I was minding my own business when Emily deviated from her kibitzing with mom and called out for me:

Emily: “Wei!”

Me: “What?”

Emily: “Are you going inside?”

Me: “Inside where?”

My mom interjects.

Mom: “The delivery room”

Me: “Are you crazy? Why would I want to do that?”

Now, FYI, the delivery of Regine was to be done through Caesarian method - due to Emily’s poor state of health. If you don’t already know what’s a Caesarian section, it’s a procedure where the doctor makes the baby perform a vertical takeoff from the mother’s womb instead of the usual cooter exit…

Mom: “Be there for her maa… you can hold her hands or talk to her to distract her attention”

Yeah, like it’s gonna make her forget that she’s delivering a baby.

Me: “That’s insane mom. I heard that it’s very messy, just like a butcher opening up a pig. No thanks. I guess I’ll just wait outside and let the doctor do his job”

Mom: “Don’t be such a pussy. It’s gonna be totally obscured from your view with a curtain, ok?”

Me: “Forget it. I’m waiting outside. Maybe Emily can SMS me after she delivered, I’ll then go inside…”

Mom & Emily: [smack heads repeatedly]

Hey, call me a pussy or a bad husband if you want, but I’m not the kind of person that goes all out to pretend that I totally dig at the idea of some random guy cutting up my wife, with all those gores and stuffs. No way. At least not on the person that I love. I just can’t bear to witness that. I know I’m gonna get the trauma that I don’t need.

(but if that Caesarian were to be performed on my boss’ head to remove an uterus out of it, then I’ll definitely so gonna fucking watch it with a tub of popcorn)

People, I need some enlightenment.

If,

a burung - berkicau
an ayam - berkokok
a goddamn kucing - mengiau
a harimau - mengaum
a perempuan - meng-”ohyes ohyesss!” — [you fucks... there's no known distinctive call-sound for human]

Then,
an itik and lembu - meng[what]?

I know cow moos and duck quacks in English, but what’s the Malay equivalent of their characteristic noise?

I’ve been asking some of my Malay friends, but none of them seems to know the answer in BeeEm. Any of you know anything?

****

Speaking of that, I wonder why the fuck do we have to distinctively name each and every sound made by different animals. Why bother? Like, there are literally shitloads of species of animals on this planet. How the fuck are we gonna remember all of them?

Man, I strongly feel that we should standardize a common word to describe all the animal sounds. Forget quacks or clucks or moos or roars. Just fucking slap it with something that’s easy to remember, maybe like… hoody-hoo.

- I kicked the cat so fucking hard and high, that I can hear it’s hoody-hoo fading off like an ambulance driving off.
- That cheebye dog can’t seem to stop hoody-hooing at each and every passing vehicles.
- She has been hoody-hooed by her mother-in-law for the whole week, that’s why the moping.
- Belerang jantan tersebut menhudi-hudihu sepanjang hari untuk menarik perhatian aweknya

How convenient! If only that could become a reality…

Emily & I went to scour around for some DVDs last Saturday, and ended up inside this shop. It was a pDVD outlet manned by approximately 4 young Jay Chou wannabes. Since Emily & I were deprived of DVDs for months, we unsuspectingly went ahead to raucously flip for some titles, without noticing that the guys inside were actually operating their business on a lookout…

Well, I should have seen it happen. The door was only partially open and there was an unusual crowd of Jay Chous hanging outside the DVD shop looking left right center. My compulsion to get the DVDs somehow took over me, and I entirely overlooked the impending menace. Or perhaps, I was simply too feebled by old age to fucking notice anything at all. Anyway, I only had enough time to select a couple of titles, when one of the toads squawked “Close the door!! Close the door!!” to one of his colleagues and then WHAM! We had the vertical sliding metal door pulled down shut, locking us with the rest of the patrons from inside.

What a luck. (If you can remember well enough, I’ve blogged about my first dramatic experience here.)

But this time, there weren’t any housewives around for us to contend with, just a few blokes minding their own business (Emily was the only object inside the shop that’s closest to the description of a housewife). A couple geek patrons were making some commotion though, not about the fact that they’re being locked in, but were sorta like heated up from some discussion about the porn flicks displayed on the shelves there - which beckoned one of the pDVD operators to hush them up lest the raiding officers might hear them from outside and suspect of something.

For a moment there, it felt like hiding inside a closet from a deranged psychotic killer on a murderous spree. Had it been dark inside, it would have been a totally rad experience.

Anyway, I was cool about the whole thing going on right there, until it dawned on me that we might be arrested for patronizing a pirated DVD shop. Like, piracy is an offense. Stolen goods. And we all very well fucking know that buying stolen goods is a felony. The thoughts start to get really disturbing and I went over to ask one of the Jay Chous

“So, the whole place’s like, being raided or something?”

The guy, being sort of a good customer service sport, replied:
“Don’t worry. We just received some tip offs to temporary shut the place down. We’ll open the door back in no time. Just relax”

That kinda allayed my fear a bit,
“Oh cool. Thanks. Say, do you happen to have that Wallace and Gromit DVD?”

He beamed me another fake smile and replied courteously “I’m sorry man, no we don’t”

And we silently waited in there for what must be like, 10 minutes? before the same Jay Chou I spoke to, started to beckon everyone to evacuate the place as soon as possible (”but come back some other day”). Then one of them pulled open the sliding door and another one got himself ready to switch off the lights to abandon the place.

But then, just as all of us started to bail, one of the lookouts from the outside gave the safe signal to Jay Chou, which he then made another announcement, “Gentlemen, it’s alright now. You may resume selecting your movies, we’re back in business”. And the lights blinked back on.

I then paused for a moment there, contemplating if I should continue to remain there… but finally decided to just pay for the 2 DVDs I selected and get the fuck out of there. And so, I went to the counter to pay for the discs, when Jay Chou said to me

“Eh, boss… only 2 DVDs? Why don’t you get another one? 3 for 20.”

I was like, hell, ok… and bought 3 DVDs instead. I love shopping for pDVDs. Customer satisfaction guaranteed.

Emily & I were there to watch “The Poseidon”, but somehow, the show has stopped screening. And we were left only with a few choices : “Mission Impossible 3″, “X-Men”, “Over the Hedge”, “Da Vinci Code” and a bunch of movies that didn’t catch my attention.

Since:
- both of us didn’t like Tom Cruise,
- I had slept through the first 2 X-Men movies
- I’ve read Da Vinci Code, and I think it’s fucking boring.

We settled for “Over The Hedge”. Was it a good choice? Depends. If I’m an excited 5 year old who has never seen a raccoon before in my life? Hell yeah. If I’m a guy who expects more from the CGI world after watching the likes of “The Incredibles” or any other motion pictures animated by Pixar? Nope.

Somehow, the graphics failed to impress me and the storyline was just OK.

The movie starts with a naive raccoon that hit a boner when he tried to steal a hibernating bear’s junk food out of the compulsion of hunger, ended up waking the disgruntled bear and inadvertently trashing his stuffs. The bear got tulan, caught him up and was about to gave him a big brain squirt, when the smooth talking raccoon manage to convince the angry bear that he’s able to restore everything he trashed as ever before, and was thence given the time to fulfill his pledge until the bear wakes up half a moon revolution later.

And that’s how the raccoon came to this oasis of little wood smack dab in the middle of a modern human suburb (which was separated by a perimeter of hedge, hence the title) and met a group of rustic animals who have never seen humans before. (how they end up in that little area of woodlands without noticing the humans around them, still escapes me to this hour. But hey, it’s just a fucking 3D cartoon, they needed no logic in that…). From there, the raccoon works out a plot to convince (he’s good in convincing) the bunch of animals to help amass his promised loot back to the bear within the promised dateline - and adventure ensues.

Overall, it was just adequately entertaining. It didn’t flop too bad, nor did it fare well enough. It’s just another mediocre animated movie that simply didn’t cut the cake. For this movie, I’d recommend a pDVD instead, and watch it at home… unless of course, you’re itching of an outing and you’ve watched everything else at the cinema.

Emily: “Dear, I told my uncle about our plan to not let our kid learn how to speak & write Mandarin. Seems like he’s very against the idea”

Me: “Then?”

Emily: “He said, people would not laugh too much at a Chinese who does not speak English, but on the other hand, would despise a Chinese that do not speak his own language”

I felt a sting up my pride

Me: “Fuck lar, then what about me?”

I don’t fucking feel like it’s something to be ashamed of. Yeah so I don’t speak good Mandarin and I don’t even know how to write my own name in Chinese either. So fucking what? What is so bad about it? Why is it so imperative for me to write my name in Chinese? Do we even have the use of it?

I don’t understand why do they have to make it sound like I’ve just sold my Chinese soul to the devil just because I believe it is dumb to learn some vernacular language that has absolute no value for my future at all.

I’ve met shitloads of people who knows how to read & write in Chinese. And you know what about them? Most of them are a bunch of delinquent parasites who doesn’t know how to even prepare a decent presentation slide and speak up their minds. They’d only sit around and nod, not knowing what others are discussing about, only to make stupid mistakes later on during their assignments. Tiu nia seng ahhh! — [nahhh that's Chinese]

Just today, a junior engineer enquired me about some “tua khor”. I asked him what the fuck is “tua khor” … and he went ahead to describe it with an aid of some sign language over a minute, then only I manage to make out that he’s referring to a “dual core” processor.

“You fuck! That’s called a DUAL CORE! Not TUA KHOR! You know what TUA KHOR means??? TUA KHOR means fatass in Hokkien!!”

And many more that are fucking stodgy, dumb and aberrant in development. Those Chinese ed farts. A bane of the modern community. They just don’t bother to learn some decent English, and fucking expect everyone to spoonfeed their static ass. Just look at those despicable Jay Chou wannabes and cheapskate motherfucking Ah Lians (and those unstable romance novel freaks). I despise these kind of people and I certainly do not want anyone in my family to be like that.

That’s why, I came up with this pledge - no vernacular education for my kid. She’s gonna converse in Cantonse and English with us… and write only in Roman alphabets. If she ever become interested in learning Mandarin? Let her start herself when she’s old enough to earn her own wage. I just don’t fucking care.