Selamat Hari Raya

Ustaz Samsuri asked me where I’m celebrating Raya. He smiled when I told him that I’m a hometown kid, with nowhere else to go but the same place I go home to everyday; or was a smirk? So I didn’t really get the question, which was really a variation of the when-are-you-getting-married question. That was a sneaky one; I bet my relatives this Raya will be more blunt.

Somehow I’m not at all too excited about the coming Raya. In fact, I never find Raya exciting, even as a child. After a month of fasting, we will go around visiting one another and get fat(ter). Well, Malaysians take Ramadan as a month-long food fest anyway, so Raya is just the culmination of it, in a way. It is just sad that we need celebrations like Raya as an excuse to visit friends and relatives; the rest of the year we are too busy with work.

But that’s the whole point, isn’t it? I guess that is really the reason I hate Raya, for it reminds me that we need to find an excuse to take time off to see each other – Raya, weddings, funerals, etc. So within the space of a week or so we squeeze in all the celebrating and visiting that the whole Raya experience becomes exhausting that most of us would find ourselves relieved when it is over.

By the way, right after is exam week, which means marking a bunch of exam scripts afterwards. If students hate exams, lecturers hate exams even more.

Heroes: Cheerleader chick may be related to Wolverine (Dean Hendler/NBC Universal Photo)

Now that we are well into fall (not in Malaysia though, we have haze!), the best thing going on for me at the moment is the shows on television. On Mondays there are Prison Break (season 2), How I Met Your Mother (2), and Heroes (new). Then there are NCIS (4), Veronica Mars (3), and Eureka (new) on Tuesdays; Grey’s Anatomy (3) on Thursdays; and Ghost Whisperer (2), Close to Home (2), and Battlestar Galactica (3) on Fridays. Stargates SG-1 and Atlantis have just completed their first half of their twenty-episode tenth and third season runs respectively, to be continued in February.

Yes, I’m a geek, and I don’t have a life. And the above are not in Malaysian television (sucks!). Thank God for the Internet, and P2P.