Mom is back at home, packing up stuff. All (or most) of the furniture is getting shipped to my bro's spiffy new place... yep, he's "inheriting" lots of stuff. Lucky fella ;)

Dad called me up.

"Do you want anything from the house? I gotta ask you because I have two children and I can't just let one of them take everything."

"I only want the two World Book dictionaries, Volume I & II."

"What about the encyclopaedias? We have two sets, World Book and Compton's."

"I like the World Book Encyclopaedia, but I don't have anywhere to put it!"

Later, talking to Mom:

"The dictionaries will help me in my linguistic studies, Mom."

"Don't you already have dictionaries?"

"Yeah, but these have way more entries! And notes on etymology!"

Some movie adaptations are so amazing, they make you want to read the book. Or at least, they make you curious about the book, which is close enough.

This afternoon I exited the cinema after seeing Stardust in 1Utama and made a beeline for MPH Bookstore. You see, I remembered Eyeris -- a huge Neil Gaiman fan -- saying that it wouldn't matter whether you were to read the book first or watch the movie first: he said the book wouldn't spoil the movie, neither would the movie spoil the book. I took that to mean that the book would only enhance the movie experience, and that since I liked the movie, I'd probably love the book.

Guess what? I scoured the Fantasy Section and couldn't find the book. In fact, the shelves seemed devoid of anything with Gaiman's name. The only thing I could find was an anthology he had co-edited with someone called Ed Kramer -- The Sandman: Book of Dreams. Way to go, MPH.

Which reminds me... when Lynnee and I went to see Hairspray at The Summit USJ, we were so awed by the music that we went looking for the soundtrack CD as soon as we got out of the cinema. Enquiring at MPH, we were told that not only did they not have it; the person who attended to us said the soundtrack wasn't out yet, but a few days later Lynnee found the CD at Tower Records.

Sounds like somebody in MPH is asleep on the job, if you ask me.

Talking about being asleep on the job... I couldn't believe my eyes when I spied CS Lewis's The Four Loves in the Fantasy Section. Okay, maybe his Space Trilogy is excusable, although it really belongs in the Science Fiction section, but The Four Loves?!? Hello? That's not even FICTION, for crying out loud!

I also found Georgette Heyer's Footsteps in the Dark, Penhallow and The Unfinished Clue shelved in the Romance Section. Yes, Heyer was well-known for her Regency period romances, but she was also well-known as an author of detective fiction. Somebody in MPH really is asleep on the job... do they not even know what kind of books they are purchasing?

Remember the book I wanted so much, way back in August? I saw it at Big Bookshop yesterday. Going for RM12.

I couldn't believe my eyes!

Of course I grabbed it. It was the last paperback left. The hard cover version was going for RM19.

And what, you might ask, was I doing in Big Bookshop? Err... ah... um...

I've been such a good girl; I even stayed away from the Payless Books warehouse sale last weekend (granted, I was having exams, but did you really think a puny thing like exams could possibly stop me from going to a book sale?!). Yet today I found myself walking into Big Bookshop's warehouse-like outlet in Atria Shopping Centre. Uh-oh.  *cue ominous music*

The good thing is, I only had RM50 in my wallet and was fully cognisant of my stomach's needs -- that is, I still had to buy dinner for myself. And I have been living a plastic-less life since 2003.  *chants: Say no to credit cards!*  So I knew I couldn't splurge, no matter how much I might long to do so. Nothing like economic realities to make a book lover toe the line.

Well, I grabbed Meg Rosoff's Just In Case, like I said earlier, and also picked up Martina Devlin's The Hollow Heart. The latter is a story of the author's experiences with IVF and her longing to conceive. I've always wanted to have children and took for granted the fact that I would eventually meet someone, get married, and have a family with him. At 29, I'm starting to accept the fact that I might never marry, which is okay... but the desire to have a child is something that's inborn, not manufactured, and I'm curious as to how Devlin dealt with it -- ultimately, not only were her attempts at IVF unsuccessful, her marriage also crumbled and fell apart under the strain. Talk about blow upon blow.

Of course, as my father said, "You don't need to have a husband in order to have children," but I can't see myself bringing up a child alone. For one thing, I'd have to be seriously financially secure in order to do so, otherwise I'd be spending all my time trying to provide for him (or her) and end up not having much time to spend with the little one. Parents in dual-income families are already facing the same dilemma; how much worse would it be if one were a single parent?

Anyway, to get back to the point, I walked out of Big Bookstore with those two books. Yes, just two! I'm so proud of myself!  *beams*

 
Oh yeah? Hmm. Then why was Jeff Ooi taken in for questioning by the CID in 2005 for a comment left on his blog, not even something he himself had written? And why, in July, did the police detain Nathaniel Tan for three days, and question Raja Petra Kamaruddin for eight hours, both supposedly also relating to comments left on their respective blogs? And then even haul in Raja Petra's wife for questioning too?

BULLSHIT.

Never before has there been so much talk about keeping bloggers in line. Our dearly beloved Information Minister Datuk Seri Zainuddin Maidin has been quoted as saying that political bloggers "blatantly abuse the freedom of the Internet". Energy, Water and Communications Deputy Minister Datuk Shaziman Abu Mansor has threatened to invoke the Sedition Act against bloggers publishing "negative viewpoints". 11 websites, including an undisclosed number of blogs, have been shut down by the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission this year for "contravening rules and regulations concerning the publication of information on the Internet".

As a former journalist who worked in the mainstream media, I know there is no such thing as true freedom of speech in this country. When all the major newspapers are directly or indirectly controlled by various parties in the ruling coalition, the news is inevitably going to be somewhat biased.

Maybe this has not bothered us so much in previous years... but as the abuses of power are getting more blatant, what I see among the educated urban professionals is a distinct lack of trust in the crap that is getting churned out in newsprint every day. They turn to blogs for the "alternative" picture -- what many see as a truer picture.

Our so-kind Information Minister is about to help them with this, since he has just announced that Radio Televisyen Malaysia (the National Broadcasting Department) will be publishing selected content from Opposition Leader Lim Kit Siang’s blog on their own website. “From today, you can expect to see whatever sensationalised, racist and chauvinistic comments in his blog because we will publish them on the RTM and our other agencies' websites,” he was reported as saying on Friday.

As some of my friends would say, this is called being unclear of the concept. But never mind, dear Datuk Seri, I'm sure Mr Lim Kit Siang will thank you for the extra publicity.

I take back what I said last year. I am Nanowrimo-ing. Good grief.

Starting 12 days late, still with no plot, no characters and no novel inside me dying to be written, but who cares? I'm going to be completely silly and not worry about anything having to make sense. I'm going to worry about the word count least of all (famous last words from a person who didn't think she was competitive until she started playing Scrabble on Facebook!).

Erna was, of course, the influencing factor. She kept tempting me with mentions of dancing chimpanzees and such; it sounded too fun to miss out on.

Besides, it's been ages since I've allowed myself to let go in my writing. One of my school-going cousins let me read an essay of hers the other day and I realised that ever since I entered law school all my writing has been serious and fact-based. Of course, it didn't help that I became a journalist after graduating. I think I might have forgotten how to give free rein to my imagination. I'm such a control freak sometimes.

So I'm going to allow myself to be silly and write nonsense. I hope it'll be funny nonsense, then it'll at least have some redeeming value, but if not, well... c'est la vie!

Five boxes of stuff arrived in my house from my hometown last week, and I finally got to unpacking them today. Great hilarity ensued as I unearthed baby photos, letters from pen-friends, poems I'd written...

I am fast coming to the conclusion that I wrote some very bad poetry in my teen years. But it's funny too -- odes to crushes, laments about exams, and paeans to friendship.

I especially like this one, written to a pen-pal of mine who was taking an inexcusably long time to reply my letters. It's very aptly titled 'Sarcasm To A Pen-Friend':

 
Sarcasm To A Pen-Friend

I hope your fingers will heal real fast
So you'll be able to write neat indeed
I hope you recover from your tests quick
So your brain can function at its normal speed
I hope you've rested well and long
To replenish your lost strength
I hope your memory starts to improve
So you'll remember me, at length.
I hope your self-imposed quarantine will soon end
So you can communicate once again
Above all, I hope what you have isn't catching
And it isn't causing you THAT much pain.

(click image for larger version)

 
Five boxes of stuff landed at my house, but the ONE THING I'd told my mom I wanted -- the dictionaries -- got packed and sent to my brother's house.

"But I told you I wanted them for my studies!"

"I didn't know you meant right now."

"Of course right now -- I'm studying now, aren't I?"

"Well, it's already done. I've sent them to your brother's house."

"Arrrrggggh!"

Funnily enough, it's been two years since I last wrote for a living, but I still call myself a writer.

Heck, I still think of myself as a writer.

And I'm seriously considering taking up writing again as a means of putting food on the table. Having tried other ways of making a living, I find that writing is the one thing I can do that seems least like hard work. Everything else takes a great deal of effort (which is not to say that I cannot do those other things, just that I find them HARDER to do!).

I've always subscribed to the Confucian saying that if you find a job you love, you'll never need to work a day in your life; so, well, maybe something to do with writing is the key. Although I don't love writing the way a friend of mine does:

Writing is so much more than putting your train of thought in words. When I write, I feel transported, a kid again, playing with my King Kong toy.

I never feel like that. For me, the lure is the desire to get my thoughts across to the reader, helping them to see what I see, making them understand what I think and how I feel about an issue. It's about presenting ideas clearly, producing what journalists call "clean copy" -- a piece that is tight, coherent, smooth-flowing, and comprehensive -- a piece requiring little or no editing. It's about telling a story so well that the reader gets caught up in the story and forgets that it is made up of words, because all he can see is the story.

When I manage to do that, I feel quietly satisfied, as if I've done what I was placed on earth to do. It's almost as if writing were my raison d'être.

"What? You're done? How can you be done? I haven't even covered the other side yet!" I exclaimed to Lynnee and Erna.

Yep, we were at the Penguin & Pearson warehouse sale yesterday, where I was systematically going down row upon row of books. So as not to miss anything, you know. What to do, I'm kiasu (afraid of losing out). Not to mention a bit OCD at times.

But the place was so hot and stuffy, and my feet were killing me -- I was wearing high-heels because I'd had a meeting in the office that morning -- so in the end I gave up and didn't canvass the entire left portion of the place at all.

Still, I ended up with far more books than I could afford to buy. "I'm only bringing RM100, so I can't spend too much," I'd laughingly told friends. Who knew that, even with that wide a margin, it would be so frustrating?

After much weeding out, I ended up with these:

• Saki because I've wanted a collection of his stories for ages;
• 1984 because it's one of those books I know I should read, but haven't, although of course I know the rough gist of the story;
• In Silence: Why We Pray because prayer is still very much a mystery to me -- our contemporary culture is more au fait with the "God, please bless me, help me to be successful and give us good weather for tomorrow's picnic" type of prayers;
• Poirot In The Orient because it was 3 stories for RM12 and Agatha Christie is a genius;
• So Many Books because it incorporated this quote from Socrates: "If books don't encourage us to live life to the fullest, they are dead";
• Call Me Elizabeth because it's a story of a mother who became an escort to put food on the table for her children; and
• The Gift of Stones, Fascination, Innocent Eréndira and Children Playing Before A Statue Of Hercules because they're short story collections, which are easier for light reading -- plus Gabriel García Márquez is a well-known literary name (more well-known to me than the other three, anyway).

 
The ones that got away:

• Eyeris and Suanie both mentioned seeing Stardust but I couldn't find it, much to my disappointment;
• Erna bought a collection of John Donne's poetry but there was only one copy left  *sobs*;
• Left behind the two Bridget Jones' Diary books because I was over quota, and though they're entertaining it won't kill me not to have them, even if I did kinda identify with Bridget;
• Was contemplating collecting Ian Fleming's works but decided that can wait (what I really want are books by Leslie Charteris, creator of The Saint. Anybody???);
• Gave up Poems & Readings For Funerals because, well, in the balance, I'd rather buy something that makes me happy;
• Discarded Miguel Street by VS Naipaul on Erna's recommendation: "Naipul no need lah. Very hard to read." I thought the premise of the book was fascinating though;
• Placed Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass back on the pile... I do like his poetry, but figured I'd give priority to prose instead.

 
Now to read them all! I haven't even read those I got from the last book sale...

 
LOLcats are starting to affect my grammar. Badly. OH NOES! I IZ SPEAK TEH LOLCAT!

If you don't know what a LOLcat is, allow me to acquaint you with them: pictures of cats, overlaid with pithy captions written in what one writer has called "kitty pidgin".

There's something very contagious about this kitty pidgin. Its tentacles have reached deep into my brain, and now I want to speak it. Deliberately flout all the rules of grammar. Not care whether my subjects and verbs are in agreement. Wilfully litter pages with misspelt words. Fly in the face of my normally perfectionist self.

 
Upon closer inspection, I think kitty pidgin might be fairly close to our Malaysian slang, which might explain why I so easily slip into it when I'm talking. Then again, it's not hard to conjugate wrong once you know how to conjugate right. It has been said that it is possible to get cat-speak wrong, which means you must actually know how to alter the words and where to omit others.

Apart from the fact that the cats are normally cute (and I'm not even a cat person!), the captions can be unbelievably apt. Not to mention clever. That's enough to keep me visiting icanhascheezburger.com daily to see what's new in LOLcat World. Even if mah English it iz corrupted!

 
At first I was insulted. Are you trying to say my blog is unintellectual? And not to be taken seriously?!?

On second thought, I decided to take it as a compliment. Writers are supposed to write clearly and simply, and my blog is so well-written that it appeals even to elementary schoolchildren! (See, everything depends on the spin. The spin is king. Long live the spin!)

Did you know that Louisa May Alcott did not like Huckleberry Finn? In fact, she disliked it so much that she reportedly was instrumental in getting the committee of the Concord Public Library (in the state of Massachusetts) to ban the book from their library.

Basis for the ban? The book's "tawdry subject matter" -- after all, it was a story about a black slave and the son of an alcoholic -- and "the coarse, ignorant language in which it was narrated" -- because it was written in the vernacular, the sort of dialect a young, uneducated boy would use. [source]

The story goes that Twain, upon learning of this ban, proceeded to take out advertisements in newspapers across the country, saying, "My latest book, Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain, has been banned in the state of Massachusetts FOR ALL OF ITS DIRTY INCIDENTS." Sales of the book, which had been slow, picked up overnight.

I'm rather sceptical about this advertisement business, though, because I've only been able to find one reference to it, from Elliot Engel in A Dab Of Dickens & A Touch Of Twain. Makes for a good story, but needs more verification.

Nevertheless, I found this little tidbit interesting. Perhaps because it makes Alcott less of a one-dimensional name printed of the cover of a book and brings out her human-ness. But also because I wouldn't have expected her to dislike or criticise the work of another well-loved author. I mean, you'd think she'd recognise good writing when she saw it, considering the fact that she herself wrote so well. But nooooo--!

Moreover, it's astonishing (to me, at least) that she felt so strongly about the book that she even approached the board of the public library to get it banned. Obviously, the book aroused some fierce emotions in her, so fierce that she wasn't content simply to criticise it or write angry letters to the author. She had to Do Something.

Come to think of it, I didn't even know that Alcott and Twain were from the same time period, let alone that they knew of each other. I always somehow think of authors as autonomous entities who churn out books... not as real people who might interact with one another! Especially when their books are as unrelated as Little Women and Huckleberry Finn!

 
If my dad were here, he might have placed that ad in front of me and said, "Hey, Miss Journalist! Tell me what is wrong with this ad!"

He used to do that all the time with random sentences in newspaper articles. He's sharp, is my dad. Can't pull the wool over his eyes, no sirree.

Do you see what I see? If I were to be kind, I'd say this company is trying to hedge its bets and cast its net as widely as possible to catch all possible candidates. However, if I were to be unkind, I'd say this company has no idea what it wants.

Is it looking for experienced people, or is it looking for fresh graduates? Your guess is as good as mine. I suppose this proves that they truly do need an editor, not least because "editing skill" should be in the plural!

There's something about reading a written work aloud that strips it of all pretense and lays it bare. I remember my mom wresting a romance novel from my hands when I was 15. She declaimed it as "trash" and, flipping through its pages, proceeded to read certain passages aloud to me in a most disparaging voice.

Somehow, words that had danced and sung on the page seemed tawdry and clumsy when read out loud. For that reason, I've never tried to read a romance novel out loud. Ever. They've never been about good writing anyway, only fairy-tale worlds. Why tarnish the illusion?

Other works can't get away with the same excuse, however. The best pieces ought to be able to weave a spell and still be well-written. And good writing is good writing, no matter what the medium -- print or audio.

Having attended the 'Readings' at Seksan's on Saturday (an event where writers -- both published and unpublished -- read their works to an audience), I think I finally understand why all the writing advice I've heard keeps telling me to use adjectives sparingly. Too many adjectives clutter the piece and lose me when I'm listening. They're okay on the page, because then the reader has the chance to read at his own pace, absorb the image that is being painted, go back and re-read the description to let it sink in. But when something is being read aloud, at some point a bunch of adjectives get to be too much information.

I remarked to Erna that pieces with action or dialogue are probably more suitable for reading aloud to an audience, but she disagreed with me. Maybe it's just the person I am -- I don't have a high attention span when listening to somebody read or lecture, but I'm always captured by flashes of insight, emotion, humour, whimsy, movement, rhythm and rhyme.

I grew up reading Reader's Digest. When I got my hands on the latest issue, I'd always flip to the funnies first -- Laughter, the Best Medicine, Life's Like That, All in a Day's Work, and Humor in Uniform. Much like how, when presented with a newspaper, I always flip to the comics first. I just like things that make me laugh, y'know?

The cool thing about the Reader's Digest was -- and still is -- all the little anecdotes scattered through it. After reading the funnies, I'd flip through page by page, looking for the other funnies. Then I'd read Quotable Quotes and Points to Ponder. After that I'd go through the articles, winding things up with Drama in Real Life just before finishing with the longest one, the Book Section.

I normally do have a system, even if I look like I don't!

Today's Reader's Digest somehow just isn't the same. It's not as funny or as heartwarming and insightful as before; it's also thinner, and seems to have less content. When I was in my mid-teens, my parents stopped subscribing to it for that very reason, and Dad began subscribing to National Geographic instead. I didn't always read the National Geographic articles, but I was fascinated by their gorgeous pictures.

There are very few things from your childhood that you can go back to and find still as captivating as before, but the Reader's Digest seems to be one of them. I'm re-reading some of the old issues and laughing just as much at the jokes as I used to. Luckily I don't have a very good memory, so I don't have that "I think I've heard that joke before" feeling to spoil my fun!

      Two children were bragging about their intelligence. "When I was eight months old, I could walk," said one. 
      "You call that intelligent?" responded the second child. "When I was that old, I let them carry me."
--Laughter, the Best Medicine, Reader's Digest (September 1994)

"That time of the semester" doesn't have quite the same ring as "that time of the year" or "that time of the month". But it is that time of the semester... when provisional results are released.

My classmate kindly asked for my student number and offered to help me keep a lookout, but when she told me what I'd scored, I decided I had to see for myself. Just like how, in my undergraduate days, I called my college THREE TIMES to verify my final year results. In case, y'know, the person reading the results to me over the phone had accidentally read those of the candidate listed above or below me. It isn't wildly beyond the realm of possibility, after all!

So I traipsed over to the university today during my lunch break. Lo and behold, my classmate's eyes had not deceived her!

Research Methodology: A-
Critical Discourse Analysis: A

*blinks*  I distinctly remember walking out of the exam hall after the Research Methodology paper and telling friends, "I'll probably pass, but most likely won't score."

So much for predictions! *super silly grin*