DIY Plastic Surgery

Ever heard of it? Well, there was the guy who gave himself rhinoplasty with a chisel and inserted a chicken bone to replace the cartilage he’d removed, the woman who cut open her own tummy to do a tummy tuck, people who try to glue their ears back or iron – literally – the wrinkles off their face.

And who could forget the Korean woman who ran out of money for silicone injections and decided to use cooking oil instead. As in she filled a syringe with cooking oil (you know, like Mazola or Knife) and injected it into her face.

Because everybody wants to look like Jocelyn Wildenstein, right? The poster girl for plastic freaking surgery. *shudder*

These poor crazy nitwits don’t need surgery. They need to be bundled up in a straitjacket and sent to the loony bin.

Couple of weeks ago, I read about Discountmedspa.com, a site that sold injectable facial fillers and chemical peels it promoted as containing a “mystery” ingredient. Right. There are even videos on the website showing you how to self-inject – just stick the unsterilised needle in here, there and over there! Nothing to it, folks!

The site has recently been shut down and the budding entrepreneur behind it, a Laurie D’Alleva, has since been arrested. Because obviously, all of the women who’d been insane enough to buy from her had discovered that, gasp, not only did the injectables not work, they produced horrific side-effects too! Like third-degree burns, hard lumps and bumps, bacterial infections … duh.

In fact, one of the customers whose entire face became inflamed after injecting herself with god-knows-what, was on record saying, “My first reaction was, why did I do this? I’m a relatively intelligent woman!” Honey, if you’d been even mildly intelligent, you wouldn’t have done this in the first place.

Screw Discipline. I’m Going Back To Bed

I feel like crap. I have run no more than three times since I got back from the Singapore Marathon in December and I will say it again: I feel like crap. I’m battling a combination of wretched guilt, some extra poundage (I don’t know how much cos I don’t own a scale) and a crippling feeling of malaise. Before I bumble any further, I should explain my use of the word ‘run’. By ‘run’, I mean a pathetic attempt at walking and jogging and whining all at once – a Herculean feat especially since I have literally crawled back to square one as far as my stamina is concerned. It’s awful. I don’t know where that 2009-ME has gone. The one with all the discipline, drive, enthusiasm, energy … it’s like she died last December and left this miserable 2010-ME in her place. I do not like this 2010-ME. It’s a defective model.

So I’m going to get my act together … right … after … Chinese New Year. No no no no-o-o-o-o. Right now, right now. To get started, I shall now inspire myself with some quotes about the one thing I need the most right now: discipline.

“It was character that got us out of bed, commitment that moved us into action, and discipline that enabled us to follow through.” (Zig Ziglar)… My commitment and discipline have gone bust but I think I still have a smidgen of that character left. Now if only I can find it …

“Discipline is remembering what you want.” (David Campbell) … I seem to have forgotten in the face of other seemingly important, more ‘pressing’ things …

“Lack of discipline leads to frustration and self-loathing.” (Marie Chapian) … Self-loathing – yeah, plenty of that going around right now …

“We must all suffer from one of two pains: the pain of discipline or the pain of regret. The difference is discipline weighs ounces while regret weighs tons.” (Jim Rohn) … I have a horrible feeling that regret will indeed one day weigh tons – literally …

“No evil propensity of the human heart is so powerful that it may not be subdued by discipline.” (Seneca) … Well, I guess the desire to lie around in bed and have bacon bits for breakfast can be considered by some to be ‘evil’, can’t it? …

“If we do not discipline ourselves, the world will do it for us.” (William Feather) … Well, either the world or nature itself …

Hmm, so am I sufficiently inspired? I don’t know. Ask me tomorrow when I’m trying to get out of bed early in the morning. Ask me then.

If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, sounds like a duck …

… it is a duck!! What is this nonsense I hear about Tiger Woods now being in “rehabilitation” for this awful “condition” he suffers from called “sex addiction”? Right, so now Mr Billionaire Golfer gets to fork out thousands of bucks a week to go through therapy to work through his issues (most of which, I’m sure, will relate heavily to his childhood) and be “cured” of this terrible “disease” he has allowed to “control” him and ruin his career.

It’s like he’s the innocent bystander who has, due to a lack of awareness, knowledge and coping skills, allowed the disease to take over. If only he knew! If only he’d attended Nymphomania 101! If only he’d read a self-help book!

It’s all so … American. Blame it on your family, your childhood, your genes, a past traumatic experience, your cold-fish spouse … bottom line: blame it on everyone and everything except yourself. Oh, you were bullied by Bertha in the kindie playground? Oh my god, no wonder you blew the brains out of all those kindergarten teachers with an AK-47. Oh, you had a bad date thirty years ago? No wonder you disemboweled every one of your dates between 1992 and 1995. It was that one horrible event that sealed your fate, wasn’t it?

You steal because you’re suffering from kleptomania. You burned down the church because you’re suffering from pyromania. If you run around ***king everything that moves, you’re not a filthy STD on legs, you’re a nymphomaniac. If you couldn’t care less about other people, you’re not a horrible person who should be burned at the stake, you’re a victim of antisocial personality disorder. If you act like a crazy person and have emotional outbursts in public (embarrassing the shit out of everyone else), you’re not a psycho-weirdo-freak, you’ve been afflicted with histrionic personality disorder. If you’ve got an ego the size of a baby elephant, you’re not overbearing and arrogant, you’ve got narcissistic personality disorder. You hate your new job because you have adjustment disorder. If you disobey rules and are scatter-brained, you’re not stupid, you have attention deficit disorder. You can’t stop lying because you suffer from mythomania. If all you want to do is lay in bed all day, you’re not a lazy bugger, you’re a clinomaniac. If you need alcohol to function, you’re not a drunk, you’re a victim of potomania!

Sure, all these labels make it easier for the doctors to put you in a box, predict your behaviours and mete out the agreed-upon methods to you. But they also put you in a third party position, as if you and your disease were separate (“Remember Horace, you are not your disease …”), therefore, absolving you of any responsibility for anything you’ve done, no matter how heinous … because you’ve got issues.

But guess what? Everybody’s got issues. Granted, some are more serious than others … but most of it’s just a part of life. So you were not popular back in school. So your parents favoured your younger sibling more. So the teacher flunked you cos you wouldn’t sleep with him. So your spouse pummels your face with a golf club after she finds out you’ve been cheating on her. So you’ve got issues. Oh hell, who doesn’t? Everything can be turned into an “issue”. So life sucks. Get over it.

And if you’re a multi-billionaire dude who screws around, you are … a multi-billionaire dude who screws around. Call it like it is. A man is only as faithful as his options anyway, and with him having so much fame and money, come on, are you people seriously telling me you’re shocked he’s unfaithful? I’m just surprised it took the public this long to hear about it. That, and how bad he is at (cough, cough) flirtexting.

“No Fatties Here!!!”

“Letting fatties roam the site is a direct threat to our business model,” said Robert Hintze, founder of the dating site BeautifulPeople.com. The site kicked out 5,000 of its members after they appeared to have fattened up over the holidays.

Man, the horizontally/metabolically/abdominally/whatever challenged are going to have a field day with this one. It’s discrimination, as clear as day. Or is it? At the end of the day, isn’t discrimination all about which side of the fence we’re on? We don’t give two hoots about discrimination and partake of it wholeheartedly, until we’re the ones being discriminated against.

Discrimination is seen as unfair only if it prevents us from being accepted into a social club we want to be a part of. If it’s a club nobody in their right mind would want to join, then it’s not discrimination. For instance, nobody wants to join the Ugly Club, no matter how exclusive it is. So even if you bar certain people from joining and ‘discriminate’ against them, nobody will particularly care cos hello, it’s the Ugly Club. But the moment you do the same with the Sexy Club, all hell breaks loose.

Come on, there’s discrimination everywhere – except that, in most cases, it’s not discrimination, just requirement. Couple of years back, I remember the government lashing out at job ads that listed ‘Chinese-speaking’ as one of their requirements. They labeled it discrimination cos the employers were eliminating all the people who needed jobs but couldn’t speak Chinese. That’s called a job requirement, you dumbass. Even that is discrimination now? I’m all for equal opportunity but hell, this is ridiculous.

Speaking of equal opportunity, I hate to break it to you but there’s no such thing. Oh sure, in the name of being politically correct, we’re all equal in the eyes of God blah blah blah … as in we all deserve the right to live and not be like, you know, murdered. But then, God sends you straight to Hell if you’re a non-believer, so isn’t that discrimination as well? Or is it discrimination only if it’s something you cannot control? Perhaps. Like a physical disability. Or the colour of your skin. Or your gender. Or your height. So if you want to be a model but you’re 4’11”, are you a victim of discrimination if the modeling agency throws you out on your butt? And what about if you want to have a profile on BeautifulPeople.com and they reject your application cos you’re ugly? Is that discrimination cos unlike your height (which you can’t control), you can – to a significant extent – control the way you look? A little makeup here, a little shape underwear there and presto!

So my point is (and trust me, I do have one), discrimination is everywhere and it is, in many cases, situational. You’re accepted in some situations and you’re discriminated against in others. The lesson to be learned here is: stop trying to crowbar your way into places where you don’t belong. And if you want it really bad, then be smart, stop carping and learn to play by their rules.

50 Things That Make Me Go “Eeeww”

1. Guys with long pinky fingernails.
2. Guys who perm their hair. I don’t get it.
3. Cars that honk when you don’t move the nano-second the light turns red.
4. People who spit in public.
5. People who mispronounce ‘development’ or ‘three’, use ‘double-confirm’ or say ‘actually’ at the beginning of every sentence.
6. People who cross the road like their grandfather owned it.
7. Cars that go faster at crossings even when there are pedestrians (pedestrians meaning me).
8. When you’re pissed and somebody says, “Chill dude chill.”
9. Limp handshakes.
10. Sweaty, clammy handshakes.
11. People who think Paula Abdul deserved to be on Idol.
12. People who don’t like Simon Cowell cos he’s a “meanie”.
13. Anyone who thinks Adam Sandler is funny.
14. People who step on the toilet bowl to pee (what the hell’s up with that??).
15. People who leave the toilet stall all wet after use.
16. Manoeuvre – it’s the one word I can never remember how to spell.
17. Korean actors with permed bouffants and creepy, effeminate lips.
18. People who speak really bad English but with a British accent.
19. Bats – they look like the spawns of Satan.
20. Stupid things politicians say in the paper to dodge our questions.
21. Men with hair pieces cello-taped to their heads – come on guys, who do you think you’re kidding?
22. Men with comb-overs. Sure, drag the twelve greasy strands the opposite direction and we’ll be none the wiser.
23. Unibrows – unless you’re channeling the spirit of Frida Kahlo, just pluck the damn hairs.
24. Bushy, unshaped eyebrows. Last I checked, tweezers aren’t all that expensive.
25. Moles with hair growing out of them.
26. Ears with hair growing out of them.
27. People who wear super-short shorts to go running, displaying their wobbly cellulite and jumbo thighs for the world to see.
28. Sun sleeves. Worse – patterned sun sleeves.
29. When you’re eating out with ten people and you’re the slowest eater and everyone gets their food but you and when your dish does arrive, it’s not what you ordered.
30. Restaurants that don’t provide complimentary glasses of water (and make you pay RM5 for a bottle of mineral water instead).
31. When waiters take your order and you can tell from their blank faces that they have no idea what the heck they’re doing.
32. When all the parking metres near your car are spoilt and you need to walk really far.
33. People who move their heads too much when they talk.
34. People who physically stand in an empty parking space to ‘reserve’ it for their friend who’s driving around the lot in search of a spot wa-a-a-ay on the other side.
35. People who don’t signal and turn, or signal but don’t turn or turn the opposite direction.
36. People who drive with their hazard lights on.
37. People who drive too slow.
38. People who drive like they have a woman in labour in the backseat. Usually, they don’t.
39. Idiot lorry drivers who tail you and flash you from behind.
40. There’s a traffic jam FOR NO REASON.
41. Traffic police on the shoulder lane on the Federal Highway waving at you to go straight. Hello, there’s no other way to go la. Did you think, without these buggers, we’d all stupidly turn right and crash into the divider?
42. People who slow down to gawk at accidents.
43. You finally find the perfect pair of shoes and they don’t have it in your size.
44. You buy something only to have it go on sale 70% two weeks later.
45. People who go into the dressing room and stay in there while their girlfriends run around the boutique pulling additional stuff off the racks for them to try on.
46. Paying forty bucks for a book only to find it super-boring.
47. Visible panty lines.
48. Cracked heels with dirt lodged in them.
49. Carrot-cut jeans. Every pair should be burned as a warning to other defiant manufacturers of carrot-cut jeans.
50. Shapeless, baggy garments that do nothing for your figure.
51. Reaching 50 and realising I can still go on!!

Resuscitating My (Dead) Inner Artist

You know how they say to really know yourself – your gifts, temperament, personality and all that – you just need to look at the kind of child you were. That is who you really are … your authentic self. You’re not really this adult person you’ve grown to become. You change as you grow up – no prizes for guessing why. I look at the kind of things I used to love to do back when I was a kid and one of them was drawing. I loved sketching and painting and making things with my hands. It’s been ages since I’ve done anything like that. The last time I picked up a pencil to sketch was 14 years ago. Which was when I drew this Chinese girl …

… this really stiff-looking horse that has, for reasons I cannot remember, no eyeballs …

… and, for some bizarre reason, Oprah Winfrey (without the extra poundage and for some other bizarre reason, with white hair).

I was skulking around this arts and crafts store the other day and was struck by how excited I became all of a sudden … looking at the canvases, the tubes of paint, the brushes … it got me thinking again. Maybe it’s time to attempt a resurrection of the inner artist I’d shoved aside for 15 years. You know, dredge her up, slap her around a bit and see if she’s still got any life left in her. She might. I certainly hope so … I’d hate to see her dead forever. Besides, drawing will give me something to do when I’m old, senile and retired.

5 Great Reasons To Have Kids

I am no lover of little tykes. Anyone who knows me – or has read this, or has even seen me – can vouch for that. Lately though, I’ve had a tiny change of heart. I don’t seem to recoil in revulsion in as severe a degree as I used to whenever I came in proximity to a small child. While this isn’t an indication that I’ve been taken hostage by an uncontrollable urge to get knocked up, it is an indication that I’ve come to terms with the faint possibility that there might be some benefit in having (or at least being near) a kid after all. Here are five of mine:

1. Kids are amusing. They walk funny, they fall down a lot, they say strange things and they do a funny little dance whenever people dressed in giant animal costumes appear on TV.  They are a never-ending source of entertainment. What can I say? I get bored and sometimes, I run out of good DVDs.

2. Kids make great excuses. “Oh, I can’t come in to work cos my kid is really sick … Aiya, I have to leave this wonderful (read: super-boring) luncheon cos my kid’s waiting for me at home … Sorry I’m an hour late, you know my kid la, always giving me problems!!!”

3. Kids can be useful. Once they’re old enough – say, two or three – you can use them to fetch things for you, do chores around the house and if you’re lucky and with enough training, they can even lift moderately heavy, non-breakable objects and operate kitchen appliances.

4. Kids are like your personal dolls. You can dress them anyway you like and they have to comply. Sure I know there are precocious two-year-old terrors who are extremely finicky about their choice of attire but hey, take solace in the fact that they’re still small enough for you to arm-wrestle into submission.

5. Kids boost your self-esteem. They ask you all sorts of questions (why is the sun so hot, why is the sky so blue, why is that tree so big?) which you can easily answer even if you have no idea what the hell you’re talking about. “The sun is so hot cos it’s made of fire!” And they will believe you, which makes you feel really smart and powerful.

It has taken me three decades to inch away from absolute repugnance to … a somewhat milder form of repugnance. At this rate, by the time I do develop something bearing even the flimsiest resemblance to maternal instinct, I will be well be in my 60s and my uterus defunct. What a relief.

Revolutionary Road

Why did I buy this book? First reason: I read glowing reviews on Amazon; reviews that went so far as to declare the book ‘flawless’ – high praise indeed. Written by American novelist Richard Yates in the 50s, the book never enjoyed commercial success in its time (purportedly cos it was too depressing; can’t disagree there) and its author, a gifted storyteller who was never given his rightful place in the canon of great American writers. The book is enjoying a lot more publicity now though, thanks to the movie adaptation … which brings me to the second reason I bought this book: Kate Winslet.

What’s the book about? A suburban American family – one man, one wife, two kids and a picket fence. The stay-at-home wife is once an aspiring actress while the husband aspires to be … nothing (he has a decent-paying but boring-as-hell job in a machine manufacturing company). They’re not really happy with their marriage and life in general – always feeling like there should be more – but are pretty good at keeping up the pretense of a typical happy American family.  Life goes on in its humdrum pace: there’s work every day (so boring the husband screws around with one of the receptionists just for kicks), meet-ups and dinners with friends (the friendships are a bit of a farce), occasional fights between husband and wife, after which they make up and make nice, sweeping the growing resentment under the carpet and move on.

What did I like about it? Book 1 and Book 3. The novel is written in three parts: Books 1, 2 and 3. I especially liked the first one – the first few chapters kept me hooked. I liked how it started with the less-than-stellar play followed by a good marital slug-fest … and I particularly liked the ending. Some people might’ve seen it coming a mile away but I didn’t, at least not until she made breakfast for him and was uncharacteristically nice the day after a huge fight. No spoilers here, don’t worry.

What did I not like about it? Book 2. Just like the middle child of any family, this was my least favourite. Probably cos nothing much happens. I confess to skipping a few passages here and there when my mind began to wander.

Reading this book made me want to … watch the movie. Which I did a week later.

Burn, Baby, Burn!

I used to read the local papers diligently. Every single day, in fact. So every morning, over a cup of coffee, I keep up with all the happenings in our country:

somebody robs and maims somebody …

some driver falls asleep at the wheel, crashes the bus and kills everyone in it …

somebody slaughters somebody else for cutting him in traffic …

somebody blows up a fancy hotel, a plane, a train, a really really tall building, another person …

somebody warns us not to “sensationalise” racial issues …

somebody spews some more vacuous rhetoric on the wondrous transformative powers of 1Malaysia …

somebody builds a really really big house with funds that seem to have popped out of nowhere …

somebody hacks off the head of a sacred bovine creature and runs around town with it in a most defiant manner …

somebody gets thrown in the slammer for simply doing their job …

somebody gets shoved off a really really tall building …

somebody is accused of corruption while another, who is as corrupt as the big nose on his face, walks away free as a bird …

somebody wants to ban lipstick, high heels, concerts, performances, oxygen, butterflies, whatever …

somebody burns a church …

and another …

and another …

I’m calling it a day and tossing the papers in the bin. I don’t want to read them anymore. I’d rather read this.

Who’s Afraid Of Jane Austen?

Why did I buy this book? Being an aspiring pseudo-intellectual, I want to know about the literary greats even if I haven’t actually read their works. Despite the fact that I am not actually afraid of Jane Austen (I have read her – I’m a girl after all), I liked the book title cos there are some authors Hitchings talks about in there of whom I am a little ‘afraid’ – people such as Dante, Joyce, Proust and Tolstoy.

What’s the book about? A smart, witty insight into literary greats you should know in order to appear sufficiently knowledgeable. In addition to the writers mentioned above, the author talks about Homer, Virgil, Shakespeare, Dickens, Cervantes, Dostoevsky; has a chapter on writers you should know today (Philip Roth, Salman Rushdie and Martin Amis, among many others) and scientists such as Darwin, Freud and Hawking whose books we all “know” about, have never read and most probably never will.

What did I like about it? The book lives up to its title: it gives you enough meat about each author and their most famous works – you know more than just plotlines, you understand its significance, central themes and a little analysis to boot. It’s easy to read and pretty funny too. This is going to make me look like the dimmest bulb in the chandelier, but until this book, I didn’t really know what Ulysses was all about (it’s a novel set in the 1904 about a writer and an ad salesman, and their lives over the course of a single day in Dublin). I thought it was about the Trojan War or some Greek god or something. Don’t blame me! Ulysses is Latin for Odysseus, who was the son of Laertes and the ruler of Ithaca and a Greek leader in the Trojan War and the protagonist in Homer’s Odyssey and Brad Pitt’s rippling thigh muscles … um, what was I talking about again?

What did I not like about it? I wish the book went on another 100 pages! Also, there’s no mention of Mark Twain or Oscar Wilde (except fleetingly and might I add, insufficiently) or F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Reading this book made me want to … actually read some of the books the author talks about, so I downloaded Ulysses and sampled the first few sentences. Wah lau, so damn ‘talky’. Surrender. For some reason – reading this book made me want to read … Frankenstein. Don’t ask me why cos he’s not mentioned in the book at all. I guess God works in mysterious ways …