Month: March 2005

My mother used to tell me, ‘If your friends asked you to go jump into the ocean, you would’.

And that’s how I turned out. Just that my friends haven’t asked me to jump into the ocean yet.

But I think that’s just how my friends like me. I am very easily persuaded. Especially by women. And tonight was no different. Sam took me to dinner, saying chicken rice and salted vegetable soup was just the tonic for a long day at work, and I agreed, even though I knew that she was just hankering for chicken rice and not really concerned about what was really good for me.

Then we browsed round the shops, not really looking for anything, but coming across a nice pair of shoes she said she thought she wanted, and which she bought, and which she persuaded me to buy a pair of for myself.

Then we browsed some more, not looking for anything else, but coming across the shop that sold Havaianas slippers, where she picked out the pair of slippers identical to the ones she had, and persuaded me to buy a pair for myself.

Same pair of shoes, same pair of slippers, but I’m not worried this would lead to something. It’s not as if it’s as permanent as a tattoo, which I have one, and which is identical to one someone else has, because that someone else persuaded me to have the same one.

Nope. Don’t mean a thing. Just like when someone else told me some time ago, ‘hey, you should start a blog’.

‘l like the pair you have but you should get the pair I have’, Sam said

Tag: Havaianas

My cousin in KL’s just SMS’d me that she felt the tremors.

This is what I’ve got on the net this moment: http://msnbc.msn.com/id/7316846/, and http://tsunami.gov

My friend who was asking me all those questions yesterday leads such an interesting life, travelling all over the world, meeting really interesting people and having conversations with them.

I will be writing about her encounters with Bali beach boys and NGO volunteers who work as hotel chauffeurs to fund their NGO activities. But the hour, it is late, and I have to clock-in at the factory early tomorrow morning. Why is the hour late? Because my friend called earlier to tell me she just realised there was this little known language or Creole known as Papia Kristang, which apparently is spoken in Malacca and Singapore:

Cristão (or Papiá Kristang or simply papia, i.e. language in archaic Portuguese) is a Creole language based in Portuguese spoken in Malacca, Malaysia and in Singapore.

And, we also had an argument about how ‘barrage’ was pronounced in ‘Marina Barrage’. She called it ‘barrage’, as in a ‘barrage of artillery fire’, while I called it ‘barridge’ as in ‘barridge rhymes with porridge’.

And because we liked talking to each other so much, we took a long time before we decided to settle the argument with a look up at dictionary.com. I was right, as expected, but neither of us had watched the news on the telly to know how CNA and Channel 5 presenters pronounced the word.

Then we went back to talking about the Portuguese and she said, ‘how come we don’t know that many Portuguese?’ I said, ‘Gort! We have Vernetta Lopez and all the other Eurasians on telly and radio, and we have the de Souzas and the D’Almeidas, who made their fortune harvesting gutta-percha which was used to insulate telegraph wires’.

Then my friend got sleepy and said, ‘hey, let’s talk again tomorrow, do you know where I can get good Peranakan food? I don’t, cos I no longer have a finger on the pulse of the nation’.

I’ll have her finger on my pulse!

I couldn’t turn down his impassioned plea, so Vicnan, you’re it:

If I try very, very hard, I can adjust my spectacles with my tongue