Life's Remains....

Today (26 October) is my eldest daughter's birthday. 16 years old..... the most confusing age. I'm talking about me as a parent. After work today, I exited the NKVE at Subang Jaya to go to my favourite haunt, Subang Parade. I kind of like it there since it's not too crowded like Sunway Pyramid, and there's MPH and Rock Corner, my two favourite stores and there McD and Pizza Hut and Nando's and Secret Recipe and Sushi King and even KFC. Anyway, I thought of getting my daughter a soft fuzzy toy, but Nur is really known for the soft fuzzy type. Besides, we already have two big teddy bears and one turtle soft toy which are pretty much abandoned. She like those Jonas Brothers.... not all of them, just one of them, t he cute one... I don't know, it's Nick or Joe or Jacob or Jeremiah or something. So I thought maybe just get her a CD. The poster at the entrance of the CD shop looks new... but when I asked the shop assistant, she said the album was at least half a y...

Reds 20 Year Wait Ends!! I am sleepy... I got up at 3 am this morning to watch Liverpool vs Lyon, knowing very well that my favorite English Premier Club can easily lose. This is a tough season for Liverpool FC. Already we've lost 4 in 9 games. Last season, Liverpool only lost twice, but drawn 11 games, and ended up 2nd to Manchester United. This Sunday, at 9:30 pm Malaysian time, I will be glued to the TV to watch Liverpool take on the league leaders Manchester United. My son, who is not a football fan, asked why I keep supporting Liverpool and keep getting frustrated. Support other teams, my son recommended. Maybe he's right.....Arsenal is not faring too badly, and I am an admirer of Arsene Wenger. Last season, when Liverpool were going through their slump (as every team in the league will experience at various stages of the Premier League season), drawing games they should've won comfortably, I actually, supported Man U for a while, because I (as I told my Man U suppo...

Today, I went to the market, by myself.... alone... without my dear wife. As she is incapacitated, and the food supplies were running low, it was up to me to ensure the survival of our family. I've done it before, I think, a long time ago, just after the birth of my youngest child, while my wife was in confinement... but, that was almost 10 years ago. 07:30 hours, after the debriefing by my wife, equipped with a list of things to buy, I embarked on a journey of uncertainty..... I was unsure what ikan senangin (threadfins) looks like. The night before, I googled an image of the fish, tried to commit the picture to memory. 07:48 hours. Arrived at destination. As usual there wasn't an empty parking space in sight around the Subang Jaya SS15 wet market. I stopped the car and wait for somebody to vacate a space. There were a few, but they were on the other side of the road and were quickly filled by others who were also lying in wait. 08:02 hours. went once around the block and...

While waiting for my wife, as she was undergoing surgery, I regretted that I didn't bring to the hostpital the book I was reading, "Life of Pi" by Yan Martel. I had not finished reading it, in fact, I abandoned it for a while, because I can't stand the graphic descriptions of how (driven my hunger) Piscine Molitor Patel killed turtles and birds. Bookless, I found myself walking to the mamak restaurant across the street from the hospital, with the intention of buying a pack of cigarettes. I approched the cashier counter, looking past the cashier, and scanned the showcase of a variety of (supposedly) repulsive pictures of various cancer ridden anatomy. I've always preferred the gangrened foot (and by consensus the least repulsive of all the pictures) but whatever the picture, they are easier to ignore than the nagging yen for nicotine. Then, as I was just about to reach for my wallet in my back pocket, it occurred to me, that, at that particular moment, I did not re...

It's 9:39 pm as per my bedroom wall clock. In approximately, 2 hours and 20 minutes I will have lived on this earth for exactly 45 years. And today, strangely, I have been receiving more birthday wishes than I can ever remember. The first to wish is my wife of course, although, her actual words we.... 45 today huh? Perangai tak berubah... Then, my phone started to tinkle, and the wishes started to pour in.... ok, I got 5 text messages. One was from Maxis, the telephone company, one from an insurance company and another from the electrical goods store where I bought MP3 players for the girls. The other two were from my female friend (as opposed to girlfriend) and the other is from Edward, who sold me the insurance from the aforementioned insurance company. Then, there are my facebook buddies... all 4 of them wrote a birthday wish on my wall.... A few years ago, I told myself that I will be retiring at 45. This milestone, just a couple of hours away, seems unlikely to be achieved...

Looking at my children, how close they are with each other, made me realise that I don't know how it feels to be them... to have siblings with age difference small enough to actually share an era. I was born in 1964, which means that I started school in 1971, at which time my youngest older brother is well into his teenage years, my eldest sister is 30 years old. I was almost like an only child, spoiled silly by my mother and sisters, frowned upon by my father and brothers as an annoyance. I have no fond memories of brotherly love, like wrestling each other or playing a game together, which makes me rather apprehensive of how my two sons relate to each other. They are 5 years apart, but I was often afraid that Afiq will treat Aiman as a nuisance and leave him out of whatever he was doing. That, happened for a while, but I found out that Afiq blamed Aiman for not being able to play his PS2...(long story). I straightened that out, and ever since, he and Aiman are so close, it warms m...

The arrow of time can only move in one direction. Forward. That is the law of the universe... the law of God. What this means is just that we only have memories of the past, and we can't see the future. And (it is theorised) that even if one has gone to the future, and come back to the past, he will not have any memories of the future he's gone to. So all we have in our minds are things that has happened in the past. I am trying to think of things that happened in my life, and the more I think, the more I realised that, I seemed to have forgotten of so many things in my past. This happens all the time, (especially during Eidul Fitri), when the conversation, inevitably, steered itself to comparisons of then and now. More often than not, I am surprised that some people remember things about me or what I said or do that I have no memory of. And it amazes me that some will remember every detail of a certain long gone event like it only happened yesterday. Once, I showed an old pict...