Thursday, July 02, 2009

Here and There ...

Between places
Just because we have an answer
and because we think we understand
don't really mean we found the path
ending with happy ever afters
do you really know the reasons?
that makes us all so mortally flawed?
of all the images we are created from
that his is most unattainable
holo, wings and hymns
ever willing us to reach for more
hellish claws rise from below
intending to pull us down
leaving us no other choice
to become more than we can ever dream

The day started with rain.
Now it seems like its going to start pouring.

Thursday, June 25, 2009

Just like that ...


They say a picture speaks a thousand words.
So yeah.
Am going through a tough patch now.
Balancing between whats right and what needs to be done.

Will post something up as soon as I can.
Thanks for all the kind emails.

Wednesday, June 10, 2009

A rock and a hard place ...

It’s been a while since I posted.

Reason?

There were something’s on my mind that I needed to sort out.

Work.
Love.
Life.

Its part of the process that helps defines my work plan.

If you have read my newest post in WFF, you will see where I am headed with this topic.

The office is going through its 2nd wave of earth quakes and landslides.

A year has passed and even though the accounts are in the green, we are not making as much money as we anticipated.

Yes, the economy is shaky and all the clients are tightening their coin pouches.
But it’s not a good enough excuse for the board and funders.

So the boss has decided to reboot the company.

By the time the dust settles, half my work staff will be gone and I will be moving into a much smaller office.

It’s sufficed to say that I am not very confident on what’s going to happen in the future.

Too many variables.

Too many unknowns.

The odds are against us.

But I still believe in the man I call my leader.

I still yet believe that he can pull us through.

So here I am contemplating a choice.

A decision that will scope my future.

Do I take the job that pays twice my current salary but has a shelf life of only 1 year?

Or do I stay and push past these obstacles that besiege my leader.
Betting that my abilities and those that stays behind is enough to battle against the tides.

As I said.
Decisions.
Life is about choices.
And I will have to make mine soon.

Wednesday, May 27, 2009

How I became a wife worshipper ...

What happens when you see a beautiful woman?

You look.
Like all things beautiful, we will always look.
Women look at handsome man and colorful dresses.
Man will look at beautiful woman and skimpy dresses.
We all look.

Some look longer than others.
Some fantasized with what they see.
Some even go the extra mile and ask for their contact information.

And that’s what happen to me when I was 13 years old.

I saw something beautiful and I acted.

Of course you can guess by the fact that I am blogging about it, it will end drastically for the author hence the blogging value of it.

It was the first year of middle school.
I left my friends in my primary school and went venturing into a notorious private school in my home town.

If you followed my blogs from the beginning, you will notice that I tend to always make this kind of decision with my life.
Leaving familiar place and people to move into foreign places.
To taste a different kind of life.
Now looking back, it was a childish notion, as no matter what decisions I made, it would have been new to me.
But as of that time, it was what cross my mind when I told mom that I wanted to enroll into the private institution.

Back to the story.

I was a stranger in a strange land.
Alone.
No friends.
No familiar faces.
Nothing that I can cling to for security.

So I did what any mortals under that situation did.
I hid myself at the back of the class room in a corner seat where no one will be likely to bother or notice me.
How wrong I was.
A pudgy kid walked up, placed himself on the seat beside me and said "This is the best seat in the house"

I was not very comfortable of course, I wanted to be hidden.
Why is this kid making it so hard to do that?

"Hi my name is Goh. What’s your name?"

I looked at him and stammered my name out.

"Nice to meet you. Hey do you know that there are roughly 146 steps on the stairs up to our school?"
I shake my head.
He rambled on with a lot more information that I knew nothing about, conveniently ignoring the fact that I never asked about them in the first place.
And that was how I met my first friend in middle school.

You might still be wondering when I will get to the part where the beautiful girls become a subject.
Well, now would be the time.

In between the part where Goh was telling me the fact that the library is located 3 stories too high from the ground, she appeared.
Walking in with a group of other girls and they sat down in the middle of the class rooms.
I could not take my eyes off her.
She was stunning.
Her hair cut to the school regulations fitted her very well.
Framing her eyes and mouth to the exact proportion that made her just irresistible to the eye.

Goh eventually noticed that I was not paying attention to him and seek out the reason for my distraction.

"Oh. Her. She’s out of your league little boy. I hear a senior has already started to ask her out."

A senior? It’s the first day of school. How in the world did a senior get to her before any of us?

As if sensing my ignorance, Goh went on to explain.

"She stays in the school hostel."
"A native to the state of Pahang. So she's been here at school for the last 1 plus week."
"The senior I mentioned lives at the dorm as well."
"As I said, she is out of your league"

Skeptical was the look I gave him.

"And how would you know that?" I asked.

"Oh, didn't I tell you? I am from Selangor and I am staying in the school hostel for the time being."

And so that was how I started my path to oblivion.

Days pass.
Weeks pass before I finally gathered enough courage to even walk near her.
It was in the middle of the second semesters that I decided that I should do something to make her know how I feel.

Thus I hatch a plan of writing a letter to show my appreciation of her beauty.
It was not a love letter per se, just a letter of admiration.
But to a kid at that age, that was equivalent to writing the declaration of independence.

Neatly I folded the 2 page letter and put it into a white envelope.
During recess time, I secretly left it in her drawer and then I ran.

I kept away from the classroom for the remainder of the recess.
Even when the school bell rang, indicating the end of the rest period, I dragged my feet all the way back to the classroom.
And I should have listened to my instinct.

When I walked into the door, the whole class erupted in laughter.

"That’s him. He wrote it."
"How stupid."
"Who does he think he is anyway?"
And many more comments that did not help diminished my embarrassment.

How did everyone know?
It was a private letter.

Then I saw it.

The letters was pinned inside the glass notice board.

How did it end up there?

Only the class monitor had the key to that.

And she was the class monitor.

It took me a while to put all the logic together.

She put it there.

The object of my admiration had humiliated me in front of my whole class.

To say that my world came crumbling down is an understatement.

It was obliterated.

I slinked back to my seat and hid myself behind an upside down text book.

Tears never came.
But the heart hurt like hell, it was burned with an iron brand.

Since the letter incident, Goh kept his distance from me.
The whole class kept their distance from me.
Since she was the center of popularity, I was shunned as the golem in the lord of the rings books.

My grades declined to a state that after my first year, I fell 2 classes down and was moved to the less "hopeful" bunch.
This ended my time of misery in the upper classes.
To them I was just another kid and they took me in with no questions asked.
Of course they knew about the incident but they cared no more about it then the books they held in their hands.

It was then that I understood the difference.

Eventually, my grades picked up again and I moved back into the upper class.
I was still the misfit.
I was not the cream of the lot, but I do well in what I do.
So they put up with me.
Most of the time, I slink back to my friends in the lower classes just to feel normal.

I can safely say the small incident that no one but me will ever remember shaped my mind in a manner that defined almost everything that I do since.

So today, I am who I am because I understand the difference between others and me.

And I know where my loyalties are.

I look but I don't touch.
If I touch, I wear gloves.
If I am confident, I open up a door.
If they walk in, they get a chance.
If they prove worthy, they get more than my heart.
I will give them everything that is mine and more.

Now you understand a little more about why I love my wife the way I do.

Friday, May 22, 2009

The beholder ...



No, I don't know who she is.

I found her pic on a blog that I visited.

The reason why she is here now?

Because she reminds me of a girl that I once know during high school.

She was one of the "popular" group.

I was not invited to that party.

But for some very strange reason, she was a close friend of mine.

Its been years since I last saw her.

I believe she married into the world of the rich & famous and divorced shortly after with a baby girl in hand.

Sometimes I wonder if its a curse to be that beautiful.
They can't seem to find the kind of people that will love them properly.
Or should I say they can't seem to attract the kind that appreciates them the way they should be.

Spoken like a through "outsider".
I will forever be one of the ones admiring into the garden.

Oh, wait...
My mistake.

I apparently married one of the most beautiful woman in the world.

How come I am still so crazy about my wife after so long?
Maybe there is love in this world after all.

Monday, May 18, 2009

Doing it my way ...



There is this thing called a creative block which all writers young and old fear more than death itself.

It feels like the well is dry and all that is left is the lingering mirage of where the mojo used to reside.

Well, it’s really not true at all.
There is no such thing as a creative block.
My hero MM will beg to differ of course as he has been suffering from a slight set back in his delivery datelines.

The only ever block that any writer faces is that of a road block which every mortal human faces in our days of urgency to reach a destination.

Every time during my creative writing process I face the issue of a blank wall.
That means, I might have a topic and I won't know where to start.
Or I might not even have a topic at all and face the cruel curse of staring at a blank screen for hours.
At least that’s what might have happened if I did not know how to handle the blank wall.

You see, I paint the wall so that it’s no longer blank.

Does that mean that I resolved the blank wall issue?
Yes and No.

Let’s start with the part that I term as "No"
If I did not resolve the issue, doesn’t that mean I am still having that thing I say did not exist?
Well, that is true.
The wall is there but it’s no longer the same wall as it was before.
It’s now a wall of ideas.

I did not solve the problem because I still have not removed the wall itself but I found a way to incorporate it into my creative work.

Let me give you an example.

I started my blog on Wisdom For Free (hence forth known as WFF) thinking that I will base it on the occasional insights I gained while creating postings here at 12AM.
But the more I posted here, the more that I found that I don't have much to contribute into the WFF column.
So at the end I mostly double posted my columns in here and over there, as and when it fitted both the site themes.
It got me no where and I ended up keeping the site but stopped posting anything significant to WFF.

Later on when I found THE WRITER, he gave me the solution to what I needed for WFF.
He did it with POST IT notes.
I did it with DISPOSABLES TISSUES.
Well in reality I used everything that I can doodle in.

While coming up with ideas to post, I tend to doodle on my tissues to lay out my ideas.
I would put phrases on several of them and then move them around the table to see if something makes sense.
That’s me addressing my wall.
Finding a weak point so that I can puncture its defenses.

I almost always find something worth while to write about and pen it down in my paper notebook.
And that is how I create articles.
So what happens to the tissues?
They get wrapped up with the leftovers and dumped.

Yet now, they serve a larger purpose.
No longer condemned to a life of insignificance.
They become my creative wall for my endeavors in WFF.
WFF has so many topics lined up that I sometimes wonder if I can finish them all.

So the "YES" part is simple.
By taking these ideas that I created while figuring out how best to remove each obstacle.
I ended up transforming the wall that blocked me into an instrument that propelled me instead.

It shares the same concept to the saying "Make lemonade out of the lemons we get."

Will I solve the issue that the blank wall created in the first place?
The answer will always end up as yes, because once we start pursuing the alternate path, we tend to find that we end up at the same destination anyway.

After reading all this.
You still feel confuse?

Let’s do the 10 second course then.

If you find that you can't write or create based on the topic you are paid/encouraged/ordered to do.
Then start doing something else instead.
Write about yourself, your neighbor, your dog, you son/daughter, your wife.
Express all the emotions in everything that comes to your mind.
Even a simple "mind dump" will do wonders in putting ourselves in a different perspective.

The reason is simply because that drunken monkey in our head that we call our brain had driven itself into a corner and forgot how to reverse itself out.
We have to help it.

I am sure that I will face a lot more walls that will try to block me.

I am also sure that most of them will seem enormous and threatening.

With a pen in my hand, I am ready.
Ready to paint rainbows on to the wall that blocks my path.
While all the time dancing to the rhythm of Frank Sinatra voice.

Friday, May 15, 2009

God and Facebook ...



I am not trying to be make fun of religion or anything.
But this is really hilarious.

Note:
If I offended anyone with this please forgive my sense of humour.
It has never understood its true calling.