The Beloved Rambutan

The hairy fruit (photo from www.rambutan.com)

There is a rambutan tree (Nephelium lappaceum) in front of our house. Mak Ngah gave us the sapling years ago when she was working with the Ministry of Agriculture. It bears fruit all year long, so we don't give much attention to it. We never mind that on Fridays people often just pluck the rambutans off the tree on their way home after the prayer, but sometimes my parents still like to yell at the school children; LOL.

Driving home from a cousin's wedding at Tanjung Karang on Saturday, I was so pissed at the people in a car in front of us. They were eating rambutan, and were throwing the skins and seeds out of their vehicle onto the road along the way. I’m pretty sure that littering counts as antisocial behavior; why can’t these people keep the rubbish in a bag and throw it away properly later? It reminds me of a reader-submitted cartoon in a newspaper recently about a father teaching his son “not to litter… near the house” as he dumped a bag of trash onto the roadside from a moving car. Talk about having a third world mentality, the lack of appreciation towards the environment is one thing, selfishness and lack of respect for others is another.

It just follows that I really hate smokers. They care little that the rest of us non-smokers suffocate in the vile smoke, and treat the world like one giant ashtray. An ustaz at the department, now a fellow colleague, never tires to tell us that smoking is as haram as liquor. We had an interesting discussion on the subject in Fiqh class. Smokers have no respect for others, thus deserve no respect in return.

Back to the hairy fruit, it’s not fun at all to be swarmed and bitten by the kerengga or weaver ants (Ocoephylla smaragdina) that ‘guard’ the tree every time my parents ask me to fetch them the rambutan.

Merry-Go-Round

A surprise find in our letterboxes today at work: the salary slip. It was a surprise because the salary slip arrived today on the 24th, one day before pay day, which is tomorrow, the 25th. It’s unprecedented, as far as I know; the salary slip always arrives on or after pay day, sometimes even a week after.

So everywhere I saw staff members today walking with the salary slip in hand, or sitting at the lounge area looking at the figures; some with clear beaming satisfaction while others, including me, in puzzled exasperation. WHAT? WHY?

It has been six months since I got my MA. First, they told me that I had to formally apply for promotion and wait to be called for an interview; everything like applying for the job for the first time. Then, suddenly I found out, one afternoon, that the said the interview session was held in the morning, and I wasn’t informed about it! I ran to my boss (the department head, not the dean) to find her equally in the dark, and surprised, that she picked up the phone immediately to enquire on my behalf. It turned out that I never needed to attend the interview. I received the offer letter some weeks later, put my signature on some sheets of paper, forwarded them to the dean’s office, and sit happily in my office waiting for my pay rise.

Then came the pay slip.

Where is my money? I was put in touch with an officer in Finance, who directed me to an officer in Management Services, who passed me to another officer in Management Services, whose phone was engaged. I called again later once, twice, third time lucky, only to be told to speak to another officer in Management Services, who was in a meeting. SIGH. Luckily, instead of telling me to call later, as usually bureaucrats seem to enjoy doing, the person on the phone offered to take my message.

I got a call later, from the actual person in charge, who told me that they didn’t issue the necessary instructions to Finance because there was something missing in the package I sent to the dean’s office.

Why, oh why, didn’t anybody say anything?

“Don’t worry, they’ll reimburse you the full backdated amount later”, consoled the Senior Accounting Assistant at the General Office. She patiently helped me make sense of the salary slip earlier, and got me in touch with that first office in Finance.

“Kayalah engkau lepas ni”, said my mom. I wish.

Welcome to the Wild

Sungai Lembing

Pigs, or rather wild boar, droppings, got my colleagues all freaked out. LOL. We were volunteered (kena jual, as I put it) to spend a night at Kuala Tahan last weekend to survey potential venues for an annual staff program. The boss wanted to have it at Taman Negara. Everybody hated the idea - Taman Negara isn’t exactly a place for everybody - but wouldn’t dare to speak up against the boss, so the five of us were sent to check the place out. “What an expensive way to prove a point!” commented a fellow volunteered colleague. She hated the thought of going through all the trouble for nothing. I had never been anywhere near Taman Negara before, but it turned out just about what I imagined. It’s animal kingdom, so you should expect to find artefacts to that effect.

The all-expense-paid getaway to the edge of civilization was fun (the mobile phone signal was excellent, though), but it did cost me my weekend. I was really looking forward for a quiet weekend after that chaotic first week of classes. This is my first semester with a full twelve-hour workload, which so far has been unexpectedly exhausting that I find myself completely knocked out by 10pm every night, if not right after dinner. Hopefully, it’s just my body adjusting; or perhaps it’s just because I have sleep in mind coming home from work everyday. Whatever.

I did, however, manage to go and watch Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest on Thursday last week. Harta Lelaki Mati, as per the subtitle, was fun. I should have known, in a movie created to promote a theme park attraction, nobody dies; nobody with a named character that is. Is Jack dead? Johnny Depp was brilliant as always. I love sail ships, even merepek ones like the Black Pearl and the Flying Dutchman in a merepek movie like Dead Man’s Chest.

(Interesting webpage on what kind of ship the Black Pearl is, here.)

Great news too with the coming of July is the start of new tenth season of Stargate SG-1 and third season of Stargate Atlantis. The first episodes premiered last Friday on SciFi in the United States. Finally, something to look forward to during the weekends.

Bag of Chips

Life is like a bag of chips – full of air and all mashed-up.

Hot sunny afternoon and terrible traffic - a fact of life for anyone commuting between Gombak and Sungai Buloh everyday - had me thinking about... ice-cream. So I stopped at a 7-Eleven on the way home and get me one, plus a bag of spring onion and garlic flavored potato chips. The ice-cream was gone in about 30 seconds, but I didn't start on the chips until I got home, work clothes off, on my bed.

Ever noticed that the chips sold here are labeled “For Sale In Malaysia Only”? I wonder why that is; maybe the government subsidizes junk food too like they subsidize everything else from sugar to rice to petrol. It wouldn’t a surprise, really. Those big-shot junk-food manufacturers could very well be extremely well connected. Or, perhaps the chips sold in this country have some special ingredient we don’t want foreigners to have a taste at. Why else, then, that they only put “permissible flavorings” and permissible colorings” as the ingredients? We Malaysians only have to trust the Man that whatever permissible chemicals they put in there are actually edible and don’t give you cancer. Mind-control drug? Funny too, that the packaging also has labeling in French, for something meant to be sold only in Malaysia; perhaps for the benefit of our Vietnamese guest workers. The Indonesians can read Malay, while the Bangladeshis and Myanmarese can read English. We Malaysians love our guest workers.

The first week of every semester is time for us lecturers to play hide and seek – hiding from students appealing to join your class. It is “add and drop” period, when students can add and/or drop classes. Much of it is done electronically, but students would always want to join the classes that are already full to the brim, which are blocked by the system. Why? They’ll give you a million and one excuses why they absolutely need to register for a particular class; some are valid, most are just loads of BS. In my personal opinion the system is simply being abused, and most of these students never bothered to plan their studies.

Sigh… reminiscing the days when lunch was a tub of Ben & Jerry’s.

Bedtime Stories

Today I went to a GW meet; the first since I got back, my only second time ever. It is quite strange, though not in any negative way, to see a bunch of people you know only by their online nicknames. Even face-to-face, we call each other by nicknames. It’s just convenient, I suppose, than to try to remember the names of people you only meet a few times a year. I am terrible with names, anyway. The pseudo-secret venue, communicated directly to those who were coming via text message/SMS, was one of the newer but more peaceful shopping malls in KL, thankfully. I would have hated it if the meeting was set up at Suria KLCC, like that one time I went before.

As can be expected, some took the opportunity of the meet to seek confirmation for stories, rumors, urban-legends, if you like; that they have heard before: do we have this or that and how many, did this or that actually happened and how etc. I just sit there and listen.

The worst thing anyone can do with a rumor is to tell it to someone else. It doesn’t really matter whether there is a grain of truth in it, or totally outlandish; the damage is in the spread. Rumors are by definition unsubstantiated and incomplete. We like to think that there must be at least some truth in it, like how a legend is based on an historical event, and fill the gaps in the account with our own imagination.

Like a terrible secret, a rumor is hard to keep, so we spread them around. Sometimes it is out of concern – “just in case it is true” – and sometimes it is just for fun – “what harm will it do?” More harm than good, really. Some rumors create panic, like bomb scares, but generally rumors are like waves on a beach. Slowly but surely the erosion changes the shoreline. Just as we cannot take back our words, one cannot un-hear a rumor. Some rumors are in fact slanders; worse than adultery, according to the Prophet.

Many people argue that they don’t mean to spread rumors and slander, but just telling the [real] story; same difference. Some rumors are started off by certain parties for their own not-so-innocent motives, so by spreading them around we are only turning ourselves into willing tools for someone else's sinister machination.

If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.

Joseph Goebbels, German Minister of Propaganda, 1933 - 1945

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PS: I don’t care for Akademi Fantasia (AF). But doesn’t anybody else think that the daily Diari AF is turning people into voyeurs? I’m pissed that my mum is so caught up in it.

Two Days

The tango, the candy

YESTERDAY: Watched Take the Lead with my sister; can’t really help it, I’ve always had a soft spot for dance movies. If only I could ballroom dance. The closest I ever got to dancing was in primary school, when I signed up for a dance performance for Speech Day. Tarian endang wasn’t much of a dance, though, but it was the only thing there was. The teacher didn’t believe me at first (why, I already did plays and choirs and instruments before?), and some of the other kids made fun of me, but we did okay after weeks of daily practice.

When we got home I cancelled my alarm clock setting for the 3am France-Italy semi-final match. Sleep. I like them, but not enough to lose sleep over.
TODAY: Woke up and looked up the Internet to see France won. YAY! Yes, I left the PC on, connected, all night. TM/Streamyx is not getting my RM66 easy.

We had a pot-luck party at the department today during lunch time. I was volunteered MC. We celebrated former office bearers Prof Mansor, Dr Rokiah and Dr Latifah; and bid farewell to Dr Hafsah. I ate too much, and got one terrible headache.

Park, Here?

The new parking sticker design – the gold university logo on a pink octagon – is downright ugly! See bottom picture. Why can’t they just use the old design? The previous 2004-2006 sticker, in the middle, was a simple and discreet silver rectangle. Even the yellow square 2002-2004 sticker on top looks nice. This new one simply looks cheap and loud.

While we’re at it, let me rant a bit about the parking situation on campus.

The main campus ground was designed as a walking campus: the Sultan Haji Ahmad Shah mosque in the middle is surrounded by administrative and academic buildings, encircled by a two-lane street. Residential colleges and sports facilities make up the outer layer. Since full-time students are guaranteed housing, parking space is limited, but enough to cater for commuting staff, non-resident part-time students and visitors. The campus is served by RapidKL and Putra LRT feeder buses, so resident students really have no need for private transport.

Still, many students keep a motorcycle or a car on campus. I had no problem walking around campus on foot and taking the bus to KL as a student, but these people need to take the car just to get their asses from the hostel to class. So, we have a shortage of parking spaces. In response to this, as well as increasing number of traffic accidents, the university authorities turned the road that circles the campus into a one-way street, and introduced road-side parking along certain stretches.

Both are hardly solutions to the original problem - congestion. Resident students should not have any need for a car or motorcycle in the first place, and if left unchecked the number of cars and motorcyles are only going to increase. Even now, students are beginning to encroach into staff parking areas.

The limited parking spaces need to be rationed out. We begin by registering all the parking spaces in the university. Staff members would then be assigned their own parking spaces. Saving a few spaces for visitors and non-resident part-time students, the rest of the parking spaces would then be auctioned off. We may even allow a secondary market for parking permits, which would make an interesting study in itself. This would go a long way to solving the congestion problem efficiently though a market mechanism. On top of it, the university would also make some extra cash!

My Super Weekend

What is your idea of a perfect weekend? I don’t have one, really. Usually at the beginning through the middle of the work-week I would wonder about going somewhere or doing something during the coming weekend. But then as the weekend looms – usually around Friday evening – it becomes most appealing to just laze around the house all weekend.

It’s really tiring pretending to be busy all week that at the end of it all I want to do is to stay home and relax. Why would I want to go out anyway? Everywhere will be so crowded with people that you’ll be gasping for oxygen amid the noise and attitude and body odor. It’s not just the malls and shopping complexes and cinemas, but also the parks and beaches too - everywhere. Plus, going out costs money too – petrol money, toll money, parking money, food money etc. At the end of it I may actually feel even worse than when I started, so I might just as well stay at home.

I guess then my idea of a perfect weekend is a breezy and sunny Saturday and Sunday for me to do the laundry, polish my shoes, and clean the bedroom and bathroom in the morning, and watch movies after movies on HBO all afternoon.

No wonder I’m getting fat.

Superman getting a tan; they still can't make him a better suit (Warner Bros./Yahoo! Movies photo)

MOVIE REPORT: Superman has got to be the most boring superhero around, even for an alien, but when I tried to buy the tickets for Thursday the shows were actually fully booked! So, I had to settle on Friday. It was a 10pm show and there were some guys wearing German football jerseys. Surely those guys cannot be true fans, for going to watch Superman Returns when the quarterfinal match between Germany and Argentina was on!

Just as well, I rarely saw a movie I didn't enjoy, even if it is Superman. So he has a son; or rather Lois Lane got herself pregnant with Superman’s child, but manages to get someone else to play daddy when Superman suddenly took off on a 5-year ghost hunt to what's left of Krypton. But now the hero is back. Will there be a sequel? It wouldn’t hurt to get to see Kate Bosworth again.

Spiderman 3 opens next summer. See the teaser trailer here.

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PS: Pray France beats Brazil this Sunday morning. Yeah, right!