A few weeks ago my body just decided to shut down and I came out with one of those crazy fevers that puts your whole life on hold. Even after two weeks, two types of antibiotics and half a litre of cough syrup later, I lost my voice. Which was quite cool. In that I can sing AND sound like Louis Armstrong way.

The best part of the whole ordeal was that I was left alone at home for an entire weekend. My cousin had a wedding up in the north, and my parents and brother had to attend. I would’ve gone myself if I wasn’t a walking incubus of crap. But I was, and my mum was oh so kind in leaving me her car in order for me to drive out and eat.

Okay. Driving is not a big deal. Most people I know had gotten their license before SPM, or a month after they finish school. But for some bullshit of being the youngest or something, it took me countless of arguments, 8 months to get my license, and over a year after the license, before I was even allowed to touch any of OUR cars. And early this January, we had five. In a house of three drivers.

But that’s a rant for some other day.

So this was a pleasant surprise. A real pleasant surprise.

My family left at noon on Saturday and Sha was supposed to come sleep over to keep me company. She had something on during the day though, so I was pretty much free during the afternoon. Hanis wanted to have lunch, and I came over and picked her up.

Sending her home, I found myself at the wheel with this oddest feeling. I had cash in my bag, petrol in the tank, a free afternoon, and no one expecting anything from me. There was a P sticker on the car, I had my license, and there was nothing the law could find fault with me about. I was, there at 3.15pm, somewhere in the USJ area, with the car in neutral, taking stock, that I was a legal, independent adult.

It’s like this strangest fear took control of me, and no one was there to tell me what to do. I could go wherever, do whatever.

This was meant to be one of those defining moments in my life. A Catcher In The Rye scene where Holden Caufield just decides to run off somewhere where the sun never sets. Somewhere. Anywhere. Absolutely anywhere but here.

Yet I took the right turn onto the road to Taipan, bought more cough syrup and a single helium red balloon. Then went home.

_____________________

The next day Sha had gone home and I had the car and the house to myself for the rest of the evening.

Earlier on, we made a move for tapas in Bangsar, and she was sweating throughout the whole drive on the New Pantai Expressway. It can only be pure exhilaration, this heightened response and control as your foot slides smoothly from the accelerator to the brakes at a bend on the highway, tapping only gently, before going back to the former. I love it. I truly do.

So yeah. We ordered and we talked. About school. About our future. About love and loss. Where she’s finding herself in her life, and how I have learnt to settle.

If I could bottle that one moment, in between the chicken liver pate and the grilled sardines, with the rain beating down and absolutely nothing to do with life, nothing about the future, nothing about tomorrow, then I would be able to capture one moment where I could say I put everything behind.

So I did not get into Cambridge. The only thing I’ve ever wanted so hard as long as I can remember.

So, the interview STILL plays in my head at night, and the content of my essay flashes through my mind as I stare at the ceiling. So I cried for a week afterward. So I cut my hair and bought new clothes and became socially distant for a while. So I get all sorts of coos from friends and family who think it’s no big a deal. It was a big deal. I planned my whole life to lead to this. But it didn’t. And I felt so fucking lost. Don’t give me sympathy on my facebook wall, because you will never ever understand.

But so what? It’s ok.

It’s ok because at that moment I was content.

Leaning back against my handbag with the cough syrup, I could’ve even said I was happy.

And nothing could take that away from me.

Driving later that night with Azlan at my side, on the NPE through to Jalan Tun Razak all the way to Taman Tun Razak, getting lost somewhere between pudu and the Kampung Pandan roundabout; seeing KL in all her glory on an empty Sunday night. Cruising down the AKLEH with that magnificent turn with the Twin Towers on the side, sparking up memories of a dusty book and a hopeful letter of a young naive child so full of awe of Le Corbusier; to watching people queue up to catch the last bus home from the hub around Pasar Seni.

Nothing can take that away from me.

__________________________

The Playlist:

Marina & The Diamonds – Hollywood (Acoustic)
John Mayer – Wheel
Bill Withers – Ain’t No Sunshine
Beirut – Rhineland (Heartland)
Le Tigre – Deceptacon
Beatles – Drive My Car
Beatles – Michelle

and

Sufjan Stevens – Chicago.

x

Earlier this evening I went out with Sha and Azlan for some dinner and coffee, and managed to get myself the first season of Mad Men. The press are always raving about the whip smart, fresh whatever whatever insert exciting one-liner comment here about it, yet sometime last year The Guardian was raving on about the whole chauvinism around it.

Ok, after two episodes, I have to say I’m hooked. But I couldn’t agree with Hadley Freeman more.

Tomorrow morning, in exactly less that six hours; I will be sitting for a 3 hour test on industrial organizational psychology. We write long ardorous essays on human resource and ‘leadership’. We recite researchers names on this and on that, and we evaluate and argue fact against reason, like we do.

We learn that apparently  women are more likely to collaborate, ask for opinions, and are more people-oriented than task-oriented.

We analyse performance/situation graphs which plot : Good Leader-Member Relationship + High Cohesion + Strong Leader = Low Productivity.

And without fail we find ourselves integrating what we have learnt to what we do, as we do.

I’ve been thinking about my work in societies and club-work more and more now that we’ve started on this topic. What was my management style? What type of leader was I? Why couldn’t I find that cohesive force in the board that I was chair of?

For example; why did I let people delegated with a certain task off the hook more than I can remember? Is it called being weak? Was it because I wanted to be nice? Or was it because at the end of the day, we were all just students and I’m thinking ahead of myself.

In French class a few years ago, we had to discuss the role of women in organizations. We had to read opinions of various executives on what they feel about managerial styles and the implication it had on the women that exercised it.

The conclusion from our group discussion then, for which I still agree to now is this, really. We will never be given the same ground. Men can be decisive and egoistic and sure of themselves and we applaud them for having a stand. Women do the same and end up being called tyrannical and get nicknames such as Nuclear Wintour.

A few weeks ago, the Economist published an issue with a picture of Rosie the Riveter, applauding how women make up for more than half the workforce. As that was the theme of their issue, they also had interesting articles on new human resource research, on new statistical facts I can quote in my psychology essays, on how the oft seen ‘weak’ or ‘humanistic’ approach of women are now seen in better light, as actually being more effective than what was ever thought of.

My father has always given me the room to flex my own thoughts and actions, and has an opinion that I should make my way in the corporate world. I speak my mind, bulldoze my way through, and always felt that my gender roles will only ever be fully seen in the bedroom. There, I grew up telling myself, is only where we can correctly see the difference.

Women in Malaysia share equal pay rights as men, we make up more than 60% of the class in higher education, and our pocketbook is handled by a governor, who in any other muslim-majority nation would not even be given the respect to be a governess.  The glass ceiling, I thought, was giving in; and I was so sure that the cracks will come off clean ‘when I become big’.

But there was something about watching Mad Men that scared me. It may have been filmed in a completely different era, way before the Sexual Revolution, and in a different culture altogether. The world has progressed and we’re in some kind of post-post post Germaine Greer stage, but-

I recognize those looks.

The way the copywriters look at the new secretary, compliment her and show her around; what she mistook for kindness and limelight for her innate charms- are the kind, oh so interested conversation I get plied by during intermission and breaks at debate tournaments and conferences.

I always thought, oh it’s because I’m a breath of fresh air, because I speak my mind and I argue what I believe in. Because I have a sharp tongue and sarcasm that used to shut up the Malay boys back in school, because all that Economist and Monocle gave me opinion and taste. Because, in the end; the privilege of confidence had given me an air of authority amongst the boys club.

But no.

It was because I was eager to charm, ready to be friendly and interesting and make good conversation. A childhood of entertaining my parents’ friends and my doting relatives had given me the practice of knowing what to say to the right people; striking the right chord in the right string. And without knowing it, I had played right into their hands.

It feels disgusting. I feel now like I was just whoring my intellect to be fondled by eager and expectant young men. Just like they do in the 60’s.

Papa, I think I may need some help. The structural design of the ceiling is sturdier than we both thought.

2.  Do A Britney.
A-Saloon provides free computer and internet services as you get your hair done. Rates are as low as RM33 for Junior Stylist Cut and RM50 for highlights. Shiseido Fuente Professional hair products are used throughout the whole experience.
The salon is located at the Blue Atrium, First Floor. Ask for Jenny Yong. You can ask her for an ‘Ainaa’.

3.  Read Kerouac’s On The Road.
Appreciate an American classic road trip book as a means of escapism from your kiasu Asian life. Revel in the staccato prose of jazz, poetry and the phosphorescence of youth as Sal travels from the East Coast to the West and back again.
Restrain self from dropping out of A-Levels/University/Life to find that odd un-Asian notion of self-actualization.
Also, check out James Franco’s reading of a short excerpt of the book, here.
Big Bookstore Taipan has a selection of old stock Penguin Classics (Silver) Kerouac for RM16.90. The new 2008 print of silver Penguin Classics are stocked by reliable bookstores for RM 60.50.

4. Watch a selection of inspirational and soul crushing foreign films.
A good place to start would be Louis Malle’s Le Feu Follet (1963) where we follow our protagonist, Alain Leroy, a fellow suicidal depressive (yes, just like you) through his last day in Paris, visiting friends and old haunts, lighting cigarettes in well cut suits, looking to find a reason to keep living. Enjoy the cinematography, the philosophy, and the oh so terribly beautiful ennui of being suffocated by youth and privilege. Because just so you know, he doesn’t find that reason in the end.

Le conseguenze dell’amore (2004) will amaze you with its unique storytelling chronology. Set in Lugano, Switzerland; the story starts you off with a million and one questions and fills in the gaps slowly through the arduous Antonioni pauses. Need to be mentioned cinematography includes watching a slow motion 360 overhead camera spin, cool as fuck driving in a BMW 7-Series from hotel to Credit Nationale in less than 5 minutes, and watching an Italian man light cigarettes in really well cut suits.
It’s much deeper than that. But you’re depressed so we don’t need to get there do we?

Das Leben Der Anderen (2006)
Il y a longtemps que je t’aime (2008)
Le scaphandre et le papillon (2007)
And finish your depressive cinematic romp with yet another beautiful screening of
Reprise (2006)

5. Create two playlists to get through periods of Self-Loathing and to kick start The New View.

Self Loathing Recommended Tracks:
The Veils – Lions After Slumber
Cat Power – Hate
Sufjan Stevens – Casimir Pulaski Day

The New View:
John Mayer – Vultures
Florence + The Machine – Blinding

“No more dreaming like a girl so in love so in love / no more dreaming like a girl / so in love with the / wrong world.”

6. Maintain Good Karma.

Reply back dated emails, return long due phone calls, and send simple text messages to people you should really be speaking to on a more regular basis. Renew ties you have long forgotten, and maintain the bonds that you should keep. Fulfill promises you made years ago, and eat humble pie in instances that you know you did wrong. Return others’ books and things, buy birthday cards and candy canes, and remember to call your grandmother.

Be thankful for what you have, count your blessings knowing that you’re only ever accounting for the tip of the iceberg. Enjoy the simpler things in life. Realize the amazing blessing of seeing the sunrise every morning.

And out of your darkness, when you do find moments when you can feel something that may be the faintest hint of happiness, embrace it.

So when others breach on areas that may overlap or hit you hard with issues surrounding your breakdown: answer graciously, and truthfully. Then move on.

7. Drown yourself in frozen yoghurt.

Recommended selection includes quarter large red tub of Original Tart flavour, quarter Death By Chocolate, and a variation of either Taro, Pomegranate and Strawberries. Load up on the oreo dust and kiwi fruit and finish off with a drizzle of muesli.
Tutti Frutti Frozen Yoghurt stores are available around the Klang Valley.

8. Pray.

That you’ll make it through this. And you will.

It was the December 08 issue, so they had this whole section of people who are – or, in this case 6 months later- shaping the world in their respective fields.

One of the articles was about a computer game designer who creates these simple but adorable 8-bit games that have a whole deep existential flair to them. His game, Passage, was said to be by tech-reviewers as proof that gaming is in itself a type of art comparable to music or literature.

According to the interview, he lives in a hut on a meadow with his family, keeps electricity to a minimum and does his coding in a super old-school dell laptop. Like, super cool, kan?

Intrigued, I checked out the game, read the reviews and had a few rounds.

So basically it’s just this rectangular box on your screen where you have to keep moving on to get to somewhere you don’t know any shit about. The far corners of both ends of the screen is blurry, and only gets clear as you walk onto them. Your character is a super pixelated blue-eyed brown haired character. It’s possible to move up and down, step on some chests to get more points, but basically moving itself gets the number tally on your upper right screen going on.

Thirty seconds in, you will meet a girl with green eyes, and just as pixellated as you are. Walk into her, and a big heart will form and the whole game will go on with her being beside you. Being with her means you can’t walk into certain passages where you could get more points from treasure chests.

As you play on three minutes into the game, you realize your pixel-hairline is receding, and before you realize anything, your wife’s hair is turning white. The environment in the screen turns from yellow to red to blue to purple. Your character starts to bend double.

And then your wife dies and in her place lies a tombstone. You could move around a bit, but you too, stop and have a tombstone in your place.

There are no monsters to kill, no quests to partake on, and nothing to kill you; except inevitable death.

In the three odd trials I had of the game, I tried marriage. I tried being single. Then some other strategy came to mind. Do any of you remember in one of the old Mario games, in the first 10 seconds of the game, if you don’t land or jump on the turtle-shell, then you won’t ever have the chance to go back and do it?

Well I tried that out. I avoided the girl, ran on in the game, collected about 300 points and jumped on every goddamn chest I could get my square little legs on. Then I ran back to the yellow environment to get to her. It worked.

We fell in love, though seconds later we grew old. Our hair turned white, we bent double, and she shortly died thereafter. My points were about 500+.

I was reading the reviews and there was this really sweet comment from some guy who said when his game-wife died he merely left his character beside the tombstone and died beside her. He played the game with his real-life wife nearby and couldn’t bear to think about leaving the tombstone.

So Passage tells us that it’s possible to go and run after ‘having it all’, to go back and fall in love. That it’s possible to get great points by chasing treasure chests alone, but that 4 minutes in, it just gets boring and pointless.

That at the end of our five minutes, we will all have to die.

That it actually feels better to die knowing you have loved and lost.

Than die alone with nothing but 700 points you will lose anyway.

And yeah, before you have to ask me about the cryptic past posts, and the new Facebook updates in between, I did meet someone with slit brown eyes. We jumped on treasure chests and hid behind library shelves. But our five minutes was up. And we let go.

Passage by Jason Rohrer is available here. His personal page can be found here.

This past month has seen an exodus of students who would lug big bottles of water and their thick, earth-shattering ring folders, making homes out of the otherwise empty carrels. You know it’s exam season when you have to comb through rows of seats to find none un-occupied nor used as a sleeping pod.

In the midst of my own last-minute revision (can there ever be such a thing as consistent revision in the classical system?), I find myself in moments of wanton distraction and thought. As beautiful as it may sound, being surrounded by shelves heavy with discourses on history, to the more often read pop-psychology, to literature and beyond, I can’t help but feel that there is something sterile and unromantic about Sunway’s library.

Is it the overhead fluorescent lighting? Perhaps its the pallid depressed looking inhabitants, blasting bad screamo music from supposedly cool emo headphones. Maybe it’s just that sometimes the library feels like a temporary hide-out for people wanting to get some a/c.

I sometimes wonder how it must be like for the librarians. Do they go to work everyday feeling like they’ve been given a purposeful existence? Do they feel like it is their task, their god-given duty to sow the seeds of intellect into the apathetic post-pubescent? Or do they just arrive at 8.00 a.m. like most of us, to start another 8 hours of card scanning and book arranging?

Philip Larkin wrote a bulk of his poetry while working as a librarian at Hull University, my sister’s alma mater. He’s probably the most oft-quoted British post-war poet (‘They fuck you up your mum and dad’, anyone?) who I’ve still not found an opportunity to slip into in any of my GP essays. There’s always this underlying tone of nostalgia and regret, of loss and premature wisdom about his stuff. The sad meaningless sex, the sad meaningful sex, and the constant struggle to search for that something deeper, the intimacy beyond the sex.

Sometimes I wonder if the quiet man behind the check out counter has some sort of Larkin-like life after he punches out at five. Does he take the free shuttle bus home to a small apartment filled with half-drunk coffee mugs, leaving brown stain rings on stacks of papers he’s been working on for months? Does he smoke away his nights, lounging around in a kain pelikat and a milo ais, as he nurses some Perec or Le Clezio?

How does it feel dedicating your life to such a sturdy unchanging place where its visitors are constantly changing and leaving? Do they resent our youth, our temporary existence in the air-conditioned cement and steel space? Do they too hope for a day when they would leave the carpet for better pavements elsewhere? Or do they, like Larkin, find the place a temporary residence to rest their everyday existence, as they nurture their other lives elsewhere?

Either way, while I see the same faces everyday, we never have spoken more than the usual card, grunt, thank you. They don’t care whether I’m borrowing something they know I won’t make head or tail of (Pure Mathematics, Longman Publishing, 1993), neither do they respond to my exuberance upon finding something long catalogued, unread, and hard to find (The Story of Penguin, Jeremy Lewis).

Not that I’m asking for everyday chance encounters with the 80s hairdo man where he would pontificate about Ayn Rand or something, but just that it seems to me everything in the library seems like a transaction.

The sterility of the place comes from how it is only used when it is needed, and never seen as anything else otherwise. A place for a nap, for those last minute homework completions, to facebook your status (is Bored and Tired and omggggg hungry la!), and of course, to study for the tedious exams that everyone’s lives seem to revolve around.

No conversation about some new piece of literature, no soul-searching, existential struggle. No poetry from no prose-filled mind.

Early this year, a friend of mine was having trouble locating the Economics section and was given a rather disgruntled answer when the object of her search was in fact a row behind her.

Dear reader, can you blame me for thinking what the answer would be if I chose to ask, “I am looking for the Critic for Pure Reason”, and being answered,

“We’ve been looking for that for a while, too”.

//

Holding hands beneath the table in the auditorium; as the lecturer at the podium tries her best to preach the values of tolerance and harmony, while not actually practicing it herself.
Knowing that we are the only example of this; as my fingers encircle your palm, as your thumb slides down around my wrist: as we make a step into the unknown. Knowing, we are the epitome of what this class stands for. A bond that neither of us ever thought we’d know.

//

The comfort of new strangers. Making space and making time to accommodate people unknown before.
Yong Tau Foo in the cafeteria before a rushed and soporific economics class. Slow walks to the cab stop to catch a ride to the mall, books : left behind. Heartfelt conversations about the new life that we share together, as we huddle in dirty cosy cafes. Finishing our iced teas before running back to campus in the rain.
Bonds made : new.

In the darkest moments of decrepitude or awe-filled moments of fleeting inspiration; I feel nothing but a resentment; a deep brooding envy for those who have in their feeble hands, a grasp of expressing their deepest most abstract emotions without having to explain themselves.

Be it their starkest, most undignified scrawl; intentional or unintentional strokes or lack thereof in their art-work; their unmistakenably self-assertive vantage point expressed in the most unique of angles in photographs; or the most awe-inspiring of all, the ability of some to completely mean what they say through music.

The gift of words however; as completely mind-shattering as they can be in the right hands of the most accurate of writers; comes with a guide. An explanation. A foreword, a footnote; a review of the piece in some sort of institution which prides itself over its literary obsession. While music reviews do exist in their millions; you never find Pitchfork having to explain a stroke of the violin as some sort of political manifesto, or the afro-bop a paeon to post-colonial society.

Various savants will of course write long treatises about Shostakovich’s involvement and subsequent rebellion against the Soviet Union, but never will they dissect the pause, the diction and the prose of music as they would to a Rushdie or Nabokov.

There are so many ways of expressing oneself; but only the usage of words could so effectively submit one into a category or an opinion.

Look here. My hands on yours could mean a million and one things that may or may not be a testament of how I would relate myself to you. A faint brush of your skin on mine could mean that far deep inside my writhing organs I desire you for every drop of worth you have. It could mean some sort of naive repressed limerence. Or it’s simply just a touch; a split second coincedence of movement and nothing more.

No sentence structure. No compound-noun subjunctive verb may may not be you I love desire forgive me fear dark deep shadow play of emotions.

With words, whatever I say or commit to paper with my pen is forever inked deep in the surface of how anything and everything will relate back to me.

With everything else, what you do – just is.

We no longer argue for separate territories on the sofa or give each other the evil eye, let alone feign ignorance of each other’s existence.

In fact, over these past few months our understanding of each other has grown ten-fold. We sometimes sit down next to each other and I find myself telling him about my problems, all of them; and sometimes I even bother sitting down on the kitchen floor to feed him. He would come and bite my arm as I lie around the house reading – more Murakami, naturally – and plop himself next to me; like an old friend.

In fact, I no longer feel threatened by my cat, and all past fantasies of stabbing him repeatedly with the kitchen knife – out of annoyance – have completely left me.

Murakami has probably done for the understanding of the feline race as much as what Simone de Beauvoir has done for feminism. While “The Second Sex” was a catalytic work of literature that inspired millions of women to take charge of their own sexuality; Haruki Murakami and his prolific of short-stories and novels have made millions of us literature reading humans realize that cats are not mere creatures who eat fish and sleep in our beds. Amongst other things, his books have made us aware that cats understand fields of meteorology that humans are unbeknownst to and that the feline form is able to comprehend much more about socioeconomics and politics than we are aware of.

Quite similar to how my ongoing delay in reading anything by Germaine Greer on the subject of feminism; I have yet to read Nastume Sōseki’s “I Am A Cat”, and of this I am quite ashamed.

Rest assured, all intention of obtaining a copy is still existent and going strong, as is all determination to further understand the intellectual sentiments of my cat.

Ask yourself a question my friends, are YOU suffering from a bad case of miscommunication between you and your cat? Do you silence your qualms and worries about each other by merely feeding your partner (read: cat) an extra portion of tuna rather than address the situation at hand?

Then read something, anything by Haruki Murakami; and save your relationship with your cat.

If you are wondering about what I’ve been doing for the past week, or if you were waiting for a disastrously hilarious and amusing post about all the interesting things I’ve come across this week, then you’d be quite disappointed to know that my week had consisted of two main activities.

Reading the weekend paper. And eating.

Well not really. I did go to the gym on tuesday, watch four dvds, go out with my sister’s boyfriend to buy him a laptop, go out for dim sum, walk around Soho, perform experimental cooking and experimental tempera paint making (it’s a long story), and erh, as I have a crappy hazy memory on holidays, nothing much.

Right at this moment, I am also watching Top Gear (yes, very much a Lad show) but I am also thinking about Simone de Beauvoir’s The Mandarins (very much a feminist that woman). I am thinking about a part in the story where Henri, a journalist who owns a newspaper called L’Espoir, and how he at first wants to keep a neutral front on the paper. Meaning how he didn’t want to have any political preference, which was quite the thing for papers at that time, (as much as it is a preference now) as the book is set in war-time Paris.

Now this came out of random really, as I was reading the papers and wondered why my siblings prefered The Times to The Guardian. I usually buy The Guardian, but it has come to my realisation that my family does buy more of The Times, when they can actually be arsed to buy the paper. I remember asking my brother about this a few weeks ago on which political front The Times represents, and he probably answered something that didn’t really etch into my memory, something something centre, (wouldn’t be different if he said front-back-left-right-centre).

Truth is, I can’t find it out myself, as I’m hardly overseas long enough to observe the paper and the local news here, and also because my father is against me wanting to get a subscription to the New Scientist, let alone The Sunday Times. And well anyway, back to the point, it made me realise the fact that when in most countries, even when there are no impending wars or big political ongoings, papers always take sides, may it be left, right, or neutral, subtly but still something there; yet the papers in Malaysia however, blatantly sound the same.

I remember the time when the whole Mahathir/Anwar case was going on and how The Sun (pre-it’s reincarnation into an advertisement infested circular) were anti-Mahathir and therefore did some things unsatisfactory to said politician. Most of the reporters in The Sun were then fired and well, it went completely down hill until it’s new revamp into the circular it is now. Its rise from its fall was admirable, but I can’t help but feel sorry for the insatisfactory being of a paper it is now, a polarised difference from the adamant, passionate free speech reporting it once had. So yeah, that’s meddling with politics for you.

I like the newspapers here, regardless of publisher. Though I must admit, maybe the Guardian’s new layout has made me more attracted to it, but unlike the notion my brother accuses me of; I’M NOT ATTRACTED TO THE SIZE. Having a tabloid size isn’t really a problem to me but the reporting. Though I must admit, The New Straits Times looks like a tabloid now, with it’s size, it’s new logo, AND it’s reporting. So maybe the layout does play a part on how you look at it. Hell yeah.

Another observation with the “DO-NOT-MESS-WITH-POLITICIANS” rule is one I was reading about these entrepeuners in Russia and how when they start to mess with Vladimir Putin they end up in jail or getting exiled. Which is funny. In a sad way.

Now, you may have realised that the title of my post wasn’t refering to stir fried newspapers and a russian politician all at one time as a dish, but more like a train of thought I have right now. The only missing part is the Fry, which is another thing on my mind right now, Stephen Fry. I was watching his movie Bright Young Things the other day and the thought that came to mind was “this movie is awesome.”. After watching the extra features: “this director is awesome”. Why this guy crossed my mind again is because I was just looking around Borders on Friday and I realised a row of books written by him.

I was tempted, believe me, but for that price I would rather buy something I wouldn’t get at home and a hardcover for the price difference. But I didn’t buy a book in the end. Because I bought a Jeff Noon book at Waterstone’s about half an hour before knowing we were going to Borders. But for one thing I know I can’t get that Jeff Noon book in Malaysia.

Then I went to Borders again on Saturday, as this time George wanted to get himself a book (he got Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World as recomended by yours truly), and we were passing by the Gabriel Marquez section which is beside Stephen Fry section and he noticed this book I didn’t really give much thought to until he pointed it out. Moab is My Washpot is the title. I read a bit of it, and it’s good. But it’s an autobiography and I wanted something more substantial. And light. I’m going home on Economy Class with only 20kgs.

So I got Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. And it’s a nice novel and all. But I am STILL tempted to get Moab is my Washpot. But I’m scared I’ll go over the 20kg limit.

Then I realised why his name is so familiar, as I remember watching him get an honorable degree from my brother’s alma matter when attending my brother’s graduation last July. And the fact that he has a show on tv called QI. And that he’s actually more influential around here than I thought.

The book? I’m tempted.