Of marriage and permanence

I read this article a while back, and last week a conversation with a friend made me re-think of it. He said, once you do "something" with someone, you should be bound to that person for a period of time, say two years, before you can leave. In short, something like marriage.

Anyway, that would never work. Because marriage already exists and people are already...shirking it. They're already breaking the rules with cohabitation and divorce.

The article talks about cohabitation, and how young couples feel like they need to do a "test run" before getting married.

They do not know that what they are actually doing is undoing marriage. They miss the central logic of marriage as an institution of permanence. They miss the essential wisdom of marriage — that the commitment must come before the intimacy, that the vows must come before the shared living, that the wisdom of marriage is its permanence before its experience.

I'm not going to say what is right and what is wrong. I'm not even sure I know it myself. Never mind that this article is from a Christian point of view, and that I am not a Christian. Never mind that the research mentioned in the article doesn't have any hard proof to it. This article raises some valid points. Food for thought.

Peter and the heads

Ever heard of "Peter and the Wolf"? (It's a children's story book)

I'm not going to tell you that story, but instead I shall tell you about Peter and the heads (in my car).

One day we drove my car out for lunch. Usually other people drive...so Peter had never been in my car before that.

Now in my car there are a few...soft things. Peter first caught sight of this.

a Bugs Bunny neckrest

Not that I ever use it as a neckrest...but it would be more useful in the car than at home. If ever....you know.

Peter's reaction was, "Two heads! Why heads only? No body one? So strange!" (I'm not sure about the exact words)

He went on a bit about that...then he caught sight of my cat, hanging from the rearview mirror.

the nice cat that helps me recognise my car from far away

The following exclamation was, "Another head? So many heads in your car!"

Then he accused me of chopping off animals' heads to put in my car. He said that I'm cruel. :'(

But I'm not cruel! *sniff sniff* They already didn't have bodies when I found them...you could say that I saved their heads after finding them beheaded. :P

I later told Peter that there was another one behind him...a teddy bear. But he was okay with that one because the whole body was intact. *whew*

(Still, heads are better than headless bodies, aren't they? :P )

The temple on the island

Remember the temple I mentioned?

In this post, I present you the Fu Lin Kong temple! (I hope I got the right temple... lol)

the entrance

the temple and its garden

a guardian standing in front of the temple (actually, it's a donation box)

a great wall!

it's long...

a little red shelter thingy...and a big rock in the background (there are steps going up to that rock)

looking down on parts of the "great wall"

on the way up

looking down on Pangkor island...and the peninsula

looking down at the temple (the pink van in the little clearing is where we came in)

a small hut on a pond

a bridge over the same pond (and that's the temple on the right)

two more donation boxes, in front of the temple (actually I didn't notice that they were donation boxes when we went in)

The end. Like it?

Unsent letters 2

You know how it feels like when you follow a friend to a party, where your friend knows everyone, but you know no one other than your friend?

That is how I feel sometimes, even when I do know everyone.

I guess it is easier for you, more natural for you. But I still wish that you wouldn't do this to me. That you would make an effort, somehow...even if it does inconvenience you a little.

Because sometimes it feels like I don't have any reason to be there.

~~~~~~~~~~

I posted the first "Unsent letters" almost two years ago. No, I am not planning on making this a series. In fact, I hope it doesn't turn out to be one...because letters are best sent.

Homecooked dinner for a working girl

I used to cook every day, almost every meal, when I was a student in France. Going out to eat was too expensive, and canteen food was too repetitive (even though it was convenient) and I got tired of it in the end. Now that I'm working, I don't have time to cook on weekdays any more...not "normal" meals anyway. But it gets a little boring eating out...especially when you're lazy like me and won't drive too far away to look for food.

So sometimes I intentionally cook more during the weekend so that I can have some leftovers. Then I can just reheat it after work. Or what I can do, sometimes, is a quick microwave meal...with a little advance planning.

A few days ago, I made "roast" chicken...if you can call something done in a microwave "roast".

(I planned it a little late, after buying my groceries, so I had already asked the seller to chop up the chicken for me :P And I only had one potato left.)

I used to convert oven recipes to the microwave because I didn't have an oven. Now I do have one, but for this after-work meal, I still used the microwave because it was quicker. (by the time I get home, it's already close to seven...and I don't like eating dinner too late)

Preparing this took up two days in total...though maybe only an hour (or less!) in actual work. I ate this on Tuesday night...and the preparation started on Monday morning.

Monday morning: Took chicken out of the freezer and into the chiller.
Monday night: Marinated chicken and put it back into the chiller.
Tuesday morning: Turned over chicken (not that necessary, actually)
Tuesday night: Took chicken out of the fridge first thing upon coming home; cut up potatoes and mixed it into the marinade. Went to take a shower, the time for the chicken to "thaw" a bit (do we call it thawing if it wasn't frozen, but just cold?). Popped the dish into the microwave for 5 minutes on medium (I added another 2 minutes later). Serve with pasta and/or salad (for me the simplest salad is sliced cucumber :P )

I wasn't too sure how long to put the chicken in the microwave, because I had never done this using this particular microwave. Otherwise I could have put it in before going to take a shower...

And I guess the total preparation time took longer because I don't go home at lunchtime...when I did this as a student I could prepare it in one day by thawing the chicken in the morning and marinating it when I went home at lunchtime. Nowadays I could take the chicken out from the freezer the previous night and marinate in the morning...but I wasn't so sure that I would have enough time in the morning :P

The thing about preparing things this way it that any last minute dinner plans would have to be turned down...because I can't leave my chicken another day! (which happened lots of times in France, actually :P )

Everything's automatic these days

We can now take our driving test using an automatic transmission car.

So if I ever get myself a new car, I should get one with manual transmission. So that it won't get stolen by young hoodlums.

I just hope that by then, I won't have forgotten how to drive one! :P

Ignorant

Before you call me ignorant, please reflect on what you just said. Did you say it in a way that I can understand?

Because excellent students from China and Vietnam have gone to France to pursue higher education, and if some of them failed their first year, it was not because they were stupid or lazy, but because they had to struggle to understand what they were being asked.

There are two sides to a coin, there can be more than two sides to any story...and you might know both sides of the coin by flipping it over, but will you ever know all the sides to any story?

We are all ignorant of something. That does not mean that we are all ignorant.

Fish, fish, everywhere...

As promised, here comes the post on Lumut (and part of Pangkor...)

Here's the jetty in Lumut:

Beside the jetty, there was this wavy roof thing.

And across the road from the jetty, there was a big fish!

Only bones, though. :P Not even skin! Hehe...

from "inside" the fish :P

We took the ferry over to Pangkor...it cost RM10 per person (round trip).

We saw this from the ferry; looks like an unfinished 1Malaysia thingy.

arriving at the Pangkor jetty

We rented a car to drive around the island.

A beach. It was just starting to rain, so I snapped a few quick photos and we left.

There were quite a lot of people there despite the weather...

There were a few other beaches, but we didn't go and look at all of them...

some tower that we couldn't go up...

pink vans, the ones we could have rented if we didn't want to drive ourselves

An airstrip. Do any planes actually go there??

and a tower we could go up :P (see the stairs in the middle?)
(No, this tower isn't leaning...it's my camera that's leaning :P )

Then we went to a lovely temple (or should I say a temple with a lovely garden? :P ), and a couple of historical sites...but that will be for another post. For now I'll just post the few remaining photos from after we got back to Lumut.

We walked about a bit in Lumut...and reached the Lumut Waterfront. (I'm not sure whether it includes the jetty, actually...it seems to be quite a stretch!)

This is how we knew that the area was called Lumut Waterfront. Check out the sharks!

There are other fish, too. :P

And another tower to climb up :P (is there something about Perak and this kind of towers? lol)

More annoying radio commercials

There are again some horrible commercials playing on the radio. (no, wait, these are actually public service announcements)

In one for promoting personal hygiene for men, they detail scenarios about a man and a woman on a date, with the man doing things that show bad personal hygiene. The last one was "Man offers to pay the bill. Man hands credit card to waiter. Fingernails long like [here I didn't catch it, but it sounded a bit like "hantu" :P]. Woman screams! [background sound: AAAAAAAHHHHH!]"

And the word "screams" was exaggerated, like the guy narrating it was screaming himself. My reaction? *cringe*

I find this commercial so annoying...firstly because the "Woman screams!" part is repeated at least three times, and it awful on the ears, and secondly because, what makes you think a woman would scream because of that? (another scenario was "man sneezes and his nose hair flares out") I mean, women aren't that likely to scream...they'd more likely give you one look and never go out with you again. And even more likely, they wouldn't be out with you at all, because they would have noticed your lack of personal hygiene before that!


Okay, that was the commercial I just heard, which made me write this post. There's another one that annoys me, but for a different reason: there is a completely illogical dialogue in it. It is an announcement to encourage us to exercise more. In it, a girl asks her friends, "Hey guys, I'm going to the gym. Does anybody want to go?" Immediately a guy replies, "No, I'm so lazy!" So she tells him the advantages of working out, ending with "...you won't feel so lethargic. And females getting bulky is a misconception...", stressing the word "misconception". And immediately, another girl says, "Yalah, I don't want to get bulky..."

(see how well I can remember the lines? I've heard this one so many times...too many times! -_- )

The problem here is that the first girl just said that "females getting bulky" is NOT TRUE! So why is that second girl still using that excuse? Especially with the word "yalah"? Because when she says "yalah", she is saying that she agrees with the phrase "females getting bulky is a misconception"!

You know what this is going to do? People who don't know the meaning of "misconception" are going to think that it means something is true. (the meaning of "misconception" given by Google is "A view or opinion that is incorrect because based on faulty thinking or understanding.")

Unfortunately I'm stuck listening to this radio station at home because the other stations have lousy reception :/

(oh, and I was writing about Lumut when I was prompted to write this post...so that one will be posted tomorrow instead. Put the blame on annoying commercials!)

Lucky day?

Two things a little out of the ordinary happened today.

Firstly, I reached home at 6:40pm. After buying my dinner! That is probably a new record :P If you count only the time from when I started driving my car back from the office and parking it at home, I think it took only 30 minutes. But I didn't even feel that the roads were very clear...

I guess one of the factors was the time it took to get my dinner...it probably took 5 minutes, maximum. I don't know why...usually I have to wait quite a bit at this stall. But today, it was like she started cooking mine right after I ordered.

And secondly, it's about my dinner. I've been wanting to eat this fried rice for about two weeks. There's this stall in Relau (where I live) selling fried rice and fried kuey teow, and I really like its fried rice. But last week, I went there and another person was operating the stall. It was the person from the morning session...at breakfast time and at dinner time the cook is different, but they sell the same things.

I had already eaten the morning char kuey teow before, and I didn't like it so much...but I tried the fried rice anyway. And I didn't like it much either. :( After that I looked a few times to see who was at the stall...and it wasn't until today that I saw the fat lady (my preferred cook :P ) there. So I finally managed to order my fried rice!

Another thing is the sambal. They usually give me too little sambal to go with my fried rice, and for some time now I have taken to asking for more sambal. (there's an... Indonesian? taking orders, not the cook herself) Most of the time the sambal is just as little...maybe because by the time she got to wrapping up my order, she had already forgotten my request (I said that I usually had to wait...). But today she really put more sambal...and oh wow, was there a kick to my fried rice at the end! :D (I don't mix up all the sambal at once, I put it bit by bit onto the portions I'm eating. Since I used it a little sparingly at the beginning, and was reluctant to waste it at the end...well, you see how it is :P )

Sorry, no photo...I didn't think of blogging about this until I had finished eating. But I think I took a photo of this fried rice for a photo challenge before... ;)

Please don't lean on me...

When we were in Lumut, we drove to Teluk Intan one day. There isn't much to see there (unless if there's something we don't know about), all we knew to look for was the leaning tower (and that was because my mother and my brother knew about it...I had never heard of it before! lol)

Here's the menara condong ("leaning tower" in Malay) under it's most condong angle...


We only saw this angle when we were leaving... -_- Kinda lucky, I guess.

And also, the tower was closed. So we couldn't go up... (are people usually allowed to go up anyway? :P )


Next up on this trip: Lumut and Pangkor! (or one of them, or part of one of them...who knows? :P )

Oh, and I don't mean the next post...just the next time I continue writing about this trip :P Oh, the joys of being your own master. Haha...

Where do the grown-ups go?

Once in a while I find little cocoons lying around on the floor. And sometimes I see these cocoons stuck on the bathroom wall...with a little head poking out of them! Like this:


I was already extremely curious about what these things are, and what they become once they get out of their cocoon. So when I got the chance, I took a photo of one (the result of which you see above).

Then I posted the photo on Facebook, asking "What is this, and what does it become?" (well, not in those exact words... :P ) After a few "false starts", I got a reply from Jonathan who said, "It's a case-bearing clothes moth!"

An online search gave me this page and this page.

I guess the larvae in my place are feeding off my hair, insect remains and lizard droppings. Since I haven't found any holes in my clothes... *straight face*

Still, I've never seen the adult moths about...I hope they're not hiding in my closet...or my document drawer :s

Lessons from Noah's Ark

I saved these to share, quite a long time ago. But with the photo challenges and all, there wasn't a quiet moment on my blog! So now that things are a little slower (I have some stuff to post, but no time to write them now), here you go!

Everything I need to know, I learned from Noah's Ark .
ONE: Don't miss the boat.
TWO: Remember that we are all in the same boat!
THREE: Plan ahead. It wasn't raining when Noah built the Ark .
FOUR: Stay fit. When you're 70 years old, someone may ask you to do something really big.
FIVE: Don't listen to critics; just get on with the job that needs to be done.
SIX: Build your future on high ground.
SEVEN: For safety's sake, travel in pairs.
EIGHT: Speed isn't always an advantage. The snails were on board with the cheetahs.
NINE: When you're stressed, float awhile.
TEN: Remember, the Ark was built by amateurs; the Titanic by professionals.
ELEVEN: No matter the storm, there's always a rainbow waiting.

From here.

Was there a rainbow in the story of the ark? I can't remember...

And there's also a great cat photo (in the same post). The cat is sleeping on the porch of a miniature house, and the caption reads: I'm on your porch...driving down your property value.


Cute, huh? :P

Ketamakan membawa padah

I'm not sure what happened to these ants...sugar overdose, perhaps? I don't think they starved to death... Or maybe they couldn't find their way out and ended up dehydrated.

Muahaha...serves you right for "trespassing" on my sweet!

Simply nice

If you are nice to me, I will be nice to you.

The principle is as simple as that.

But sometimes, in reality, it isn't so easy...

Especially when there are a few people you want to be nice to.

And when they do not happen to be there at the same time.

Or when they are there with someone else you don't really/especially want to be nice to.

And what if, you do something nice for someone who has been nice to you, and someone else who has been equally nice to you finds out, and feels slighted?

On ne peut pas plaire à tout le monde. That is the title of a French television show...a talk show, if I'm not mistaken (I didn't have a television in France, I heard about this from my friends). It means "We cannot please everyone". Yeah, like that story about the man walking with his son and his donkey.

So should we be nice, but not too nice?

Just to keep the balance. So that no one gets too much niceness, and no one feels left out.

Oh, I don't know. It is easier said than done.

Friendship is barter trade with credit. And my debts shall be paid. In full, maybe with interest...however unasked for it may be. Especially if it is unasked for... because that's what friends do (or don't do).

Kampar's special

Have you ever heard of Kampar's chicken curry bread?


At the end of last year (yeah, I mean 2011, less than a week ago), my family and I went to Damai Laut Resort in Lumut. The resort is somewhat deep inside a "jungle"...it's quite a long drive out to the nearest town where we could find food. We already knew that because we had been there before, so my parents bought one chicken curry bread in Kampar, on their way to Ipoh (where they picked me up) and then we went to Damai Laut together and had the bread for dinner.

You've already seen the box, so here's what was inside it:


There were instructions on how to cut it, inside the box cover.


We followed the instructions....and ta-da!


It was pretty good...the bread was the sweet bun kind...we dipped it into the curry sauce.

A piece of bread like this costs RM28 (if I remember correctly). It made for a light dinner for five of us. This is the small size...there's a bigger one too! Double of this, I think...

We can find the bread in KL too...there's a shop selling it in Kota Damansara...near Sunway Giza if I'm not mistaken. When we were there, we debated whether to try it...but didn't buy one in the end. (I think it was because they only had the large size left :P )