Resolutions

My ultimate goal in life is to win a Nobel Prize in Physics and a Man Booker Prize. Well, I thought of winning a Pulitzer as well but opinionated as I am, I can never be good at journalism where you have to be objective and stick to the hard facts. My piece on the Syrian civil war would have been titled "Let's make those uneducated Muslims fight among themselves so the rich countries can swoop in and suck their oil."

It's 2013, so I guess it's the perfect time to have new resolutions.

Hence this year, I am going to start writing a book that will get me that damn Booker. As for the Nobel Prize, I'm thinking of inventing human teleportation but as of now, I've got nothing yet.

Organic food

In France, consuming organic food is seen as something only the rich (or the pretentious) do. At the supermarket, the organic food section is usually small and secluded, and looks like an afterthought section created once every other section is done. At peak times when the whole supermarket is overcrowded and the lines at the cashiers snake into the aisles, one section remains deserted - the organic food section.

Normal people would maybe pick a carton of organic almond milk or some gluten-free energy bars from this section, but I have yet to see anyone filling their carts exclusively with organic foodstuff. The French are a bunch of highly critical people, and most of them do not really buy into the idea that organic food is really organic, and they might be right. After all, the ecosystem consists of a very long and complicated chain reaction where everything is related and nothing is standalone. So imagine an organic farmer who stays away from DDT in the hope of growing beautiful organic lettuces, while just a mile away another farmer is heavily using fertilizer and pesticide for his cabbages. Both farms are interconnected by soil and underground water. Who's to say that the organic lettuces are not contaminated by fertilizer and pesticide used a mile away?

Besides, despite all kinds of apocalyptic warning about the world's energy supplies running low, we still pollute on a daily basis to maintain a certain level of comfort at the expense of the environment. It would be extremely pretentious to consume organic food when one spends half an hour in the shower, wasting hundreds of gallons of heated water.

Of course, these arguments are used to support - or mask - the real reason why very few people choose to buy organic food: price. Organic food in France is very expensive. People are not willing to spend three times the amount they would pay on normal pasta, because pasta is part of their staple diet. On the other hand, they would be more lenient towards the idea of splurging on the occasional organic raisins or sunflower seeds.

Which brings me to the core of my thoughts this morning: how do the Germans keep their organic food at low prices?

When I was living in Germany, one of the things I loved was how cheap foodstuff was. I particularly loved their approach to introducing organic food to the masses. Instead of making it the food pariah stashed away in some remote corner people would usually overlook, they would put organic spaghetti next to the normal ones, and they cost exactly the same. They have eliminated the most crucial deciding factor, so I have no excuses left not to buy organic food. In the beginning I was almost always guilted into buying it, but that kickstarted my conscience about eating healthier and it quickly became a habit. I would automatically pick out organic carrots and rucola at the veggie aisles, and I would quickly scan the muesli row for the big green BIO label before rushing off to the checkout. After a while, it became unthinkable to buy so-called chemical foodstuff when organic food was widely available and cheap. I was not a firm believer in the wholesomeness of organic food, but at those prices, 'why' easily turned into 'why not'.

And I felt healthier and happier when I was there. Maybe it was the breathtaking nature surrounding me everyday. Maybe it was the positive energy of the Germans in contrast to the whiny, cynical behaviour of the French. Maybe it was because I loved my job. But I am somehow convinced that organic food played a big role in it. Now that I am back in France and buying organic food is financially challenging, I do not feel as healthy or happy as I was back in Deutschland.

So I am thinking of switching back to organic food, but that will require a substantial budget change. I am not famous for my thrifty ways, and eating organic food will definitely put a huge dent in my wallet. But I guess like it or not, well-being comes at a price.

I cannot get a beautiful home by the river like I had in Germany. I cannot get amazing view of apple and prune farms out of my bedroom window anymore. And I certainly cannot get the sincere smiles people gave me when they said 'moin moin' every day. The only thing I could try to emulate is the food I ate when I was there.

So I am pencilling that into my list of resolutions: eating more organic food.

A macaque who votes is a dangerous primate

"Taken out of context."

The oldest, most worn-down excuse ever existed to explain verbal slip-ups. As the most undiplomatic person on Earth, I am at the risk of having to resort to using this excuse very often in the future, given my whimsical and outspoken nature. Every day I come home regretting at least 5 things I've said during the day. Good thing I am constantly surrounded by intelligent people who are able to take everything into context, think over and analyze my statements instead of passing swift judgement and taking offence easily.

The only problem is that in the future, I might not have the luxury of always being surrounded by smart people. Now that my tertiary education is coming to an end, I have to prepare myself for the prospect of having to face the real world where people may or may not be as smart as those I'm used to having around me, and worse, of having to carefully weigh my words instead of just blurting them out.

I am only capable of conveying my words according to my own understanding of the logic behind them, but I cannot be in control of the listener's interpretation of those words. I can only hope they would ask me to clarify should there be any doubt, and not simply jump to the wrong conclusion that is the complete opposite of what I am trying to say.

Let's take Nurul Izzah for example. A demure, pious and intelligent Muslim Malay young woman with a striking beauty to boot. She had the misfortune of having to deliver an intellectual public speech in a country like Malaysia where politics are run by idiots, and where a lot of people are so badly infected with acute stupiditis that they always put two and two together and get five. In her case, people get "Izzah supports murtad (apostasy)" from her sentence "there is no compulsion in choosing faith, even for Malays." A perfect case of affirmative conclusion from a negative premise.

I am apolitical, thus I do not adhere to any particular party. But I pity her. I pity her for having to explain herself to people who have the IQ of a retarded macaque, time and time again, in the most rational, diplomatic and unnecessarily apologetic manner, just to be met with immature reactions from her opponents who may only be satisfied once Nurul Izzah has been lynched.

More importantly, I pity my own people who - even after the government has institutionalized critical thinking into our education system - still manage to make idiotic assertion on a fairly simple concept.

The saddest part is that most of these people are deliberately dumbing themselves down for the sake of politics.

The demise of sense

Skylar opened the garage door, leading Walter to a stack covered with a piece of flower-patterned cloth.

She lifted the cloth, revealing a pile of crisp dollar bills neatly arranged in packs of ten thousand dollars each. The pile of money took up almost half the space in the garage and reached up to an adult's thighs. It was the money she had been laundering from Walter's meth dealing, using the car wash as a front.

"How much is this?" Walter asked.

"I have no earthly idea. I truly don't. I just stack it up, keep it dry, spray it for silverfish. There is more money here than we could spend in ten lifetimes. I certainly cannot launder it, not with a hundred car washes," whimpered Skylar in resigned agony. "Please tell me, Walter, how much is enough? How big does this pile have to be?"


His response was a cold, pregnant stare.

Voice of reason

I got a call from someone who needed me to be the vocalist of his band for their gig this November. It's been a long time since I last had a gig (by the way I can't really pull off the word 'gig') and I don't really have anything planned in November so I thought what the hell. I said yes.

Then they sent me the playlist. One quick glance at it, and I told myself, "Oh God what did I just get myself into?"

If there are two bands in the world that I can't stand, it's Bloc Party and Arctic Monkeys. I seriously, from the bottom of my heart, honest to God, think their music is shit. Pointless, noisy and extremely annoying. Yet, on the playlist I can see songs from both bands. That I'll have to cover. And I'll have to make it look as if I'm enjoying singing them.

But there's more. Scrolling further down on the list, you'll see Muse and AC/DC. Okay, I'll admit that eventhough I'm not a big fan of AC/DC, their music has grown on me. Muse, on the other hand, I can't even. Since a lot of my friends are huge Muse fans, I've tried to keep an open mind and listened to Matt Bellamy's I-just-got-my-balls-caught-between-elevator-doors wailing voice every time they put Muse on during parties, at full volume no less. But never in a million years would I actually play Muse on my iTunes when I'm alone, let alone cover them on stage as if I endorse their garbage.

As if that's not bad enough, the list also includes songs from Rage Against The Machine. They wrote down 4 songs from RATM, and asked me to choose one. So I listened to all four, again with an open and receptive mind (well, as receptive as one could be when listening to yelled gibberish). I wasn't really familiar with RATM's music before. Now that I've listened to their music, I thank God that for all of my existence on the face of this holy earth, he's spared me from the scarring psychological harm that is RATM's music. Their songs make me feel violated, confused, depressed, angry, bewildered, and maybe even a bit deaf. Then again, I'd take deafness any day over RATM's music.Why am I never in a band whose playlist include tunes like Ray Charles' Hit The Road Jack or Quartetto Cetra's Crapa Pelada?

Fortunately, The Kinks, Lynyrd Skynyrd, and Metallica figure in the list. You can never go wrong with The Kinks. And Lynyrd Skynyrd is also good. Metallica is only awesome because I grew up listening to it, otherwise I would have dismissed it as shit. Just like Linkin Park. I found their later albums crappy but I loved their first album, and that's weird because all their albums actually sound the same. Then I realized that I listened to their first album before puberty hit, and the later ones post-puberty. Therein lies the difference.

I don't want to be the asshole who insists on overhauling the whole playlist (which I actually can do, because I'm the singer and singers always have the last word, not to mention they earn more money). So I'm thinking of backing out.

I don't think I'll be able to live with myself if I go through with this gig, knowing that I've inflicted bad taste and shitty music to everybody in the concert hall.

Born To Be A Nomad

A friend shared this article entitled Moving Around Without Losing Your Roots on Facebook and tagged me on it. It's an article about the meaning of home in a globalized world.

I have to admit that after so many years living abroad, the notion of home gets a little fuzzy to me. Well in truth, even before I came to France, I didn't really know where home was. Since a very young age, my family and I have been following my dad moving from one place to another, so we never really had one place where we felt attached to. When my family finally settled in Kuala Lumpur, I got two full years of staying put in one place until I had to go to boarding school in Perak.

Right after SPM, I went to UM for two months before going to INTEC for three months and then off I went flying to France. You'd think that I would finally be rid of the moving hassle for years until I graduate, but no. In France, all Malaysian students change cities at least once, and on average we move house 3 times during the whole study period. In my case, I've called 8 houses home for the past 7 years.

One problem with moving around is you have barely enough time to make good friends, and when you finally do, you suddenly have to move again. I sincerely don't know the whereabouts of 90% of my childhood friends. This was before social networks and mobile phones, so moving away meant losing your friends forever.

I can safely say that I have lots of acquaintances, but very few good friends. One reason why I'm so secretive and such a loner is because I never had the chance to spend enough time to trust or to gain trust from my friends. I grew up knowing that all my friendships had expiry dates, so there was no point in establishing BFFs because before I knew it, I'd be leaving again.

That, unfortunately, has become my lifestyle. People who know me know that I never really go the extra mile to maintain a friendship. I'm never the go-to friend of anyone, because I myself don't have a go-to friend.

I'm not blaming my dad for working in a field where we had to move so much. In fact, I'm entirely grateful for it, because my siblings and I had the chance to learn different dialects and see different cultures at a very young age. Growing up was never boring because we always experienced new things and ended up mastering the art of adapting to a new environment. But in the process, little by little we lost the ability to feel attached to another person who's not a family member.

So I have mixed feelings about the article. On one hand, you want to feel proud to say that you're a citizen of the world, a vagabond who lives on a ship without an anchor and who knows people at every port in every country. On the other hand, you lose the sense of belonging. Everywhere you go, you're the outsider.

When I have kids, I hope we'll be able to stay put long enough for them to create everlasting friendships.

I loved my childhood but in retrospect, I would also love to have one place where I can safely say "this is where I grew up".

The Rapist

I'm thinking of getting a therapist.

Well, no, I'm not depressed or anything. I'm happy as could be. But there are some things in my life I need to sort out and I think I need to talk to someone who is impartial and unbiased about any of my life decisions.

The problem is, I still have trouble believing in talk therapy. My understanding of talk therapy has somewhat improved ever since I met that lady in Grenada. However, every time I hear the word shrink or therapist, I'll still think of all the American movies I've seen where the shrinks get paid a lot of money to sit around and do nothing.

But that's not the main reason why I have a hard time buying into the idea of having a therapist. My biggest problem is this: every therapist has a therapist of their own, because even therapists have problems.

Why is that an issue?

Well, supposed I am a mechanic. I fix cars for a living, and get paid handsome money to do it. But the day my own car breaks down, I have to go to another mechanic to get it fixed. That must mean that I'm not a very good mechanic, right?

Same goes for therapists. If they can't solve their own problems, why the hell should I pay them to solve mine?

But still, there's a FOC therapist in my school. I'm graduating soon, so I need to take advantage of these last few months to actually make good use of all the free stuff you get as a student in France before it's too late.

Remember, remember

Another thing that pisses me off about the American ways is their date format. Their date is written backwards.

It's never really been a problem to me because all the Americans I've met used the date format verbally so where I would say fifth of April, they would say April fifth, which doesn't cause confusion.

The problem arises in writing, specifically with the numerical format. Everywhere else, 5/4/1988 would be fifth of April. In America, that would be fourth of May. That makes no sense. Granted, sense is relative, so what makes sense to you doesn't necessarily have to make sense to me blah blah blah. But common sense is actually very objective, and it dictates that we have to arrange things in a certain ascending/descending order to make life simpler. Days accumulate into a month and months accumulate into a year, so on and so forth. Thus, it is absolutely logical for the date format to be dd/mm/yyyy, now isn't it? In descending order, that would be yyyy/mm/dd, which would look strange, but still acceptable. But mm/dd/yyyy is just bizarre.

Why am I ranting about this all of a sudden?

Well, I was applying for an intern position at this American company, and the deadline for the application was 8/11/2012, meaning I still have a week and a half to submit it. After tweaking my resume (tweaking here doesn't mean embellishing it, it just means modifying it in a way that highlights the skills sought after by the company) and writing an eloquent cover letter, it hit me that I might have read the deadline date wrongly. Which, of course, I did. The deadline was actually on the 11th of August, a month and a half ago, so I'm way overdue.

Since I had gone through the trouble of modifying my resume and writing a cover letter, I decided to just submit my application anyway. I bet all the current applicants suck, so the position is still vacant and when they see my application they'll suddenly realize that their saviour is here, their knight in shining armour.

I've been sending out a lot of resumes to North American aerospace companies recently, and I don't really know why. I can't really afford to fly there, and I don't have a single clue about the accommodation. I'm not even sure if those are paid internships I applied for.

I just figured that I needed to change air. Europe has been fun, but America, that would be something new and exciting. I guess I'm becoming an adrenaline junkie. I always feel the need to be under pressure, because challenge makes everything so much more meaningful. I'll have to double my effort to get to where I want to go and to experience new, exciting stuff.

So I decided to just send my resume to hundreds of companies in the US and Canada because I believe in the laws of probability. The more you put out there, the higher the chance of something good getting back to you, whatever it may be.



But still, their date format sucks balls. Imagine how flat and lifeless the famous quote would be if Guy Fawkes were American: "Remember, remember, November the fifth."

Asian soup

Saying that the Germans eat a lot of pork would be an understatement. Germans are obsessed with pork. Pork is their drug. At the supermarket you'd have a small section for poultry, a tiny section for seafood, and like 3 whole aisles for all kinds of pork. Okay I might be exaggerating, but not by that much.

The Germans are so smart that even if pork didn't exist, they would have invented it anyway. That is how much they love this meat.

In our cafeteria, we have a salad bar and 6 dishes you can choose from. You can be pretty sure to have at least 3 pork dishes, 1 soup dish, and 1 vegetarian dish. If I'm lucky, the last dish would be fish. On my unluckiest day, the last dish is also pork, so I'd have to go for the veggie dish or worse, the salad bar. The only good thing about the salad bar is that it's self-service, so to make my money's worth, I'd pile up all kinds of greens and tuna and corn and red beans in my bowl until it looks like I'm about to hibernate for the winter, and I don't even like red beans.

So the other day I went to the cafeteria and saw "Asian soup" on the menu. I was intrigued. One soup that represents 60% of the human population, encompassing thousands of lands and cultures, from the Mongolians to the Persians, from Vanuatu to Kuwait, from Kamchatka to Uttar Pradesh. One soup to rule them all. The Asian soup.

"This must be a very good soup," I whispered to myself. So I decided to take it.

The soup was murky, so I couldn't really see what was in it. All I knew was that there was no meat in it, so it certainly didn't contain any pork.

Then came the moment of truth: the taste test. I closed my eyes, took a spoonful of it and sipped, expecting to embark upon a gastronomic journey across a multitude of exotic cultures with layovers in the desert of Jordan, on the high mountains of Bhutan, under a papaya tree in front of Angkor Wat, deep into the rainforest of the Borneo, in the wilderness of Fiji, and in front of a mosque in Turkmenistan.

Well, I was utterly disappointed.

The spoonful of shit I just put in my mouth was so called the Asian soup because it had rice in it. Yeah, they put some rice in a soup, and decided to name it "Asian soup". The Germans could have engineered a coconut tree into a space shuttle, but they seem not to be able to grasp the simple fact that Asia is so motherfking ginormous that it's impossible to blend and strain all of us into one soup. The funniest thing is, I'm pretty certain that the "Asian soup" I have eaten cannot even be found anywhere in Asia, try as you may.


If the tables were turned and I were to make a "European soup", I wouldn't even know where to start, because the name itself would make zero sense. What do you put in a European soup? Maybe three teaspoons of economic crisis, an ounce of unreliable currency, and a dollop of dwindling younger population to sustain the workforce?

Yeah, now if only there were a supermarket where I can buy those ingredients for my soup.

At the risk of sounding like a spoilt brat...

I hate money.

Judging by the way I spend money, one wouldn't have the impression that I hate it. But I actually do. I hate money. Or rather, I hate it that I need so much of it to live, that my happiness actually depends on it. I've always seen myself as a prudent spender, but this year I came to a sudden realisation that I am actually a terrible spender.

I'm happiest when I'm travelling, and that needs money. A lot of it. I also like good food, and good food is usually not the cheapest. I hate making early decisions because I change my mind like I change clothes. If there's one thing I've learnt about myself, it's that I can never be set in stone about anything, because even my mind has a mind of its own. So I always wait for the last minute to decide on something, which is a very expensive habit. A last minute flight ticket or hotel reservation cost a fortune. A last minute change of plans almost always involves money.

I've always told myself I should be more careful with my spending, but like all expert procrastinators, I'd end up saying, "Yeah, maybe later" and swipe that damn card anyway.

Now I'm living in a place surrounded by nature, with fruit farms as far as the eye can see, and it's virtually impossible to spend more than 5 euros a day. But somehow I'm still always broke.

I guess I'm set in my ways. I am and will always be a big spender, and I have to stop being in denial about it. I need money to be happy.

Which is why I hate it. I hate it that I love it.

Stupid capitalism. (When all else fails, blame capitalism.)

There she goes

I ordered a java chip and the cashier asked for my name so she can write it on the cup. I hate it when people screw up my real name by throwing in an 'a' or an 'n' too many so I decided to go for a dubiously generic English name: "It's John."

She looked at me with a slight frown and a twisted smile. "Going for something simpler for me to write down, are you? Well, John is easier to write than, say, Yoaojukulonyihua," she retorted.

"Wait.... How do you know my real name?" I said, trying to be cheeky. And all the baristas burst out laughing.

I usually love making strangers laugh. But not today. Somehow their collective laughing was muted by my own thoughts. The sunny city of Hamburg was full of people, but none of whom actually mattered to me. It might as well have been empty and gloomy, it might as well have been the apocalypse.


During the journey back home, I let Bill Withers mock me on repeat on my iPod.


"Ain't no sunshine when she's gone..."

Cut the middleman! Cut the mothereffing middleman!

We've all seen how in recent years, bookstores have been going under one by one like dominoes. Even giants like Borders aren't immune to the attack of online bookstores.

As much as I love reading and would love to support the paperback industry, I'm still a prudent buyer or in modern terms, a cheapskate. I was wandering around in a bookstore in Hamburg two weeks ago when I saw a copy of Moby Dick retailing at 8 euros. The book came out such a long time ago that a Buddhist could have been reborn 3 times since the first edition, so it doesn't really make sense for it to be so ridiculously expensive. So I looked up on Amazon and bought a used copy of the novel. It cost me 1.76 euros with free shipping, and it was delivered to my office desk the next day. And the book is in mint condition and could pass for a new one if it wasn't for this small stamp indicating it had belonged to a library somewhere.

It's a no-brainer, really. You pay a fraction of a book's retail price with just 3 clicks, like literally 3 mind-blowingly simple movements of your index finger, and you wake up the next morning with the book on your doorstep. Sometimes, going to a physical bookstore to buy a novel is like saying, "No, I don't want to pay 3 euros for a large pizza and have it delivered free of charge to my house. I want to go to Pizza Hut to pick up the pizza myself, and pay 4 times as much. I insist."

As if the low price and the speedy delivery hadnt't sufficed, Amazon decided to go all out to kiss my ass by giving me a card that allows free 30-day trial of its new online streaming services from which I can download all kinds of movies and TV series at no cost. It's like getting cheap pizza, having it delivered for free, and on top of that they give you 45000 DVD or Blu-Ray quality movies to choose from in case you need to watch something while enjoying the delicious pizza.

Sometimes it really puzzles me how Amazon makes money, but I don't care as long as I benefit from its heavenly system.

This all being said, I bought a new copy of Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts (an amazing read, by the way, I'll review it in another post) at the same Hamburg bookstore and that set me back 14 euros. But that was only because I needed something to read on the train and bus ride back home.

The Unavoidable Nazi Talk

The first day I arrived in Germany, it dawned on me that I would be living and working among the people whose grandparents were involved in the most atrocious war ideology ever inflicted on man - Nazism. That very day I asked myself, how much time will have passed before I have a Nazi conversation with a German?

The answer to that is 3 weeks. I just had my first serious Nazi talk last night, with my roommate's girlfriend who incidentally is tall, white and blonde. The Egeria of the Aryan ideals. I jokingly told her she could easily have been on one of Hitler's propaganda posters. She took the joke well but she told me that in her younger years when she first learnt about Nazism, she felt somewhat guilty and self-conscious, so much so that she coloured her hair dark brown.

All the Jews fled Germany during and after the war, so she'd never really met a Jew before. Then she went to New York for some time where she met some Jewish people. She wanted so much to make them like her, it was as if she was being apologetic about what the people three generations before her had done. The fact that the war was not that long a time ago made her feel like she was still carrying the burden of the horrendous crime and it's up to her generation to make up for it.

So I asked her, what is the hardest thing to live with, knowing what had happened during the war. She looked at me and said, "It's knowing that your grandparents were involved in the war and that they might have been Nazis themselves. We don't really talk about it, but growing up as Germans during the war, the propaganda would get to you and you would somehow believe it. How can you not support and cheer the movement that claims your race is the best race?"

It's not really a taboo subject in Germany today. In fact, they talk so much about it in class that people are getting sick of it, and many insist that people stop giving too much focus on it and move on. According to her, they talk about it not only in German and history class, but also in biology. This is due to the fact that many biological experiments were done on the Jews held captive.

However, it's still a somewhat taboo topic in the German homes and it's especially sticky when the grandparents are around. Grandchildren in other countries all around the world grow up with the misfortune of having to hear their grandparents boast about their contributions during the war. Germans kids, however, never get to hear fascinating war anecdotes from their grannies. It's as if the elders wanted to erase that from memory (and even history, if possible) and one of the first steps to do that is by not speaking about it. It's only been 70 years ago, and a lot of German grandparents today were soldiers for the SS. They had all been brainwashed about the Master Race ideology before joining the army, so it wouldn't be shocking if some of them still have remnants of that ideology in them. Hence it's best for the grandchildren not to ask where their grandparents stood during the war, because it could open a nasty can of worms.

My roommate is Swiss, and his grandfather was also in the Army during the war. He had to guard the Swiss border against the Nazis. And he is not one to mince his words, because when my roommate brought his German girlfriend back to his home in Switzerland, his grandpa said, "You're dating a German girl? How do you know that she's not a Nazi?" 

She took it pretty hard, especially because she has absolutely nothing to do with the whole thing, but it's her generation who has to pay the price. The WWII might have ended in 1945, but then there was the Cold War that lasted until 1991. The Berlin Wall had been erected to separate East and West Germany because according to the East, the West still was not clean from Nazism even after the war. To this day, it's still regarded as one of the last bastions of the big war, and it only fell in 1990. So it's not any wonder that it's the German kids of this era who have to clean up the mess.

Germany is a very technologically-advanced nation. It sits among the wealthiest states in the world, and is exemplary in a lot of fields. In the Euro crisis of today, Germany is almost single-handedly carrying the whole zone on its back to prevent its collapse. The German efficiency needs no introduction, and its free education system can put a lot of countries to shame. Despite all this, the Germans opt to remain low-key and walk on eggshells during world summits, maybe because the world still hasn't forgotten about what they did during the war.

I listened to the whole story with a troubled mind. We condemn the Nazis for inflicting the terrible Master Race idea to the whole world, but in a quaint country somewhere in Southeast Asia, there's still a system where a self- appointed Master Race rules a country, and people are still qualified by their origins and creed. During the war, the Jews had official papers that identified them as non-Aryans. In this quaint Asian country, people are identified as 'indigenous' or 'non-indigenous' on official papers, with special treatments for the 'indigenous' people. It's like living in a parallel world where Nazism is dead, but its main ideas are still being upheld.

Germany might have closed their history book regarding racism, but some other countries are still writing theirs.

If you hate your job, then don't read this post.

Because I love my job. I didn't really know how much I love it until 5 minutes ago when I was browsing the internet and suddenly thought, "I wish Monday would come faster so I can go to work."

I still remember the last job I had four years ago which was cleaning and inspecting parts of high speed trains, and it sucked. Every morning of every day I'd wake up saying, "It's six a.m. already?? But I just went to bed 10 seconds ago!" and dragged my feet to the bathroom which was not an easy task because it always felt like someone put 2-tonne shackles on them.

But now, every morning I go to work singing "Take the shackles off my feet so I can daaaaaanceee.."



My job is awesome.

Growing Up

I miss being young.

Sometimes at work, I feel like people are all so grown up that I find myself being a little boy again. The average age of my colleagues is somewhere in the vicinity of 32, and I might possibly be the youngest, but I've always thought of age as just a number. When you're an adult, you can't be that different from a guy who's ten years older than you.

Boy was I wrong.

In my university, people talk of their boyfriends/girlfriends in a fling-y kind of way, like they don't know where it's going but they don't really care. At work, however, people talk very affectionately of their girlfriends (most of my colleagues are men) and they're at a point in their lives where they need to take the next big step which is either getting married or having kids. Yesterday I was telling a guy about how I plan to travel around Germany during my free time and he said, "You're so lucky to be young. I remember at your age, I went to the tanning place almost every week, I partied a lot, I travelled whenever I felt like it. I even shaved regularly. And now everyday it's work, every night it's sleeping early at 10pm, and every weekend is spent with my girlfriend who lives in Frankfurt and who's starting to ask me when we're getting married. And my razor doesn't recognize me anymore."

One time I was in a car with another colleague who didn't look a day after 23 but who turned out to be 31. He told me he lived with his girlfriend and they just moved into a big house with four bedrooms. I jokingly said, "4 bedrooms? Are you guys planning to have kids or what?" He looked at me, in all seriousness, and said, "Yeah, we're planning to have at least two kids. I want to have more, but my girlfriend is the one who's going to carry them so she'll have the final word on how many kids we should have." Wow.

Since my town is really small, I always wonder what people do on the weekends. I asked this one guy with whom I always speak English because he lived in the States for a couple of years so his English is pretty good. He said, " On the weekends? Oh, I do a lot of carpentry because I love building my own furniture. This weekend I'm going to build a coffee table because my girlfriend thinks the one that we currently have is too small."

Building furniture sounds really grown up to me.

And today, we played beach volleyball after work and the smallest thing I did would be rewarded with a round of, "Good job!" or "Schön!" ("Nice!") or "Gut gesehen!". They only did that to me, maybe because I'm the new, shy intern and they thought I needed some pick-me-up so I could loosen up a bit, but it really made me feel like a little boy surrounded by adults who cheered him just because he managed to avoid colouring over the lines with his crayons.

I miss the days at uni when someone goes to the bathroom for more than 10 minutes and when he comes back, everybody will be like, "How big was your submarine?" or "Did you repaint the bathroom walls with your explosive diarrhea?" or "You sure you did a thorough job wiping your ass? Because now the whole class smells like shit."

Now, whenever someone disappears to the bathroom a bit longer than the time needed for peeing, no one really cares. I'm probably the only one there thinking, "He probably just gave birth to a big, brown and spiral stinky baby," and giggled in front of my computer.


Yeah, growing up is no fun.

Luck

I was chatting with a friend about my awesome internship and how I love my office and she said, "Wow, you are so lucky to get this job!" I laughed it off, but I was actually quite vexed by that statement, because after all I've done to get this internship, people still see it as a stroke of luck?

Believe me, this has very little to do with luck. Luck is when you step on a 100 euro bill on the street, or when you are running late to the train station but suddenly your train is running late too. But when you work relentlessly for something, that's no longer a lucky strike.

I've always wanted to work in aerospace, so when I saw this composite convention in Paris a couple of months ago, I decided to skip school and go for it. I perfected my resume, printed out 40 copies (20 in French and 20 in English), and off I went. Each and every of the leading composite manufacturers in the world was there, so I figured there were no better opportunities to drop off some resumes, all the while having small talks with the companies' representatives face-to-face.

I practically combed through each and every stand talking to everyone I saw. I saw my resume being examined before getting put under a pile of newspaper and pamphlets, also known as the day's junk. There's even this Dutch guy who took my resume and when I came back half an hour later, I saw it being used as a coffee coaster. I got rejected by Toray, the world leader of composite materials manufacturer, by a simple head shake. I got turned down by BASF, who told me there weren't any internships available (in other words, "we don't want you.")  Of course, it was not a career fair, so they weren't there to recruit interns. They were selling their products, so I was like a fly in a fancy restaurant. Persona non grata that no one is capable of getting rid of.

Even when I got the job, I was faced with a billion problems. They had to justify why they had to take a non-German intern to the German Employment Centre, and that was a beautiful shitstorm. They asked me to send them all kinds of documents imaginable, from my birth certificate to my SPM result slip all the way to my latest exam results. Hell, I even had to prove that I went to high school in Taiping, and that I had enrolled in a French language programme in Angoulême (luckily I still keep all my enrollment certificates).

Me being me, of course I decided to crank the difficulty level up a notch: I decided to go travelling with my brother and my friends when all this shitstorm was at its peak. So I had to do everything by e-mail. I needed to look for internet cafés while travelling because I had to print and FedEx urgent documents. I had to ask for help from people at my school through the telephone, and I had to call some people in Germany from wherever I was at that moment. And my phone bills went through the roof! I only learned that I had definitively secured this intern position a week before I came here, so for a whole month I was in a limbo state but I told myself to gamble it because I was already in that deep.

And when I finally thought everything was falling into place, I received an e-mail saying that the room that I had reserved had been let go to someone else. And I only had one week before starting my internship to find a new room in a town I didn't even know. So I had to make a billion phone calls to find a new room, and God knows how lousy my real estate vocabulary is in German so it was really a pain in the ass to discuss rent and the tenant's agreement in German, only to realise half an hour later that I was looking at an unfurnished room that is situated in another city, but the agent insisted that with a car, it'll only take me under two hours to get to work. That stupid bitch alone cost me 40 euros on my phone bill.

So no, it is definitely not a lucky strike that I got this job. Luck can only bring you so far, but you have to do the rest yourself. With a little help from people around me, and a little prayer to God, I made this happen for myself. It might sound cocky to say so, but it pisses me off when people complain about stuff but don't work towards improving it. And whenever others made it, they'd say "That's just luck."

I'm Liking This Country

I thought the Germans were a bunch of cold, unfriendly people. These past week, however, has proven me wrong. They are friendly, warm and smiling people who would go out of their way to help you out.

I'm liking this country already.

A Stranger Named Light

           Someone once told me I was too cynical about the world, that I saw bad people and the bad in people everywhere. With all the stuff we see in the news today, how can I not? Of course it’s not my intention to incriminate every stranger I see. I just find it hard to believe that anyone would be nice to you just 'cause, without expecting anything in return or worse, without trying to scam you. As a frequent traveller, I am used to being too prudent and holding my belongings a bit too close to my body lest they get snatched or stolen. I am so used to questioning the intention of every stranger who comes to talk to me and expecting them to want spare change, and I am so used to judging people by the way they dress or talk or walk, that I just can’t seem to enjoy pointless conversation with random people in the street anymore.

My sense of independence makes things worse. I am the biggest control freak and my trust issues make it hard for me to depend on anyone. As a kid, I was accustomed to broken promises and I was no stranger to being disappointed, so much so that I told myself that when I grew up, I had to do everything myself in order to avoid disappointment. Unable to rely on people, it gets hard for me to make new friends or to just take people’s words for anything - double checking is my second nature.               

So yesterday when I arrived in Stade, Germany for my summer internship, I had everything meticulously planned. I had an appointment with my potential landlord and I knew exactly which bus I was going to take and at what time. Everything went pretty well. The house was clean and fully furnished, and the rent is cheap. The place is also a daycare centre by day, so it’s full of kids when I arrived. In a small northern German town full of blond, blue eyed people, I stand out like a sore thumb and children look at me as if they’ve never seen a brown Asian guy before. Some kids came up to me and asked me if I spoke German. Some others just looked at me silently and followed my every step with the corner of their eyes. Some told me stories about their holiday plans, and some others asked me to play football with them. I forgot how adorable kids can be. My landlord told them I could also speak French, so they were pretty excited about that and asked me if I could teach them during their summer break.

That was the moment I told myself, “Well, strangers aren’t that bad.”

On the way back from the house to the train station, a German lady started talking to me in the bus. She wondered why I chose Stade out of all the places in Germany. I told her I didn’t, Stade chose me. This is where all the heavyweights in the aerospace industry decided to set up camp, so it’s not like I had a choice. I told her I was waiting for a positive response from my landlord and that I was going to spend the night at a youth hostel. She looked at me and said, “That hostel is going to cost you 30 euros! I have a comfortable couch at home and you can sleep there tonight.”

I was very skeptical. I was a foreigner, we didn’t know each other at all, and she was a frail middle-aged woman so she couldn’t possibly defend herself if I ever decided to do her harm. I would never invite a stranger into my home, so I can’t imagine why a stranger would invite me to theirs. Of course, I have this angelic face people just fall in love with, but that doesn’t guarantee I won’t pin her down to the floor, strangle her and steal all her jewelry.

I hesitated to accept the offer. My suspicious nature told me to politely decline. The problem is, I am independent but I am also a cheapskate freeloader. Why would I pay 30 euros if I can sleep comfortably and have a nice home-cooked dinner for free? Even if she had bad intentions, looking at her small stature, I was certain I could take her down with my pinky finger. So I said yes.

And that was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. She turned out to be extremely nice. She made me veggie noodles and carrot spring rolls for dinner. She also gave me a bag of chips while she was cooking in case I felt hungry. We ate cherries she just plucked from her friend’s garden, and she let me use her internet. She was just being this all around nice person I had never met before and that shook me to the core. I grew up convinced that there are no genuinely nice people out there anymore, and now I have this very friendly, nice German lady who gave me food and a roof to sleep under without expecting anything in return. She also called all her friends to ask them if they had any extra room in their houses, in case I didn’t get the room at the daycare centre. She left for work at 7 this morning, and she already prepared me breakfast consisting of bread, cheese, milk and apple juice.          

Now I’m in the train, on the way to Hannover to see some friends, but I’m still baffled by the niceness of this lady. I used to hate people. Now I see that there’s no reason to be skeptical about everything and everyone, because we can be pleasantly surprised at how nice strangers can be. As independent as I thought I had to be, my whole belief system just got shaken by this surreal Blanche DuBois moment I just had – we all need to depend on the kindness of strangers sometimes.

That furry little bastard

Lately I've been hearing mouse noises in the walls of my room. Yes you read that right: IN the walls. I guess this is a hipster mouse, you know, because running on the ceiling is too mainstream. This building is really old, so the walls probably have a million tiny holes due to many years of rewiring and whatnot. A mouse can crawl through a hole the size of a pencil and it can chew through anything safe for metal. So it wouldn't be shocking if there really were a mouse in my walls (writing 'a mouse' is wishful thinking as I really don't want there to be lots of them, I hate critters.)

I had this problem 2 years ago when we just moved in, but we put some traps about the apartment and we also had a cat for a while so we thought we had gotten rid of it. But now the mouse is back, and I bet with a vengeance, as it's starting to make a lot of noise while scurrying around in the wall at night. Sometimes I hear it scratching on a spot really near me as if saying "Do you hear this? You can't see me, but I'm scratching right next to you. It's me, The Great Mouse, killing you slowly." Suffice to say, this bastard is a brazen rodent.

So I googled the ways you can get rid of the little bastard. I came across sites where people tell stories of their pet mice. Wait, I lose sleep over these nasty creatures and you voluntarily keep them as pets? Mad people... mad people everywhere.

Then I saw this rather helpful article explaining the A-Z of the rodent world and how you can avoid getting infestation in your home. However, I couldn't help but chuckle when I read the line "Once the mouse trapped, you can drive it to a field far from your place and release it there."

How dumb are you? If I caught that furry little bastard that has been making my nighttime a living hell, I wouldn't waste gas and nicely drive it back to mouse Disneyland and release it there just to see it reproduce and come back to my home with its whole family. I love animals, but not those who would stay at my place rent-free, eat my food, and give me rabies and stinky droppings as thank you gifts. And I definitely wouldn't drive them to a place where they can be happy and roam free. When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, did the Americans escort them nicely back to Japan? No, they went ape-shit and threw nuclear bombs at the Japs. Now that's how you do vengeance.

If I caught the mouse, I would tie it to a small pole, poke it with needles, and staple its tail to a candle. I'd then burn the candle so the hot wax would run down its tail, all the while spraying its eyes with cooking grease.

Once it is completely blind, I'd make scratching noises and say "Do you hear this? You can't see me, but I'm scratching right next to you. It's me, The Great Human, killing you slowly."

And I'd keep poking that poor rodent with needles until it's dead.

In France, we are very condescending

Like I said before, my resolution this year is to look at the bright side of things and to be more positive. So far, it's been a huge success. I find myself very calm these days. Even when I'm mad, it never lasts for more than an hour, then I'll be back to my chirpy, positive self again. I even tried listening to Justin Bieber to give him a chance, because I realized that the reason I had dismissed him as shit was because it was just uncool for my generation to be listening to Justin Bieber, or to even acknowledge his artistry. I suddenly found that very hypocritical, because Carly Rae Jepsen's Call Me Maybe is just as shitty, but somehow it's cool to like it. You know what, Carly Rae is signed under Justin Bieber. Suck on that, hypocrites.

So yeah, I've been very positive lately, and I'm starting to like it.

Except for this morning, when I received an e-mail from this French lady (she's kind of a bitch, and every Malaysian student in France knows that) refusing to accept to be the guarantor for my new apartment. Of course, she had the right to say no, but she could have said it nicely. Instead, this is how she worded her mail:

"No, I won't be your guarantor. In France, being a guarantor is a serious matter. So either the owners accept our corporation as a moral person to be your guarantor, or you'll have to look for something else."

She is known to be very frank, and I appreciate that. But I hate the part, "In France, being a guarantor is a serious matter."

To me, that's another way of saying, "I don't know how things are done in your backward country, but in THIS country, being a guarantor is a big deal."

Maybe I'm just looking too much into it, but she could have simply omitted the words 'In France' and the sentence would be "Being a guarantor is a serious matter." Just as effective, and not at all condescending. I imagine her thinking that in Malaysia, we live in bamboo huts and to rent a bamboo hut, tenants and owners just spit on their palms, shake their hands, and have a coconut dance together to seal the deal. No guarantor, no legal papers, no signature. Oh, and the rent is two full-grown chickens, ten betel leaves and a spittoon.

No, lady. We also have to sign a contract, and pay rent in the form of money, and we also need a guarantor. And being a guarantor is also a big deal in our country, or any other country for that matter. Not just in France.

I've actually had this problem before. Once I went to the post office to send some letters and I was in a hurry so I just went to the counter and asked the guy how much it cost to send those letters. The guy looked up at me and said, "In France, we say "bonjour" when meeting people."

I admit that it was my fault for not being polite because I was in a hurry so I completely forgot about social courtesy, but that doesn't mean I come from a country where people pee on each other to say hi. He obviously saw that I wasn't French so he felt compelled to start his sentence with that "In France" bullshit. You know what, mister, France has been voted one of the rudest countries in Europe, so you can take that bonjour up your ass, push it farther upwards, and choke on it. Thank you.


Okay, back to my zen self.