Of My Moleskine Notebook

The lower-ground floor of the library, for the most part of my being here, is usually half empty. All areas between and behind shelves would be completely devoid of any human life, leaving the lone librarian with the 80’s hairdo, ponderously pushing his trolley of unread political science books no one actually reads.

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”.

You can’t really compare the experience of being a piece in between thousands of bodies, stuck together by sweat, grime and a shared passion in one cause. Hanging on to your dear life with your arms around the people who you grew up knowing better than yourself. The bond only created by the profusion of DNA, live rock music, and experience. The bonds of old: renewed.

//

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.

Here’s a cheer for some existentialism thought-
as I cross my legs
being somewhat sandwiched
between Science Fiction
and art critique;
between the Beckett
and Translated Poems from the Sanskrit.

His skin like
translucent Chinese Moon
eyes all beady and austere-
those hands:
large, warm and damp.

Possibly- (or so they say in GP)
the best things to hold
at 17 and purified-
virginal and terrified;
when all belief and thought
cease to be held on to.

In carrels like pews for prayer
I bent my knees and hoped
that reason would come;
come barreling through
this exasperating furrow of silence-
all rage, all worry-
writhing in my insides.

I spent the first week of college contemplating my subject list. All sorts of questions ran into my mind, “Will the universities I want to go to accept my subject combination?”, “Am I missing out by not taking this subject?”, “Am I capable of taking this subject?”, “What the hell do I really want?”. And so on and so forth.

Tomorrow I will be going to college for the second week; and it feels like I’ve been enrolled there for quite a while. Everytime somebody calls me up or messages me on Facebook asking me “How is college OMG?!”, I just tell them what I honestly think every morning as I sit on the toilet : it scares me everyday.

I spent four days contemplating the books in my bedroom and what is it that I actually want and what I can actually do. This is going to sound super lame, but the hardest part I suppose was letting go of science subjects. I am definitely set on taking Economics and Maths as two A Level subjects, but the third subject combination took me a lot of thought and time. The choice was psychology or physics.

Honestly, if you know me well enough, you would know that I really like physics. I like all the calculations and the logic; I like using words like vectors and motion, optics and matter; electrons and the whole shebang. But if you know me well enough to know my academic results for the past two years; I’m not too good at the subject. And that’s putting it lightly.

It would’ve been a no-brainer then to go on to take psychology without question. Though me being over-exuberant and naive and so childishly stupid as you can imagine, when met with my psychology lecturer for the first time during the subject briefing, asked her far too many questions about the subject and whether it would be “coherent” if I wanted to go on to study economics, and if good universities will look at it as worthy.

Honestly, I am going to constantly remind myself to not step on the toes of academicians. I think my questions (which were spun out of good intentions and anxiety) must’ve offended her to think that I was going to psychology as a last resort and not as a choice.

Honestly, I don’t know what I want.

Staring at the bookshelf in my room, I can trace back my long list of passionate subjects past, and even the point in time that I went through the phases I went through. There is of course the years of ardent passion about architecture, evident in my sketchbooks and books about buildings. The letter I wrote six years ago to an aging architect in Connecticut; safely lodged between the pages of his book.

There were the years that I engulfed myself in natural history. The years that I swore to myself that only a career in science would do, the years that I bought myself a 12-inch skeleton and a hardcover of Charles Darwin’s Theory of Natural Selection. The years that I bought the New Scientist every other week. I still have those magazines.

I have to say I also flirted with mathematics and physics. There is a soviet-union math olympiad book which I wrapped but never really attempted to finish; various introductory books to quantum physics, a book on the origins of geometry…

So that is why after going to see the student counsellor, another lady for an aptitude test, various seniors; and long discussions with my parents: I sat down at the sofa and cried.

I guess this is what my economics lecturer would call “opportunity costs”. It’s when you have to give up something, because you’ve made a decision for something else. All the other alternatives have to be sacrificed because you made that one big call to choose something else.

I hate hindsight. I hate it when people look back and say where they went wrong in life, and they continue to harp and feel completely despondent when they think about how things would’ve turned out if they did something else.

I hate the fact that I’m a victim of hindsight. That short bursts of regret would pepper my thoughts, and the ever present human err to ask “what if?” happen to be a challenge that I have woken up to for a good part of my life.

The counsellor gave me a good piece of advice:  whatever you choose, you stick with it, and don’t look back.

Jangan pandang belakang.

Everyone is talking about what a year it has been to them. They write long detailed posts in accepting and un-judgemental prose; an air of wisdom through experience tousled around their images of memorable activity during the year. They write about the events that have defined them, and the people they have loved and lost; the music they had made love to or cried over, and for those whose purpose is to write about issues : The Financial Crisis and The US Elections.

To be very terse; I find all these articles and posts annoying. This is simply due to because – unlike most of the general human population – I have not thought of the year in retrospect, and am completely too chicken to even start.

There is just far too much to rant/blabber/cry about this year and the fact that my life and the lives of people around me are going to change in the New Year, is just too overwhelming to try to capture on paper without sounding contrived.

Then there’s that whole “oh this time last year I was..” going on in my head. It’s really, to be honest, a bitch.

This time last year I had a crazy sleepover with two of my closest friends. My parents were away and had given me complete dominance of the house for the night they were away. So the girls and I cooked steak and pasta, ate vanilla ice-cream while watching The Notebook; and fell asleep on the floor under the make-shift tent we made in my room.

The room was a patchwork of tablecloth and bedsheets tied and hung through the window and bed; and as we stared at the ceiling listening to Kevin Drew with lazy japanese origami lanterns hanging overhead; our bodies made shadows through the fabric; illuminated by the warm glow of a lantern.

This year my parents are going away again, but all my friends are off gallivanting abroad or are already busy treading the paths set up for their new lives. When they come back in the New Year, I would then have already started my trek in a new land; whether I end up at boarding school or not.

It’s really discomforting this situation I am in at the moment. I have yet to receive a reply to whether or not I will be accepted into that boarding school, and in the midst of that anticipation; I have far too much time in my hands and so start thinking about the what-ifs to if I stayed on here and attend a college in Subang instead.

Then there’s that whole TOP 10 CDs of 2008! Or my Top Ten Movies, Books, Songs, Bands.. and so on and so forth. To some people it may not make any sense to why it might matter. In my opinion however, pop culture chronicles our lives as a time line lying in the background. While we all have our own lives completely independent to any influence of the overplayed 1# hit on the radio, our daily existence at that moment in time can always be put into context by remembering generally where we were, what we were doing when everyone was singing Katy Perry’s I Kissed A Girl. Give me a few more days, maybe then I can write this post.

The thing about doing all these flashbacks, retrospectives and looong ardurous essays on existence in mid December is that it is a necessary catharsis, a way of letting go before moving on to the new year. It’s as if we just need to compile a short recap on our growth as individuals before we seal the book of memories shut; before stuffing it at the back of the bookshelf.

Some would call it a Briefing on The Economy, A Retrospective of Cultural Events 2008, The Academic Calendar, Highlights, or What I Did This Year OMG!. But be it a long article in the FT, or an unreadable post (perhaps like this one) on a blog; it’s in essence the same thing.

We all need to lick our wounds before we head on to the next fight. In the new year.

I started this evening with a sick feeling in my stomach. A kind of a toss between having a disagreeable gastrointestinal condition and the influx of pensive thought which would never fail to torment me this time of the year. Mind you, I have been sitting in front of this damned LCD screen for about 5 hours or so, making feeble attempts at writing a colossal piece of cathartic prose or some over-romanticised shit like that.

Instead I went through my old blog posts. Then my old writing. Then Facebook. Then whatever sane musing I convinced myself I should articulate some way or another went totally OUT of the window because everyone on MSN decided to message me at the same time.

One person in particular is my dearest friend Elaine.

Over the course of the past few weeks, Elaine has been writing countless of university application essays which would help secure her a place in a liberal arts education in an Ivy League. Most of these character limited, earth-shattering personal responses would find their way into my gmail inbox; and roughly about 11 a.m. every morning, as I wipe from the sleep from my eyes and read through Draft No. 22 in my smelly pyjamas; I am further convinced that Elaine Leong Li Jing deserves a place in Brown/Princeton/Swarthmore (it depends on the day of the week) because she : has had a definitive experience/is going to save the world/would challenge the foundations of cognition and philosophy/has the wisdom of an old Confucian sage.

Well, okay; her essays aren’t anywhere as pretentious; but really the prompts are quite superfluous. I really wonder how amazing do you have to be to catch the admissions officer’s eye. I am rather sure a big percentage of these essays would cover an experience which had stemmed from a co-curricular charitable activity, a few percent or so on death/illness/near-death experience, and I do not doubt the thousands of essays about some grandiose super heroic act of kindness or another.

The thing is, it’s not just that you have to seem completely compelling in general, you have to seem even more compelling than the other 20 odd thousand or so applying for 1000 seats. It reminded me of Erwin, the young substitute teacher from The History Boys and his take on how to answer entrance exams. He trained the boys to write essays that would seem memorable and unique. So parallels between Stalin and Thatcher were compared. Carry On films could be referenced to when talking about World War 2; and the foreskins of Christ “added garnish” to essays on the Church.

So, this morning I wasn’t that shocked to receive a short personal response by Elaine that compared Obama’s marketing campaign to Mussolini; or that one of the reasons she wanted to go to Providence was because she wanted to check out whether the university was really that filled with hippies.

Maybe it’s just me, but I would offer her a place based on early decision straight away.

Then theres this tedious question : How did you become interested in Brown?

This question I think is a bit of a wild card. You can’t answer college counselor, you can’t say website or advertisement or 20 second spot on prime time TV. You can’t exactly tell an Ivy League that you found out about them at the back of cereal boxes. This is not a survey. It’s your application form that’s going to be torn apart, analysed and tallied up with the other 20k entires.

Honestly, I think most Malaysians know about Brown and Yale due to Gossip Girl and The OC.

Though come to think of it, that could be a pretty eye-catching personal response:

My discovery of Brown and its status of a top liberal arts university is completely due to an intellectually stimulating television show called Gossip Girl. This exceptionally well written documentary about life in the upper-class strata of “Manhattan’s elite”  featured a case study in which two adolescent hormonal girls were vying for a top notch education while at the same time competing for legitimacy as Top Teenage Bimbo. The very pretty blonde, whose plaid mini-skirts I greatly adore, had put Brown as her first choice! After finishing a ravishing episode of the series, I then went onto my pink Hello Kitty laptop and googled this “Brown” she had mentioned in between getting laid, getting in a bitch fight, and getting laid again! This is how I had gotten interested in a top liberal arts education at Brown!

If you made it this far and have started to wonder about the purpose of this entry, I would just like to say that I don’t know, myself. I think somewhere in between I wanted to touch on the what was the likelihood for teenagers at the ripe old age of 17 to actually know what they want, or what they think they want..

Or was it I wanted to muse about what possibly could be so definitive in one’s life when one only went through puberty a few years before. Of course, this is not counting the few who actually have had life-changing experiences, tribulations, Homeless to Harvard-esque courage and brilliance…

In a year or two, if all goes well; I too might be squeezing the juice out of my grey matter trying to write my common application essay about some definitive moment in my life. And I just realized that unless something huge-ass hits me in the face in this short period of time; I really cannot pontificate much.

Just that keep that thought.

Well anyway, I think I would need to retire to bed now; as in less than 9 hours or so, I would have my own little admissions affair to deal with. My father has taken the liberty to take the day off tomorrow to take me to submit my application form to KYUEM as well as visit the school. I am approaching this with excitement and underlying anxiety; because my parents have talked about sending me there since the place was called KMYS, because I really am not sure if they would let me in due to the fact that my trial results were really : Shit, and because if they accept me with open arms then that would mean I would have to cancel an interview I have scheduled the next day with a magazine about an internship.

Reading that last paragraph, I think if I keep up with this anxiety and producing these fragmented long sentences with no sight of an end in the form of full stops; I could perhaps pull off a pseudo-Salman Rushdie prose-style.

If there’s one thing Salman Rushdie is good at doing, it’s not obeying the sanctity of the full stop.

(Actually, my French teacher Bruno used to tell me that in class. Ainaa, respectez la sanctité de la ponctuation, s’il vous plaît. )

Watch out everyone. Five years of pent-up shit coming through your way.

ON WRITING

I am afraid to write.

It’s taken me a long time to actually say this out. But I am inexplicably hesitant in writing a post on my blog, or my own journal; a speech; and I even leave my english literature essays done at the very last minute.

I don’t exactly know when this annoying fear took hold of me. I keep telling myself; there is no point whatsoever in waiting another ten minutes to put down a sentence; or even a point in rewriting the last one five times.

I won’t actually call it being a perfectionist. But I don’t think it’s pure lazyness either. It’s just fear. Fear of seeming maladroit, or not hitting the spot. Fear of inferiority on paper.

I look at the other students in my english literature class and I feel nothing but a weird sort of lame envy and wonder. They just write. Raging through grammatical errors or simple blase answers; they just write and they don’t fear.

Same with certain blogs I’ve come across of peers my age. They write about the most banal of things, take pictures of things that are of no big a deal; but the fact that they do it : It Actually Works.

The only reason that I can get halfway through this post without deleting it first because I’ve made myself promise to write it without having to care about how the language sounds, or trying to be PC about it. I’m just telling myself : write and move on. Because if I don’t I’ll keep deleting things and let my blog end up the way it had been for the past.. Three years?

Thing is, what am I supposed to write about? My political views? My musings on jasmine tea? (I think that is one phase I have gone through and bored absolutely everyone dear enough to be obligated to read this blog) Should I share my holidays and pictures and experiences? What? What I’m reading or listening to? Which I find useless because you all probably don’t care what I’m into, and most probably have heard of St.Vincent or Air or Bloc Party or whatever band it is I’ve blogged about before, and seen it around anyway.

Thing is, I AM VERY AFRAID OF SEEMING PRETENTIOUS.

Should I write about jet-setting musings on european airports? Just because I can? And even if I do will the lone reader to my blog find it pretentious? Or bragging-like?

Should I talk about fashion and style and how much fun it is going to an Asprey sale? Or should that be attention-seeking?

Should I talk about me me me me and my life? After all it is my blog and you guys are all my friends (and one lone uncle, Hello Pak Long!); but isn’t that… somewhat..self-centered?

Looking at other people’s blogs.. I envy your confidence in knowing what to disseminate. A friend posted up a picture of all gadgets she had acquired over the year, another friend goes on about what she likes and doesn’t like. Lynn can come on her blog and just spew out imaginative screenplays of her deflowering Tom Sturridge (or something like it) without a sweat. KinkyBlueFairy doesn’t have much to say, except that she just parties a lot. And gets paid for it.

Hell. I don’t know!

ON IMAGE

The same thing goes with attitude and self-projection. I remember when I was in Form 1 or 2, and I had a bunch of seniors who were not actually that good looking, had pretty normal lives, and your everyday basic taste in music. Their myspace page however could have implied that they shat roses and lived next door to Liam Gallagher.

One kid for example didn’t talk to you if you were not “cool enough” in his opinion, loooooved Oasis to death, wore normal clothes from Topshop or whatever, couldn’t hold a guitar yet pranced around like he was The Shit. Clothes were worn like they were from some rack by Hedi Slimane, swagger could have suggested he was in a band; and for some reason attracted every other tom dick and harry on myspace to go nuts.

Thing is, it was intimidating and made you feel inferior; eventhough you had a stack of NME mags beside your toilet back home and actually already went through the whole Oasis thing when your siblings were teens : Ten Years ago.

What that kid had was an inert sense of how to package himself to the world. He didn’t have the goods, but he had the branding. His only talent turned out not to be the ability to hold a tune or model a style; but a deep understanding of walking the walk. This self-affirming confidence is the only thing you need to make it far online.

I won’t point fingers but look at those “celebrity bloggers” or whatever people call them in our country. They write about things you and I already know and had owned/experienced/eaten at/done before; they take pictures that are sometimes blur/without composition/useless as hell- in a completely simple syntax; and devil may care state of mind. If they persist with it long enough, join a blog directory such as Petaling Street or Rice Blogs; are a bit hot or have a bit of a sense of humour; the next thing you know they’re endorsing some brand and have their own guest spot on KLUE. Hell; they could even win the MP seat in your area.

Thing is what sets these people apart from you and I is not the fact that they’re richer, more cultured, or smarter, or any better looking. The people on the list to my right are comprised of many intellectual afficianados of literature, film or folk music. Some like fashion, some like politics, some are incredibly jet set; but I can assure you they’re so much into and in touch with things than that Kid and KinkyBlue fairy and Kennysia all combined. What differentiates them writing about getting paid to attend a Guinness Party in London with all expenses free, and you writing about your short soujourn in Mayfair, is that they don’t ask themselves “So What?”. Their deep sense of self-affirmation makes them just blast their whole life online; not worrying about the possibility of seeming “pretentious”.

Same with the kid above. Because he acted like he was : The Shit; he subliminally convinced everyone else he was really. The Shit.

So it goes with Facebook and Myspace. What books do you like? Well a lot. Music? Hell, tonnes. Activities? Where do I start? I have friends who write in original accounts of their top 5; or a random collection of things they can think of at the top of their head. I also have friends who have Interests that would demand that you scroll down 2/3 of the page so you can read about how much they adoooore how easy it is to get daddy to buy them a new charm from Tiffany’s. Then of course, there’s that Limewire-fiend who thinks she’s La Shitte because she decided to list out a list of ALL the slightly obscure bands inside her iTunes; convinced that she ABSOLUTELY ADOOOOORES all of them. Eventhough she’s only ever heard one song.

Long story short; the matured, self-preserved and uncondescending who are afraid of seeming pretentious and a waste of space online do a web-blunder. If you want to be seen or heard, you gotta blast every bit of yourself out.

It’s image branding. What you disseminate is what people look at you as. This world is too fast and too shallow to want to get to know you for your “ideas”. They don’t want to learn about how nice of a person you are, or loyalty or intelligence or whatever self quality by getting to know you.

They look at the package. And if it gives them a good enough account; then you’re worth knowing.

If I were a sociologist; I’d call this the Cory Kennedy effect.

Darling, today you don’t need to be a frequent flyer, designer clothes, a trade, a talent or even contacts. Go online and market yourself well enough; and all those things above will come running after you.

Phew. Needed to get that out.

Time; it seems these past few days; has been running through really fast. Hell, time these past few months have been running by really fast.

These past two weeks had been, at least for me and Farhanis; non-stop late nights filled with editorial board work, accompanied by tutorials and the necessary preparations before we leave school. All this spent with nothing but a deep pang of ingrown guilt : “Why are you not studying yet? Why are you NOT bothered?”

Ngeh.

It’s really… Something.

Filling up your Sijil Berhenti Sekolah, getting your testimonials and sub-standard forecast results for an exam you’ve been dreading since January. Last year. Knowing well enough that you’re not ready.

Not ready for the exams. Not ready for what comes after you’ve finished those exams.

Then comes the whole act of preparing our class’ senior pages. Arranging in pixel-format the faces you’ve greeted every morning with dried saliva at the side of your mouth; people of whom you’ve seen red-eyed and half-dead after double chemistry; people whose space you’ve shared for atleast the past two years.

Smiling to myself about comfortable we’ve all grown with each other. And looking through the pictures since form four; how much we’ve all grown up. All around each other.

I can’t believe I’m saying this. But I think I’m going to miss USJ 4.

I can’t believe I’m going to leave school.

Oh. My. God.

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.

A few months ago, a dear friend of mine Elaine decided to help out a friend of hers set up a home stay program in a nice village called Natai, just outside Kota Kinabalu.

She had visited Sabah as a college student, and the short few weeks she had in the village had left a lasting impression on her. Her stay however was not without its mishaps; the accommodation she had paid for months in advance was a complete rip off, and she would have been totally clueless and lost if it wasn’t for her villager friend. Now the friend is setting up a properly planned homestay with Elaine’s help.

I assure you it is virtually impossible to speak to Elaine without her enthusing about the untouched nature and her frustration at the sheer ineptitude of the locals making the most of their land. There is just so much potential in the area, but the villagers (out of lack of exposure or education) just don’t seem to bother trying to make an income for themselves from bringing people to share their piece of untouched nature. As a result, there is a lack of competition and regulation of tourism in these areas just outside the main tourist attractions in Kota Kinabalu, and those who do open up hostels or homestays there often provide a rough deal for a premium price. Putting both the disgruntled traveler, and hopeful village economy at loss.

To curb this monstrosity, Elaine and her friend decided to set up an affordable and comfortable option for travelers who are looking for something off the beaten track. A traditional wooden Sabahan house, fitted with modern amenities; had been converted into a sort of bed & breakfast approach; but instead of offering just a room and a meal, the keeper provides three main meals a day and serves as a guide for the attractions around.

The website is linked here and I hope you’d all check it out and bookmark it for future reference. Please tell all your friends who are planning to go for a holiday East, those who want to experience something completely unique and still incredibly untouched; and for the lazier of you, just check out the pictures here and prepare to be spellbound.

I might be going after SPM or so; if I can get the approval of the ‘rents, but in the mean time I’ll be hawking this homestay to anyone who I think would be interested