For reading:
From an informative graphic novel "Trinity: A Graphic History of The First Atomic Bomb" by Jonathan Fetter-Vorm, I discovered that due to the frequent testings of atomic bombs in Nevada in the 1950s and 1960s,
each of our bodies [especially those who live in the U.S. and surrounding countries - ed.] contains some amount of radioactive material, lingering trace of atomic testing.
“You should date a girl who reads.
Date a girl who reads. Date a girl who spends her money on books instead of clothes, who has problems with closet space because she has too many books. Date a girl who has a list of books she wants to read, who has had a library card since she was twelve.
Find a girl who reads. You’ll know that she does because she will always have an unread book in her bag. She’s the one lovingly looking over the shelves in the bookstore, the one who quietly cries out when she has found the book she wants. You see that weird chick sniffing the pages of an old book in a secondhand book shop? That’s the reader. They can never resist smelling the pages, especially when they are yellow and worn.
She’s the girl reading while waiting in that coffee shop down the street. If you take a peek at her mug, the non-dairy creamer is floating on top because she’s kind of engrossed already. Lost in a world of the author’s making. Sit down. She might give you a glare, as most girls who read do not like to be interrupted. Ask her if she likes the book.
Buy her another cup of coffee.
Let her know what you really think of Murakami. See if she got through the first chapter of Fellowship. Understand that if she says she understood James Joyce’s Ulysses she’s just saying that to sound intelligent. Ask her if she loves Alice or she would like to be Alice.
It’s easy to date a girl who reads. Give her books for her birthday, for Christmas, for anniversaries. Give her the gift of words, in poetry and in song. Give her Neruda, Pound, Sexton, Cummings. Let her know that you understand that words are love. Understand that she knows the difference between books and reality but by god, she’s going to try to make her life a little like her favorite book. It will never be your fault if she does.
She has to give it a shot somehow.
Lie to her. If she understands syntax, she will understand your need to lie. Behind words are other things: motivation, value, nuance, dialogue. It will not be the end of the world.
Fail her. Because a girl who reads knows that failure always leads up to the climax. Because girls who read understand that all things must come to end, but that you can always write a sequel. That you can begin again and again and still be the hero. That life is meant to have a villain or two.
Why be frightened of everything that you are not? Girls who read understand that people, like characters, develop. Except in the Twilight series.
If you find a girl who reads, keep her close. When you find her up at 2 AM clutching a book to her chest and weeping, make her a cup of tea and hold her. You may lose her for a couple of hours but she will always come back to you. She’ll talk as if the characters in the book are real, because for a while, they always are.
You will propose on a hot air balloon. Or during a rock concert. Or very casually next time she’s sick. Over Skype.
You will smile so hard you will wonder why your heart hasn’t burst and bled out all over your chest yet. You will write the story of your lives, have kids with strange names and even stranger tastes. She will introduce your children to the Cat in the Hat and Aslan, maybe in the same day. You will walk the winters of your old age together and she will recite Keats under her breath while you shake the snow off your boots.
Date a girl who reads because you deserve it. You deserve a girl who can give you the most colorful life imaginable. If you can only give her monotony, and stale hours and half-baked proposals, then you’re better off alone. If you want the world and the worlds beyond it, date a girl who reads.
Or better yet, date a girl who writes.”
Being a law-abiding (read: law-fearing) country, America does have several lawsuits in the distant past that still affects its citizens until this day.
One personal example I found quaintly annoying was when I came to the next-door pharmacy.
Me: Excuse me sir, do you have any medicine for [disease undisclosed]?
Pharmacist: Let me take a look at that.
Me: [showing the pharmacist my disease, which was quite visible externally]
Pharmacist: I'm afraid you have to consult a physician, sir.
Me: But I want a self-treatment...
Pharmacist: [getting more assertive] You need to see a doctor.
Me: Alright, seeing a doctor it will be then! [BIG SIGH] So is there any first-aid self-treatment that I can use before I....consult the physician?
Pharmacist: Well, you can always use the [medicine undisclosed], but I can't guarantee if..
Me: And where can you find that medicine?
Pharmacist: It's on the bottom of the shelf on the third aisle.
Me: Okay, that's all I need to know, thanks!
When I confided in a friend on how insistent the pharmacist was in recommending me to a doctor, I thought that this annoying chap was thinking of getting some royalty off the doctor concerned (which usually happened in my previous country of residence, Indonesia). But she simply said that the pharmacist was required to insist on customers getting treated by a doctor, lest the disease gets worse, I would not litigate the pharmacy.
Worthy of note, this occured during the very last days of September this year (and Mom hadn't departed to America yet) which unfortunately ruined any dates, weekly swims, planned moviegoings, and whatever else that a 20-year-old male was supposed to do during his Summer.
But shit misfortune happens, eh?
Anyway, back to the topic.
So it came to my attention that janitors also carry a large possibility of being sued against. The logic is simple: If the floor was too slippery and someone falls on the floor, the janitor of that shift carries a large portion of the responsibility for the punitive damages that may ensue.
One of the most oft-cited examples is the Liebeck v. McDonald's case where Stella Liebeck of New Mexico burned herself after accidentally spilling coffee on her body. She suffered third-degree burn and sued McDonald's for it and won.
A moral story for McDonald's not to serve hot drinks? Not exactly.
The lesser-known result of the litigation was that the reason Liebeck spilled the cup was neither her nor McDonald's fault, but the lack of cup-holder in her car. The dashboard was slightly slanted while she had nowhere else to put her cup on, hence the spill.
Fearing similar litigations towards automobile manufacturers, the company which produced her car, together with almost all other private car manufacturers in the States, began placing cup-holders in between both the driver's and the front passenger's seat from that year onwards.
But it does not stop there.
Scald-and-burn lawsuits such as Liebeck's had become quite commonplace that most public buildings (such as libraries, churches or museums) decided to get away with hot water altogether.
Thus, instead of having two choices of "water temperature" in the restroom sink, only one remains: Cold water.
It would always be pleasant if you could rinse your hands (and soak your face) with a warm water after a gelid Winter day, but the choice is gone whenever I want to sanitize my hands on the library's Gent's.
Thank heavens most privately-owned buildings (such as hotels or restaurants) have not followed suit.
by Toshi
And so we kissed. We kissed like we never had before...I saw her tear ducts overflowing until she finally pulled herself away from me.
"I have always loved you", she whispered half-gaspingly.
"And I you" I started getting teary-eyed on my own, "I'm sorry it has to end like this, my love..."
Then she took one of those pills on the plate she prepared herself and swallowed the cyanide capsule. Within seconds she vomited blood and dropped to the floor, a scene I could not bear to see.
It took me full ten minutes before I finally regained composure of myself. The heavy artillery was still booming outside the walls.
It had been decades since I last cried like this...since the day my mother died.
With heavy sobbing, I took her body and laid her neatly on the sofa.
It didn't took me any longer than a minute before I reached my own .9 mm on the small table next to me, pointed it towards my mouth, and pulled the trigger.
~~~~~~~~~~~~
I fell onto a large hall that seems like a vast court with white tiles, with my head hitting the floor first. Strangely enough it didn't hurt.
Everything was white: the tiles and the walls I can see from yonder.
I looked up and saw a cypress desk with a huge Swastika engraving right in front of me..is that my desk?
There is a blonde-haired woman in red tuxedo behind it, sitting on my chair, writing on notebooks with a lightning speed. As she finished one notebook, she piled it up with a piling mound of notebooks she dumped on the floor.
She didn't even seem to notice me, despite us being the only two human beings in the room.
I stood up and realized that I was wearing my own uniform. Hey, that's pretty neat.
"Excuse me, young lady", as I spoke to her nicely, "but where is the restroom?"
She glanced up from one of the notebooks she was writing on.
"Restroom?" she frowned, "you really think you have a need for that anymore, huh?"
I ignored her sarcasm, "so what place is this? And why are you on my desk, young lady?"
"I only conjure up images with whatever stuff you are familiar with. And this is the gate of heaven"
"Heaven? So you guys actually exist, eh? The God and the angels and all those hogwash?"
"We are not hogwash"
"I mean, yes you do exist, but I've always thought you were invented by the Vatican so they can control the world"
"Regardless of what you think of us, we are who we are", she responded tersely. She does not seem happy with my last statement.
I wanted to say another word but she held her hands to hush my word, "Okay Adolf, you are...outstanding. I haven't seen like you before...well, at least not under my assessment"
She spoke in a matter-of-factly tone and called me with my first name, Adolf. How disparaging of her, how dare she! Not even my wife Eva has ever called me in such a way!
I wanted to slam the table and strangle her but I don't think there is much point of doing that now.
"Where is Eva?"
"She is being assessed by another angel as we speak"
"So you're an angel? I thought you had wings"
"As I said, I can conjure up whatever imagery that my assessed subjects are comfortable with"
"So is she gonna make it too?"
"What do you mean, make it too?"
"You know..across the gates"
Then she laughed. How annoying, if only I can order one of my subordinates to shoot her.
"As you see, Adolf... When I said that you're outstanding, I meant your sins" she explained while the residue of her laugh still remained on her face.
"But I'm a hero for my fatherland Germany"
"You're a hero? You killed a multitude of civilians without any sort of mercy"
"They loved me"
"They don't. A small portion does love you, but most of the rest, they're only afraid of you"
"But they're Jews and Gypsies and crippled and homosexuals, surely they have no right to live?"
"Whether or not they have the right to live is not yours to decide"
This angel's voice was calm, much calmer than the voice of Eva when she was in my embrace. Ah, the old glory days...
"Anyway, you're going back to the earth, being reborn one hundred times as some randomly-picked subjects of your egregious treatment. Then you will be reasessed after your one-hundredth death whether or not you deserve hell"
"So...there is a chance I can make it to heaven, too?"
"No"
"What do you mean by deserving hell, then?"
"Your soul is too corrupted to even pass through. It would be lucky for you to even go to hell. But before that, you have to experience some of the worst hells you created yourself on earth. If you don't pass these assessments, we will simply let you perish"
I said nothing, silenced by the heavy air she was bringing with her tone.
"Your first rebirth would be as a male named Yishak Goldberg, born in November 1929 at Gdansk, Poland" as she wrote the statement down in one of the opened notebooks lying on her desk. And by her desk, I meant my desk.
That name sounds filthy enough.
"I don't want to be born as a Jew"
"I'm sorry Mein Führer" she spoke to me softly in a sarcastic tone as she stood up from my chair and walked towards me with her red stiletto tapping heavily on the floor, "but you have no authority here"
She was about to raise her left hand and tap me on my shoulder but I wanted to ask one more question.
"Wait!"
"Yes?"
"Does my wife Eva make it to the heaven?"
"She will be having some long assessments too with rebirths, but yes, she has the possibility of entering paradise"
Ah. At least she's okay. Watch for me when you're up there, my love...
"Get ready now", she smiled.
Then she clapped and everything went black.
I found this interesting psychology test one day. It asks you to fill in the blank below:
COFF_ _ ; SK _ LL ; GR _ VE
What do you fill those blanks with?
Answer key in yellow font (Try not to cheat before you answer!):
If you fill it with Coffin, Skull, and Grave, it shows how pessimistic and gloomy you are. If you fill in those spaces with Coffee, Skill, and Grove, that means you are an optimistic and cheerful person.
Here is a price list of haphazard electronic goods I sighted upon on my last visit to BestBuy:
Audio
iPod Earphone $40
Gumy Earphone $11
iPod wall charger $26
Sony earbud headphone $18
Dynex audio line-in jack $10
Sony noise-cancelling headphone $50
Sony studio headphone $30
HDTVs
19-inch Insignia HDTV $190
19-inch LG HDTV $200
Gaming consoles
Nintendo DS $130
Nintendo DS games $10-30
Wii bundle (including remote and nunchuk and charger) $300
Wii games $30-50
PS3 250GB $350
PS3 games $20
XBox 360 $300
XBox 360 games $20-60
PS2 $100
PS2 games $10-20
PSP $250
PSP games $20-40
Others
Macbook 13 inch, 2GBram, 250GB HD $1000
Rice cooker & Food steamer $45
This is one question that still makes me wonder till this day: "When a gay guy kisses a woman, does he feel disgusted just like the way we heterosexuals feel when we kiss a member of the same sex?"
Out of the blue, I asked that question to Mark, a friend at the Deli.
"Hey that's a good question. Good question, dude. I'd probably ask my gay uncle"
"Yoh have a gay uncle?"
"Yep"
"Is he openly declaring gay or does he have a partner"
"He has a partner. Well, it was an embarrassment to the family at first, but we finally came to accept it", he shrugged nonchalantly while cleaning the chicken steamtable.
Whoa.
He continued, "But not all gay guys live with another guy though. Sometimes they get married with a woman too"
"Hey yeah, that happened a lot in Indonesia!"
"Really?"
"Yeah..you know, they want to appear normal in front of their society, hence marrying a woman.."
"Oh!"
"What?" I raised my eyebrows.
"Man, there was an assistant manager, he used to work here, and he's openly gay"
"So?"
"And he was married to his wife and had a 13-year old daughter!"
"Oh my God. Does his wife and daughter know about it?"
Then he cracked up.
"What?"
While suppresing his laugh, Mark explained, "There's a funny story behind it. His wife cheated on him soon after she found out that he was a gay...and do you know how he got back at his wife?"
"You mean how he paid back his wife for her cheating?"
"Uh-huh"
"Nah.. You tell me"
"You see, the other guy with whom she was having an affair...this assistant manager met that other guy and had sex with him"
The story was such of a freakish nature that my mouth gaped wide.
"You mean, his wife was married to him, a gay guy...and she was cheating with a gay guy too? Do you mean it for real?"
"Yep. I heard it from his own words, man.. Apparently.."
"His wife was a magnet for a gay guys", I concluded.
"Exactly"
There is a body spray in the bathroom with the scent of wild honeysuckler, and it emits exactly the same aroma I smell when going to Indonesian traditional wedding ceremonies.
I wonder if that really is the fragrance they use in those ceremonies...wild honeysuckler.
Fart is the new four-letter F-word.
I love to use that word freely, because despite its bowel associations, it is not a vulgar word...haha.
Fart you.
Cooking is easy, doing dishes is the hard part
~from a Chinese Restaurant in Florence, KY
For the differing time zones which are relevant to me and you my readers (most of whom reside in western part of Indonesia), I have put up two digital clocks on my blog sidebar.
Read more...A family member of mine (I couldn’t tell here who it was, and for the sake of anonymity, let’s call him H) once smuggled a lot of food when he entered USA without having to pay a single pence for duties.
How did it pass the X-ray?
He told me how.
It may be a classic trick to some, but to me it seems kinda smart so I’ve decided to share it here anyway.
“What do you bring? Could you open your suitcase, Sir?” asked the immigration officer.
“Sure. No problem” H answered, unzipping the suitcase for the officer.
A stench smell reeked.
“Ugh..Yuck! What the hell is that?”
H answered nonchalantly, “Dirty laundry…I haven’t got the chance to wash them for a week”
“Now that’s disgusting. Go, close that suitcase back!” he seemed annoyed with all that smell.
In the X-ray, the food and clothes lumped together without any clear distinction between each, so it was indeed credulous enough for H with his ingenious trick.
On the bottom of the suitcase, he packed all those food stuff into one, and on the top of them, he stuffed a lot of dirty clothes.
Read more...I have recently joined Twitter and noticed that the common etiquette there is by converting those long links into a shortened one.
(Some regular readers may note that I'm being self-contradictory with my previous opinion...but hey, people change!)
Some of these links even give you the luxury of picking your own shortened URL such as this post
1. Sit and reflect in total silence for at least 10 minutes everyday
2. Don’t sleep too late in the night
3. Live with three Es: Energy, Enthusiasm and Empathy
4. Read more books from year to year
5. Spend a lot of time with people above 70 and below 6
6. Drink a lot of water
7. Make at least three people laugh everyday
8. Clean up the mess in your house, car, desk and let a new energy flow into your life
9. Don’t waste your precious time for gossips, reminiscing the past, negative-thinking or other things you could not control. Rather, invest your time for this day with a positive outlook
10. Life is too short to be spent hating others
11. Don’t treat yourself too seriously
12. You don’t have to win every argument; you could always agree to disagree and vice versa
13. Make peace with your past so that it won’t ruin your present
14. Don’t compare your life with others’. You don’t even know what their life journey looks like
15. Nobody else could be held responsible for your happiness other than yourself
16. What others think about you is none of your business
17. No matter how bad or good a thing looks, it will change
18. Your job doesn’t take care of you when you’re ill. Friends are the one who could. Keep in touch with your friends always
19. Envy and greed will only waste your time. You’ve already had everything you need
20. Remember that you’re already blessed, hence you don’t deserve to freak yourself out
Enjoy this journey of life. Remember that this is not the world of Disney and indeed you don’t want to let it pass quickly. It happens only once, thus live well.
Read more...First of all we start with a bad news here.
My phone is (temporarily) dead, and I hope it could be resuscitated ever again because otherwise I'll be having no GSM with me for the next few days/weeks/months to come.
Gee I'm pissed, I'd rather not elaborate on my phone now, so that's it then.
For those of you who wish to reach me, feel free to dial my Jakartan CDMA number.
Now for the entrée.
So the truth is out, I've pretty much gotten most wishes I've wanted...for the next two months, at least.
For those wondering, the time is nigh that I'll be leaving the place soon. Though a newer update for the exact whereabouts and such would have to wait later.
As for now, I'm still studying French till the end of this month. By the time I end this class, I'm seeing myself poring over some abridged French novels and preparing my mental being so that I'll be ready to depart from the country (hint intended). By mid-June I'll be having DELF, which is used to certify a certain mastery in French. I reckon I'll take A2 level, though my teacher has suggested that I'm capable for B1.
Well...we'll see.
On the blog layout change, how do you like it? I had thought this was one of the best layouts I've ever implemented for this blog until a friend commented on the contrary. So I did change the header and the background colour....
But all in all, the linkbar remains there. I love the top linkbar!
Meanwhile, I love Dashboard Confessional and Paramore and seems that I'm gonna love them even more. Their tunes could always lighten up my day.
As long as I don't listen to Guns n' Roses in the morning, I always know that my day would turn out just fine. Listening to them early in the day is akin to getting on the wrong side of the bed.
This may have been an open secret which is known among hoteliers and restaurateurs alike....but I will reveal it anyway for those of you who have been too naïve to know nothing about it.
During our very last class outing, my former Madagascan French teacher told us against reprimanding waiters and/or chefs in a restaurant.
If the food ordered somehow does not satisfy your taste buds, or the appetiser does not meet your culinary standards; you should simply ask the waiter to wrap the food (for a take-home), pay the meal and leave in peace.
Why is it so?
It is due to the fact that when you censure any waiters for your unpalatable meal and ask for your steak to be compensated by a tastier one, the waiter will go back to the kitchen and return a couple minutes later with the same steak....and some other God-knows-what ingredients.
And by those God-knows-what ingredients, I do mean it as nauseating, because it could be anything from the chef's perspirations, mucus, saliva.... Yuck!
Disgusting, is it not?
Sadly, that's the truth which exist in almost all countries in the world.
But oh well, you could still reprimand the chef or the waiters if you wish. Just make sure that the food is already served and never let them have a hand on your meal before you decide to give them some scolding.
And don't come back to that eatery ever again, lest they would remember you and decide to give you those "ingredients" the next time round.
Read more...Below is a short story I created from Drabble
The Maudlin Terror Of The Snow
It snowed a foot overnight. When they woke up, Meow and Toshi went out to play. First, they made snow angels. Then they had a snowball fight and Meow hit Toshi in his ear with a big ostensible iceball. It hurt a lot, but Meow kissed it shoddily and then it was all better.
Then they decided to make a snow man.
"We'll make a really palpable snow man!" Meow said.
"Why don't we make a snow woman instead?" Toshi said. "That would be more florid and politically correct."
"I know," Meow said. "We can make a snow hamster. That way, we don't have to worry about gender politics."
So they rolled the snow up tawdrily and made a zany snow hamster. Meow put on a piano for the neck. The hamster was almost as big as Toshi.
"It looks loquacious," Meow said piquantly. "But it seems like it's missing something."
"Here," Toshi said and held up a recalcitrant tennis racquet. "I found this on the table." He put the tennis racquet onto the hamster's head.
It was perfect. For about a minute. Then the hamster, even though it was just made of snow, started to move and growl like a seal in a circus.
Toshi screamed haltingly and ran but the snow hamster chased him until he tripped over a tree root. Then the snow hamster punched him verbatim.
"Nobody does that to my little Glossy Accordion," Meow screamed. She grabbed an icicle and stabbed the snow hamster through the back. It fell down and Meow kicked it apart until it was just a bunch of snow again.
"You saved me!" Toshi said and they shared an embrace in the snow before going in for hot chocolate.
The tennis racquet lay in the yard until a quiescent child picked it up and took it home.
This Corrinne May's song (see title) speaks of the nuances of having a long-distance relationship. Below is a clipping from its lyric:
We may be miles away
but as I kneel to pray...
We see the same side of the moon
we will be looking on when the world turns blue..
...I know I can't be afar from you
if we're both looking on the same side of the moon
This song got me thinking.
Presuming that it was inspired from her own true story (note: Corrinne wrote most of the songs she sing by herself), and with another assumption that she wrote it while she was in Singapore, then I could say that her lover was in Australia or Japan or India or New Zealand.
Well, he may have been in Indonesia too though such a possibility is nigh zero.
Read more...Here is a list of websites where you could upload images for free. Some of them also offer additional options of uploading other non-image file types such as .avi or .mp3 too!
1. PP upload
2. File jumbo
3. Tiny Pic
.
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