I'm just sayin'...

So I know the check mark, or tick, is a pretty effective visual marketing device because it carries positive connotations: approval, competency, credibility. It sure worked for Nike. It's been working for the Heart Foundation for years, and I genuinely appreciate the work the Foundation has done to help people take better care of their bodies.

But you'll have to excuse me. Although I've walked past this pizza bar many times and wondered about its "gourmet pizzas", I don't know about the pizzas from this section of their delivery menu, because they come with names like "Roast Beef Tick Pizza". Which makes me think of a pizza with roast beef and, well, ticks all over it. And, well, yuck. I grew up with pet dogs in a tropical climate, and I can well imagine what that would look like. (Fortunately, I don't share the childhood experience of someone who also knows what that would taste like.)

Like cold water to a weary soul...

I woke up feeling dreary this past Monday.

The distance between here and home seemed even more obvious than usual, and I felt like hiding under the covers and muttering, "There's no place like home. There's no place like home." until I woke up in my four-poster back home with the cow prints on the sheets. Or at least, until a butler appeared at the foot of my bed bearing chocolate, tissues and a roti pisang hot off the pan.

Didn't happen.


But what did happen is that I received more SMS and e-mails from friends and family at home (and beyond) than I have in a single day since getting here.

"As cold water to a weary soul, so is good news from a far country," goes the book of Proverbs.

And for this weary soul, knowing that I have people on every continent who love me is very good news.

Another one of those posts with random pictures

One evening last year, I was feeling pink and I wanted to test out my new camera. And I made sure that nothing embarrassingly private could be read in the shots, so stop trying to read my handwriting.
















The Twin Towers through a skylight in Suria KLCC.
















One of the twins, shakily photographed while I sat in way-past-what-can-reasonably-be-called-rush-hour traffic. Has it ever occurred to you when you looked at one of the Twin Towers through a crack in between buildings that you're the only person on Earth who can see that exact view? That the guy in the next car might have just as good a view, but it's still not the same one you've got? And maybe we need to appreciate our unique perspectives a little more than we usually do?

Please tell me I am not the only one who thinks such things while sitting in heavy traffic.
















To be honest, I hesitated to post this photo. Why? Because the person who gift-wrapped a box of sliced mango for my Christmas present is someone who reads my blog (which is how he discovered I love mango in the first place), because sometimes Malaysians have this thing about expressing appreciation for something nice that someone of the opposite sex did for them, in case that act of appreciation is seen as something else entirely. But you know what? I like talking about good things people have done for me. In ancient Hebrew tradition, apparently, "Thank you" is expressed as, "I will tell of your good works." And so I will.
















One I miss immensely, and will continue to for many years. I still can't believe she's gone and I didn't get to say goodbye. I don't know what I'd give for one more cuddle with an energetically wriggly fluffball, because I'll never get it anyway.

I also appreciate what another friend did the previous time she went missing (before the last ever time), which was to get out of bed in the middle of the night and drive over to help me search under drains and in bushes. Never mind that we haven't spoken for months; it doesn't take away my gratefulness.
















Last Sunday night, I was walking briskly home after attending church in the city, and I passed my neighbour's rose bushes and thought, "How nice if I had the time to stop and smell them."

Then I remembered that I did. So I did.

It's been too long...

I don't like leaving the blog un-updated for too long, because then its posts become like appam that's been left too long in the plastic bag on the dining table: old and unappetising. And I have had some complaints that updates are too irregular as well as too infrequent. So, now that I'm trying to introduce some semblance of sane order to my life, I'll aim for one new post a week, at the very least.

But now I'm feeling extremely sluggish in the blogging muscle, and I don't know what I want to write about.

Maybe I could write about how cold today was, and how thankful I am for many things:

1. That my housemate's sister offered me a ride to the mall so that I would not have to carry 4.5kg of hand weights home by bus and on foot.
2. That though I woke up coughing because my throat was cold, it didn't stay cold, because I have a loosely knitted scarf in happy pastels that I threw into my luggage at the last moment when I was leaving KL. So the coughing has ended.
3. That my housemate made a deliciously cheesy, corn- and tomato-filled omelette for dinner, and so for a respite from a half-day spent typing an assignment on my PC I got to eat omelette with toasted, buttered rolls.
4. That I have tastebuds with which to savour omelette, butter and rolls.
5. That those same tastebuds also have a penchant for chocolate ice-cream, which I scooped into a mug and took with me on a walk to the park, despite the cold.
6. That I have overcome the psychological barrier that my first assignment of post-grad life had presented.

This is getting too wordy, and after a whole day of wordy, I can't do it anymore.

Omelette in progress

Bye Spunky, Hello Providence

Many of my friends know how much my (formerly my) car Spunky meant to me and how much I'd hoped its next owner would be someone who appreciated how truly special it was.

So, e-mails were sent, phone calls were made...

... and nobody, it seemed, wanted to buy my car. The only people who wanted it and might be likely to become Spunky enthusiasts were offering me a figure rather low for a Spunky, so I declined.

So, four days before was due to leave KL for Sydney, I gave in and phoned my car loan agent, explained my predicament and asked him to help me sell Spunky.

This was with a very heavy heart because I knew that selling to a car dealer meant that Spunky would lose every shred of, well, Spunky-ness, namely the horses. Don't ask me why those horses were so important to me. It was one of those "becoming real" things that the Velveteen Rabbit talked about. To others, Spunky may have been a gaudy, slightly scratched car with a missing piece from its front bumper; to me, it was the best thing on four wheels.

The dealer called, I told him the brief specifications of the car, and we agreed to meet in SS2's commercial square because he didn't know the shops near my house.

When he called later, he said he'd found the shops. So off I went to meet him, fully intending to turn left towards the shops and a soft shoulder where I thought he could inspect the car in peace without fear of cars zooming round the corner and squashing him.

Instead, I was vigorously signalled to turn right, into a side lane, rather than left onto the shoulder.

Mr. Car Dealer Guy turned out to be rather more pushy than I liked...

... so it wasn't difficult at all for me to make the decision not to sell to him.

Now if this were an ordinary car-sale story, it would end with me being back at Square One, with a car and no sale.

But my life has not been ordinary for a long time, and it was not ordinary that day.

To cut a long (but fun) story short, Spunky has been sold to a private buyer and its new driver likes the yellow, likes the horses, and is very happy to have a Spunky.

And because of the Spunky affair, my father now has a new friend, cooking coach, English student and bilingual Bible study partner.

Which all leads me to realise that, while for weeks I was preoccupied with finding a buyer for Spunky, God had a lot more in mind than getting me to let go of my car before coming to Sydney.

How often is it that the centre of my focus, all that I can think about, is really only a sideshow to the main thing?

Note to self: Remember that life stretches beyond me, I, myself...

... and my car.

Life is crazy

GK3

But I know You will keep me sane.

Happiness is...

When I was a little girl, I had a T-shirt with a picture of Smurfette and Papa Smurf on it. A line of text read, in cartoony script, "Happiness is walking with my Papa."

I remember how when I was three or younger (because I wasn't even in kindergarten yet) my dad would on some evenings take my brother and me to the playground behind our house. It was a short walk, yet at that time, happiness was walking with my papa.

As the years went by our communication lines got thinner and thinner, frayed and weakened by my dad's increasingly hectic work life, my growing sense of self, and what I can only explain as naturally tense dynamics between the two of us.

When I was 16, Pops had a heart attack that by any medical analysis "should have been" fatal. But after a month of bed rest, a quintuple bypass and more bed rest, he was back on his feet. In fact, within a day or two of surgery, he was back on his feet because his surgeon (my uncle) had ordered him to be mobile as soon as possible. My brother and I did laps with him down the hospital corridor at the rate of about one patient room per five minutes. Hey, it's not as if we were trying to win any races. It only occurs to me now that that was probably the first time in more than 10 years that the three of us had walked anywhere together that way.

I haven't taken a walk with my dad since those weeks following his heart surgery. We do other things, like have meals together. We've never talked much about things of the heart, but anything else is fair game: electronic circuits and stray puppies for him, comical moments of the day for me. I'm glad we talk at all.

Why this sudden burst of nostalgia? I was working on my PC on this cool, drizzly Saturday night when he knocked on my door and opened it with the widest grin on his face and a plastic container of sliced mango on his hand. A few nights ago, a relative had given us a few imported mangoes and on the way home, my dad said he'd cut them for me. For most of my life, I've been angry with him for not knowing me well enough. But one thing he has learned about his only daughter: I could probably live by mango alone if given the chance.

As I took the container from him and he stayed to talk, I had a glimpse of uglier times from our past, times when all I wanted to do was run away. (And once I did, only I did it in such a well-concealed way that even I didn't realise I was running away.) Things between us still aren't perfect, but they have improved and that gives me faith that they will continue to.

The mango was sweet and fragrant, deserving of its probably exorbitant price. But it wasn't as sweet as the thanks that flowed from my heart, thanks that this rebellious child has made her peace with fathers divine and earthly.

Which way is forward?

I've spent the better part of the past year disillusioned by the institution of church and rather worn out from much of the posturing I see there. It's uncomfortable being in limbo, not knowing whether to stay or to move on. Especially when I know that chances are, whichever church I next find myself in is just as prone to the same human follies.

I don't know whether to feel convicted by this article, or convinced that I am searching for the right thing and will not find it where I am and so it really is time to move on once and for all.

One thing I'm very thankful for: in all this time of my being bemused with the church and sometimes its people, God has proven himself to be bigger than my questions and more powerful than my confusion. He is still there to be loved, wherever I am, for wherever I am, he's there loving me.

Which is good to know, because right now I'm wondering: where next?
Image by Michal Zacharzewski, Stock.Xchng

Oh folder, wherefore art thou?

Like a sandal left on the beach, forever separated from its mate,

Like a little girl suddenly alone, looking desperately for Mummy,

Like a twentysomething searching for direction,

is a folder containing hundreds of e-mails I was compiling for work.

Lost.

Driving with Spunky

I love my yellow car with the horses. I do. I love how my brother says he doesn't need me to ring the doorbell when I arrive, because the yellow glow that precedes it already tells him I'm outside. I love that friends find it easy to follow me when we're going to a place they don't know. I love that I was able to buy the car I'd been eyeing for a year, for 1/5 less than market price but in near-new condition.

However, I am not so crazy about the fact that almost every day, I only have to drive past a bus stop or busy pedestrian walkway to find people waving at me with great fervour. It's not because Malaysians are a friendly bunch. It's because they think my precious Spunky is a taxi.

Sigh. Talk about not knowing a good thing when they see one.