From Bedlam to Bedroom

"I'm gonna fight 'em all

A seven nation army couldn't hold me back

They're gonna rip it off

Taking their time right behind my back"

Seven Nation Army (2003) by The White Stripes

I'm listening to the Glitch Mob remix.

I have a love-hate relationship with my chosen career, and these days, it's gravitating far too much to the hate side of the spectrum. I hate being the Ward Captain for the sinking HMS Female Surgical Ward. I hate being accountable for my colleagues' screw ups, and I hate having to be the person to talk to them about how they can improve on their performances when all I want to do is mind my own fucking business. I hate that our workload doubled due to an unprecedented deluge of new patients in the past few weeks. I hate the fact that on some days, there are only three house officers available to perform the collective job list of the ward while I'm still getting requests from my bosses to send ever more house officers to the endoscopy and the fluoroscopy rooms, the clinic, and the operating theatres - and then having to explain to those same bosses why the millions of little jobs in the ward were not accomplished to their utter and complete satisfaction.

Most of all, I hate being in a position of leadership I neither desired nor asked for. It happened when I was in the OB/GYN department, and now it happened again. I am by nature a loner, an outsider, a contrarian, and an irreparably twisted weirdo. Why do the people in-charge keep getting these ideas that I should instead be part of the establishment?

It's been a couple of weeks since I had breakfast or lunch and my stomach is starting to forget what those feels like. I'm making amends to myself by having really nice dinners every day and then going home to make myself an equally nice drink. Today, I made myself a rather long, sippy White Russian - one part vodka with one part Kahlúa on the rocks, and then topped off with almost two parts cream.

It was heavenly, indulgent, and I damn well earned it. And I'm going to watch Midnight in Paris nursing it.

Having a slice of me-time,

k0k s3n w4i

The Most Dangerous of Worms

"The modern king has become a vermiform appendix - useless when quiet, when obtrusive in danger of removal"

Austin O'Malley

For this post's quote, I nearly went with "Usul, we have wormsign the likes of which even God has never seen!"
In a way, it's actually more apt.

Last month, I had the opportunity to perform my very first emergency appendicectomy after having observed and assisted only once (a couple of months ago at that), and right before scrubbing in, I spent a couple of minutes reading an online step-by-step guide on how to do it. Most of my superiors agree that a house officer should assist in at least three appendicectomies before going for it, but lucky for me, the medical officer who was supervising me did not ask if I've fulfilled that informal quota. Having Caesared a baby out of a mother's womb before, slaying a little worm really felt safe in comparison. Incidentally, the worm Ouroboros had bitten its tail and came full circle - when I was 5 years old, an appendix tried to take me out. Now after 5 years of med school, I served my cold, cold revenge and took one out.

However, this post is not about my mostly ad libbed journey through my medical training. It's about the vermiform appendix, which is basically Latin for "worm-like extra-bit".

You'll notice that "worm-like extra-bit" is a very accurate description.

Appendicitis refers to the inflammation of the appendix, and it happens when its teeny-tiny opening into the caecum gets blocked by something. That something may be a bacterial or viral infection, parasitic worms, cancer, swallowed foreign objects, or a faecolith (which literally means "shit stone"). Depending on which part of the world you live, how old you are and which gender you belong to, there's about 6 to 16% chance that your appendix will try to kill you in this lifetime - and 27 out of 10,000 times, it will actually succeed, even in spite of the full force of modern medicine. Just owning one is a possible mortal hazard waiting to happen. So why oh why are we equipped with a self-destruct mechanism hanging uselessly off our large intestines?

If you believe that God created us in the form we now inhabit, then you must also believe that God is a blithering halfwit who can't even build an alimentary canal without accidentally installing a killswitch. However, if you understand evolutionary biology, you'd recognise the appendix as a vestigial organ serving none to non-essential functions as suggested by its high variability in shapes, sizes, orientations and positions and evidenced by homologous structures in other animals. The appendix is basically part of the caecum writ pathetic, and in herbivorous mammals, their caeca are capacious and contains cellulolytic bacteria which aides in digesting plant material. In animals less dependent on vegetation for food (such as us humans), most of our caecum is a shrunken worm-like structure. In fact, some carnivores have their entire caecum reduced to an appendix vermiformis. Further proof that the appendix is a vestige of our evolutionary heritage is that our ape cousins like orang utans have larger appendices while our most closely phylogenetically-related species, the chimpanzees, has an appendix very similar to ours. Rhesus macaques, which is considered lower primates compared to chimps and orangs (and is more distantly related to us than either), don't even own an appendix but instead, have a broad caecal end much like other herbivores. We are technically in the process of losing our caeca, and the appendix is what we get out of it.

Okay, those of you who paid attention in 2009 saw the internet exploded with scientific news of a possible function for the human appendix. To understand this, you must first understand that our guts are commonly filled with helpful, "good" bacteria which lives symbiotically with us, helping us digest food, teaching our immune system how to fight, and fending off so-called pathogenic "bad" bacteria. When our gastrointestinal tract does get invaded successfully by non-native microorganisms and everything is being washed out in a diarrhoeal holocaust for example, the appendix functions as a kind of bomb shelter for the local friendly bacteria where they wait out the shitstorm, ready to recolonise our colons (heh) as soon as conditions are right for them again.

Some creationist cretins who denies evolution touted this particular bit of research as ahah! proof! that since the appendix has a function, it is therefore not a vestigial organ and that God is awesome while Darwin smells.

They neglected to note, however, that the paper in question actually supports evolution. It aimed to explain why the appendix, being the peril disproportionate to its perks to higher primates, is still being conserved in their bodies. It is an interesting bit of medical science, but one of its senior authors accidentally stuck some feet into his mouth and, much to the glee of creationists everywhere, said:

"Maybe it's time to correct the textbooks. Many biology texts today still refer to the appendix as a vestigial organ."

Wrong. A vestigial organ, by definition, doesn't mean that something is useless. Evolutionary vestiges refers to any diminished structures that played a larger physiological role in a species' ancestor than in present. Charles Darwin himself wrote of vestigiality in On the Origin of Species as much: "an organ, serving for two purposes, may become rudimentary or utterly aborted for one, even the more important purpose, and remain perfectly efficient for the other." In the case of the human appendix, it is the reduced part of the plant-digesting powerhouse of a caecum our evolutionary forerunners used to have in their employ i.e. vestigial. Maybe this narrow annex of the caecum have found new life as a reservoir for our gut flora in times of disease but so what? This happens all the time in evolution and we even have a term for it: exaptation. Feathers are the classical example of this process. It first evolved to keep theropod dinosaurs warm (yes, velociraptors were covered in feathers), and was then coopted for display and flight in their avian descendants.

And you know what? What minuscule function the vermiform appendix does perform for us doesn't seem to be all that important after all. Countless patients undergo appendicectomies every day around the world, all to no apparent ill-effects to their health. I mean look at me: 20 years without an appendix and still counting. You don't see me dying just because occasionally, water spouts out of my ass instead of crap after some bad sushi. But if I didn't have that appendicectomy 20 years ago, I very well could have.

So there you go: is God an omni-incompetent nincompoop or did evolution happened? You decide.



Worm-slayer,
k0k s3n w4i

Sophie and the Sin of Athenian Idealatry

"Date a girl who reads because you deserve it. You deserve a girl who can give you the most colorful life imaginable. If you can only give her monotony, and stale hours and half-baked proposals, then you’re better off alone. If you want the world and the worlds beyond it, date a girl who reads.

Or better yet, date a girl who writes."

Rosemarie Urquico

An excerpt from the essay reply to Charles Warnke's You Should Date An Illiterate Girl. I like both pieces.

There is a girl I'm in love with, and her name is... let us call her Sophie. Sophie is perfect, and embodies every quality - rare or otherwise - that I admire in a girl. She's about 5'1" of perky impishness and dimpled smiles, and she wears her hair in that pixie-cut chic I adore oh-so very much. But these are merely the frosting, and not the cake.

The thing about Sophie is that she is a prolific and voracious reader of books. All books. From autobiographies to bildungsromans, historical fiction to sci-fi, and the highest to the lowest order of fantasies. She reads them all no matter if its written by the Brothers Grimm or the Sisters Brontë, Edgar Allan Poe or Ishiguro Kazuo, G. K. Chesterton or Sidney Sheldon. She had been there and back again, into the wardrobe and down the rabbit hole. She had beheld Dorian Gray's portrait in its various stages of decomposition, walked away from Omelas and witnessed the passion of the Nazerene. She always carries a paperback in her handbag, several volumes of audiobooks loaded into her MP3 player, and a thousand more in her Kindle just in case  because she thinks that there is no worthier pursuit to fill the intermissions of her life than ink in its myriad forms. She had visited worlds beyond ours, and lived more lifetimes than the single one helping we are allowed. I want to reminisce with her these places we have been to, these lives we have led. I want to sit across from her as she swims between the pages of a new novel, and I in mine. I'll steal glances at her. I'll watch as as her eyes brighten and her breath halts - and then she'll break surface for a moment just to read to me a line or a passage which excites her, touches her or simply blows her mind out of the water.

As she consumes pages and proses, she also crafts them. She's working on a novel and holds the ideas of several hundred more in the bookshelves of her mind. She could think of no higher calling than to leave at least one of them behind before the light of her consciousness goes out, and no higher honour than having it considered worthy enough to be catalogued in the sum total of humanity's bibliography - a sentiment I share with every fibre of my existence. She understands the crippling paralysis of the writer's block, and the pure joy of finding the perfect words, the bon mots, in expressing precisely what she means to say. She also writes a blog and record every opinion and emotion which inhabit her psyche, and document every worthwhile experience of her beautiful life - because every life interpreted through the lens of carefully-considered, heartfelt words is more splendiferous than one which meanders unlettered. A writer is an uncommon creature which does not merely think, but thinks also about thinking. I cannot identify with those who only wade in their stream of consciousness but never stood at the banks to watch it flow, taking notes of its liquid form, its ripples, its waves. Most of all, I want a lover whose mind I can read.

Sophie is intelligent and loves the accretion of knowledge for its own sake. She believes in the silent power of knowing how things work around, above and inside us. I like it that she comprehends the concept of falsifiability, delights in the fact that dinosaurs still exists today and often on our dinner plates, and knows that the Dirac Sea is not a body of water. I like it that I can argue with her about gravity; on the plausibility of gravitons as predicted by the quantum field theory versus the geometric elegance of Einstein's general relativity. I enjoy our coffee talks where we discuss comparative theology, debate on the merits of Kantian ethics, and wrestle with the Platonic Theory of Forms (which we refer to as the Hylaean Theoric World because we have both read Neal Stephenson's Anathem and loved it). I recognise in her my intellectual equal, and if you lived a life surrounded by simple people and simple conversations you would celebrate this discovery too. It's like she's at just the right height to dance with. Or to kiss.

There are so many women who walked by me without so much as leaving a faint footprint in their passage through my life - faces without names that I shared a seat with on buses and trains, drift past as I stroll down a street or in a mall, or sat across from in a café or a library on a lazy Sunday afternoon.

Behind one of these faces is Sophie.

Oh, if only I know which!

Forgive me, Sophie. Forgive me O Future Lover for I have sinned against you. I am a daydreamer, a hopeless romantic and an idealator of the worst degree. And I am in love with the idea of you.

Romanticidal maniac,

k0k s3n w4i

The Benefits of Being an Asshole

"Sometimes I park in handicapped spaces,

While handicapped people make handicapped faces.

I'm an asshole (He's an asshole, what an asshole)

I'm an asshole (He's a real fucking asshole)"

Asshole (1993) by Denis Leary

Does it make me an asshole that this song amuses me?

I just punched out an overnight shift playing doctor in the Female Surgical Ward to a beautiful blue-skied Saturday morning. After a serviceable free breakfast at the dietitians' office pantry, I envisioned a good time at the movies so I made my way, by my winsome lonesome, to the mall which hosts the least depressing movie theatre on this side of Borneo. The 12:30 PM screening of Spielberg's War Horse was the beast I intended to catch.

Afternoons are perfect for movie matinées because the halls would be habitually unpeopled, and I will not feel the frost of my mortality while I wait at the box office queues. "Un billet, s’il vous plaît," I asked in English when it was my turn and I was informed, to my horror and indignation, that the hall in which the film was playing was reserved exclusively for couples, pairs and deuces only - and that if I must trespass into that turf for twosomes, I was obliged to pay double.

Essential background info: the Kuching MBO cineplex has this one stupid theatre which was retooled to host twin seats for people who wants to touch each other when they are not-watching a movie so they can charge them an extra buck. Like so many other decisions of the chief executive cretins that run the company, it was avaricious, shortsighted, and betrays an uncommon lack of business sense. Just take a look at their recently redesigned official homepage: it's a case study in how not to design a website. It runs entirely on Flash (necessitating a long loading time), autoplays loud stock noises, features klunky pixels and colours from the early 90's, and massively obstructive navigation. Some old fart probably saw it and okayed it because he thought it looked cool, dynamic and hep. That same old fart probably still has an active Friendster account, wondering where everyone went.

I know that the couples' theatre is a scheme which lost MBO more potential potential profit than it earned them. An average screening will see about one quarter of its seats occupied by duos and evens (this being an optimistic projection) while they turn away singles, trios and odd parties which would have gladly paid to fill out all those other vacant seats for them.

Anyway, I started ringing friends up - but 15 minutes, as notices go, was pretty short and not a single one of my on-and-off movie-going mates could come through for me. Having exhausted that option, I toyed with the idea of waiting at the box office till another odd number comes along wanting to see War Horse as well, but the crowd was quite thin that day. As half past twelve loomed ever closer, I knew drastic actions were in order. You see, I had just completed a seventeen-hour shift. If I want to see a Steven Spielberg movie that's going to make me weep like a newly-deflowered maiden, then you can wager your donkey that I was going to get my way.

"I would like to speak to your manager," I told the box office attendant, smiling politely as I did so. She seemed cowed and explained that nothing could be achieved by that because of their ticketing system was rigged in such a way which made it impossible to sell odd numbers of tickets for that particular theatre. Yes, "impossible" was the word she used. Challenge accepted.

Don't worry, I mouthed and shooed her along.

In a moment, the "manager" in the shape of a surprisingly young lady appeared. I introduced myself, shook her warmly by the hand, and proceeded to lay my grievance on her. She repeated that same bullshit apologetically about how the system was programmed and that if I want to see War Horse that day, I must purchase two tickets. Still smiling, I told her, "Clearly, you aren't authorised to make any useful decisions here. Please show me to someone who can."

She then flagged down this unassuming chap in a company polo neck and presented him to me, and after exchanging niceties (I always make it a point to do that), I unloaded a speech, all in one explosive burst of verbal diarrhoea, that I had been drafting in my head the whole time. Like so:

"I am a regular patron of your cinema and I come weekly - frequently more than once - to catch the new features because I'm something of a film enthusiast. Today, I want to see War Horse. I looked up the showtimes online. Then, I drove all the way from my house to get here, only to find out that this film is screening in the couples' hall and that I can't see it without paying for two - a crucial piece of information which was not mentioned on your website or any other film sites that carry your schedule. This had happened a few times before and I was forced to watch something else or go home. I just saw the seat availability for the 12:30 PM show, and you had only sold two pairs of tickets so far. You are obviously running at a loss and I am obviously rather pissed. So my question, Mr H, is what can you do for me?"

It went down pretty much like this.

It was a little too grandiloquent for standard Malaysian parlance but I aimed to intimidate. And you can't argue with the results.

"Okay, we are aware of this problem because we had gotten complaints before. We are changing our policy but till then, please be patient with us, sir. Right now, you can watch the movie," he said and immediately ordered the box office girl to sell me two tickets for the price of one. Impossible my ass.

I actually had a second hell-and-brimstone speech in reserve involving consumer associations, smear campaigns and nuclear PR fallouts had the first one failed. I also had plans on escalation and making him put me through to his superiors in their headquarters if he proved to be incompliant. You see, I really, really wanted to watch War Horse.

Also, don't fuck with me when I'm post-call.



P.S. Having held three jobs (and technically a fourth now) in the service industry - including one in a cinema - I feel totally justified in being a teensy-weensy bit demanding and difficult when I deal with customer service representatives. If you, like me, run into this same problem with the Kuching branch of MBO, you are welcome to try brute-forcing your way through the way I did.

Asshole par excellence,

k0k s3n w4i

Chronicle: A Review

"Man with all his noble qualities, with sympathy which feels for the most debased, with benevolence which extends not only to other men but to the humblest living creature, with his god-like intellect which has penetrated into the movements and constitution of the solar system - with all these exalted powers - Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin."

Charles Darwin

I am a fan of the the found-footage aesthetic, even when it is indulged in for completely spurious stylistic reasons. While I have not seen The Blair Witch Project or Paranormal Activity, I certainly enjoyed Cloverfield immensely. Maybe it does not work for everyone, but the persistent acknowledgement of the camera's eye adds a layer of realism which regular films lack - it's kind of like the visual equivalent of a first-person narrator versus a third-person omniscient one. It certainly helps that I am practically immune to motion sickness thanks to a lifetime of reading in moving vehicles and playing frenetic first person shooter video games.

One realisation I arrived at while watching Chronicle is how ubiquitous video cameras are in our daily lives. Practically everyone and their pet camel owns a camera phone or digital camera these days and it seems that every inch of everywhere has security cameras watching it. Found-footage films had, in the past, been criticised for "recording" events that they have no plausible access to but it's a complaint that, I feel, had gotten hollower and hollower over the years. With enough free time and clearance, it's conceivable that someone can stitch together a coherent chronicle of a series of just about any event at all.

The film was marketed as a Jackass-esque feature following the hilarious pranks and follies of three teenagers after they mysteriously gained telekinetic powers from a freak crystal accident (the narrative wisely chose to leave that angle grossly unexplained). They blew girls' skirts up, relocated parked cars, terrorised children at departmental stores - and then one of them caused a tailgater to swerve off-road into a lake, nearly killing the driver. Every group of high school friends always have that one guy who ruins the shits and giggles for everybody else, and Andrew is that one guy in Chronicle.

Spoilers will be running loose and amok from here onwards - because there's no point discussing any work of fiction using only vague allusions.

Does not reflect what the film is about at all.

Andrew is the protagonist of Trank and Landis' unconventional superhero story. He is pretty much that weirdo kid in American Beauty who carried a video camera everywhere and obsessively filmed everything - but with an abusive stay-at-home father and a mother dying from Vague Hollywood Terminal Illness. Throw in industrial-strength high school unpopularity and bullying, perpetual virginity, and superpowers, you'll have the recipe for a budding psychopathic supervillain. Dane DeHaan played Andrew ably and is one of the many unexpected delights this film has to offer.

I also thought that it's a modest act of genius to marry psychokinetic abilities with the handheld camera of a found-footage movie. Half the time, no one even needs to be physically holding it, eliminating the much-maligned jitter-cam effect.

The violence in Chronicle is presented as-a-matter-of-factly and somehow, the film ended up being more disturbing for it. When someone's head impact against the asphalt, it leaves a bloodstain behind. Andrew's descent into darkness leaves a trail of those stains behind as he find sadism increasingly more permissible. He started small, tearing a spider limb to limb, before graduating to forcibly pulling teeth out of someone's head and crushing people with vehicular objects. Some of these visuals were really awesome, when they weren't inspiring revulsion in my stomach. Andrew also waxes philosophical about how predators do not feel pity for their preys, and how we experience no remorse in killing insignificant insects. It then turned into rather heavy-handed diatribe against the theory of evolution, perpetuating the discredited stereotype of an amoral survival-of-the fittest-type Darwinist. Bad movie, bad! However, the scene accompanying Andrew's nihilistic musings was so bad-ass that I instantly forgave it.

Several other script flourishes soured Chronicle a little for me. One character name-dropped Plato's Cave as they descended into a hole in the ground for apparently no purpose. When they introduced Michael B. Jordan's character as the token black guy of the psychic trio, I mentally hoped that he wouldn't be the first person to die - and I was disappointed when he proceeded to do just that.

Made for only $ 15 million, it looked as cheap as it costs. I wonder if the decision to shot this in the found-footage format was financially-motivated but still, the special effects are good enough to not take the audience out of the film most of the time - unlike in Attack the Block. In spite of its lack of polish, I still enjoyed Chronicle immensely. Go watch it if you aren't prone to getting motion sickness, and if you are, pop some motion-sickness medicine and go see it anyway.



P.S. Psychic nosebleeds!



Has an anti-motion-sickness superpower,

k0k s3n w4i