Westbound

One more notch to her belt, figuratively speaking:

23. In five days, she’ll be leaving for six months. Please return her in one piece, Bangalore.

What better reason?

Few like memes as much than I do.

1. Were you named after anyone?
   Not to my knowledge.
2. When was the last time you cried?
   Three days ago.
3. Do you like your handwriting?
   No. I write fugly.
4. What is your favourite lunch meat?
   Chicken (luncheon meat, be damned).
5. Do you have kids?
   No.
6. If you were another person, would you be friends with yourself?
   Yes.
7. Do you use sarcasm?
   Yes, but often with disastrous results that involve crickets chirping overhead.
8. Do you still have your tonsils?
   Yes.
9. Would you bungee jump?
   It ranks high on my ‘bucket list’.
10. What is your favourite cereal?
    I don’t know.
11. Do you untie your shoes when you take them off?
    No.
12. What is your favourite ice cream?
    Again, I don’t know.
13. What is the first thing you notice about people?
    Their clothes – in first or last encounters, what they were wearing is all I remember.
14. Red or pink?
    Red.
15. What is your least favourite thing about yourself?
    Stammering and speaking too fast when I’m excited or nervous; my arrogance is a close second.
16. Whom do you miss most?
    No one? That’s not the right answer, is it?
17. Do you want everyone to complete this meme?
    Why not?
18. What are you listening to now?
    The whirring of my fan.
19. What are your favourite smells?
    Coffee, hotel lobbies, Estée Lauder’s White Linen, alcohol on a person’s breath, cigarette smoke on my clothes.
20. Who was the last person you talked to on the phone?
    My mother.
21. Do you like the person who sent this to you?
    It’s more of a ‘copy and paste’ initiative, but I do like her.
22. What are your favourite sports to watch?
    Tennis, soccer, American football, baseball, volleyball, cricket (I’m determined to figure it out), extreme winter sports – if you can’t do, watch.
23. What is your hair colour?
    Dark brown.
24. What is your eye colour?
    Black?
25. Do you wear contact lenses?
    No. I had LASIK in 2008.
26. What is your favourite food?
    I don’t have one.
27. Scary movies or happy endings?
    Happily ever after, please and thank you.
28. What is the last movie you watched?
    The Hurt Locker.
29. What colour is the shirt you’re wearing now?
    Army green (with a red star – it’s a Communist China T-shirt).
30. Summer or winter?
    Winter.
31. Hugs or kisses?
    XOXO.
32. Who is most likely to respond?
    Kay-Lene, because her blog needs a break from the melancholy!
33. Who is least likely to respond?
    Too many to count.
34. What book are you reading now?
    I’m struggling to complete three books – Like the Flowing River, My Life in France and Train Man.
35. What is on your mousepad?
    A shark (or a UFO with teeth, apparently).
36. What did you watch on TV last night?
    SportsCenter Asia on ESPN.
37. The Rolling Stones or The Beatles?
    John, Paul, George and Ringo.
38. What is the furthest you have been from home?
    Either Las Vegas, or the Grand Canyon.
39. Do you have a special talent?
    Yes.
40. Where were you born?
    Singapore.

Vigilante

At this point of my life, before I accomplish things meaningful beyond comprehension, only one contribution is significant enough to matter… So to better this world, naturally.

It is my God-given talent that I make any queue in which I am move the slowest. The shortest, the express aisle, the most efficient-looking service person – educated guesses notwithstanding, I ultimately pick the one that takes the longest time. The take-home message, folks: do not, in the name of patience, stand behind me when I’m waiting in line.

By the way, some people do have superpowers, lame or otherwise.

No wiser

Fudge (Part II):

1. Misplaced expectations.
2. Pants on fire.
3. No tennis on TV!
4. Insomnia.
5. The process of starting over.

There’s truth in that

A writer has a duty and an obligation never to be understood by his own generation; convinced, as he is, that he has been born into an age of mediocrity, he believes that being understood would mean losing his chance of ever being considered a genius. A writer revises and rewrites each sentence many times. The vocabulary of the average man is made up of 3,000 words; a real writer never uses any of these, because there are another 189,000 in the dictionary, and he is not the average man.

Paulo Coelho, of these qualities, you do not have.