My First Attempt at Buying Porn

"They want to be like me . They're seeing the glamour icon but don't realize . . . there are more facets to me besides spreading my legs ."

Jenna Jameson, American Porn Star

I really enjoy reading interviews of porn stars.

Today, or rather, yesterday was my first day of my new semester over at the ol' medical school grind house after a very long, very restful week-long holiday. And today, on my quote unquote first night, I'm already pulling an all-nighter. Then there was that little orientation session for the Semester 7 Surgery clinical posting, which broke the news to me that this Semester is a whole different species of animal from the previous one. For one thing, I didn't a TWO case discussion sessions in the morning back in Semester 6. I didn't have a case discussion session in the afternoon either. Altogether, that trebled my workload. Also, in Semester 6, I only have to take the hour long journey to Muar once per week. Now, I have the dubious privilege of going there every single day. The Surgery posting is now 8 weeks long instead of 6. And guess what guess what? On two of those weeks, I'm going to be actually living in the Muar Hospital! The faculty in charge of our Batch just informed us cheerily that the place we're staying in Muar during our tenure there finally has hot water. It makes me wonder what other essential conveniences they'll finally have next in the subsequent semesters.

After that very interesting introduction on life in hell, the lecturer asked us if we have any questions regarding the arrangements for our posting this term.

"So, where's my life in all this?" I asked while poring over the timetable, just barely out of earshot. That's lucky because they don't really approve of wisecracks in hell. I mean, medical school.

Okay, I got to work my ass off now in this first half of the Ante Meridiem. But first, a little anecdote of a pointless little incident back when I was living at my aunt's in Kepong last week.

I saw a small middle-aged man with thinning hair and gold rimmed glasses, and he was rooting furtively alone through a box of porn DVD's belonging to a couple of street corner pirates. I felt sorry for him - sorry that he had yet to discover the internet. There's a global repository of porn out there so vast that it's enough to put anyone off porn forever (for free, by the way) and this uncle here is still getting porn the old fashioned way, buying a few hours of smut with real money.

Not pictured: sad uncle who has never heard of the internet.

So, as I was thinking; the only logical thing for me to do here was to go stand beside the uncle, root through the box with him and flash him a real friendly smile - which I did, by the way. He didn't smile back though. In fact, he seemed to have lost his appetite for porn right there and then, and drifted away, pornless.

It then occured to me that I have never bought porn from a shady street corner pirate before so I thought I would, y'know, in the spirit of doing everything once. I even called Phoebe telling her that I was doing.

"Can't you just get them from the internet?" she said in weary contrast to my childish excitement.

"But I've never done this before!" I replied, as if it's a real good reason.

Anyhow, after about 5 minutes of digging through that big drippy box of merry debauchery while aunties glare disapprovingly at me as they and their kids walked past, I decided that I wasn't going to buy any after all. The thing is, there's that side of me that just pops up every time I'm looking to purchase any form of fiction; a novel, a movie ticket, or even porn - it doesn't matter which. I call that side of me the wannabe-cognoscente. While trying to pick something out of all the colourful and obscene but not very informative porn DVD covers, I started wondering whether any of them have won any awards, if my favourite porn-stars are starring in them, about the quality of production, the budget, etc... just like what I do with books (which I obviously discern between choices using a totally different set of criteria, of course). I called Phoebe up to tell her about my failure to buy porn, because as my girlfriend, she gets to know every mundane detail of my day.

"You're missing the point of porn," she pointed out after listening to my report



Will stick to the interwebz,
k0k s3n w4i