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!!

My Favourite Pompous Quote

There’s nothing I love more than a mean-spirited insult cloaked in the most pompous of languages, uttered by the most arrogant of men. And this, in my opinion, takes the cake.

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“… He writes the worst English I have ever encountered. It reminds me of wet sponges, tattered washing on the line, stale bean soup, college yells, dogs barking through endless nights; it is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it.
It drags itself out of the dark abyism of pish and crawls insanely up to the topmost pinnacle of tosh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash …”

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

That’s so beautiful it’s music to my ears. It was penned by American writer and satirist HL Mencken on President Warren G Harding’s inaugural address in 1921.

Too bad it wasn’t physically possible for him to live long enough to witness President Bush’s inaugural address. I bet he’d have something interesting to say about that!

My personal favourite part of the quote? The topmost pinnacle of tosh – hahaha, that cracks me up! Now if I can only find an occasion to use it.

What’s The Difference Between A Man And A Chimpanzee?

One is hairy, smells and scratches his arse.

The other is a chimpanzee.

Hahahaha!! I’m sorry. This is juvenile but I couldn’t resist.

Complication, Thy Name Is Cake

Why do I complicate things? Is it due to my unacknowledged fear of facing reality? Do I hide behind a façade of abstruse explanations and cleverly formulated rationalizations so that it appears as if I have a valid reason for behaving the way I do? Do I complicate matters to flabbergast other people (who usually have no idea in hell what I’m jabbering about anyway), make myself look all deep or purely to inject some entertainment value in my life?

Just got into a lengthy (read pointless) discussion with Slugabed over the issue of Cake, after which I completely pissed him off. While I won’t indulge in the gory details of our discussion, suffice to say that it wasn’t actually about Cake. It was about the significance of Cake – a significance that was lost on him, I might add.

It was hard to carry on such a conversation with Slugabed, especially when he wouldn’t keep quiet and kept interjecting with, “What are you talking about??” in a tone which first hinted of curiosity, then bewilderment, then incredulity, eventually morphing into impatience, sarcasm and finally, downright annoyance.

I cannot lie. I felt slight stirrings of satisfaction in me when I heard Slugabed starting to buckle under his gargantuan effort to stay sane while trying to understand my ramblings, be the bigger person and give into my whims.

It’s strange. I feel like I’ve succeeded whenever I confuse and/or annoy somebody. Why does this seem to give me greater dissatisfaction than say, actually coming to a mutual compromise and chalking up some progress?

I know what Slugabed is thinking right now. He’s thinking that I’ve gone completely nuts. He’s also wondering what in the world I mean by Cake – is it a code for some other confectionary? He’s trying to figure out how to handle these vile mood swings of mine. He’s formulating a strategy for the next time I decide to go berserk on him. He’s thinking next time, when she gets like this again, I’m going to just ignore her until she starts to talk some sense … or being a typical man, he’s probably wondering if he should have Cake for dessert.

Images by stock.xchng

To Love Is To Suffer

“… To avoid suffering, one must not love. But then, one suffers from not loving. Therefore, to love is to suffer; to not love is to suffer. To be happy is to love. To be happy then, is to suffer, but suffering makes one unhappy. Therefore, to be happy, one must love or love to suffer or suffer from too much happiness.”

- Woody Allen
American Actor, Author, Screenwriter and Film Director, b.1935

Image by stock.xchng

15 Words To Use In Your Next Conversation

This post isn’t about big words. It’s just words I really, really like – maybe because of the way they look or sound or stuff they make me think of. So here they are – read them and make a solemn vow to use them at least one time. Trust me. It’ll be fun.

(1) MORIBUND

First of all, I like this word because it looks to me like a Japanese word. Something very Asian about it – the ‘mori’ and the ‘bund’ like Shanghai Bund. Of course, the actual meaning is approaching death, which is rather funny. “Ooh, are we feeling moribund today?”

(2) SCHOOLMARMISH

Schoolmarmish means someone who has the matronly qualities of teacher in a kampong. I’m seeing unkempt hair, poorly applied makeup, horribly unfashionable apparel and heels never exceeding half an inch. Someone who is strict and is a stickler for rules. ‘Marm’ is similar in sound to ‘mom’ though not in a warm, nice maternal way; but in a more unflattering way.

(3) POMPOUS

Something about the word pompous which sounds so inflated, full of self-importance. Look at this: pomp and pageantry. The word even looks pretty on a page – maybe it’s the circular shape of the letters P and O and another O and the sleek curve of the U. I think a little dose of pomposity is endearing and quite funny – maybe that’s why I liked Frasier so much back when it was on TV.

(4) MONGER

We all know the neighbourhood fishmonger but I like how ‘monger’ can be attached almost like a suffix to any other thing you’re peddling – eg. fearmongering, pornmongering, etc. Just picture a bunch of smarmy, middle-aged men peddling little jars labeled with scare tactics like ‘death’, ‘regret’ or ‘pain’ in the pasar.

(5) ENNUI

First of all, I love the way this word looks. So unusual. Almost foreign. I also love the way it’s pronounced: ohn-wee. Isn’t that exotic? It means oppressive boredom, like when you’re stuck listening to some droning ignoranus and you’re slipping into a sea of ennui, you know, before you proceed into a state of moribund. *snore*

(6) VACUOUS

I heard this years ago on Monty Python’s Flying Circus when this guy went to John Cleese asking to buy an argument. They get into a fight and John Cleese yells, “Don’t give me that, you snotty faced heap of parrot droppings! … Shut your festering gob, you tit! Your type really makes me puke, you vacuous, toffy-nosed, malodorous pervert!!!” – hahahahaaa!! That was so damn funny I still remember it today and still love the word vacuous (stupid) along with snotty (conceited), gob (a small lump) and malodorous (stinky).

(7) FLUMMOX

Sounds to me like a vacuum cleaner brand (I grew up with Electrolux, what can I say?). Flummox means confused, perplexed. Say flummoxed and I imagine a person with eyeballs as wide as saucers, practically bulging out of his sockets; mouth rounded into a perfect ‘O’, eyebrows twisted into knots. Flummox is a funny-sounding, funny-looking word.

(8) SMARMY

This is someone we’d call ‘damn yong sui’ – someone with a face so sleazy, so oily (figuratively, of course) and with so much insincerity oozing out of every pore that you just want to bitch-slap the smarm out of them. Beadle, the evil Judge Turpin’s idiot sidekick in Sweeney Todd comes to mind. Timothy Spall played him so well and was so horribly repulsive that I squirmed in my seat the whole time.

(9) HEBETUDE

I remember seeing this word in an article in Time magazine many years ago, “… in a terminal funk of hebetude and sloth …” and fell in love with it. It’s an odd-looking little word. While it means mental lethargy or dullness, the word itself doesn’t really reflect it. It’s also cool that until today, ‘hebetude’ is still underlined in Word as a misspelled word. Haha.

(10) SPIEL

You know that scene in the Exorcist when the girl pukes? (Blech) That’s what I imagine spiel to be. While the actual definition is to say something at great length to persuade (I say con!) someone into doing something, to me, there’s just something very negative about spiel. Even the pronunciation of the word … it isn’t a word you say, it’s a word you spit out. Talk about verbal diarrhea.

(11) MEGALOMANIA

There’s something so wonderfully maniacal about this word. It sounds so pompous (yay!) and evil. The world is full of megalomaniacs – even those with a little authority can suffer from megalomania. What was really funny was this episode of The Office when resident sycophant Dwight becomes drunk with power when he gets to decide which of his colleagues would have to work over the weekend. “This is so sad. This is the smallest amount of power I’ve ever seen go to someone’s head,” Jim says. That was so funny.

(12) SLUGABED

Slugabed speaks for itself: a late sleeper. This is my nickname for my boyfriend who’s a loyal member of a species that can slug around in bed until the ungodly hour of 2pm. Of course, he also goes to bed at the ungodly hour of 6am on a regular basis. I will never understand the concept, not even if I live to be a hundred.

(13) DOUR

Someone with a sour face. When I see this word, I picture an overweight woman, scornful expression etched on her puffy features, lips so thin that they resemble bent razor blades, patches of powdery dough all over her face. In one hand is a rolling pin while the other’s perched on her ample hip. She’s standing in an almost combative pose. Yup. That’s what I see when I see ‘dour’.

(14) CLAPTRAP

I loved the phrase ‘unctuous claptrap’ so much that I wrote it down in my dictionary. Claptrap is almost onomatopoeic (a word that sounds like the sound made by the thing it’s referring to – come again?). Claptrap means empty language – yammer yammer yammer, blah blah blah, etc. Come to think of it, maybe claptrap should be craptrap. Hey, I just invented a neologism! Craptrap: empty language that’s also full of sh*t.

(15) TROGLODYTE

I love troglodyte. It means a Neanderthal that lives in a hole. Hahaha … that pretty much describes men in general, doesn’t it? Offense intended. But I like this word because it looks so troll-like. I think Hunchback of Notre-Dame. I think shriveled, skeletal gargoyles. I think Smeagol. I think Benjamin Button before he turned into Brad Pitt.

All Together Now, “Awww …”

This post you’re about to read is a departure from the norm – the norm being health, fitness and the pursuit of rock-hard thighs. Yeah, it’s a total aberration but I can’t help it. A few months ago, I received an email, opened it and saw this!

Look at that!

And that!

And that!

Omg, they’re so funny. I swear, if this doesn’t make you smile or feel even a teensy weensy itty bitty bit happier, then you, my friend, are not human.

I think everyone should have a pick-me-up picture – something they can look at whenever they’re feeling a little blue (wei, porn not included okay). These are mine. Then my colleague had to spoil everything by showing me pics of Chow Chows with their fur dyed to turn them into panda bears!!! The pictures FREAKED ME OUT. Some people may think they’re cute but good lord, they made me absolutely sick. I don’t know la. I just have this thing about animals being turned into like, another species. I’m VIOLENTLY against it and I think the people who do it should be jailed.

I’ve Found The Cure To Cancer, Diabetes, AIDS, Acne & Mood Swings

I care a lot about my health. That’s why I try to eat fruits and vegetables and avoid things that can lead to an untimely death (eg. poisonous plants, gasoline and most recently, char siew paus).

My health is also why I’ve kept one particular flyer tucked safely in my journal for a year. Every once in a while, I take it out to look at it. Recently, I realized how selfish I’ve been to keep this information all to myself. Good news must be shared! Especially when it can save people from horrible diseases and death. So I made the decision to share the information contained in this flyer. In fact, I’ve even gone the extra mile to enlarge each part of the flyer so that you guys can read it for yourself.

Whenever people slip things under my windscreen wiper, I usually toss them out without even looking at them. But not this time. The catchy headline seduced me immediately: LATEST BREAKTHRU IN TECHNOLOGY. I had become powerless and was lured in like a moth to a flame.

As my eyes travelled down the very long list of horrible deadly diseases, I was blown away. From cancer to AIDS (I thought AIDS was incurable but apparently not!), sinus infections to acne. I couldn’t believe it. This technology can cure cancer AND acne? It can also cure you of kidney disease and high blood pressure (I didn’t know high blood pressure was considered a disease – how ignorant I was before I read this flyer!), Lyme disease and even MOOD SWINGS! Wait wait, got some more. It can boost your fertility and cure sore throats while helping you fight Parkinson’s. And ALL FOR ONLY RM198! What a bargain!!!

At this point, I’m crawling out of my skin with excitement. Then I discover that this miraculous technology isn’t a drug but a MIRACLE FOOD! It’s so powerful that it works in JUST 2 DAYS. In fact, some Thai actress who was apparently mute AND crippled, could TALK within 24 hours and WALK within 48 hours of eating this Miracle Food! Thank god she was cured. I shudder to think how her acting career could’ve survived with her being, you know, mute and crippled.

I’m so excited, my fingers are trembling. I flip the flyer over and there are testimonimals. If that doesn’t convince you, I swear, nothing will. I mean, just read the headline: DIABETES LESS THAN A MONTH. You can become diabetic in less than a month! Most people take years to screw up their blood sugar levels and you get to do it in less than 30 days?? I say go for it. And below the headline are four pictures of grotesquely deformed feet with pus oozing out everywhere, bloody sores and other things. You know, just in case you don’t know what diabetes looks like.

Then come the testimonials: they’re all ang-mohs and look very happy to be cured of their diseases. The first lady was suffering from bronchitis, sinus, allergies, fatigue, migraine (AND headaches – double whammy) and joint pain. That’s a lot of suffering for one person, poor thing. Thank goodness she was cured in 8 months.

Even this guy (who looks suspiciously like Ralph Lauren) who had a damaged vertebra was cured in 18 days! And look at the doctor dude two pics down: his daughter had serious sinus problems and was cured in one month. And the last lady whose kidneys, muscles, liver and pancreas had FAILED was cured in 13 days! This Miracle Food practically raises people from the dead!

Makes me wonder why all these scientists are running around growing human organs on the backs of lab rats and cloning hamsters. They should all just become distributors of Miracle Food. They can do a lot more good that way, don’t you think?

Great Truths About Death & Money

1. I have all the money I need … if I die by 4 o’clock today. (Henry Youngman)

2. You can’t have everything. Where would you put it? (Steven Wright)

3. Money was invented so we’d know how much we owe. (Anon.)

4. I intend to live forever. So far, so good. (Steven Wright)

5. I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying. (Woody Allen)

6. Money is better than poverty, if only for financial reasons. (Woody Allen)

7. What’s the use of happiness? It can’t buy you money! (Henry Youngman)

8. To love is to suffer. To avoid suffering, one must not love. But then, one suffers from not loving. Therefore, to love is to suffer; to not love is to suffer. To be happy is to love. To be happy then, is to suffer, but suffering makes one unhappy. Therefore, to be happy, one must love or love to suffer or suffer from too much happiness. (Woody Allen)