some even argue it's not a colour, rather the absence of it), white sure did a good job coming up with cool fancy nicknames for itself.

It took me a while to differentiate between linen white and seashell white before I decided to stop giving a shit and just pick one.

"I'll go with this one," I pointed to the top left colour square in the catalogue, the one that actually looked white and not one of those whites that were actually yellow.

"Alright, wedding white it is," he said. 

Yes, the colour I chose was called freaking wedding white. There are so many different shades of white they ran out of objects to assign to them so now they resort to attributing them the name of events and ceremonies. What's next? Birthday blue? Bar mitzvah green? Fall of the Berlin Wall grey? 

Early this year I learned about the colour fuchsia and I thought I was hot shit for knowing such an exotic colour. Now after having been mindraped by a thousand shades of white, I walked out of the shop with painting supplies and disappointment. 

Plato had it right. When we think we know everything, we know nothing.

The Cook and The House Hunter

Been back home in Malaysia since December. Surprisingly I don't miss France as much as I thought I would. One thing I do miss though, is cooking. I cooked a lot in France, and don't at all in Malaysia. I literally only helped in the kitchen once for the entire duration I have been back, and that was only because my mom bought home darnes of salmon and asked me specifically how to properly cook them on a skillet.

Back in France I would try out all kinds of recipes, from homemade chicken burger to the fattiest potato-free moussaka known to man. I also loved making fusion franco-thai cuisine. Granted, it was only "fusion" because half the ingredients in Thai food were hard to come by or too expensive, so I had to make lots of recipe-tweaking and concessions. After all, lemongrass and lemon juice do taste alike, ginger looks like galangal's estranged twin brother so they serve the same purpose, coconut milk is just milk from a fruit so it is totally possible to substitute it with full-cream milk, and kaffir lime leaves and bay leaves are basically the same thing...... right? 

Ok maybe not. But my fusion dishes didn't taste half bad. In fact they were pretty good. Except for that time when my tom yam goong tasted like sewage water (who adds milk into tom yam?), or that one time when my sambal tasted like dessert because I was going through a period of time where my mantra was "if it tastes funny, add sugar until the taste improves." Or even that one time when I used an old lemongrass in my bolognaise and it tasted bitter (otherwise lemongrass is a god-sent for bolognaise). Lesson learnt: if your lemongrass is 3 months old and has the texture of a twig, don't use it because it tastes like shit and I'm pretty sure it gives you cancer. You're probably thinking Why didn't you just go buy fresh lemongrass? Oh look at Bill Gates over here going around telling people to go buy fresh stuff like a true 1%-er. I bet you're also a vegan who snacks on macadamias and celery dipped in hummus, who throws away his yoghurt 4 days prior to the actual expiry date. I'll have you know that I once ate yoghurt three weeks after the so-called expiry date and it tasted fine, albeit with a funny tinge of tartness but I guess that's pretty normal for a mango yoghurt. And yes, I got severe diarrhea the next day but that was totally unrelated...

Anyway...

I'm currently looking for my own place and a big part of that is because I want to be able to cook my own meals. I love Malaysian food but I have come to a point where the sight of rice and noodles makes me want to strangle a newt.

So if you know a great condo with a balcony overlooking the city centre, preferably with an island kitchen and 3 bedrooms, and costs less than RM300k, then please call me.... so I can call you out on your blatant lie because these days even a shithole in Sungai Buloh costs you a liver.

And that's only the deposit.

Hey are you from [list all the Asian countries]?

I was getting a haircut at my usual place. It was peculiarly busy for a working Wednesday at 3 p.m., so I had a bit of a wait to do.

In came this dude who took up the place next to me on the waiting bench. He looked at me intently, so I just whipped out my phone and started reading my e-mails just so he could see I was engrossed in something and wouldn't bother talking to me. Plan executed, plan failed.

"Hey, may I ask you something?" he said. "Um, yeah sure," I replied in the most uninterested tone I could muster, complete with the "...and make it quick" 0.2 second-glance to the dude before looking back at my phone. Some people should really acquire basic common sense.

"Where do you come from? Well, let me guess...." Oh here we go, I told myself. This is literally the least fun game in the world, because it only involves the other person listing down 15 prominent Asian countries and me saying "nope" every damn time. Seriously, I've been living and travelling in Europe for almost 8 years and the number of people who guessed my nationality right has been around 3, tops.   

"Japan?"

Nope.

"China?" Nope.

"Korea?" Nope.

"Taiwan?" Nope, and I already said no to China.

"Thailand?" Nope.

"The Philippines?" Nope.

"Vietnam? Cambodia? Mongolia?" Nope, nope, nope.

I was about to say "Let me just tell you where I come from and save the both of us 10 precious minutes" when he finally gave up and said,  "Okay so where do you come from?" Phew.

"Malaysia," I said. He retorted with, "Ahh, I wasn't that far. I was getting there anyway." Yeah, of course. The amount of countries in the world is finite, so of course you would get there eventually. I just didn't have the whole day for this stupid game.


In all honesty, I'm not offended when people do that. I'm just a bit annoyed by the fact that most of the time they don't even bother making educated guesses rather than just jumbling together multiple Asian countries hoping to strike gold.

The thing is, it's either you get it within the first 3 guesses, or you'll never get it. Simple as that. Those who guessed it right, it's because they actually took the time and energy to analyze my appearance, rather than just blurting out random Asian countries.

I have double eyelids instead of epicanthic folds, so statistically speaking there are fewer chances I come from the Far East which would rule out Japan, Korea, China and Mongolia. I'm fairly tall and bulky for an Asian person, and height and weight are very much correlated with a country's financial standing. That rules out Vietnam and Cambodia. From my observation, they are usually the shortest and thinnest of the Asian people. My skin is more olive and mildly tanned, which should hint at Southeast Asia. So Thailand and the Philippines were, in fact, pretty close. So maybe there were actually some amount of logic involved in his thought process. But the fact that they were so far down the guessing list and followed by Cambodia and Mongolia just proved that it was merely a fluke.

Maybe I'm just becoming super politically correct, but i just don't see it fit anymore to just ask people where they come from just because they look different. It might not offend me because I am in fact a foreigner in Europe, but it bothers a lot of other people of foreign origins but who were born and bred here. I still remember a conversation with a friend who had Lebanese origins a couple of years back, during the Hezbollah conflict.

"So what is really happening in Lebanon?" I asked.

"Um, I gather my knowledge on the issue from the news, so you probably know as much as I do, if not more," he said.

"Are you worried about your family?"

"Well, all of my family is in or around Cannes, where I spent most of my life. So no, I'm not worried about them for what is happening in Lebanon," he said, with a bit more sass than I would have liked.


I didn't understand his annoyance back then, but with time, it's all becoming a lot clearer to me.

Life lesson before 8 a.m.

It was a chilly autumn day, as it always was in the north of France. Truth is, on this side of the Hexagon, it was always autumn or winter. Summer would grace us with its presence for two weeks a year, and before you know it, you'd be grabbing your winter coat on your way out again.

I was on my daily commute to campus, half an hour away across town. The journey was mostly uneventful until I caught a glimpse of my Solid Mechanics professor getting on the increasingly crowded metro. She was fumbling with her twisted earphone cords, or what I call the less intellectual version of the Rubik's cube.

It was always a funny sight when I saw my professors outside of campus, living their mundane plebeian lives like everyone else. The sudden realisation that they were just normal people with issues of their own, like earphone cords that needed straightening, or money problems, or just the usual waking up on the wrong side of the bed, somehow lowered the pedestal they were thrust onto.

She saw me. I shot her an acknowledging smile, but she took it as an invitation to come over and intrude the peaceful fictitious sphere populated by me and my iPod. Damn you social courtesy.

"So do you always take the metro to campus?" I asked her, knowing very well that she did. In my defense, there are absolutely no good questions before 8 a.m. In fact, if I were to overhaul the code of social conduct, I would abolish all forms of communication before 8 a.m. or morning coffee, whichever comes first.

"Yes, I do. It's just more economical, what with the hike in gas price and all," she replied. I nodded in agreement. Now that the first stupid question was out of the way, I was stumped. What do we talk about next? I contemplated talking about the weather, but it'd been the same grey sky for the last 5 years, and I wasn't a big fan of stating the obvious.

"So you're a Malaysian Muslim right?" she asked, brows arched. I nodded. "Which sect of Islam do you belong to? Sunni or Shia?"

Sunni, I replied.

"I'm a Muslim, too. My family comes from a predominantly Shia region in Morocco," she said with a smile. We then proceeded to talking about the different rites and rituals of our respective cultures, with no one trying to discredit anyone's belief. It was merely a healthy discussion between two people from two diverging sects of the same religion, without judgement or persecution.

I alighted the metro having learned something about Shia and life in general. Most importantly, I was all the more convinced that people are just people. Back home, us Sunnis see Shias as heretics, with some going as far as seeing them fit to be mass murdered. It's funny how we seem to tolerate people from other faiths more than people from another sect of our own faith. And here I was, talking to a Shi'i, with the Muslim faith being the common denominator for both of us, instead of our different sects dividing us.

The world would be a much better place if people would just let people be.

Bluntness is the only way to get your point across

I recently went out to dinner with friends: Italian place, right smack in downtown centre, huge portions, a bit pricey but that is to be expected at Italian restaurants. I don't have a problem loosening up my wallet strings for good food. In fact, I dedicate half of my paycheck to selecting top-tier foodstuff that is worthy of a magical journey through my intestines. This being said, if I'm paying 25 euros for a meal, I better get 25 euros worth of quality.

Sadly, it wasn't the case that night. In fact, it was the worst restaurant experience I've had in a long time, Italian or otherwise. The waitress had this default pissed-off look like someone just stole her last tampon. We even had a competition going on where we tried to be the first person to make her crack a smile (spoiler alert: I won). And the food was beyond awful. They somehow managed to overcook my pasta to the point where it became so limp, even Viagra didn't want anything to do with that shit. And the cream sauce was basically water with a hint of cream and maybe pepper. The only okay part of the meal was the salmon carpaccio I had for appetizer, but that was only because carpaccio doesn't require any actual cooking.

After pushing the rest of my pasta around the plate (I could only bring myself to eat half of it eventhough I was hungry as fock) trying my best not to look pissed and spoil the ambiance, I decided I was going to give the tamponless waitress a piece of my mind. The waitress, sensing this, just walked frivolously in our general direction as if she was daring me to piss her off with my impending commentary. Come at me, biyatch, I uttered under my breath.

"Any dessert order?" she asked us with one arched brow upon realizing no one was eating anymore.

"Is the dessert as good as the pasta?" I asked her. She nodded, beaming with pride, but somehow still not smiling.

"In that case, I'm not going to have any because my pasta was easily the worst I've ever tasted in my whole life, and I wish I was exaggerating," I said without missing a beat. That was when she cracked a nervous smile and I won the aforementioned competition. "Sir, if the pasta was not up to your expectations, you should have not eaten it," she replied, notwithstanding my obviously unfinished plate. "I ate half of the plate because I was super hungry, and even if I return the meal it's not like you're going to comp it," I said, raising my voice just a tad.

Cue audible gasps all around. Yes, the French can be so dramatic sometimes. I just shot them a look that said "Calm your gonads, people. It's not like I just bombed Hiroshima. All I did was complain about my food". And you can only dream of having a meal comped in France even if there was a giant dung beetle sticking out of it.

The waitress just shrugged and left with our plates.

"Um... You know.. We don't really do that in France. Usually if we dislike the meal or the service at a restaurant, we just don't come back," said a friend. It was cute, because he thought I was a Chinaman fresh off the boat who was unaware of the local customs.

"I appreciate the French Culture 101 lesson, but I've been here long enough to know the do's and the don'ts, thank you very much. Truth be told, I've never even done such a thing in my life. It's just that the food was so bad, I just had to let it be known," I explained. 

On further analysis, I think I should have let it slide and not said anything. For some reason I let my alpha side prevail, and that's not a good side of me.

One of the hardest things I've always had to do is not speaking out my mind. Oftentimes I'm convinced I have Asperger's by the way I'm completely oblivious about how my verbalized opinions might affect people's well-being. It's not all bad though, since I like the fact that I'm the go-to person for a lot of people around me to get advice because they know they can count on my "no sugarcoating, no beating about the bush" nature.

Some people find my bluntness rude, but these same people appreciate it more when I compliment them because they know I give out compliments as often as the Malaysian government fulfills its promises.

I've learned to control what I call my 'honest impulses' where I get a sudden urge to speak my mind, usually negatively, about something. I've learned to let little things slide. I've even learned to lie through my teeth about how pleasant something is, even when it's clearly not.

But if my lying about something is going to perpetuate mediocrity, then it's safe to say I'd prefer letting my honest impulses run wild.

Life As A Dog

Sometimes I wish I could be a dog for a day. Not because they're cute and cuddly as hell (why would I care what I looked like if I were a dog?)

I just would love to know how it is to just love everybody equally and unconditionally.

I was walking home from work today, tired and hungry, when a Yorkshire terrier came to me and demanded - no, insisted - that I pet her. What a beauty she was. Her walker who was trailing behind smiled at me and said, "She loves everybody."

How is that even possible? I can hate someone just because they laugh weird or wear a big-ass watch with stupid tachymeter or nautical shit, complete with four different time zones, a chronometer and a compass too. Who do they think they are? Jean-Jacques Coustaud?

Dogs won't hate someone for their watch. Or for anything. They just love. I envy them. 

Great Arguments Are Made of These

We were chilling on the Garonne riverbank enjoying the gorgeous sunset when a lady approached us and said, "Hi guys, I'm kinda bored. May I join you?"

Of course, we said. The more the merrier. She was Korean-American, married to a French, but as her French was pretty dismal we had to switch to English. As the only person in the group who spoke decent English, I had the de facto duty of engaging her in conversation.

All was going well until she uttered, "I live in California, but I hate America. They have absolutely no culture." Naturally she was expecting me to concur, as if it was a sentiment shared the world over. As if, by virtue of not being American, I was supposed to agree that anything American is bad, that the Americans had no culture. The hatred towards Uncle Sam is supposed to be a universal thing, is it not?

Well, tough. Contrary to popular opinion, I, for one, find that the American culture is very present and not just in America, but all across the globe. How can I not, when I'm sporting a pair of jeans and T-shirt, when all I listen to is American music and its declensions, when half of my favourite films are American, when I even adopt American mannerisms when speaking English although my education was largely British.

"That's unfair and a bit hypocritical, don't you think?" I asked, looking her straight in the eye. She reacted accordingly with wide, judgemental eyes.

"What do you mean, unfair?" she queried.

"Well, for one, your outfit is clearly American. You speak with a distinctly American accent, and I'm pretty sure the hamburger is part of your diet. How can you deny the existence of a culture when you are immersed in it?"

"Because it's a stupid culture!" she retorted, obviously irritated.

"So you're acknowledging that it is a culture nonetheless, be it stupid or not?"

"Yes, but not a culture I'd like to adhere to."

"So now that we've established that they do have a culture, we can discuss whether or not it is stupid," I said cheekily, knowing that half the battle was already won because she had just indirectly contradicted her original stance about the nonexistence of the American culture.

"It is stupid, period," she said, probably hoping that such a flimsy argument would suffice. Well, again, tough. I'm going to need more than that, lady.

"I think you're confusing stupidity and practicality. Their culture might not be as ancient as that of the Indians, or as intricate as the French, or as elaborate as the Chinese. But the practicality of the American culture makes it prevalent in almost every developed nation. I'm proud of my beautiful Malaysian heritage and culture, but do you know that people come to Malay weddings wearing jeans and T-shirts instead of our own traditional attires? You want to know why? Because it's simple and practical. Like it or not, we've all adopted the American culture for the sake of simplicity and practicality. So much so that it's become an integral part of our culture, to the point where we deny the Americans their own culture. And that is highly hypocritical."

"If that's the case in Malaysia, then you guys are just stupid," she said, dead serious. Aha. Of course, when all else fails, go for the low hanging fruit. At this point I had nothing else to say to her because suddenly she came off as childish, on top of being pretentious and arrogant. She might have perceived my sudden silence as a sign of defeat, so she decided to go in for the kill. Or so she thought.

"How old are you?" she asked.

"25," I curtly replied.

"Ah, I see. Well, you're still young. Give it some time and you'll see," she said, and I swear I saw her grin triumphantly towards her own reflection in the Garonne river.

I just smiled. So, on top of being pretentious, arrogant and childish, she's also ageist. She is one of those dumbasses who think age equals wisdom. The mere fact that I'm almost 20 years younger than her somehow discredits all my arguments. I might not have lived as long as she has, but I consider myself very well-read and cultured, and I take pride in my maturity. Given her frail arguments and willful recalcitrance even when proven wrong, the only difference between her and me are the wrinkles around her eyes. She might be years older, but none the wiser.

You just can't win with these people.

Coincidences and Baader-Meinhof

I was ten years old when one weekend my whole family decided to go pay a visit to my elder sister in Penang, so I brought a book along to make the long journey bearable. The main character was a girl whose dreams helped solve a crime. While in the car, suddenly my parents had a discussion where Jalan Travers was mentioned and I found it funny because Travers was also the name of the main character in the book I was reading. But wait, there's more. Once we reached Penang, it so happened that most affordable hotels in Batu Feringghi were fully booked so we had to roam around looking for a reasonably priced hotel with vacancy. We finally found one in a secluded area, and the hotel's name was... Travers Hotel. That was when funny became freaky. Today, it was brought to my attention that this phenomenon goes by the name Baader-Meinhof, where you come across something unusual for the first time and later keep seeing that particular thing over and over again over a short period of time.

I love freaky coincidences, because I don't fully believe in them. As much as I'm driven by the logical aspects of things, I still have enough superstitions to know that some occurrences are just metaphysical. Science has accomplished so much, but there are still a lot of things the brain can't grasp, and when the brain fails, science follows suit. Freaky coincidences are among the places science just can't reach. The best we can do is breaking them down into probabilities and statistics, whence phrases like "You have one in thirty thousand chance of finding your doppelganger."

I'm currently reading Fritjof Capra's The Tao of Physics. While the book is a magnificently boring piece of shit, I'm still learning a lot about Eastern mysticism, most importantly about how we shouldn't try to understand and explain the universe but instead just agree with it. I'm not even trying to understand coincidences; I just enjoy them.

Last summer I was walking around London with a friend I'd known since primary school who came for a short visit. We were just reminiscing old times when all of a sudden we saw this girl walking in our direction and she looked extremely familiar. Turns out, it was a common friend of ours from primary school who just happened to be in London at the same time. She was studying in Dublin, Ireland and was only in London for the weekend; I just arrived all the way from France that very morning, whereas my other childhood friend had driven down from Aberdeen, Scotland the night before. The fact that the three of us came in from three different countries just to bump into each other in yet another foreign country is just mind boggling. Granted, my encounter with the Aberdeen dude was planned, but the fact that we bumped into a common friend from primary school (that was 13 years back!), in a cosmopolitan city as sprawling as London, is something to ponder upon.

Humanity owes so much to coincidences and serendipity as most inventions and discoveries were unearthed this way. In a world where people are growing dismissive of divine presence, God still finds a way to gently shook us to the core and remind us who's boss. It's... beautiful.

Musical chair

At lunch today somehow my boss and I got to talking about relationships and marriage. Neither of us believed in soul mates, but him even less so. The French in general are quite skeptical about marriage, and I don't blame them. 50% of marriages in France end up in divorce, so if those statistics are to be trusted, the odds don't look good.

This said, my boss got married 6 years ago and had three beautiful girls out of it. So I just had to ask why he decided to get hitched anyway despite the odds.

"You know, when I was your age, I fell in love all the time. I could fall in love 10 times a day, and I'm not even exaggerating. At any given moment of my youth I'd have a girlfriend, and with every girlfriend I thought it was going to last. I really loved every one of them, and I could never understand people who complained about not being able to find love because I was in love all the freaking time. But I've never really had that one Earth-shattering relationship where my girlfriend was my everything, where I was ready to die for her, where being with her trumped everything else in the whole wide world. Maybe I'm just unlucky, or maybe that kind of love only happens to very few people."

I said nothing. I just wanted to know where he was going with it.

"And you know why it tickles me when people talk about soul mates and tell me that they've met theirs? It's the fact that these so-called soul mates always happen to live in the same city, or work in the same industry, or studied in the same university. For all I know, my soul mate could be somewhere in freaking Nepal and there's no way in hell I could meet her. But for some of these people, their soul mates happen to grocery shop at the same store or go to the same bar as they do. Isn't that convenient?"

Still not seeing where he was going with this.

"What I'm saying is, even if my soul mate were somewhere out there, I would never cross path with her. Now, does that mean I should never settle down with anyone? Just because destiny hasn't been all that nice to me, does that mean I can't get married?"

"So you're saying that you settled for the next best thing?" I chimed in.

"No, not really. If you think about it, love is like a game of musical chairs: you turn round and round, and all of sudden you realize time is running out so you decide to settle for the chair you have at the moment and hope for the best. That's all there is."

Then our conversation was cut off by this other dude who started going off at a tangent and veered away from our initial discussion, so I never got to hear the end of my boss' interesting train of thought.

I don't really know why I find his words fascinating. Maybe it's because I know for a fact that he's a devoted husband and father, which means that he makes do with the cards he was handed, and play them off magnificently well.

It's the kind of honesty and clarity of mind that I find essential, yet lacking, in our society today.

Keep calm and keto on

There are upsides and downsides to everything, including weight loss. The upsides include a boost in energy, stamina and confidence. The downsides, however, have been unexpected. For one, I need to buy new clothes, and tonnes of them. I just bought a new pair of Pepe Jeans two months back that set me back a pretty penny, and now I no longer fit into them. I currently only have one pair of jeans that fits.

The most surprising bit, however, is that my shoes are getting too big. I've always thought that your shoe size remains the same no matter what, but it is actually not the case. My running shoes are getting loose, and my everyday shoes as well. I've been gradually tightening the laces for weeks now, until today during my daily run when I realized that the laces couldn't be tightened any further. Same goes for my running pants.

My spending this month has shot through the roof so I can't really afford to revamp my wardrobe. Besides, I'm thinking of losing another 4 inches around the waist for the upcoming months so it wouldn't be wise to splurge on new clothes only to say goodbye to them a couple of months later. Thank heavens for belts, though. I've added two holes to my belt, and tomorrow I'm going back to the leather store to add another one.

It has not been an easy journey so I'm quite pleased that I've been able to stick to it. As a go-getter who never deprives himself of anything, my life motto has always been "if I want it, I'll get it" and that includes food. To be able to just restrain myself from eating whatever the hell I want is a huge accomplishment. Having a health freak for a boss has been a huge help too. Every time we bump into each other we'd be talking about yesterday's running session, or arguing about healthy meals, or just discussing running shoes brands. He's 8 years older than I am and has three kids, but he doesn't look a day over 27 and could outrun me any day. I'm really looking forward to the day when I can run at his pace without panting like a pig.

Another unexpected downside to weight loss is the flabby skin. I was convinced that the human skin is supple enough to just balloon up or shrink as needed, and that if I lost weight, it would just magically tighten itself. Fat chance. I currently have flabby belly skin that just hangs there, and Google told me that the only way to tighten it was by doing sit ups and crunches in order to build abs and fill it up. I was appalled. I have an imaginary list of things I despise with a passion, and those two things are way up there along with "waiting" and "people with bad breath".

So today I started working out to Jillian Michaels videos on Youtube, and it's been a bitch. I've been phasing out simple and complex sugar and running 4.5km almost every day, but this was the first time I actually felt my body hating me. Every muscle in my body just vibrated with utmost contempt towards its host, so much so that when the excruciating workout session was over, I could hear applause from every fibre of my body followed by a brain impulse saying "never again!". I swear, even my damn brain was in on it.

I say, fuck you body. I'm powering through, and you're going to power through with me, like it or not.

First World Tribulations

The crisis is hitting home. Well, my current home, that is. With the rise of emerging Asian markets (i.e. cheap labour, almost non-existent human rights, total disregard for the environment etc.), French companies are struggling to keep up. Mine included. In our last meeting, there were talks about downsizing and taking things offshore, something I found very hard to believe in the aviation sector. I guess with China having their own aircraft industry now, the fear on this side of the globe is getting more real than ever.

The repercussions were immediate. A co-worker was told his contract was not being renewed and he has to pack his stuff before the end of the month. That is three days away. The average salary increase is only around 2% this year and the worker's union is furious. We even received e-mails from the upper management, written in an extremely patronising tone no less, about how further negotiations are not foreseeable. The number of paid leaves are being slashed, meal allowance remains the same while food at the canteen just underwent a price hike, claims are being scrutinised to death, and recruitment is getting frozen. Those who are on their probation period might see themselves getting the boot at the end of it instead of an open-ended contract.

As for me, I don't have the slightest care in the world. Of course, work is piling up because we're bidding on tenders left and right, and the sooner I come up with solutions to our problems the better. It might sound stressful to some people but to me it's heaven. I like feeling important, I prefer working under pressure, and I sure as hell enjoy it when my boss sees my work and says "That looks great, we might be able to sell this." On top of that, I am actually applying everything I've learned from freshman year up to my Master's, and that includes my prior experience working at the German Aerospace Center. My dream job has always been one where I get to actually be creative and use my brain, and knowing that my work will eventually lead to improvements - no matter how small - to aeronautics, that is just an indescribable feeling.

One tiny problem though. It is getting hard to maintain a positive outlook on your job when others around you are whining all day long. I am used to the constant bitching of the French (and am actually quite fond of it), but hearing them complain about not being able to tend to their gardens after work because of the long hours is not much fun. Coming from a country where a 37-hour week is almost unheard of, I get really wary of my co-workers bitching about it.

Personally, I am pretty content with our working conditions. In fact, I think it's really hard to beat. I am on first name basis with everybody, my bosses and I are very good friends, the work environment is very hip and young. You just can't imagine a better work environment anywhere. Of course the crisis-borne fear lingers and everyone gets uneasy about it, but I think it's really not as bad as it sounds. In France, even if you get sacked, the government still gives you around 60% of your previous salary until you find another job. Sixty percent! That's a shitload of money. I have a friend doing a trip around Asia right this moment using the compensation given by his company after he got laid off, as well as the monthly unemployment allowance given by the government. In short, he is actually earning a lot more than I am right now, and I'm busting my ass off at work while he is somewhere in Cambodia soaking up the sun and the culture.

That is the beauty of a capitalist-socialist economy, and the French should appreciate it more. While it is not to say they should stop complaining, it surely is a reason to look forward to the future. And it is absolutely not a valid excuse to shit on the present because all said and done, they still have it way better than most of the world's population as of right now.

Ahhh first world trials and tribulations... even after all these years they still look petty to me.