It’s a long, loong weekend for me. It’s Chinese New Year weekend and I am stuck with no one but my two loyal, fluffy teddy bears. All my friends are gone for the holiday and celebrating. (Which I find it very strange since I am pretty sure none of them are of chinese descendent or married to one!)
Four uneventful, lonesome days proved to much for me, so I did exactly what a socially retarded dude like me would do in time like this - I went and checked out the internet chat rooms.
You can talk pretty much about anything to pretty much anybody on the internet, but people can behave appallingly in chat rooms. You probably innocently popped in with a casual inquiry about the whether and bam, you’d receive a lot of messages asking if you are menstruating.
This is both astonishing and unbelievably scary. Well, unless, you are really into "that", that’s fine with me but I think I better off talking about gardening, ancient history or pressing wild flowers or something. So excuse me for being a prude.
And then there this new way of communicating which made me realized I haven’t probably been in internet chat rooms, gee, for quite sometime. People now love to write in a hurry, you know, the incredibly keystroke-saving letter combination or grouping punctuations to form pictures, as if they were ancient egyptian symbols.
In fact my messages were filled with such ‘codes’, it could send to space: lol for "laugh out loud", brb for "be right back" and ic for "I see" and didkwaysimawpakirirabdwi for "damn, I don’t know what are you saying, I might as well press any key in random in reply and be done with it".
Usually, I do have a very good instinct and great at deciphering and decoding things. I live for meaning. In fact, just the other day, my housemate accused me of talking to a stray dog. (I named her Joy). I am that good when it comes to 'unintelligent' communication.
But this one message stumbled me. One message so laden with enigmatic codes it completely threw me off guard. It took a great mind and even greater patience to remotely convinced myself that this person didn’t just throw insult at me.
Horny toad: I m m****, asl, u 1 sx?
Me (Sexy amoeba): :0 (wide-mouthed surprise)
Horny toad: u m?
Me: ;) (knowing wink)
Horny toad: u no ne f?
Me: :O (even greater surprise, or maybe that’s a pig)
Horny toad: #-)
Me: “{}+:?>< (Of course I made that one up).
Yeah, that was stupid and I was bumped out but hey at least it was mentally stimulating.
And the great thing about internet chatting is that you are completely in control of the situation. In the last resort you can just log off.
N (for ‘end’)
Sunday, February 14, 2010
Friday, February 5, 2010
A Battle I Can't Win
I just got back from my beginning-of-the-year holiday. Oh nothing extravagant. Just a mini 4-day, 3 hours drive, getaway with oh well, who-else.
I thought I needed to get the engines going. You know, get my grooves back. Now that the workloads in the office are beginning to pile up and expectations are shooting up from every side, I needed a breather. It’s a new year for god’s sake. I was in a dire need for self-pepping.
I didn’t go very far. Just someplace that near to a beach. I am drawn to water. Lots of it. It gives me a much needed clarity and a point of view.
So what else did I bring back? See, I found out I was good at getting suntan. All I had to do was put my face up to the sun for a couple of hours and voila, people would seriously think I was just come back from a Caribbean Island (or just survived a very bad fire explosions in a tanning salon, depending on which part of my body that they were looking at)
I also, cruelly just found out that, throughout this 4-day 'winding-up' period, I've (shriek!!) gained a little weight. An absolute nightmare. Maybe a couple of kilos, I don’t know, I wouldn’t even dare to step on the scale. I simply knew it. My hips never lie.
The worst thing about holiday is that everything tastes delicious out there. An old piece of keropok lekor you would sneer at in the city becomes an irresistible taste treat. A simple plate of rojak buah with a lot of gravy nuts in it will have me rolling around on the floor in ecstasy.
Before the day had gotten under way, I'd been known to inhale two bagfuls of pisang goreng and keledek goreng all in one sit. With no drink. Yikes.
OK, I came back to KL yesterday with my “new beach body”. So what? I may have 'temporarily’ fall off the wagon in that department, but at least I got my mental health and a new point of view (to top off my new "golden” complexion), right?
Sigh.
I thought I needed to get the engines going. You know, get my grooves back. Now that the workloads in the office are beginning to pile up and expectations are shooting up from every side, I needed a breather. It’s a new year for god’s sake. I was in a dire need for self-pepping.
I didn’t go very far. Just someplace that near to a beach. I am drawn to water. Lots of it. It gives me a much needed clarity and a point of view.
So what else did I bring back? See, I found out I was good at getting suntan. All I had to do was put my face up to the sun for a couple of hours and voila, people would seriously think I was just come back from a Caribbean Island (or just survived a very bad fire explosions in a tanning salon, depending on which part of my body that they were looking at)
I also, cruelly just found out that, throughout this 4-day 'winding-up' period, I've (shriek!!) gained a little weight. An absolute nightmare. Maybe a couple of kilos, I don’t know, I wouldn’t even dare to step on the scale. I simply knew it. My hips never lie.
The worst thing about holiday is that everything tastes delicious out there. An old piece of keropok lekor you would sneer at in the city becomes an irresistible taste treat. A simple plate of rojak buah with a lot of gravy nuts in it will have me rolling around on the floor in ecstasy.
Before the day had gotten under way, I'd been known to inhale two bagfuls of pisang goreng and keledek goreng all in one sit. With no drink. Yikes.
OK, I came back to KL yesterday with my “new beach body”. So what? I may have 'temporarily’ fall off the wagon in that department, but at least I got my mental health and a new point of view (to top off my new "golden” complexion), right?
Sigh.
I just can’t win, can I?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)