Wednesday, December 31, 2008

My Marriage In A Month

The city's alight. It's 10.47 pm and all the world's awake. Tim is dozing in bed, waiting for me to reheat yesterday's meatloaf, and his belated Christmas pressie is waiting for him in the living room.

We've had our ups and downs this month, our first month of truly living together as husband and wife, and while we haven't nailed it yet (by far), we're getting there. It's not going to be easy, and I need to watch what I do and say (I've been single and listening to myself for far too long), but I'll do it.

Because I'm the happiest I've ever been.

There, I've said it. Finally.

Happy 2009. May love and peace blanket this night, and every night thereafter.

Tuesday, November 18, 2008

The Best Thing In The World

Do you think if Hitler had access to this website, he'd have done what he did?

I think not.

I could watch this all day but I think my head would explode.

Streaming .TV shows by Ustream

Mood: Overdosed on Cute

Monday, November 17, 2008

The Big W

I am getting married in 6 days. In fact, the wedding proper stars in 4 days, and continues on through the weekend. Trust me to never do anything by halves.

I have been dying in stages for the past month, and in between bouts of nausea (nervousness, you fools, not pregnancy) and stress, there has been some excitement. And also a strange feeling not unakin to the the day I first brought my dog Shaman(yes, that's his name. Story later) home. The thing running through my mind then was: What on earth have I done?

Having said that though, I am also getting little flashes of that feeling I had when I was in Amsterdam. Of finally getting what I want- but not really believing that it was all happening, and all good. Where I think about what has happened (and what is going to happen), and I get all gleeful and giggly. And I am NEVER gleeful and giggly.

Yes, it's going to be weird.

Mood: Hmmmmmmm

Thursday, November 13, 2008

Saturday, August 09, 2008

A Simple English Quiz - Or Is It?(Bwaa ka ka ka ka)

How many of the 100 most common words in the English language can you name?

It's not as easy as you think ...

I got a sad 44/100. Lemme know how many you managed. Good luck!

Mood: Hmmmmm ....

Friday, August 01, 2008

Save The Date: Solar Eclipse

Mark your calendars. On Friday, Aug. 1, NASA scientists will broadcast and webcast the next total eclipse of the sun, live from China. Viewers can watch the event on NASA Television beginning at 6:00 a.m. EST. They can also watch it at the website for the Exploratorium in San Francisco starting at 6:30 a.m. EST
access


This image combines three frames taken on March 29, 2006, from Turkey during the last total solar eclipse. Seeming to burst from the edge of the moon are flares of the sun’s corona. Click on the image for details on a webcast of the next total solar eclipse, which will happen Friday, Aug. 1
Get the full story here: http://www.sciencenews.org

Mood: OOooooOOOooo!

Thursday, July 24, 2008

Love Between a Father and Son

A photo-essay about a son and his father.
I can't say any more. Just look. And cry.
(yes, I'm a sap)

http://www.dayswithmyfather.com/

Wednesday, July 23, 2008

From Urban to Arboreal

Beautiful storytelling of one couple's drive to transform their ugly, grey driveway into a luscious bed of greenery.

If only we could do this in KL - a bit of guerilla gardening in Brickfields, Subang Jaya or other foliage-challenged areas of the city.

Mood: Hmmmmmm

Tuesday, July 22, 2008

We Might As Well Be Speaking In Tongues

So here we are at home, just chilling, when Tim suddenly pipes up,
"Let's watch movie!"
"Ok," I say, "what movie?"
"Anything!" he says.
"Anything?" I ask, knowing I have to be specific or regret it the rest of the night.
"Anything!"
"What about these?" I say, handing him a plastic bag of newly-bought dvds.
"Aaanytheeng...!!" He begins to sound annoyed.
So I turn around, and put on another DVD lying on the floor (there are always DVDs lying on the floor - it's like an Elephant's Graveyard of DVDs, only there's no bones, and, um, no elephants)
Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay starts playing.
"Nooo!" My ever-ebullient boyfriend barks. "Play one from the plastic bag!"
I sigh. Here we go again. "Which one?"
"Aaaany one!" Gosh. His girlfriend is so dense sometimes. Also amazingly un-psychic.
I pick out Tekkonkinkreet (It's high-def anime. Don't ask) and wave it at him. "This one?"
"Noooo! Play Batman. Play Batman."

I do so love him, but sometimes, he drives me nuts.

Mood: Gawd

Friday, July 18, 2008

Terminator: Salvation



Terminator. Christian Bale.

Can any SF-loving, geeky female want anything more?

Ok, maybe Michael Biehn 15 years younger.


Mood: EEEEEeeeEEEEEeeeeeeeeeEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!! !!!! !!!!
(insane excitement)

Friday, May 30, 2008

Nostalgia Is A Double-Edged Sword (Warning: Video Intensive)

Am so seriously dossing while at work (hope my bosses don't read this). Was coerced by DonnaW into checking out 80's music videos. HILARIOUS.

Check this one out: Can you pick out BabyFace?


The hair! The shoulder pads! The bad dancing! And how come they were a lot darker then?


And how about this one? Is it me, or is this video so seriously gay?



Gosh. I am so glad I was too young to have a serious interest in music then.


But then I found this:



And such a physical sensation hit me - a tugging somewhere between my sternum and my heart. And memories long forgotten were suddenly and mercilessly pushed to the fore. Not even proper, eventful memories - just flashes of feelings, quick glimpses of perfectly ordinary moments. Days in Coventry. Waiting for SimonD, listening for his heavy tread outside my dorm room. A night in Amsterdam, driving over the Stadhouderskade.

Is it strange that this piece of music unfailingly pulls from me my most bittersweet memories? Or stranger still, that these two cities hold both my happiest and saddest times?

And here it is that I learn an important lesson: it's never the big events that you remember with great clarity. Never the moment my first love proposed to me on a bridge over a bubbling brook. Never the time I just sat and looked with awe at Rembrandt's Night Watch. These things I remember only as a passing scene, sucked dry of all emotion.

The ones that creep up on me and whale me over the head with nostalgia are always the little things: the song in my head while I was in the taxi, the CD I was playing to kill time. Those are real. And those are the ones that hurt the most.

Why I Am Proud To Be Malaysian

Sometimes.




If this resonates, please please go here:

free download

We need more level headed people in this world. We need more people that actually see.


Mood: Unashamedly proud


Saturday, May 24, 2008

LOLDogs - Can't get enough of em

wutyoutawkinbout.jpg

Taken from the I Can Has Cheezeburger? Website


Mood: Bwaaa ha ha ha ha ha

Thursday, May 15, 2008

LOLCats - Purple

so � much � purple �

Taken from the I Can Has Cheezeburger? Website


Mood: Bwaaa ha ha ha ha ha

Thursday, May 01, 2008

LOLCats - Caffeine, much?

SO KEWTE and yet, so totally PSYCHOTIC.

I LIKE.

NOT WANT DECAF!!!


Taken from the I Can Has Cheezeburger? Website


Mood: Bwaaa ha ha ha ha ha

Tuesday, April 29, 2008

Why Do People Have to be Unnecessarily Mean?

It was completely unnecessary to be spiteful. But he did it anyway.

So this is me today.

loldogs, cute puppy pictures, crankiness, I Has a Hotdog

Saturday, April 26, 2008

What I Do With My Saturdays

In this case, it's Spend A Million Dollars On My Tyres.

I'm at IanK's place, changing all four tyres. I have it on his assurance that it is purely for health reasons, as my health would face certain deterioration (i.e. death via automobile accident) should I continue to drive on bald tyres.

So here I am, paying a bazilllion ringgit on BF Goodrich tyres (which everyone assures me are excellent), when my girlfriend buzzes me on GoogleTalk.

Me: Hey, guess what?
GF: What?
Me: I'm changing all 4 tyres! They're BF Goodrich, and they cost me a million bucks!
GF: Are you nuts? Mine are Michelin, and I paid RM 86.80 a piece.
Me: /faints

Aaaanyway.

I'm a mere girl, and completely devoid of any intelligence when it comes to car tyres - although I'm learning. So I surrender to my menfriends (this time) and simply write the cheque when they ask me to.



What to do?


Mood: Bleh about the hole in my bank account, but ecstatic about my new tyres

LOLCat Spinoff - the LOLDog!

funny dog pictures


All together now ...
...
...

AWWWWWWWWWWWWW .......

Taken from the I Has a Hotdog Website


Mood: ZOOOOO HUGGABLY KEWTE my head's gonna explode.

Thursday, April 17, 2008

Why I Love David Cook (WARNING - Video-intensive)

It's the middle of the night, and I'm indulging in my American Idol insanity - more specifically, David Cook. He is SO my boyfriend. :D

One of my favourites, David singing C Cornell's version of Billie Jean:




From tonight's show, with Mariah Carey's Always Be My Baby. Am gobsmacked. He made this song so MANLY.

GAWD the smile. /faints


AND he's in tears at the end of it! I'm gonna faint again.

/faints

Mood: EEEEEeeeEEEEEeeeeeeeeeEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!! !!!! !!!!

Wednesday, April 16, 2008

It's nearly midnight. I've got this meeting minutes I need to do for a meeting tomorrow (go figure). It is a meeting I will most probably get scolded at (although it is well-deserved, but who likes a scolding anyways), and I have only one more day to get everything done.

And yet.

I had a nice dinner and coffee with DavidT, came home to Tim. He bought me dinner, the kind soul, waited up for me, and interrogated me when I came home late. And then promptly went to bed.

The gerbils (or germans, as DavidC likes to call them) are doing well, and my most favourite place in the world tonight is on the carpet at Tim's apartment. The fish is looking at me as if he's been starved for days (the oinker), and there is a warm glow of light all around me.

I am suddenly feeling very happy. Things are right with the world today. Let the problems come tomorrow, but today, life is all good.


Mood: Unapologetically Happy

Sunday, April 06, 2008

Having Standards in Genting Highlands

You can't.

You absolutely can't.

Or maybe it's simply because, against all better judgement, I booked a room in the First World Hotel. Ok, it was a last-ditched effort, as there were no rooms available anywhere else, and I was gagging to go to the Genting International Jazz Festival, and didn't really want to navigate my cold and drunken(one if its sponsors is Heineken, naturally) patootie down the winding and fog-enveloped road in the middle of the night.

Aaanyway.

Checking in was the first of my nightmares. I should've taken it as an omen(cue scary music) and just run screaming out of there. But of course, hindsight is 20/20, as they say.

Shock # 1: You need to take a number to check in. Actually, there's more. You need to take a number, wait for an hour, miss your number because there are a bazillion people all around talking loudly and blocking the queue signs, queue up for another 15 minutes at another line while the guy at the counter flirts with a guest and her daughter for 10 minutes, and then check in.

Shock # 2: The place is a rabbit warren. Literally. Giant ground-burrowing gerbils would find themselves quite at home among the maze of corridors that make up Tower 1 of the First World Hotel. In fact, they would probably also get lost if not for the signs posted up, e.g. : 701 - 789: Straight ahead, 770 - 779: Left. We were in 767- as you can imagine, we were in a bit of a quandary about direction.

We finally managed to find the room (after seriously contemplating setting up camp next to a water cooler near the lift lobby and vowing to buy a GPS unit and a Survival Kit if we ever got out of here alive) and didn't have much time to notice its charms before we charged out again - with much trepidation. After all, what if we couldn't find our room again the next time? We could have left a trail of M&Ms but feared some of the guests would pick them up and eat them.

Thank goodness the First World Plaza has lots and lots (and lots and lots) to do, so our trauma was lessened somewhat. Managed to catch an excellent movie - Three Kingdoms, tried to ignore the play-by-play commentary going on right behind us, and charged straight to the Jazz festival afterwards and got great seats.

After an excellent show (Didn't drink much, as prices were- as to be expected- through the roof), went back to the room and dropped unconscious on the bed. But not before I noticed a few things. First disappointment: the room is tiny. The ceiling is high, but really, since one can't fly or float around much three feet over one's head, added height, in this case, is quite superfluous.

Disappointment #2: All the lights are bright, white fluorescent. Even the one over the bed. If there is one thing I CANNOT stand, it's bright white lights in the bedroom. I am not going to perform a triple heart bypass, I simply want a nice, relaxing atmosphere in which to, you know, sleep.

But the view is nice, though. Sort of. We were on the 20th floor, so we had a great bird's eye view of the outdoor theme park. At odd times, the screams of the poor unfortunates (or fortunates, as the case may be) would come wafting up through the open windows.

Woke up at 830 in the morning, to the blissful lack of screams. We dressed, made our leisurely way down to the cafe for breakfast, and were confronted with a horrific sight. The First World Cafe, at 9.15 in the morning, is a seething mass of hungry, aimlessly wandering people in search of empty tables. If you've ever watched the movie Night of the Living Dead, just picture the zombies with plates of food in their hands, shuffling around- the First World Cafe is just like that.

Call me naive (or as my mother puts it, 'snobbish'), but the first meal of the day should NOT include queuing up just to get in and then scrambling for a table. I nearly had words with this Chinese guy who so nonchalantly put his plate of food on the table I was already sitting at and then motioned his family to sit there. I might be short, but I've got a mean right elbow.

And the highlight of this meal: Queuing for eggs. Am I the only one who thinks that omelettes shouldn't be made wholesale? I chuckle at my own naivete. After waiting in line for 8 minutes, I actually thought I could ask the chef to make me a simple cheese omelette! What a simpleton I was! While standing there in front of the stove, deftly dodging flying bits of hot fat and cooked ham, I meekly resigned myself and became, in my own eyes, one of the hungry, desperate zombies. I held out my plate for a mass-produced sunny-side-up, and a roll(yes, a roll - they made the omelette like a swiss roll) of ham and cheese, and slowly shuffled to my table.

In an attempt to reclaim whatever humanity I have left, I've decided to have a nice cup of coffee (latte - skinny, wet , triple grande) and reconnect with the real world(insofar as the real world consists of Gmail, Facebook and LOLCats). So here I am, sitting at Starbucks, enjoying the chill late morning air and TimeZone's impressive download speeds. The fog's nearly gone, and I expect a nice drive back down to reality. All in all, it has been an enjoyable weekend, and at least I've got something to blog about.

Peace, all.


Mood: Chillin' Out

Friday, March 21, 2008

Bwaaa ha ha ha ha

Some dude just said "Grand Pricks" on live radio.

Could he, by any chance, have meant "Grahn Preee"?

Mood: Heh heh heh

Wednesday, March 12, 2008

Why I Love My Mother

My parents arrived from Butterworth yesterday, bringing the dog and 2 crates of oranges (if you knew my family, this is nothing unusual)

I got home after work at around 830, suffering from a hideous case of sore throat. Which is also not surprising, considering I had fried cod, fried calamari, and fried whitebait for lunch (binge, much?).

Aaaanyway. This is the conversation that went on:

Me: Mom, I'm not having dinner tonite. I've got a sore throat.
Mom: Are you sure?
Me: Yes, I've got a sore throat.
Mom: I've just heated up the mutton curry - are you sure you don't want dinner?
Me: Yep, I've got a sore throat.
Mom: How about some fried banana chips?

It would've been hilarious had it not felt like I was constantly trying to swallow a chainsaw.

It's funny now, though. Although I'm still feeling like I'm swallowing chainsaws, and now I have this hippo sitting on my head.

I think I'm coming down with something.


Mood: Bleh

Wednesday, March 05, 2008

I Learned Something New

I'm going to start my life right by (1) being grateful for all the little things in my life, and (2) learning something new each day.

However, being the depressed, psychotic and immensely bipolar bitch that I am, (1) is probably not, in all likelihood, going to happen in the near future. So I'm starting with (2).

I like learning things. And I like sharing (oh, how I like sharing - just ask Tim). So I present to you, dear readers, the very first installment of DarkThalia's I Learned Something New - a new word!


Pele's Hair

(PAY-layz hair)

noun - Thin strands of volcanic glass, formed when lava is thrown into the air by the explosion of a volcano. Named after Pele, the Hawaiian goddess of fire and volcanoes (and not the football star, you fools)

(taken from Wordsmith.org)


Mood: Say WHAT?

Wednesday, February 27, 2008

My Passion

I don't know.

Somewhere along the way, I lost it.

While I was surviving Life, I lost its savour.

Got too caught up in the Doing that I forgot to Be. Gotta meet my quota, gotta pay the bills, gotta get a boyfriend, gotta get married, gotta have kids. Why do I do all these things that enable me to live, when I have so lost the desire for Life itself?

It was so easy when I was a kid. All I wanted was to travel. To visit Paris, climb Notre Dame, fall in love in Sacre' Coeur. The want was so strong I could taste it. Even now, 20 years on, I can still feel the ghost of that old desire rippling through my heart.

I've done all that, and more. And have slowly grown complacent, fat and contented in the knowledge that I've achieved my childhood fantasies. And ignored the fact that while childhood fantasies are all well and good, there are grown-up fantasies that have yet to be fulfilled.

And therein lies the problem.

I have absolutely no idea what my grown-up fantasies are, or even what they should be. The vagaries of life have worn me down, putting up walls between me and my goals even before I know what my goals are. There's never enough time, enough money, enough opportunity to do the things I want to do (although at this point I have no clue what I want to do. The very suggestion that I can't do what I want is enough to put me off any idea completely) And so I amble on, not unhappy but having a sense of disquiet, that something just doesn't fit.

This post isn't to announce that I have had an epiphany and will tell you (at the end of this rant) that I have suddenly gained clarity and would like to ride an elephant across the Pyrenees, or live among the Yanomami in the rainforests of South America. So sorry to disappoint.

I will probably live a clueless, desire-less life for a little while longer.But even without a goal, there is something I can do in the meantime.

Follow my passion.

The thing that has been a shining thread of joy running through the warp and weft of my life. The one unchanging thing that I turn to, again and again, when the highs and lows are simply too much to bear.

Which is, ironically, what I'm doing at this very moment.


Mood: Contemplative

Saturday, February 23, 2008

Warning: Massive Introspection To Follow

This post is to inform you that I will be conducting some serious soul-searching for the next few days/weeks/months.

So please expect a lot of mindless rambling.

I wish I had peyote. Those American Indians had it right.

Well, failing that, the best I can do in this country is a lot of meditation and yoga. And talking to God. And possibly eating lots of sugar. Although that'll probably just make me giggle lots (which is actually what eating pot made me do) - but a girl has to try.

My soul hurts.

Mood: Confused and Unhappy

Tuesday, February 19, 2008

My Myers-Briggs Personality Type

ENFP - "Journalist". Uncanny sense of the motivations of others. Life is an exciting drama. 8.1% of total population.
Free Jung Personality Test (similar to Myers-Briggs/MBTI)


I've had this argument with DavidC - he says I'm more of a ENFJ (or ESFP) than an ENFP.

But 3 different online tests can't be wrong, can they?

I will have to have Philippe administer my test for me. Definitely worth a couple of mojitos!

Mood: Feeling like an ENFP

Thursday, February 14, 2008

Of Frenchmen and Puppet Parodies

Well.

Have just returned from a lovely holiday in Singapore. Bunked with DavidC and Philippe, spent a wonderful 4 days there.

How to explain?

Singapore is a gorgeous country. A bit too nanny-like for my tastes, but when I'm just barely keeping my chin up out of the heaving chaos that is rush-hour KL, potholed roads and motorbikes with faulty brakes but working horns, stepping into Singapore, with her pristine streets and well-oiled MRT system is like slipping quietly into a deep pool. Noises fall away which I never knew were there.

But maybe it was all due to timing. After all, I did arrive during the CNY holidays, which means that 95% of Singaporeans were not in Singapore. So it was all empty streets and easy taxis and unclogged nightclubs.

And being with D & P was such a joy - it seemed that all my cares just melted away for those 4 days. My soul had never been lighter.

It's one of those memories to cherish.



Mood: Blissfully Refreshed