In 5 days, kiddo receives her results of her entrance exams from the McRobertson High School folks. She is such a free and happy spirit she hasn’t let this affect her in any way. Well at least she appears that way. We have asked her a number of times if this means anything to her and almost always, her response has been “not much” or something to that effect. I remember making an entry, about 2 years ago, concerning the elitist aspect of education and select classes or schools. I guess it is usually the satisfaction of achievement which is a major driver of our efforts and the push to get into these select classes or schools is not any different. I don’t think kiddo particularly wants to be seen as smart. She may be no Einstein but neither is she an UMNO member (read: intellectually challenged). What she is however, is someone who pours herself into her work. That makes her smart. I am certain that trait (of being totally committed to her work) comes more from Theresa than me. While I work hard on the stuff I enjoy, I also often stand back to get a grip of the situation and if that situation allows it, I’d kick back and space out. Not Theresa. And, I think to a large extent, neither is kiddo. She would doggedly peck away till her work’s done and that’s great. That is what’s going to make her succeed. What I think matters to kiddo is peer acceptance. I think her sense of acceptance is pretty healthy but would be boosted by qualifications for a select school. I know that even if she does not qualify, she’d adjust pretty quickly and settle down to her usual work style again. Thankfully, none of us are nervous about this and the only anxiety we have is a derivative one, ie – where should we live?
Category: Family
Msian Chat and House Hunting
Chatting about Malaysia
I have, by and large, tried to keep to my recent resolution to not run down Malaysia. So for example when I was speaking to some friends yesterday and the usual derisions were offered, I simply demurred and suggested some positive sides or proffered hope. My reservations were of course received with some surprise and jibes about whether I was starting to think about returning. I said no of course I wasn’t returning. Malaysia is no longer my home and leaving aside the never-say-never mantra as a ubiquitous caveat, I cannot see myself returning in any extended period. I cannot anyway. I am no longer a Malaysian, except maybe in a corner of heart somewhere. There is a Singaporean in the group I was talking to and he said, for the umpteenth time, that Malaysia was such a wasted opportunity. The country is beautiful, had vast natural resources and a legacy of education and legal system which could have provided a launching pad to make it a great place. Instead, constant bickering over racial issues together with greedy and corrupt politicians have conspired to send it closer to an African despot haven than ever. The increasing religious bigotry and extremist attitudes have made it an even less attractive place to invest, work and raise family. Even though the above stuff came from the group I was chatting with and not from me, it should not have made its way to this entry. I shall stop here on this issue.
House Hunting
A week after accepting an offer for our house, we have now begun viewing homes in earnest. For some reason, I am not overly concerned about finding a place. I don’t know if I should be. Properties are so expensive now so while it is great to cash in on current high prices, replacement costs would always be an issue and we knew this all along. It is just that we had planned on finding something else for a while now and had always thought about selling our current place so it isn’t a sudden decision which we haven’t thought through before. Yet, when we finally embarked on looking for a replacement home, it felt so daunting and tiring. On Saturday after the routing house cleaning in the morning, we set out and looked at various houses. By the time we got back at around 4.30pm, Theresa was so tired she was just glad to sit down in a stationary position and browse through some brochures instead. We decided to have some “teochew” porridge which was great (except for the colour as we used some sweet potato which was of the purple variety!).Yesterday after church we resumed our search and visited 2 more houses, and unlike Saturday, we spent a lot more time in each of these 2 houses. One was just off Waverley Road. It is a subdivision with 2 units and a relative had wanted the front unit which was much bigger and nicer. We were asked if we would be interested in the other one with hopefully a discount based on a bulk/package offer. It turned out the price differential between the 2 units made the remaining one disproportionately priced and it felt a lot less spacious than the other one in the subdivision. The other property we saw was just off Foster Road and was much nicer in terms of space, quality of finish and design. The one big question mark was the fact that it sat on a slope and a part of the house, meant to be a cellar-like underground storage facility, was a bit unnerving. We would have to continue looking, as painful as it is. We have just under 3 months to find and move into another place. God would have to accentuate the Heavenly Father role now.
One Down, Bring on the other Two!
One down, two to go. Winter, that is. June has somehow just whizzed by amazingly quickly. Perhaps it was the busyness at work in particular. It was maybe also the other events – kiddo’s entrance exams for Mac Robertson High, our 15th anniversary. Whatever the cause(s), the feeling has been that I have had very little time to just take things in. I feel like I have been rushed and swept by the tides around me. While I much prefer this to sitting around waiting for things to happen, it also feels like I am not charting my own direction. I guess I’m experiencing the perennial challenge to find meaning in the midst of the hustle and bustle of activities which constitute living. In as much as I have enjoyed the activities of the past 3 months or so, they have affected the life I live in ways which I don’t necessarily like.
For example, I have had to spend a lot of time dealing with trains and trams. I spend a great deal of the start of each morning working towards getting on that 6:48, 6:59 or 7:11 at the Mount Waverley station, or 3 minutes earlier at Syndal, where the gym is. This morning for example, I had to cut my run down to just 30 minutes and rushed through my showers with the sole aim of getting on that 6:56 at Syndal. I missed it so caught the 7:08 which meant I didn’t catch 7:10 or 7:16 tram at Glen Iris, no matter how fast I huffed and puffed my way up the 200m stretch to the tram stop, which meant I got in close to 30 minutes later than I would have liked. My mornings are ruled by this insane preoccupation with catching that train or that tram. All that, because of the other insane race against time – that of getting my work done.
Maybe that’s it – the endless chasing and meeting of deadlines means you lose sight of what is important to you and where you want to go, especially if these deadlines are not your own. Meeting such deadlines is a cold achievement devoid of any real thrill of making a difference, or should it? I know, I know – work ethics demand we do the work to the best of our ability without any regard for personal agenda. I’m not saying I don’t get any satisfaction from doing my job. I’m just saying the rush, the zipping by of the hours and days this process involve, robs me of a sense of “that’s what I want”. At the end of it all, it’s cold and means little.
Yet, I plough on and when my eyes and mind tire late in the day and I long to go home, another round of rushing kicks in. This time it’s the reversed trend of catching the right tram so that I don’t miss the 7:25 train at Glen Iris to go back to either Mount Waverley or Syndal. If I do, the always erratic 7:40 would see me arriving home after 8, which is always a bummer. Yarra Tram has a tram tracker hotline which you can call to find out what time a tram is arriving and if I hurry, I can just about hang up the phone, undock my notebook, pack up and make a quick dash for a tram which is due to arrive in 3 minutes. However, if the boss is still in, it’s good form to just nick in and say good bye for the day. If this was the case, it has to be the next tram, whenever that is. At times, I have had to sprint from my cubicle to the lift, get down to the lobby, sprint across the hall to the glass door (which seem to know my rush and so open at a glacial pace) and do an Asafa Powell to the tram stop. I would then spend the next 5 minutes catching my breath and hoping my heart holds out, and also hoping Theresa wouldn’t pick that moment to telephone, lest the heavy breathing suggests it wasn’t my workload in the office requiring her to keep my dinner in the oven.
Assuming I manage to get on the tram on time, arrival at Glen Iris some 20 minutes later signals another assault on the cardio respiratory system. Often, the tram stops, the passengers get off and the shuffles last only about 2 seconds before they turn into trots across the road. If the rail crossing bells start to signal, the trots escalate into an almighty stampede. This time, the distance is more than double that between my glacial glass door and the tram stop. The route also involves a 30m ramp going up, towards the station platform so while I still often manage catch the 7:25, the recovery can take the whole of the 12 minutes from Glen Iris to Mount Waverley. God forbid that Theresa should call then. I’m certain I looked absolutely pale on those occasions as I sit panting and rubbing my chest. Like Detective Murtaugh liked to say, I’m getting too old for this (expletive deleted).
On arrival home, it’s another round of rushed activities. I’d put my gym clothes in a bucket to soak away the 12-hour old perspiration, get out of my coat, jacket and shirt, pack my clothes for the next day, and go downstairs for dinner. It’d be way past 8 by then. After all the washing up, and if I pack lunch for the next day, it’d be close to 9pm. We start thinking about bed around 9.30pm. So you see there is precious little time to talk or just think about the day. This goes on for a whole week and come weekend, the cycle of house cleaning, shopping, cooking, ferrying kiddo to her activities and church on Sunday, would leave us so little time. The rush goes on. The cycles are endless. Yet this mouse prefers spinning away, chasing endlessly, on that little treadmill in the little cage, more than having no wheel to climb onto at all. It may be tiring and challenging and raises all sorts of questions but it also makes for a full life. Now for the remaining 2 months…
Living
I woke up a full 25 minutes later than I intended this morning, so I missed the gym. I had felt I needed to, to get the week kick-started. It was such a long week last week and I was so bushed that on Friday night, the last thing I wanted to do was to be in church for a long night of movie and fraternizing. Oh I know I shouldn’t use that word but on that night I really felt that way. Any form of socializing, unless it is with a very small group over a warm meal and a few bottles of very good red, was to be avoided. Anyway there I was, in the church hall on a cold and tired Friday night, watching this movie called One Night with the King. It was on the story of Esther of the Old Testament. The sound was a bad, as obviously it felt like one of those cheap movie sessions Malaysian schools used to organize – the hall wasn’t meant to the a theater and it showed. We ploughed through the 120 odd minutes of celluloid, after which we worked our way through cakes and other delights totally unsuited for such a late hour. Despite all that, it felt good to be in the company of church friends so as tired as I was it was not a totally bad way to end the week.
Saturday was therefore the start of my recuperation from the week, including the events of the previous night. I was particularly looking forward to it as we were supposed to look at a couple of houses which we had seen on the internet. As it turned out, one was a dud and the other has been sold, but that was only one part of a damp squib of a weekend. After the usual house cleaning, we dropped kiddo off at her morning class (final one, with at least a few months’ break). After replenishing my wine stock, we went off all the way to Wantirna South, for the first inspection. The internet copy writer was extremely skillful, for what was a small unit stuck behind another one occupied by very messy owner/occupier was given a description like it was a Taj Mahal perched on the Cote d’Azur going for a song. We left the house, dropped off the dry cleaning, picked up some bread and went to pick kiddo. After lunch with her, we went to do the weekly shopping, after which we headed home. I fixed up the wiring for the home phone (a new set with an answering machine, which Theresa picked up from the recent Myer stock-take sale). The made-in-China electrical extension cord was a challenge and by the time I was done it was time to go look for the second house, which turned out to have been sold the previous day already. I was peeved at the agent for making us go to the property, when she knew it has been sold. If it was to lure us to see other property it failed, because I don’t think I would want to deal with her again. That property was so close to kiddo’s present school so we were really keen on it but then again I know God has His ways of dealing with us.
We went home and it was nearly 5pm but we weren’t hungry so we watched a DVD – Stranger Than Fiction starring Will Ferrell and Emma Thompson. Dustin Hoffman played a role as well, in what was a very novel plot. Will Ferrell played an IRS agent, Harold Crick who lived a regimented life. His life was actually written as a fiction by Karen Eiffel (Emma Thompson). Their paths somehow crossed when Crick started hearing Eiffel’s narratives of his life. He thought he was going cuckoo, saw a shrink, who referred him to a Professor Jules Hilbert (Hoffman) who worked with Crick to unravel what was going on. It turned out Eiffel was writing a tragedy and she usually kills of her dramatis personae. Crick was waiting to be killed of but fortunately for him Eiffel had a writer’s block when it came to the ending. She struggled as Crick’s life took a turn for the better. One of his assignments took him to an Anna something (Mary Gyllenghall) and they hit it off after a rocky start. Eiffel finally had her writer’s block cleared up and found a way to kill her guy. By then Crick had figured out it was Eiffel who was writing his life and managed to contact her. He got her outline of a script, gave it to Hilbert, who thought it was a poetic and most beautiful ending so Crick should opt to go this way, rather than a mundane death albeit much later. He thought the book (titled Death and Taxes) could end no other way. The brave Crick went ahead and lived the final moments of his life exactly how Eiffel wanted. Except of course, Eiffel had struggled with the idea that her character was real and she was killing a real person so unbeknownst to Crick, changed the ending which saved Crick. Hilbert of course thought the ending spoiled it, thought the book would have been much better had Crick died as per the original version. It was a strange movie, but enjoyable.
We finished the movie just before 7, I cooked some vermicelli for dinner, after which we did something we hadn’t done for a long time. We caved in to kiddo’s pestering and played monopoly. She won, we lost, she was happy and we went to bed. Yesterday afternoon after church kiddo had lunch with the youth group followed by a jam session so Theresa and I went for lunch on our own. We went to Shangrila Inn at Brentford square – she for her char koay teow and I had my laksa. We went window shopping at Forest Hill after that before we went home and I did some ironing and cooked some more, for this week’s dinners. I also boiled some red beans for supper. SBS had a EPL classic match on where United thrashed the tractor boys 9-0 with Andy Cole scoring 5. It was great to see Giggsy turning the Ipswich defense upside down for half if not all of the goals. I wondered again if United would be better next season than they were. With Hargreaves, and the two latin dancers they should but one never knows. Maybe Anfield would be more threatening this time around. Apparently they are close to signing Spain’s Torres for over 26 million GBP…
And so it was a very uneventful weekend, but great because it had loads of family time. It was also great because yesterday morning, I found myself really getting stuck into acknowledging God and worshiping him. That echoed again this morning just by listening to some songs on an SD card which I thought had gone walkabout. I found it again yesterday and the songs on it (Amy Grant mainly) were inspiring stuff. It drained the battery on the phone but just listening to music about worship for a change (instead of reading) was great. Mundane stuff huh? Living, I guess.
My Dad 15 Years Ago
The 15th wedding anniversary we had was the first since my father died. For some reason, every year when I celebrate our anniversary, I thought of him. He had wanted to do more for the wedding. I regretted the many arguments I had with him over the planning of the wedding. He had wanted a really extensive guest list and had wanted all sorts of traditional arrangements, including for us to live with them for the first few months of our marriage. I had just started working then and a lot of the stuff he wanted involved spending loads more money so they were all problematic. I remember having to buy my shoes from Bata for that wedding and so I was enraged every time he suggested more things he wanted done. In fact I felt a lot of anger right through my wedding preparation period. I was surrounded by relatives to whom the occasion was a cause for the family to get together to celebrate and the bride and groom’s interests were of secondary importance. I remember being in church the night before the wedding, with tons of things to do but only a few of us were there. Theresa and I were both there and Albert Lee, my best man and Saw Hoon, Theresa bridesmaid, were the main helpers. Boon Eng was there with the artistic work. Apart from the 5 of us, I cant remember anyone else being there. I remember staying up till midnight with the work required. None of my myriads of cousins showed up with the arrangements of tables and chairs, decorations and everything else. I remember making a dash home to get people over to the church to help, only to find the house filled with relatives who were just chatting and no one bothered to help, not even after I showed up not looking very happy. My mother had insisted I “behaved” and I didn’t want to upset her so I just turned around and left home, to return to church to do the work. My father was simply totally oblivious to what I had to face. I recall those times with regret at the way I felt and the way things turned out. Thankfully, the wedding turned out well and everyone was happy, including my late father. Those were the things I had hoped to one day talk about with my dad, maybe over a beer and laughed over. I never had that chance, not having “seized the day”.
My 15th
20th June is our wedding anniversary. This year is a little special, because it is our 15th. We were both at work on that day but during lunch, I bought some chocolates (Ferrero Rocher) for the team and left a box near the biscuits for everyone else to enjoy. Few asked what the occasion was and I told them. That night, we had planned to have dinner in a place in the Bangsar (Malaysian capital night spot) of Glen Waverley. As it was a weekday, we hadn’t thought of making any reservations. It turned out to be a mistake as that place was booked out and the only option was alfresco on the footpath. That didn’t sound exciting on a cold winter’s night so we moved on a few doors down the road to a Chinese restaurant. Not quite the place to be for your 15th anniversary but we aren’t fussy in that sense. After dinner we picked up more FR chocolates, to share with the folks at the prayer meeting, which was where we headed. We couldn’t think of a better group to share this occasion with.
Paper Chase Down Under
Yesterday turned out to be a long and tiring Saturday for Theresa and I. Both of us had to accompany kiddo into the city in the morning, for her Mac Rob high school entrance exam. It’s a select school and even while waiting in the Mount Waverley station, we realised it was going to be an event with loads of people, as several families were theer for the ride into city. When we got to Parliament station even more families showed up as we left the station and walked towards Carlton Gardens, where the Royal Exhibition Centre was. It was a huge building 
and I hadnt realised the historical significance of this building until then. It was the place where the first Federal Parliament convened in 1901 with Ed Barton as the first PM. It was a huge, magnificent and gorgeous building. Most of the close to 3,000 students and their parents however, werent admiring the building. They were just mulling around, anxious to for the kids to get in to do the 3.5 hours entrance exam. By the time kiddo got in, it was just a little after 12pm and we were only meant to come and get her at 3.45pm. So Theresa and I went and walked around in the city, me looking at suits and coffee machines while she was just contented to show me around Myer, her favourite haunt. We had lunch in an Indonesian restaurant, and coffee at Myer, before finally going back to get kiddo. By the time we got home, it was almost 7pm and we were knackered. We asked kiddo if she really wanted to get to Mac Robertson High, and she said no but we suspect the peer pressure suggests otherwise. The paper chase has come down under.
Wifey’s Birthday
Today is Theresa’s birthday. It has been one of those cold, dark and wet winter days. I woke up this morning at my usual time but it was obviously raining outside. These days, I park at the Syndal station when I go to the gym. It is maybe 150m to the gym and 100m to the platform. With the rain, with my gym bag in one hand and my work clothes in the other, there’s a good chance my work clothes would get messed up and my newly dry cleaned suit and pressed shirt would be creased, wet and grotty. Then it’s the 250m walk, after my run, to the platform. It would be cold and probably still raining, but I would still be perspiring.
It was too much. I decided therefore that I would not go to the gym. I woke up anyway, about 15 minutes later, hit the showers and went downstairs to make coffee for myself, tea for Theresa and milo for Kiddo – my ritual for the past what, almost 3 years now. By the time I finished my quiet time and breakfast and went upstairs, Theresa had just woken up. We decided I would go first. So, I didn’t get to wish her a proper happy birthday and dashed out the door to catch the 6:48. I got to the station in Mount Waverley with less than a minute to spare, did a quick dash and just managed to jump into the train.
When I got off at Glen Iris, it was still dark and it drizzled for a bit. The tram driver must have seen me huffing and puffing my way up the slope because the moment I trekked the 200m or so and hopped on, it took off. The 25 minutes ride on the tram was riddled with worries about what might have been sitting in my inbox when I got in. On days like this, a jaded office worker who has had to brave public transport would have been tempted to call in sick or complained about his lot as he takes the ride in. Me, I was grateful. I was grateful the rain had finally been a persistent presence, grateful I had a job to go to, and most of all, grateful that Theresa and I have a chance to lead a relatively normal life, and I have something – someone – to look forward to each day. It’s Theresa’s birthday today and I am so grateful to God for her.
Techy Me?
I was reading, over lunch today, an article about the evolution of Steve Job’s career in identifying and launching revolutionary products. I remember working in the law faculty in my university, doing odd jobs such as running the printing section of the faculty and helping staff members with filing, furniture moving, etc. Usually at year end but sometimes in the middle of semester, lecturers change their offices and so they need to move their stuff frogfdm one room to another. I’d come in and do all the moving. It was during one of these moving jobs that I laid my hands on a Mac computer for the first time. It would have been 1987 or thereabouts. I was moving this professor’s stuff which included her Mac computer. It was smaller and had more chic than the IBM personal computer I was more accustomed to. The screen was white and the graphics were so pleasant. I later realised it was more expensive and less compatible with most other computers so I discarded any ideas of owning one but I always thought it had more class. I did however, jumped at the chance of playing around with it, and got a chance to save some files, shut the thing down, and restarted it when I’ve had it moved to the new office. It was such a fresh experience.
Recently when kiddo got her iPod and I was playing around with it, I got annoyed when she suggested I didn’t know how to operate it. I had my hands on a Mac before I even thought of conceiving her and here she was telling me I couldn’t operate an iPod. I had also had my hands on a HP PDA – the LX200 – way back in 1995
, used the first Palm 2 years later, used the first expandable PDA 2 years later and used the first PDA Phone hybrid (the Treo 280) 2 years after that. I moved on to the Treo 600, which was fantastic and recently got the 650. All through the years, I was using gadgets few around me had even thought existed. Of course KL in the early to mid 90s had not seen the gadget craze 
which swept through in the late 90s through to the first few years of the new millennium, so it wasn’t hard to be at the forefront as an early technology adopter. I thought I was no slouch when it came to handling new technology. Yet, faced with the iPod, I was labelled one, by my 13 year old daughter. As much as I resented it, I couldn’t deny that compared to 
her who took to these gadgets like a duck to water, I was indeed a slouch. The 10 minutes or so I played around with it was way too long to figure it out, by her standard.
So when I read about Steve Job’s new adventure with the iPhone, I began to feel like an old grandmother who had problems operating the VCR. I wondered what multi-touch technology was. The 5-way navigator on my Treo 650 is beginning to sound like archaic tools, much like the huge buttons on those 
VCRs. Apparently the iPhone has ONE 
button, maybe a bit like the one button on the iPod (but has many parts to that one button – isn’t this just fiddling around?) The point is, I now feel as close to technology as I thought my grandmother is. Why should I be? I will therefore, put a note in my long term to-do list: find out what multi-touch technology the iPhone uses, is all about…
PTF
Parent-Teacher Fellowship. Just a trivia on our live. Maybe not. It’d be fun in any case. This afternoon after church and the AGM of the church, we meet (again) at Ben and Kristen’s place for a BBQ lunch. We’re there to talk about Youth fellowship stuff, to know what they have planned for our kids. Ben and Kristen are an amazingly energetic and generous couple. Just last night a whole bunch of us were at their house for dinner (I brought an eggplant-prawn-chilli dish, which went down well). To have another bunch in their place for lunch this afternoon sounds like the endless round of entertaining which Malaysians do only during festive seasons, and that with help from domestics around. Anyway, while cooking the eggplant dish yesterday, I had also marinated a stack of chicken fillets for the BBQ. It’s BYO meat but Theresa recokns we shouldnt just BOO (Bring Our Own). She’s probably right, so the 1.5 kg of chicken fillets should do it! Hopefully the overnight marinate of herbs, spices and seasoning make it good.
The AGM – I hope we talk a bit about the pastor issue. We havent had one for over a year now and I dont know how long more we can or should do that…
Ante 