k0k bL0k

Chronicle: A Review

2012-02-03T01:51:00.006+08:00

"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 slash 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 frantic 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 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

Back When I Was Still Using a Pencil

2012-02-01T11:57:00.002+08:00

"When my daughter was about seven years old, she asked me one day what I did at work. I told her I worked at the college - that my job was to teach people how to draw. She stared at me, incredulous, and said, 'You mean they forget?'"

Howard Ikemoto

My favourite definition of art was one proposed by scientist and artist Desmond Morris and to paraphrase a paraphrase by Joe Fulgham from the Art episode of the Caustic Soda podcast: "Art is anything that humans do that's not done for survival, procreation and entertainment."

I personally prefer explaining myself through prose while relegating what modicum of visual artistic skills I do command to illustrating my written words (examples here, here and here) and doing pro bono design work for my college's student council (here, here, here and there). Of course, most of what I've showcased in my blog here were created after I've discovered Photoshop and taught myself how not to suck too badly on it. Before that, I made art the traditional pen-and-pencil way, and it was the only way by which I expressed myself before I discovered my love for the English language when I was sixteen years old and started indulging in expressionistic writing seriously (I had a poetry phase but I would prefer not to talk about that). While I couldn't paint, I certainly sketched prolifically in my entire childhood, through high school, and into my early university years. Unfortunately, most of what I produced was lost to the yore of yesteryears with only a handful of later pieces surviving into digitalisation.

Because the internet never forgets, I managed to resurrect a few from my now defunct deviantART account. Do click on them to embiggen,

An ogre toting a typewriter and a bank vole. No reason.

I called this one "The Shepherd Tree".

An aging pilgrim and a little girl.

A fan art of Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell entitled "From the Mirror".
I experimented with a new technique for this, smudging lines with my thumb and fingers.

A sorcerous wraith: I was mostly practicing how to draw fabric realistically here.

When I was a kid, I always thought that I would grow up to be an artist of some kind before my aspirations morphed into a more literary pursuit. That, and I went to medical school for some reason. I even had watercolour lessons for a spell which did absolutely nothing except convince me that I lack, probably on a genetic level, what it takes to paint with actual brushes - so I quit it like I quit my piano, organ, taekwondo and Chinese classes.

Anyway, what do you think of them?

Has skills useless to his day job,

k0k s3n w4i

The Sword of Christ

2012-01-29T15:45:00.003+08:00

"Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword. For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law. And a man's foes shall be they of his own household. He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me."

Matthew 10:34-37

Thus saith Jesus. When people refers to him by the epithet of 'Prince of Peace', I laugh out loud.

Two days ago, I caught up with Rachel, whom you might remember as a rather integral character in a June 2011 story regarding the psychological blind spots we humans are susceptible to when it comes to the sacred cows we believe in. It was an unexpected but pleasant surprise when I received her text at work, wondering if we could meet before she returns to Adelaide. It would have been something to discuss religion with her again now that I had read the Bible several times through (not to mention dated and accidentally de-converted a Presbyterian in the meantime), but the situation never arrived at a moment when it's appropriate - and the presence of several other mutual friends made the subject impossible to broach.

Then, after excusing myself to use the men's room and returning to the table, I found that the subject had been broached in my absence. It's hard to proceed sans context so here it is: Rachel got engaged last year to a bloke named Fish (probably no relations) who I believe was a freethinker or apatheist of some sort - but the point is, he wasn't Christian. Rachel was relating a story about how he had found the Lord, and His Original Recipe of 11 Herbs and Salvation.

"I made it clear to him that there wasn't going to be a future for the both of us if he isn't Christian," she explained. "It's very important to me."

She also recounted how she questioned him thoroughly after his "repentance" just to make sure that his conversion was sincere and not at all motivated by um, any external pressure (gee, I wonder what made her suspect that). I have no idea what questions you can ask a person in order to gauge the contents of his heart with any reliability, but she apparently knew some. All I know is if it's a pop quiz on Biblical knowledge, I can outscore most of my Christian friends quite effortlessly.

The whole situation is so bizarre to me. It absolutely defies my understanding because I would never ever abandon a girl I'm dating just because she believes differently from me. It's partly because I actually enjoy disagreements and arguments recreationally, but more importantly, I believe that whatever real, palpable thing we share in this world far outweighs what we think might be in the next.

In the atheist community, we have all heard tragic accounts of how religious parents disown their non-believing children, or couples splitting up over differences in faith. We, as a people, know the cut of the Sword of Christ intimately. And the Scimitar of Muhammad. And all the other varied and exotic weapons of religious bigotry and discrimination which dismember families and cleave lovers asunder - all over some stuff some old books say which no one can prove. Well done, humanity! Have an exploding cigar!

Maybe Rachel's fiancé really found the whole human parthenogenesis and resurrection story of the New Testament believable, or maybe he thought that it's a fair concession to win the hand of the woman he loves - it's really not my place to bet on either horse. What matters more here is that it's the coming together of two people who are about to pledge the rest of their lives to one another, and faith in that perpetuity is far more beautiful to me than faith in the eternity of any religion.

Meanwhile, Christ's blade, having spared this pair, moved on to hack its next victims apart.

P.S. Do share your opinions and anecdotes on the intersection between faith and relationships if you have any. I'd love to hear about them.

A believer in love,
k0k s3n w4i

The Red Couch

2012-01-27T18:45:00.006+08:00

"He went to sea for a day
He wanted to know what to say
When he's asked what he'd done
In the past to someone
That he loves endlessly
Now she's gone, so is he"

Lille (2008) by Lisa Hannigan

Between yesterday and dawn stretched the forever of insomnia. I lay sprawled on a red couch in the Female Surgical Ward, staring at nothing but stillness and listening to no sound but the quiet footfalls of tomorrow, each one louder than the last. It was the thirteenth hour; first night of the Lunar New Year and I was on-call. Outside, through the panes of the seventh floor windows, I saw rain. I could smell its wetness, hear its tremulous pulse.

There's a woman lying in Bed Twenty-Three, waiting for someone to come and tell her that it's time to cut her gangrenous left leg off. I tried drawing from her agony to trivialise my own, but all I succeeded in doing was commiserate with her. In a way, I too was waiting to amputate a cherished part of me which served me well but is now blackened, withered and poisoning me. My wait would probably be longer.

A self-portrait.

What happened at 7:56 PM earlier that evening, was the only bright spot of my day, and it came in the shape of a surprise text from the neighbouring Male Surgical Ward - from Liv who is half-Chinese and like me, had to celebrate the New Year by way of a graveyard shift. The text said, "Hey, later my parents will send some food for dinner. Come and join!! :)"

When I sat down at the table with Liv, I realised that I was breaking bread with a colleague with whom I have barely broken ice - and we broke both over the best dinner I had in ages. We supped till the eleven somethings before we concluded our odd little New Year's night dinner party, and I left with the sense of an unfinished conversation I would dearly love to see the end to, feeling something resembling happiness for the first time in weeks. And there is something special, something comforting about home-cooked food. It always seem to say: "Everything's going to be okay."

Then I walked back to my ward finding each step heavier and heavier as good humour and cheer hemorrhaged out of the hole in my heart. By the time I arranged myself on the red couch, I was empty. It's as though I had lost everything again.

I don't actually remember if the couch was actually red in colour, but in my mind it was - and that is all that matters.

Everything's going to be okay.

"I went to war every morning
I lost my way but now I'm following
What you said in my arms
What I read in the charms
That I love durably
Now it's dead and gone and I am free"

Lille (2008) by Lisa Hannigan

Waiting,

k0k s3n w4i

Unhappy New Year

2012-01-23T13:23:00.017+08:00

"人總需要勇敢生存
我還是重新許願
例如學會承受失戀

明年今日別要再失眠
床褥都改變
如果有幸會面
或在同伴新婚的盛宴
徨徨地等待你出現
明年今日未見你一年
誰舍得改變
離開你六十年
但願能認得出你的子女
臨別亦聽得到你講
再見"

明年今日 (2002) by 陈奕迅

This song got me. It got me good.

If we haven't broken up, I would be on my bed right now, eyes closed, talking on the phone with her because that was how I spent every crossing of one year to the next. It's almost tradition. The dull distress of my recalibrated life - now with a hundred percent less girlfriend - is propelled by the inertia of undead habits. I notice that my subconsciousness haven't yet found out I was dumped because in my dreams, we are still together.

My days remained unbleached; you wouldn't suspect that anything is wrong unless you know what songs I have on constant loop on my MP3 player. It's in the nights that I wander the graveyard of my past relationships. Here lies The One which Lasted One Year, Three Years and the Recently-Departed Four. Their headstones stand side by side, testaments to my continuing failure at love. The third time had not proved to be as much of a charm as it was advertised. You can't tell but I err far too frequently on the side of optimism. Bully for me for believing in happy endings. No endings are happy, silly.

I'm no stranger to being alone, of table-for-ones, and one-ticket-pleases. Four years of romance via electronic proxies had seen to that. I've always skated on the low floor of easy contentment, glad that there's someone out there somewhere who loves me and thinks of me often. Now that floor had fallen away, depositing me in a state of solitude I've forgotten is even possible. Suddenly, it's a world of lovers out there, their very existence mocking mine.

I wished we had that conversation where we talk about the destination we have arrived at and how we needn't to - but maybe, she just woke up one day and realised that we are already there. I agonised long and hard over the road behind us, trying to figure out the last detour we could have taken out of this one-way-street and saw none we would have considered. I did not find it, but I did discover a sign I've missed. In anticipation of her visit last month, I wrote about the uncertainty of our destinies and said:

"Next week, for a few days at least, I want to dwell on none of these bothersome things. Instead, I just want to lose myself in the nearness of the one girl I love most out of the seven billion other human beings on this planet. Oh, if only the rest of our lives should be so simple: she and I, and that elusive Here and Now."

She only gave a knowing smile in reply. I comfort myself in believing that she gave me that one last week of Here and Now unfettered to the weight of reality as a Christmas present - y'know, for old times' sake. This, and many other beautiful things she had done for me, is precisely why I was in love with her. In a way, I still am.

I feel guilt-ridden because even when she's all out of love for me, she still granted me my final wish. In return, she asked if we could still be friends and I could not even give her that at a time she needed one most. Maybe I'm just selfish that way. Maybe I don't want her to hear my voice cracked under the pressure of pretending that everything is okay when I am anything but. Perhaps next year. Perhaps on this day next year, I can be the friend she wants.

I'm going back to bed, and let the new year drift silently past. In my dreams, my heart is whole.

Still asleep and dreaming,

k0k s3n w4i

Matter Over Mind

2012-01-22T20:01:00.009+08:00

"Heathcliff, don't you know that it's me, it's Cathy, I've come home
I'm so cold, let me in-a-your window"

Wuthering Heights (2007) by The Puppini Sisters

I never liked the original Kate Bush version.

Yesterday, I was on-call in the Female Surgical Ward and I had to take leave of my post at 4:30 AM to retrieve some blood from the blood bank. I was on the seventh floor with a cooler under one arm, waiting for the elevator when a nursing sister old enough to be someone's grandmother popped out of the neighboring Male Surgical Ward with a clipboard. I smiled. I frequently and deliberately smile at strangers because I like the effect it has on people. The complex neurological cascade it triggers in the highly-socialised primate brains of human beings is evolutionarily hardwired and crosses all cultures. Smile at a two-month-old infant and it will smile back automatically. The kick I get out of smiling randomly at strangers (and setting off their socio-emotional reflex) is not dissimilar to some kid ringing doorbells and then running away for fun.

"Waiting for the elevator?" she asked in Malay laced with that Sarawakian accent I am growing increasingly familiar with over the past six months.

"Yeah," I answered dejectedly, giving the cooler a shake. The sister understood.

Instead of stopping and waiting for the elevator with me, she headed for the stairwell. My face must have conveyed my bewilderment because she automatically offered an explanation. It's amazing how much communication occurs beyond the words that spill out of that defect in our faces.

"I don't like riding the elevator at night, especially when I'm alone." She talked as if she was admiring my guts for attempting something that was, in her mind, oh-so perilous. "I'm afraid of getting stuck alone in one and it goes all dark. There are 'things' haunting this hospital."

I was about to tell her that I don't believe in ghosts, spirits, poltergeists, goblins, vampires or any other mix-bag of imaginary 'things' she cares to shake at me, but it was terribly early in the morning so I decided to be nice and simply said: "I wish I'd get stuck in the elevator. Then, I can stop being on-call and go to sleep."

It's all in your head.

As I grew older, I also grew out of my childish fears of things that go bumpity-bump in the night - and I had assumed that everyone would undergo the same process and eventually achieve the age of reason. Not so. I used to think that my father's superstitious attitude was more playful than earnest, but I was disappointed. In fact, I feel that same pang of disappointment whenever anyone above the age of twenty reveals their fear of spoooooky entities to me. Just the other night, I heard about a house officer who was on-call in the Neurosurgical ward who thought she saw a shadow flashing by after she exits the shower. She actually needed another house officer to go to where she was (from a whole other building quite some distance away) to reassure her that it was just a figment of her traitorous imagination.

When a colleague of mine just moved here to Kuching and was lodging in a spare room at her boyfriend's place, she thought she heard voices emanating from seemingly nowhere and immediately assumed that the place was haunted. They even went as far as to invite a Protestant pastor and a prayer circle to come over and exorcise the residence. I would later lodge in that same room when I first relocated here in Kuching, and realised on the first night that the disembodied "voices" were just the neighbours' trickling through the thin walls. I guess the price of taking things on faith and believing in things without the validation of evidence is that one would occasionally appear like a complete tit. And this is why I can't stand priests and other assorted holy-men - they are often the biggest tits of all.

I just don't understand how anyone can live entire lives being terrified by things that aren't real and and then act upon those irrational, baseless fears as if they are. It's such a waste of life. I was gossiping about the incident of the girl and her supposed encounter in the Neurosurgical ward with a fellow sceptic when another house officer within earshot blurted, "Don't talk about these things! I'm on-call there tonight!"

I walked right up to her, looked her in the eye and said, as I've said many times to so many others before: "There is no such things as ghosts. Stop scaring yourself."

The real Ghostbuster

k0k s3n w4i

The Familiar Road to Recovery

2012-01-16T22:56:00.020+08:00

"And she was
Like a blade of ice
Like a lonely road
Clearest day alive
Always sharp and cold
Always beautiful
I am such a fool"

Even If She Falls (2011) by Blink-182

It's been seven days since I was unceremoniously dumped by my now ex-girlfriend, and I still do not know where the crack started and what I could have done to stop the fractures from enveloping our relationship. To be honest, I don't really want to know. I abstained, almost to the point of callousness, from asking beyond her succinct answer of "we drifted apart". Knowing what I could have done differently will simply intensify the regretful sense of 'what-ifs' and 'if onlies' that now percolates the static of my daily preoccupations. Is it selfish to pretend that it really was her and not me? If it was me, why wasn't I told before it tipped across the point of no return?

One of the thing I didn't realise - but is now obvious to me - was how much she figured in my everyday life, even when we are always hundreds of miles apart. She's the reason why I have not felt even a fraction of a second of loneliness in the past four years. I call her when I'm driving. I call her when I walk anywhere, even when I walk from one building to another at the hospital where I work. I call her after I come out of a movie theatre or finish reading a book, just so I can talk to her about it. For the longest time, she was my sole confidant. Now, several times a day, I would absentmindedly try to dial her up, only to remember that we've "drifted apart", whatever that actually means.

So I deleted her number.

"Can we still be friends after this?" Phoebe asked.

"Yes," I said, not realising at the time that I was lying. I don't think I'm matured or level enough to maintain a friendship after breaking up with someone. I tried that once and got myself stuck inside a purgatory of self-pity for most of a whole year, and I only recovered after I purged my second ex completely out of my life by asking her to never talk to me, call me or even make eye contact if we run into each other on the street. It's drastic and cruel, and it worked. Maybe, just maybe, I don't want to risk the chance of knowing that Phoebe can be happy without me, true as that may be. I don't want to hear how she fell in love with someone else a couple of months from now. I don't want to know how great a guy he is, or how I'd totally like him once I get to know him.

I realised after the fact that this separation must have been planned long before Last Monday, and that Phoebe probably decided that it should not ruin our last week together, one which we had planned since August. She knew just how much I looked forward to her visit. It hurts terribly to know that through all those final days, behind the charade of normalcy; beneath each of our conversations and comfortable silences; at our many dinner tables and in bed, she knew we were heading towards the last page of our story. I resent how she had led me to believe that everything was alright when they were not. And most of all, I resent the fact that she didn't think I deserve to be told this in person, one lover to another - not even in our last moments together.

I need to be the architect of my own recovery. I need to be methodical, cold, and calculating. I had already taken myself apart once in my life and rebuilt myself from the ensuing wreckage of shame, heartbreak and self-harm. I fear I will not survive another reinvention.

Please forgive me. I'm sorry.

Surviving it one week at a time,

k0k s3n w4i

That Elusive Here and Now

2012-01-09T23:44:00.011+08:00

"The minute you think you know you got it
Is the minute you know it's gone for good"

The Tiger Inside Will Eat The Child (2011)
by Fatty Gets a Stylist

This started out as a love letter, a distillation of my thoughts and emotions - my hopes and dreams - for a relationship that just reached four years old. It was half-written, but I already knew how the rest would go. Or rather, I thought I knew. What I didn't expect was having to erase every little word I had handpicked to give shape to the rest of our lives, and start all over with a blank new page.

It was titled "We Are Four" and in it, there was a recapitulation of Boxing Day of 2011 in the recent history of a fortnight past. Phoebe flew over to Kuching to spend the Christmas holiday with me and it was the first time we saw each other in more than seven months. 26th of December is our anniversary and even though I've said over and over again how I don't see the point in celebrating the passage of time, I took her out to someplace nice and posh enough to justify the occasion. It was a rainy Monday evening and we just sat, ate and talked away the hours as if we'd been friends for ever. Then, we went home and watched The Shining, because it was one of the only two movies I have that neither of us have seen. The other was Blue Valentine, a stark portrait of the sweet beginnings of a couple and the eventual decay of their marriage. I didn't want to see Blue Valentine because I was told that it's not a film you should watch with your girlfriend.

Phoebs and I at the Hilton, 26th December 2011.

Today, I received a phone call while I was still at the hospital trying to finish my jobs at the end of a particularly frustrating 12-hour work day. I was delivering some urgent blood samples to the lab when Phoebe called.

"Hello," she began. It may have been my imagination after the fact, but I thought she sounded uncharacteristically meek.

"Hey" I said. "What's up?"

"Where are you now?"

"At work. Why? Do you need to talk?"

"I'm sorry," she said. "I want a break up."

"Oh. Okay. Why?"

"I just felt that we've been drifting apart. Don't you feel the same way?"

"No," I answered with a calmness that surprised me. "Nothing's changed for me."

That was the truth. I did not see it coming at all. If there were frays on the edges, I've failed to notice them unravel. The last months were not punctuated by petty fights or passive aggression. There was no stench of apathetic decay. I was just telling a friend right before Phoebe's visit that I'm dating the perfect girl, and said to him that some day, he'd find someone perfect for him too. Oh, it's almost funny how oblivious I was to the sucker punch I would receive today. Ha ha hilarious.

On my desk right now is a picture of how I like to remember Phoebe best: her, a book in hand, reading. I took it when we were in Kodaikanal, one of those quaint mountain stations in Tamil Nadu we found ourselves lost in those years ago. It sits in a beautiful hand carved photo frame I bought when we were there - when we spent afternoons and evenings visiting every dusty old knickknack shop in town like children.

We were children. Now she's all grown up.

I have not quite decided on how I am feeling at the moment, but perhaps I would find out when the blunt suddenness settles into a clearer understanding of when and where my life is moving to now that I've left the Here and Now. My head aches. My heart feels weak. It's as if it there's too much, far too much inside me.

And I need to get rid of that photograph. I know this sounds crazy, but I think it's killing me bit by bit. I really need it gone.

Hopes he will be okay,

k0k s3n w4i

Chicken Holocaust

2012-01-02T00:13:00.006+08:00

"Ooh! Get me away from here I'm dying"

Get Me Away from Here, I'm Dying (1996)
by Belle and Sebastian

Last week, when we were heading out to the Semenggoh Wildlife Rehabilitation Centre, we stopped at a red light near a lorry which was bursting with crates of golden, fluffy ~~chicken nuggets~~ baby chicks.

And in the midst of the mobile chick apartments, one particular ball of yellow down caught our eyes.

'Sup?

I would repeatedly show that picture to the Long-Suffering Girlfriend™ at random and she would laugh every single time without fail, confirming my suspicions that the two of us are terrible human beings. Somehow, Chicken Little there had gotten its comically disproportionate head stuck in the gap and now, it couldn't free itself. It's still alive though because we can totally see it breathing.

This chick is literally going to die for our sins.

I find baby chicks to be ridiculously adorable. I liked them so much that I actually had one as a pet back when I was a kid, and one of the things I found out in a hurry is that baby chicks grow from being cute to being tasty in a very short amount of time. Anyhow, I no longer remember what ultimately happened to it. I have a vague recollection of it escaping one day, never to return.

Or maybe I ate it, and my subconsciousness is currently repressing the mind-breaking horror of the act.

HELP I AM ACTUALLY IN A LOT OF PAIN.

Unlike most people, I suffer from no dilemma when it comes to the question of killing other animals for food - I know very well that it is morally, ethically and environmentally the wrong thing to do, but I do it all the same.

I don't know about you but I cope by remembering that it's all the animals' fault for being so damn fucking delicious.

Apex predator,

k0k s3n w4i

A Day Trip with the Upper Echelons

2011-12-22T23:12:00.013+08:00

"我地呢班打工仔
一生一世為錢幣做奴隸
個種辛苦折墮講出嚇鬼（死俾你睇）
咪話冇乜所謂"

半斤八兩 (1976) by 许冠杰

Today, I left my cookie-cutter daily drudgery in the Male Surgical Ward and went on a day trip with a trio of my bosses. We went halfway through our morning clinical rounds when one of my Medical Officers (or MO's as, we usually call them) tapped me out of the loop and asked me to follow him to a district outfit in Serian. I was to be part of a flash team comprising of one Surgeon, one Registrar, one MO and one House Officer out to deal with a sudden backlog of clinic patients and minor surgeries there when a consultant neglected to make his visit yesterday. I couldn't decide if being volunteered for the job meant that I'm one of the more reliable workers or that my superiors think I needed to be placed under extra invigilation. At any rate, I jumped at the chance. I'm not one of those talented toadies who can comfortably hobnob with the bosses, but it was a syzygy of the most benevolent ones in the department. That promised a relatively stress-free and educational day.

Coincidentally, the MO who asked me to tag along is the husband of my previous boss back in Obstetrics and Gynaecology - yes, the very one who supervised my maiden Caesarean section. I don't know about you but it always warms the cockles of my heart when I see outstandingly nice people end up together.

The road trip to Serian was about an hour long with scattered conversations about nothings. I brought up a hugely fascinating article I read earlier that morning before I head off to work titled: Why do woman menstruate? It was an excellent summary of a recently published paper on the evolution of the monthly feminine bleed. Did you know that humans, a bunch of primates, some species of bats, and the elephant shrew are the only mammals to regularly shed the lining of their wombs?

"So, you are a follower of Darwin?" my Muslim Registrar asked.

"Isn't evolution just a theory?" my Christian MO asked.

Wow. My mind instantaneously hammered out the appropriate answers. No, I'm not a follower of Darwin - I'm a follower of science. And the word "theory" in the scientific lexicon has a different meaning from its colloquial connotations. A scientific theory is a principle or a set of principles which coherently explains a body of data or observations, and can be used to make accurate predictions. Remember the germ theory of disease? The theory of evolution is just as established and proven as that. But I didn't turn those brainwaves into soundwaves. I seriously didn't want to start another endless creationism versus evolution debate so early in the day. Especially not with my bosses, both of which I'm rather fond of.

In Serian Hospital, we split the team. My MO and I went with the Surgeon to the clinic to deal with the 40 to 50 patients waiting there while the Registrar headed off to the operating theatre and got started on what we in the surgical biz term as "lumps and bumps". By 2:00 PM, we cleared the half-hundred and scooted over to the operation theatre to cut a giant tumour measuring 15 centimetres out of an 18-year-old's right breast, which was the last case of the day.

Today, I worked harder than I usually had to in the wards but it didn't seem that way to me. I think it's because feeling like you're part of a team with friendly senior colleagues who treat you with respect allows you far greater job satisfaction than being a human bedpan, waiting for shit to rain down at any moment - which is what working for some of the more malevolent, saurian and condescending specialists feels like.

Oh, Phoebe's coming on Saturday morning! On the ride back from Serian, my Registrar and MO helpfully suggested several places I can take her. It's good to have a week I can honestly look forward to.

An unlikely teamster,

k0k s3n w4i

An Anticipation of Boxing Day

2011-12-17T23:50:00.010+08:00

"If a plane crashed into my room
I wouldn't even flinch
I couldn't try to move
My mind is on you
My mind is on you"

Little Dreams (2010) by Ellie Goulding

On the morning of what I imagined to be a bright and cheery Christmas Eve, I expect to leave my house, drive to the airport and wait for the Long-Suffering Girlfriend™ to be a tangible part of my life again. The day after this Christmas would be the second time we are physically together on the 26th of December. The last time that happened was four years ago when we crossed a line we didn't know were there and kept on walking ever since. I can scarcely believe that it's been four whole years since I christened a girl Phoebe and weaved her so seamlessly into the fabric of my life that I've forgotten how to survive nights without that constant comforting thought that out there in the world somewhere, someone loves me.

There are two contradictory English proverbs pertaining to lovers far apart and they are "absence makes the heart grow fonder" and "out of sight, out of mind". One of the worst thing that can happen in a relationship is having your heart grow fonder for a mind you are slowly slipping out of. I have that insecurity, and I surprised myself when I discovered it in the undercurrent of my daily medley of emotions. I have always suspected that the Long-Suffering Girlfriend™ is too good for me and I hope the day doesn't come when she arrives at that same realisation herself.

The Long-Suffering Girlfriend™ after a light, Midori-laced cocktail back in May.

The future of our relationship looms ever nearer but no less uncertain, and it's unrealistic for me to hope that this blissful limbo we are in can be protracted indefinitely. I guess it's part of my blundersome coming of age that the bond between a boyfriend and his girlfriend appears more and more flimsy to me over time, like a game children play, a chaos of three-legged racers who breaks off from their partners at random and reattach themselves to new people all the time. Is that bottomless void of insecurity the reason why men and women get themselves sucked into the spiral of ritualised promises - the illusion of engagement followed by the charade of marriage - all in fact equally flimsy?

Next week, for a few days at least, I want to dwell on none of these bothersome things. Instead, I just want to lose myself in the nearness of the one girl I love most out of the seven billion other human beings on this planet. Oh, if only the rest of our lives should be so simple: she and I, and that elusive Here and Now.

Long-distance three-legged racer,
k0k s3n w4i

Bats and Taxes

2011-12-08T23:14:00.005+08:00

"Bats have no bankers and they do not drink and cannot be arrested and pay no tax and, in general, bats have it made."

John Berryman

I had an afternoon off last Friday and I spent it driving around town distributing a significant portion of my fledgling savings to various creditors. I had credit card bills and the car loan to pay off. I had to make rent and break even with the utility companies. That afternoon, I had one of those moments when I suddenly realised that I'm a giddy thousand feet up in the air, strung up only by the contracts of daily adult living. It can all be over if I look down.

What a life. The few measly hours in which I am not working to generate my salary was spent delivering it to other people. Ever had that nagging feeling deep down inside that we are living wrong? I do all the time.

The Ministry of Health made it clear that any and all leaves we take from work is a privilege, not a right. That's something that my bosses and even my colleagues kept parroting; the former as a psychological slogan to keep stiffs like me in line and the latter as an expression of undiagnosed Stockholm Syndrome. It stinks of manure and I couldn't be the only person smelling it. No, the allotted number of days I am allowed to forget about work, work, work is rightfully mine. I am not a slave. To try and brainwash me into thinking otherwise is cruel and inhumane.

And now for an unrelated aside: here's a bat I rescued earlier this year right before my med school finals,

I shall call it Percival and rub its round velvet belly.

I'm fascinated by bats. They are the only mammals to ever evolve powered flight and but yet are practically helpless once they are floored. They are like living metaphors for overachievers who just can't deal with setbacks or failures.

It's almost cute.

I'm also fascinated by humans. If we find a crash-landed bat scrabbling about on the ground, our first instinct (except for children and psychos) is to try and help it take flight again. Contrast that with the first instinct of a cat, which is probably to eat it.

That reminds me: I need to get a cat.

A friend of bats,
k0k s3n w4i

Hate and Bile in a Queue at the Movies

2011-12-04T20:28:00.004+08:00

"The world needs anger. The world often continues to allow evil because it isn't angry enough."

Bede Jarrett

The world around me and the people in it make very little sense to me. For example, how can anyone possibly believe that there is a God without the benefit of any real evidence? That does not compute for me. Why is having a kid out of wedlock such a bad thing? What is it with women and their fetishistic passion for exorbitantly priced handbags?

However, if I have to make a pronouncement on the one thing I understand least about people, it's how they sometimes behave at the ticket line at the movies. I don't know about you, but before going to catch a film at a local theatre, I almost always look up the day's schedule on the web first before I even step out of my bedroom. I'd arrive at the cineplex with one or three movies that I plan to watch with their showtimes already memorised. Also, I would also have a good idea of where I want to sit in any theatre (about 4 or 5 rows from the screen, right in the centre) and a sundry of other seats which I wouldn't mind terribly. One of the reasons why I don't normally ask anyone out to watch movies with me is because most people prefers to sit nearer to the back, and I hate, hate, hate making compromises on my preferences. I hate that only slightly less than having anyone - even my closest friends - contest my choice of films.

It usually takes me only about 15 seconds at the box office to get in, get tickets, and get out. So, it baffles and infuriates me when moviegoers takes a full minute or more to make their purchase. You know the type - they would approach the counter, take an eternity to decide on which film they want to watch because they did not so much as glance at the roster on the letterboard before jumping into the queue. Hell, they don't even need to do that anymore because most box offices these days have display screens overhead flashing the available showtimes. It meant that while they were waiting in line, they were too simply lazy or retarded to look the fuck up. Then, they'd hold up the line further by deliberating on the films' timings, trying to figure out which are the least offensive ones to their day's activities.

Of course, what really screws the pooch for me was when they are presented with a graphical display of the available seats, they would stare at it like it's the most mind-bending conundrum in the known universe. Civilisations rise and fall while they decide. The Egyptians probably took less time to build the pyramids than it take them to pick where they want to park their asses for a couple of hours. Usually, it's because the row at the back is all filled up and they are leery of getting too close to the film they wanted to see. I don't fucking understand it: why do people keep fighting over what are clearly inferior seats? Don't you think that you would get the most bang for the buck when you are in the middle of the blast zone of the surround sound system with the screen filling up your field of vision? Morons.

The worst scums of the earth are jerks that get to the box office and find out that their preferred seats or movies aren't available - so they proceed to hold a conference call with their buddies in situ while a hundred other patrons wait for them to make their life-changing decision. And no, they usually don't even have the decency to step aside and let others go first, fearing that even the crappy seats would be snapped up while they stall. This happened to me last weekend as three ugly, fat teenage ~~hippopotami~~ girls called the other members of their of Edward Cullen's Cock-Sucking Brigade because they might have to sit apart for Breaking Dawn: Part 1. Yes, the people behind you in a queue are judging all your physical flaws while you ruin their day. C'est la vie. In fact, if I'm in the line, I'm probably silently willing your father and mother to die in a gruesome gardening accident, or your children to be tortured, raped and infected with AIDS. I'm not even kidding. That's what I did to keep myself from boiling over, leaping at them, and crushing their larynges with my bare fingers. If you believe in the evil eye, this should cause you some concern.

One heroic mother of three standing directly behind the Twilight Cum-Sluts told them firmly that if they are having trouble deciding, they should let other people buy their tickets first - and they ignored her, indignant that anyone would dare speak to their self-entitled lard-asses that way. Eventually, they left empty-handed which meant that they wasted everybody's time for absolutely nothing. I was surprised that I had the presence of mind to stop myself from stomping them brutally in the ovaries.

One of these days, I'm going to stroke. Look, people of Kuching, I can forgive your lousy car-parking skills and your rubbish local food but please, stop being assholes at the box office. Hugs and kisses.

Has anger management issues,
k0k s3n w4i

Immortals: A Review

2011-11-10T23:20:00.004+08:00

"Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me;
The carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality."

Emily Dickinson

There are films like The Lord of the Rings trilogy that make me feel like it's perfect. Then, there are films like Tarsem Singh's Immortals that make me want to throw a hundred million dollars at it just so it can be perfected.

The premise guaranteed my ass in the audience. It's a swords-and-sandals epic featuring the Greek pantheon and their demi-divine champions; the original superheroes. And I don't ask for much. I just want a spectacle. I want fight sequences that make me go "HOLY SHIT!" every five minutes. I want depictions of the Greek gods in all their amoral, dysfunctional, psychopathic glory (the Disney-fied fatherly Zeus and motherly Hera cooing over Hercules made my eyes want to throw up, even as a kid). I don't care much for adherence to the stories per se but I do care about characterisations. In my opinion, the closest any modern work of fiction ever came to matching the vision of the Hellenic deities in the myths is Dan Simmon's Ilium/Olympos duology of sci-fi novels.

To enjoy Immortals, I had to basically overlook the fact that the Olympians were portrayed as basically benevolent, if neglectful gods. Done.

THIS. IS. ATHENS!!!

The plot goes something like this: King Hyperion of the Heraklions is a misotheistic brute who sought the Epirus Bow, a weapon that can be used to free the Titans in order to make war on Zeus and co. The Chosen One is Theseus, a bastard and everyman who is really good at kicking ass. As the plot dictates, the gods themselves were conveniently forbidden to intervene in mortal affairs unless the Titans were actually unleashed because the film would have ended in the first two minutes otherwise. Zeus could have simply nuked the upstart god-killer wannabe from orbit.

Speaking of nuking from orbit, one of the most mind-blowing sequences you'll see from this film is Poseidon stepping off the edge of Olympus, plummeting thousands of feet at a (literally) screaming velocity into the sea and creating a freaking tsunami.

Henry Cavill was physically perfect for the role (and those people who cast him as Superman in Zack Snyder's upcoming film about the Man of Steel certainly thought he look heroic). What threw me off was how poorly his character was written. Theseus was traditionally thought of as a thinking man's Herakles who employs his cunning as much as his prowess in combat but in Immortals, he's just another flavourless well-muscled blockhead. It seemed to me that he had to be rescued by dei ex machina every time he strolls into a trap. Literally. He kept getting in situations that were way over his head and the gods have to power-bomb down to ancient Greece over and over again to bail him out.

I'm not necessarily complaining though. The gods are incredible to look at when they fight, and I simply could get enough of them. Differential slow motion was employed to show how blindingly fast the deities move in comparison to mortal, and when they go mano-a-mano with the newly emancipated Titans (who could move at the same lightning speed they do), Tarsem Singh did this interesting thing where slain combatants would fall or be flung away at slow motion while the fight continues to happen at normal or heightened speeds. Athena's sequences in particular illicited several gasps of awww-yeah! from my audience. I only wish that they had enough money to create blood and gore which look less bogus. And to allow the gods to keep their pimp-tastic gilded headgears in the final showdown. Seriously, the helms they put on at the end looked as if they came out of a plastic mold. Hell, if Tarsem had more money, he probably could have hired more than five actors to play the Olympians.

It also wouldn't be much of a spoiler for me to mention that the Minotaur made an appearance (a la Achilles' heel from the 2004 epic Troy in that it's just a really beefy guy in a freaky cow headgear) - since it's probably the original Theseus' most well-known exploit. Still, it didn't make much sense to me to have a realistic version of the labyrinth-dwelling half-bovine man-killer when there are clearly supernatural elements in play in Immortals, unlike in Troy where they consciously stripped all the unrealistic bits from the Trojan War. Theseus' fights were noteworthy as well and looked as if they were deleted scenes from 300. In fact, I'd go as far as to say that a couple of them even surpassed the action sequences in Zack Snyder's Spartan homoerotic brawl-fest.

Mickey Rourke was in excellent form here as would-be deicidic maniac and torture enthusiast (he had a brazen bull and everything), and the speech about what he was going to do to a defector gave me shudders. Freida Pinto played designated love/sex interest Phaedra, and her body too gave a stunning performance (which our Malaysian censors thoroughly scissored - bastards).

It's no great cinema but I certainly saw glimmers of greatness shining through parts of it. Is it due to studio interference? Likely, considering that one of the selling points they try to market this film on is that the producers of 300 were involved. Even so, I had a pretty good time being wowed by the bloody mayhem that Tarsem Singh managed to cobble together and like the sucker I am, I'll be right there when a sequel hits - if its blatant sequel hook actually keeps its promise. To sum it all up: Immortals is what Clash of the Titans should have been. There are actually titans clashing in this.

A graecophile from way back,

k0k s3n w4i

My First Successful Surgery

2011-11-08T20:11:00.000+08:00

"Surgeons must be very careful
When they take the knife!
Underneath their fine incisions
Stirs the Culprit - Life!"

Emily Dickinson

Two of them, as a matter of fact.

I marvel at the achievements of our species which allowed me to cut a large hole into the abdomen of a living, breathing human being today and pull her newborn child right out of her into this world - which isn't a very impressive feat on its own. The fact that she's expected to survive the whole ordeal and would probably be discharged from the hospital in a couple of days is the amazing part.

I understand that most hospitals in Malaysia do not expect their house officers to perform Caesarean sections but where I'm serving, it's a mandatory procedure. My maiden major surgery was supervised by the nicest, coolest, and most fetching Medical Officer in the department who, coincidentally, shares the same name with the Long-Suffering Girlfriend™. My patient was a 37-year-old Bidayuh lady with a baby on board that (we suspect) grew a little too chubby to safely ooze out of her vagina.

To prep for it, I watched a series of instructional videos on the internet. Yes, in a government hospital, it's possible that you may be operated upon by a first-time surgeon who just learned how to do it overnight through YouTube. What, did you think we grow full-fledged specialists from cloning vats?

Alright, alright, I had also assisted in more than a dozen of these operations - so I sort of knew what I was doing. Besides, my awesome boss was standing by, ever-ready to take over the enterprise if the gravid mother on the table exploded or something (more likely than you think). I've replayed the steps in my head so many times that I actually started having recurring dreams of performing C-sects. And not all of them ended in conflagrations and macerated, finger-chomping, zombie babies.

I entered via a Joel-Cohen incision, and was surprised by how little mental resistance I encountered towards slicing a live human being open with a scalpel. This is coming from a guy whose closest experience to butchery was taking a table knife to a slab of medium-rare steak. Then, I proceeded to enter her abdominal cavity in layers; digging through her fat, splitting her muscles and snipping through her peritoneum. After identifying the lower segment of her womb, I cautiously made a transverse incision, exposing the bulbous amniotic sac which popped in a warm gush of liquor amnii. Seizing it by its head and neck, I extricated the infant from the uterine cavity in short order, cut its cord, and deposited its bawling ass into the hands of a waiting nurse. Booyah!

As per the patient's request, we tied off her tubes so she can never conceive again. Finally, came the tedious task of sewing the huge gaping wound I've inflicted into the woman's middle layer by layer. She was fully awake the whole time, of course, since she was only under spinal anaesthesia.

Anyway, I did far better than I thought I would. From "skin-to-skin", the surgery took a little more than an hour - 73 minutes to be precise - which was about twice as long compared to a C-sect performed by a more experienced surgeon. The estimated blood loss was only about half a litre; well below concern. I was in a celebratory mood so I bought everyone pizza. It's little victories like this that make my job fun.

P.S. In case I've painted an immodest and overly-competent picture of myself, I must remind you that my MO was coolly and patiently walking me through it from start to finish. I was so afraid that she would suddenly decide that I suck at it and finish the operation herself - but she didn't. Phew.

In and out again,
k0k s3n w4i

Deus ex Machina

2011-10-31T00:13:00.009+08:00

"We're all puppets, Laurie. I'm just a puppet who can see the strings."

Dr. Manhattan in Watchmen

Names were changed to protect the privacy of the parties involved.

"This is a very severe case of bilateral ventriculomegaly. The atria of the lateral ventricles measure more than 30 milimetres each!" said Dr. Vic. "The thalamus is also absent. I can't say for sure since I am unable to do any 3D scanning with this machine, but I suspect that there is agenesis of the corpus callosum as well."

He was clearly narrating for my benefit rather than for the mother of unborn child he was performing the ultrasound scan on. The woman could neither speak nor understand English, and even if she could, she would still come against the layer of Latin jargon which we medical types use to sound smart and to shield our conversations from lay ears.

"The head is far too big to be delivered vaginally," he went on. "It had to be taken out through a C-sect."

After peering into the Rorschach greys of the monitor to his satisfaction, he hung up the transducer and then went to his computer to compose his report. "There's no way of even knowing how long the baby would live after its birth," he said as he typed. "The prognosis is very bad."

He attempted for a moment to explain to the expectant mother and her mother-in-law who accompanied her about his findings but then gave up before turning to me, asking me for the Malay words for "mental retardation". I supplied them, and he then proceeded to break the bad news to her in his halting, syllabic attempt at our national tongue. It sounded blunt because he had not attained mastery yet over the usual sympathetic inflections. Meanwhile, the woman sitting in front of us was slowly processing the information she just received into tears.

"How do I tell her that the baby might even die in utero?" he asked me next. I took over from there and re-explained everything in the most delicate way I could. But what could I do, really? No matter how soft the words are, the news were still going to crush her like runaway bullet train out of nowhere. Her little babe was more than 30 weeks old, more than three-quarters of the way to the beginning of its new life - and up until that moment, she had been picturing a plump, gurgling, pink-cheeked cherubim in her mind. That picture was shattered in a second. No one expects to give birth to a mistake of nature.

"This is not your fault," I continued in Malay, pulling a few tissue from the dispenser and handing them to her. She eagerly accepted them and buried her face. "It's hard to say at this point what caused this to happen, but the child was probably formed this way from the very beginning." I avoided explaining that it could have been genetic, chromosomal or developmental because these are details she neither need nor understand.

"So, the baby is fated to be this way?" she asked quietly.

"Yes, you can say that," I answered cautiously. Fate to me is just another word for determinism but it probably meant something entirely different to her. Most people ascribed a force of agency to causality; some kind of anthropomorphic decider of destinies that has a Plan all laid out for everyone from the beginning of the universe. God, they call it.

The effect that simple idea had on her was startling. She calmed down visibly. Suddenly, the random, senseless tragedy turned into a scheduled itinerary in her life. I practically saw it clicked into place like a programmed protective subroutine in her brain, and it's uncanny. For a moment, I pierced the illusion and saw what we really are: highly sophisticated biological robots, but robots nonetheless. And we have found a way to short circuit grief.

"It's fate," her mother-in-law said, reinforcing the meme. "This is God's will."

God can mean anything we need. God can mean that there are no accidents. He can mean that all the bad things that ever happened to us are just secret tests of our characters or faith; and that all of it serve some nebulous higher Purpose. He can mean that there's a special place in the hereafter where the woman will reunite with her malformed child who was miraculously made whole and unbroken, along with everyone else she ever loved and lost, while everyone else she dislikes - murderers, paedophiles, rude individuals, or people who simply do not believe in the same beautiful fantasy she does - are summarily excluded from it for eternity. God WILL fix everything in the end, and give us our obligatory happy endings.

"This is God's will," the pregnant woman agreed, drying her eyes. And in them, I saw the invention of God, as He had been invented over and over again since the very first tragedy struck the very first man.

Homo ex machina,

k0k s3n w4i

The Curse of Epicurus

2011-10-29T22:58:00.001+08:00

"Human, I wonder why you’re a better make than I could ever build or create
You know not love or hate
I am so scared of what will kill me in the end for I am not prepared
I hope I will get the chance to be someone, to be human
Look what we’ve done
Look what we’ve done"

Human (2010) by Ellie Goulding

If everything goes according to plan, I'll be graduating my first posting in a fortnight. Ob and Gyn is not my favourite cocktail in the bar but the taste sort of grows on a person, you know?

Recently, I received an insight into how I was selected to be one of the two house officer leaders in the first place. A couple of days ago, I approached the medical officer in-charge of house officers to tell her that I'm leaving soon and that she would have to get another ~~sucker~~ outstanding individual to fill the vacuum. She told me to rattle off a string of names at random but she didn't like the sound of any of them. Then, one of my colleagues happened to stroll by and she decided on the instant that he should be the next HO leader. I half-expected her to holler "Pikachu! I choose you!"

While it's gratifying to know that I was one of the HO's she disliked least, I also know now precisely which of my coworkers she outright disdains - and I'm not quite sure what to do with that knowledge. It also made me wonder: which of my many bosses secretly hate my guts?

In a post-round powwow last Wednesday, a specialist singled me out openly as an example of a good house officer - and that totally made my day. I also secretly hate it that it can make my day. It made me feel like a spaniel pup, ever-eager to please; fetching papers and and bedroom slippers just for that little pat on my foofy head. And I also find his praise perplexing because I don't think I'm cleverer or more hardworking than any other house officer in the department. In my mind's eye, I honestly see myself as a middling worker with no loftier goal than surviving the posting without beeping too loudly on anyone's radar.

On Thursday, said specialist excused me from the afternoon round and summoned me down to his office in the clinic where he had me "chaperone" as he scanned a few patients. To "chaperone" in medical parlance meant sticking around to make sure that nothing sexy happens between a doctor and his female patient - and chaperones are always women. By the virtue (or sin) of being male, I am technically not qualified to do any chaperoning, so his request struck me as being more than a little bizarre. He then proceeded to give me a crash lecture on scanning for fetal anomalies (which I only have a very elementary understanding of) and when he was done with the patients, he proceeded to show me a few 3D sonographs of brain defects in unborn babes in his collection - which I thought were pretty damn neat. In the meantime, my partner had to do all the ward work in my absence while I essentially had a one-on-one teaching session.

I felt out of my depth then; like I'm in a race where which was rigged for me to ultimately disappoint whoever that is fool enough to bet on me. I have no ambitions to speak of. I do not aim to be better than everyone else in anything I do (and frankly speaking, I don't see my destiny in medicine at all). Whatever it is that's the opposite of a go-getter, I'm it personified. I'm so much of a beta male that if I'm a girl, I wouldn't want to fuck me.

My idea of a perfect life is that of a wealthy Victorian highborn lady who does nothing but write, read or paint, and is free to pursue studies in whichever subject she fancies because no one expects her to amount much to anything anyway. In 21st century terms, what I'm saying is that I want to be Paris Hilton, but classy.

Dreaming of pipes,

k0k s3n w4i

Hey

2011-10-19T20:05:00.000+08:00

"For here you are, standing there, loving me
Whether or not you should
So somewhere in my youth or childhood
I must have done something good"

Something Good from The Sound of Music (1965)

I've been gone far too long, I know, but just for the moment, I'm back. I have not written anything that's not a patient report or a discharge summary in an entire month, and I can't imagine that being very healthy for my psyche. Some people meditate or do yoga. Some hang out with friends. My thing is: I write.

I have a hundred specific things I want to write about but I fear I have neither the stamina nor drive to put them in words today. Today, I just want to talk in a vanilla Dear Diary kind of way about nothing.

Recently, I had a rather pernicious duty foisted on me by the boss - I was put in charge of the duty roster and my job is to distribute my department's manpower pool of half a hundred junior doctors to ensure that we remain smoothly operational. It's a much tougher job that it sounds. I receive complaints and demands in all hours of the day (and some hours at night) from the house officers I expected to herd and organise; all of them fighting over valuable operating theatre time which enables them to perform the required procedures which are prerequisites to graduating the posting. I receive a daily stream of complaints and demands ranging in tone from angry to weepy, and let me tell you: I find anyone in tears to be very off-putting. It throws me into traumatic flashbacks of my previous relationship with the Ex-Grrrfriend™.

Yesterday, a specialist texted me and asked me if I would like to participate in the research team of a study he was planning to launch, and I said "I do" and kissed the metaphorical bride. I don't fully know if I should have committed to it but research is something which I find far more fascinating than the care-giving facet of medicine - even if its in ~~OB/GYN~~ a specialty I'm not particularly fond of. But I certainly hunger for the experience. Tomorrow, I'll be meeting said specialist and be briefed on the details and all its devils. We'll see how it goes then.

Currently, I'm quite taken in by the soundtrack to Kari-gurashi no Arietti (or The Borrower Arrietty) which was written and performed by French French-Brettone singer and harper, Cécile Corbel, who sang in endearingly broken English and presumably broken Japanese as well. There are very warm and homey Celtic and Oriental fusion tones in the music and I couldn't stop listening to them. Also, after watching Arrietty, I'm increasingly convinced by the inherent advantage animated films have over their live-action counterparts. In live action movies, we see characters being played by recognisable stars we've seen in other works and in their usually very public lives, and the "reality baggage" can sometimes intrude into the performance. With animated films, particularly those voiced by obscure voice actors or seiyuu, the characters lives and breathes only within the movie's universe. In a way, I am far more likely to forget that they aren't real, and that makes me care more about them.

A couple of days ago, I discovered that there's a cineplex located a mere five minutes walk from where I live. I simply went to my fridge, grabbed a bottle of ice-cold ginger beer and a bag of crispy nori snack, walked a block down the street, and saw Warrior (because Tom Hardy ignites my latent homosexuality even more than Michael Fassbender). It's the next best thing to having my own private movie theatre. Sure, it's seedy and looks like one of those places which show nothing but skin flicks to half a dozen furiously-masturbating 40-something lonely dudes per screening, but it's still serviceable. Besides, it's on the 9th floor and has a romantic night view of the city and the river, and that's worth something. I daydreamed for a minute of buying the place, refurbishing it and turning it around - and then the beautiful madness passed.

Recapitulated,

k0k s3n w4i

Contagion: A Review

2011-09-20T13:00:00.038+08:00

"Blogging isn't writing. It's graffiti with punctuation."

Dr. Ian Sussman in Contagion (2011)

Bloggers of the world! Unite!

Soderbergh spelled out the movie in its tagline because he thinks you are stupid.

Last Thursday night, I made contact with Steven Soderbergh's Contagion, a disaster film like no other I have ever seen. It's best described as a movie length procedural chronicling how every level of human society would respond to a pandemic motored by a highly transmissible, highly virulent virus previously unknown to science. The virus is also fictional, but just barely (I will put on a labcoat and explain what I meant by that in a bit).

In many ways, it's almost a documentary in its very clinical and hyper-realistic account of what would happen in the event of a worldwide plague. Four out of four doctors agree (that was what my movie party consisted of, by the way) that it's almost a public service announcement. We did however, differed in our enjoyment of the film. I unabashedly loved it. The others thought it was more education than entertainment and opined that if you're looking for a good time at the movies, you won't find it in Contagion. It very bleak, brutal and unpredictable, much like how a real life pandemic is.

Warning: This doctor recommends that you watch the movie before reading this review slash armchair analysis. There is no known cure for spoilers.

The Virus.

The real star of the film, the MEV-1 virus, is based on our very own, real-life Nipah virus - one of Malaysia's rare honest contributions to the world of medicine. It was named after Kampung Nipah in Negeri Sembilan where it was first isolated from a human infectee (there's also a Tioman virus, if you're interested). Like Nipah, the MEV-1 is a respiratory paramyxovirus and encephalitic agent, and for those of you who don't understand scientish, "encephalitic" pretty much means "it eats braaains". Nipah too is spread primarily through touch, and typically presents itself through flu-like symptoms (fever, headaches, muscle aches, sore throat, etc) and neurological signs (like drowsiness, altered consciousness and ~~cinematic~~ dramatic seizures). It may scare you to know that Nipah typically kills 40-75% of its victims and severe sporadic outbreaks had been recorded almost yearly since its discovery in 1999. Yes, the scenario in Contagion can totally happen.

Another noteworthy trivia is MEV-1's origin story which is blow-by-blow identical to the proposed mechanism from which Nipah first arose - from the spillage of excrements and half-eaten fruits from Pteropid fruit bats into pig farms due to the increasing overlap of habitats these two animals share - or as the film puts it: "Somewhere out there, the wrong pig met up with the wrong bat."

The scientific aspects of this film are surprisingly accurate and its accuracy, by and large, can be credited to Contagion's science consultant, Ian Lipkin, the Director of the Center for Infection and Immunity, an academic laboratory for microbe hunting in acute and chronic diseases. It was he who ~~created~~ selected the film's virus, going as far as constructing the genetic map of the MEV-1 using sequences of paramyxoviruses he downloaded from GenBank. The Paramyxoviridae is a family of viruses which boasts the inclusion of common household names like mumps and measles, but I bet you already knew that.

I do however have a minor plausibility issue with a story element in Contagion where limited supply (a recognised logistic problem with vaccines in real life pandemic responses) forced the distribution of the newly-developed vaccine to be decided by a lottery based on a person's date of birth. In reality, the vaccines would be first given to doctors and nurses - because let's face it, who's going to help the ordinary folks after all the healthcare providers have keeled over and died? That scene where Dr Ellis Cheever gave his dose of vaccine to his janitor's kid while putting the wristband which marks those protected on himself was meant to be heartwarming, but it elicited a "what a fucking moron" from me and my friends. He's essentially turned himself into a walking public health hazard.

The Film.

Contagion doesn't have characters in the traditional sense of the word - going against every good advice there is on good film-making. If an unproven director had made it, I'd have chalked it up to crappy direction but it was most certainly a calculated decision on Soderbergh's part. What it has instead of characters are broadly-painted points of view. In Matt Damon, we get the ground level everyman's perspective. Laurence Fishburne represents the decision-making upper echelons of public health as a high-ranking officer of the CDC. Marion Cottilard plays the WHO epidemiologist who went on a quest to Hong Kong to identify the index patient, or "patient zero". Elliott Gould and Jennifer Ehle are the scientists charged with discovering the nature of the pathogen and ultimately finding a way to fight it.

My favourite character by far was Kate Winslet's Dr. Erin Mears. She had the thankless job of being the main exposition mouthpiece, bringing the average filmgoer up-to-speed on technical jargons like "fomite" and "R₀", and spouting statistics like "the average person touches their face three to five times every waking minute." That's a factoid that you are now going to recall every time you touch yours for the rest of your lives. Clearly, this is not the reason why I enjoyed her performance.

Laurence Fishburne as Dr. Ellis Cheever and Kate Winslet as Dr. Erin Mears.

Dr. Mears is someone we term in the medical fraternity as a "frontliner" and being one myself, I naturally identify with her most. She was charged with organising other first responders and setting up field medical stations, willingly exposing herself to contacts with the infected masses. Contagion recognises the silent, unthinking heroism of the average health worker. It's a fact that every time I draw blood, perform surgery or even interview someone, I am putting myself at risk of catching whatever bugs my patients are harbouring within their systems. All of us in the field knows someone who was infected with HIV or viral hepatitis in the line of duty. When SARS broke in 2002, many doctors and nurses succumbed to the disease and died, and this too was to be Dr. Mears' fate; to die on a bed in a field medical station she set up. Some may consider it schmaltz overdose, but I find that beat in her final hours when she tried to hand a fellow patient her jacket incredibly poignant. It was shot, aptly, like an understatement.

There are a lot of cinematic touches like that which I enjoyed. I like, for example, how it quietly highlights someone touching each other or a potentially biohazardous object, like a cellphone of a bowl of nuts. It was also most certainly deliberate when the film killed off one of its biggest named stars and a little kid in its first act. After all, anyone can die when the next big pandemic hits.

I also loved the sleuthing sequences that Marion Cotillard's epidemiologist went through in order to home in on the index patient, but sadly those parts are short-lived as her story turned into a kidnapping caper by that sleazy Chinese accountant guy in The Dark Knight in a gambit to get first dibs on vaccines for his village. I find that storyline highly implausible - I mean, after they let her go, what's stopping her from giving the kidnappers up to the law? The guy worked with her in the beginning! And he even took her to his village! Good going, poopyhead. I hope the Chinese government puts you in front of a firing squad.

The Big Ideas.

At the pandemic's crescendo, we see Minneapolis decompose into an anarchy of looters, housebreakers and thugs when the city was put under quarantine - a necessary utilitarian evil to prevent the disease from escaping into nearby provinces. It was highlighted in a scene where a throng of people were standing in line at a drugstore to purchase an alleged cure for the disease. As soon as it became clear to them that there isn't enough of the product for everyone, they immediately dissolve into an angry mob ready to snatch what they want by force. It hit home for me that civilisation is just a tissue-thin unspoken agreement we all have with one another until resources cross a threshold of scarcity. I find that idea terribly chilling - more so because I believe it can certainly happen.

Anna Jacoby-Heron as Jory Emhoff and Matt Damon as Mitch Emhoff

In Contagion, Soderbergh also drew comparison between the spread of a modern pandemic in the age of global air travel to that of the spread of fear, memes and misinformation in the age of the internet, making the case that the latter is more injurious to the ranks of humanity than a killer virus. The public's overreaction felt a bit manufactured to me, seeing as what we should worry about is really the opposite. After the whole H1N1 influenza debacle turned out to be a huge ado about nothing, I fear that people would not take the next epidemic as seriously as they should - and they should.

I have hopes that Contagion will immunise the masses against their fatal indifference (which I personally think is the goal of the movie) but then again, how does one prepare against the next potential globe-trotting, population-decimating infection the likes of which we have never encountered before? If there's one thing I learned from this flick, it's that the only thing anyone can do against a disaster of this scope and nature is damage control.

The Scepticism.

On the subject of misinformation, I was pleasantly surprised by just how sceptically-bent Contagion is. In fact, it's quite probably the most sceptical feature film I have ever watched on the big screen.

Enter Jude Law's Alan Krumwiede, a unique-hits-obsessed internet crusader stereotypically positioned to be the Cassandra against an almagam of a sinister shadow government and the corporate boogeymen out to deceive the sheeples. From his blog, he tells his substantial readership that there is in fact a cure to the MEV-1 which Big Pharma is suppressing from public knowledge for their own undefined financial gains. Said cure is a homeopathic remedy derived from forsythia, a yellow-flowering shrub used in traditional Chinese medicine, and he claimed that it made him better after he caught the virus himself. According to Hollywood film conventions, Krumwiede would be the hero.

Jude Law as Alan Krumwiede

But this film's commitment to realism did not fail at this juncture. In reality, the lone alt-med conspiracy nut on the net would be just that - a lone alt-med conspiracy nut. In truth, Krumwiede faked his illness and then supposedly "cured" himself using forsythia in order to drum up demand for it - and he ended up making millions from the masses of people who read him and trusted him. In fact, he even tried to discourage people from real medicine - the new vaccine developed by the CDC - using the inherent anti-government sentiments he engendered in the web community.

Homeopathy, if you don't know, is absolute bollocks. It's unscientific ritualised sympathetic magic, and I'm surprised that not many more people know that. 10 out of 10 of my colleagues (freaking doctors, the lot of them) assumed that homeopathy is just another system of medicine, and when I quizzed them on what it really is, they couldn't tell me - at which point I would gladly launch into a Homeopathy 101 mini-lecture I have given a million times. If you see the word homeopathy on the label of any medicine, rest assured that i~~t's quackier than a flock of ducks~~ it contains nothing more than water in it.

If you think that Jude Law's slimeball blogger is unbelievable as a character, read this real-life NaturalNews.com article on Contagion. Krumwiede clearly has his real-life analogues in delusional alt-med misinformation artists like Mike Adams, Joe Mercola and the anti-vaccination kooks over at the Age of Autism. They demonise science-based medicine (which have more than doubled the life expectancy of our species, thank you very much) and real doctors while promoting unproven "natural" alternatives that have been conclusively and repeatedly shown to be ineffective in the scientific literature.

The Last Word.

All in all, it's a very well-made film. Some critics have called Contagion a very emotionally cold and distant movie, but it's an opinion which I do not share. Real life is rarely as dramatic as it usually is in Hollywoodland, and Soderbergh's latest offering is about a real life horror story, and how. I don't remember the last time I was scared by something I see in a cinema.

Contagion also remembers the real heroes: the scientists and healthcare providers who worked their asses off to fight the diseases which plague humanity even as the Krumwiedes of the world labour to undermine their efforts. Just for this, I give Soderbergh's scandalous (and uncalled for) dig at bloggers and blogging a pass. Don't do it again, Steve, or we might just rub our grubby fingers all over your face.

P.S. Another thing worthy of mention is Cliff Martinez's dissonant, sciencey score for the film. It has a very strong presence throughout the film.

A graffiti artist who uses punctuations,

k0k s3n w4i

I Found a BlackBerry

2011-09-18T10:00:00.006+08:00

"I found a wallet
I found a wallet
Inside were pictures of your small family
You are so young
Your hair dark brown
You had been born in nineteen fifty-three"

Wallet (2009) by Regina Spektor

Here it is!

I included a picture just in case you thought I found a cluster of small dark fruits.

I found it sitting on its lonesome on top of a table outside of the Life Café at Train Terrace, and seeing that I too was on my own, we hooked up for a petit déjeuner. All my life, I only ever had dalliances with Nokias (which I value for their nigh indestructibility). Pricey delicate phones that can do a billion things and also give me back rubs holds little attraction for me because I'm the sort of person who shouldn't have nice things. However, if something nice plants its perky ass on my laps and whisper naughty things into my ear, I find it hard to say no.

Y'see, it was too easy. I could simply turn it off and pocket it. I was alone so no one could judge me. Since I don't believe in karma, God or the existence of a punitive afterlife, I fully expect to get off scot free. I could make a mantra out of "finders, keepers" or "la la la la". I could tell myself that the owner was too dumb for a smartphone and that he (and it was most certainly a guy) deserved to lose it because he was careless enough to leave it behind. Yes, that sounds like a plan.

Instead, I left it on and waited. I finished my breakfast waiting, and I was halfway home when it finally rang. Even at that moment, I felt the temptation to ignore it pulsating against my conscience. I was at the point of definite returns; it was still not too late to change my mind.

I couldn't do it.

Every cell in my body forced me to accept the call, and I did. On the other end was a rather flustered Malay man who immediately started barking questions my way. Who are you? Why do you have my phone? Where did you find it? Then, before I could say hello, he offered me a reward for the return of his expensive piece of shit - as if I needed an incentive to do the right thing. My hackles rose and I realised that I could just as easily say goodbye instead. Your phone's mine now, asshole.

I took a deep breath and told him to take one too. Then, I arranged to rendezvous with him at the nearby Wisma Saberkas (Kuching's poor man's Lowyat Plaza), a plan he eagerly assented to. On my sinister shoulder, my metaphorical devil tried to reason with me: "You can stand him up, you know. He sounds like a prick anyway."

But I waited. After almost half an hour, the bloke turned up. He looked suitably grateful to see me and thanked me profusely when I handed him his phone back. He took my digits and promised, to my horror, to keep in contact but thankfully, he had not come through on his word.

Now, why did I do that? Why would I - in fact, why would anyone at all do anything which benefit another person while expecting zilch in return? In my case, I even stood to profit rather handsomely from it, but chose instead to waste my time and petrol restoring the BlackBerry to its original owner.

Perhaps it's because I really like thinking to myself: "I'm one of the good guys." Perhaps, I simply believe in treating others the way I would like to be treated in return. Or maybe it's because I constantly have second thoughts about all aspects of my life; a process I have come to think of as my internal dialogue with myself. I figured out that the solution to the age-old conundrum of quis custodiet ipsos custodes - who watches the watchman - is to have a binary watchman system, each watching the other. In a way, there's always someone else within my head with me, policing everything I do without.

It's either that or I'm seeing the early squeaks of my latent schizophrenia.

P.S. Interpreted to its fully extent, it means that my blog represents the third level of my consciousness. That's just like me - going meta on meta.

A believer in the rule that glitters,

k0k s3n w4i

Gone Baby Gone

2011-09-15T19:00:00.002+08:00

"Don't wake up, won't wake up, can't wake up
No, don't wake me up"

By The Time (2009) by Mika feat. Imogen Heap

Do you know what's messed up?

I do, and I learned the meaning of it just last week. Dawn was cracking and I had just begun reviewing patients in the gynaecology ward when a woman emerged from the washroom with the bottom half of her standard-issue green hospital garb soaked with blood. Her horror was on her face. Mine wasn't.

That was not what's messed up. In fact, that's almost routine but it demanded my full attention so I dropped everything I was doing and attended to her immediately (or stat, as we like to say because five syllables was four too many in an emergency). So, I laid her down and jammed a disposable plastic speculum up her delicates, and what I saw through it... that's messed up.

I saw a fluid-filled, translucent sac bulging into her vagina. Within it, I saw a pallid miniature foot complete with miniature toes twitching and kicking against the glistening membrane. The sixteen-weeker mother had been dallying at the point of no return for a couple of days already and all of us were absentmindedly expecting the inevitable - but the reality of it rushed up my head like too much iced drink when it actually unfolded in crimson on my own two hands. I knew the foetus was still very much alive the whole time. I also knew that it's chance of survival outside of it's mother's body was precisely zero. I was to deliver, for all intents and purposes, a tiny living corpse.

After a couple of pushes, the sac slipped out and promptly burst in a warm flood of amniotic fluid, depositing an uncanny imp-like creature between the lady's legs. Its tiny mouth opened and closed like a goldfish's, screaming soundlessly and gasping to fill it's useless, half-formed lungs. I continued to attend to the woman while trying my hardest not to notice it as it squirmed impotently against the back of my hand. There was nothing I could do for you, little fella. Just die. While I waited for the placenta to detach from the womb, the baby slowly faded away.

No, not baby. In my documentation of the events later, I referred to it as "the product of conception". That's five syllables more than "baby", but in this case, it's okay.

I continued to chat with the mother conversationally, both of us determined to ignore the ugly fact of a freshly dead child in the room. She already knew what to expect, and was taking it far too well. When I removed the clammy, limp mannikin from the scene, I took great care to wrap it up completely out of sight with a piece of bloodied cloth. She can choose look at it when she's ready.

You know what's even more messed up? Most people believe that there is a God watching over us. If he really exists, it seems to me that that's all he does. He just stood by and watched; unblinking, unflinching, stone cold.

P.S. "God has a plan," they say. So did Hitler. We didn't like his plan very much, did we?

Messed up,

k0k s3n w4i

The Other Side

2011-09-12T23:38:00.006+08:00

"I don't know what you smoke
Or what countries you've been to
If you speak any other languages
Other than your own,
I'd like to meet you"

I Don't Know (2008) by Lisa Hannigan

Sunset over the Sarawak River.

Job #1

The very first job I held down was at the local newly-opened Tesco back in Malacca; a position which Grace of Rainbows obtained on my behalf. I was sixteen at the time, and laboured as a retail assistant for the interest of a company called Travelite, an outfit which had its fingers in the distribution of cheap luggage bags, satchels and suitcases. My supervisor was a large, effeminate Chinese man who had an even larger Australian boyfriend. He was the first openly gay person I knew.

I don't know if you have noticed but our daily lives are criss-crossed with invisible barriers separating the microcosms of our social machine. Behind every uniform, badge or cash counter is a world apart. I realised this on the first day I reported for duty in my red Tesco polo neck. For the first time, I entered a familiar building through a side entryway I never knew existed and emerged into strange new place - except, it was just the same old Tesco I had shopped at dozens of times before. I had walked those aisles as a customer, but something changed radically when I walked them as an employee. You see, I had crossed over to the Other Side.

My job itself was mindless and unexciting. I recall spending major hours of it just sitting around and trying to break the 3-digit combination on the locks of suitcases which pesky, meddlesome brats had changed for a lark, and convincing potential patrons that the bags we sell aren't utter shits. The interesting part comes from exploring all the alien secret spaces tucked away from the eyes of the unititiated; the "unauthorised" - from the greasy employee's cafetaria which served food-like objects to the cavernous, twilit storage annex with its mile-high shelves and lumbering monster forklifts. Once, I had to clamber a whole storey up one of those oversized shelves and lower suitcases down to a waiting colleague below. Back then, I was still young enough to see the real risk of falling and shattering my spine to pieces as an adventure.

Job #2

After my A-levels, while waiting for med school to start, I eased into my second job at then-smalltown Malacca's only cineplex minding the box office and gigging as an usher for three bucks an hour - that's 40 cents less than my old job three years ago, but boy did I loved working there. It was where the tinder of my passion for cinema was ignited. When I'm off-duty (and usually when I'm on-duty as well), I could saunter freely into any of its four modest theatres and watch any movie I wanted - and I watched every new release six or seven times. On weekdays when cinemagoers are thin, I could even find time to catch up on my reading. Of course, I was made to put on a silly waistcoat and a strap-on bowtie, but what job is perfect really?

I had stood behind the concession stand where they popped corn and seen the insides of the box office, the manager's office, and the place where they tuck the mega speakers away (which I had to check nightly in case someone somehow magically managed to carry off one under his or her shirt beneath our notice); but I never had the chance to visit the projectionists' room, which is a microcosm within the cineplex's microcosm. The projectionists were a rather surly species and they didn't want a kid like me mucking about their mini off-world planet. Still, I resolved to make it upstairs someday.

However, I had to resign from that job before I could because I managed to piss off pretty much all my superiors. It's a long story, but the short of it is that I inadvertently started a proto-union and made all the other part-timers feel disgruntled about our slave-grade salary (which they were totally okay with before I pointed it out to them). Shit hit fan the day I trooped into the boss's office with my colleagues in tow, and we all ended up covered in it.

Job #3

I quickly osmosed into my next job at Giordano - purveyors of tasteless apparel - within the same mall. They had an unexpectedly stringent interview process complete with a formal questionaire in which I wass quizzed on my problem-solving skills (e.g. what would you do if a customer asks if a skirt makes her look fat?). I was also asked to name the country which the company originated from, and I hazarded Italy because Giordano sounded Italian (it was Hong Kong).

If I answered honestly, I would have simply said "Fuck me, lady, do I look like I shop here?"

As a former insider, I can attest that the sickeningly saccharine sing-song "Welcooome!" the Giordanoids crooned every time you walk into one of their outlets is a codified company policy. I asked my supervisor if I could just greet customers with a clean, short, polite "Welcome" without dragging it out like a drag queen but she reacted to my suggestion as if I just spat in her newborn child's mouth. The paymasters of Giordano were a lot more generous (almost twice as generous as Golden Screen Cinemas', in fact) but I was expected to slog a whole lot harder. Once, after I've completed all the usual chores, my boss made me go up a stepladder to clean the air-conditioning vents. I'm not kidding you; she eyeballed the entire shop looking for work for me to do. Finding nothing, she had to get creative.

At the back of the shop was a closet-sized stockroom which moonlighted as a seamster's chamber and a staffroom which was just about the right size if Giordano was staffed entirely by Oompa Loompas. It was a cramped social space where I mingled with a very specific demography far removed from my usual circles: women who dropped out of high school because they got knocked up. It frightens me how easily people can settle down comfortably in dead end jobs between their narrow horizons, indulge in catty gossips as their sole pastime while making as much money as they could, and breed like base creatures, leaving behind nothing more than a headstone and halves of their genetic code behind - not that there's really anything wrong with that sort of life. It's just that I wouldn't want to live it.

***

I am not hardworking person, and I'd even go as far as to say I'm an incurably lazy one. The reason why I kept diving into the labour pool was not because I wanted to contribute to the community or to generate extra pocket money. I was in it for the perspectives; the figurative scenery from the Other Sides. They hold a weird attraction for me I cannot fully express in words.

These days, I'm apparently a doctor, a reality which I still have problems coming to grips with. It's surreal, almost disturbing. Men and women would undress on my command and I could touch them anywhere I wish both outside and (literally) inside their bodies. With a bit of interrogation, they would tell me their deepest, most shameful secrets. They allow me to stick them with needles daily as if they are life-sized voodoo dolls, and let me drain their freaking life blood out for lab tests they do not understand. If I hand them a pill of unknown providence and ask them to swallow it, the only question they have for me is "before or after meal?" I can cut them up, period. It's only possible because my patients have all unwittingly suspended their knowledge that I'm an average human being just like them. Amazing isn't it, how a couple of letters in front your name can change you so thoroughly?

There are few Sides more Other than the one I'm currently on, and I admit that I'm secretly starting to think it's pretty damn cool. Ask me again in a week if I still feel the same.

The sky outside the operation hall at the Sarawak General.

Writing from another dimension,

k0k s3n w4i

The Lotophagus and Bibliobibuli

2011-09-05T21:06:00.003+08:00

"Woke up and wished that I was dead
With an aching in my head
I lay motionless in bed
The night is here and the day is gone
And the world spins madly on"

World Spins Madly On (2006) by The Weepies

I finished reading A Dance with Dragons on the last day of August, and it was a killer of a book (as in, it will kill a full grown man if you swing it at his head). When I stepped into med school, an old friend and a fellow geek told me that I would no longer have the luxury of leisure reading. In response, I made a vow to read at least one novel a month no matter how busy I get - and I kept that vow even through my final exams. When I entered into the workforce, yet another geek friend warned me that I may soon have to abandon my modest little hobby. That galvanised my resolve because that's just the sort of person I am, and I just started on my meal of China Miéville's The City & the City for September. I will make short work of it and then belch loudly in satisfaction.

I daydream longingly and often of my time in the Indian Himalayas, where the days are in slow motion and the nights are not the beginning of tomorrows. What Thomas Wilson - Maugham's Lotus Eater - chose to do seems less and less like folly to me and more and more like a perfectly sensible plan. As a high school senior, it was a moral story about a good-for-nothing layabout meeting an unpleasant end he deserved (or at least, that's how we were suppose to interpret it in our literature studies in order to pass). These days, it makes me question the worth of a long life in service to others versus a shorter one in service to my own happiness.

I read a respectable number of books during my April in the Mountains including Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger, Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union, Dan Simmon's Olympos, Patrick Rothfuss' The Wise Man's Fear and Dan Brown's delighfully execrable The Lost Symbol. I also managed to rent a perfectly serviceable copy of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World for a steal of 3 rupees from a cosy little café in the Dalai Lama's temple complex. The place serves a mean Roquefort cheese and walnut pizza, by the way - so you know where to look now.

In Huxley's bold neoteric world, people indulge in a state-endorsed, side-effects-free hallucinatory drug called soma - going on what they term "soma holidays" - and enjoy rampant, guiltless, recreational sex. He wrote of a world devoid of angst, strife and individuality, and thus devoid of true art and creation. He wrote it as if it's a detestable dystopia. All along I was thinking: "Look how fucking happy everyone is!"

One character went on a permanent soma holiday and died in imbecilic bliss. Is that such a bad thing? If we measure the worth of our lives in the amount of pleasure it contains, then no - no, it's not. I sought refuge in literature, in art, only to stimulate the dopamine reward system in my brain. It's Pavlovian. I'm a dog slobbering at the ring of fiction's bell; a complex organic robot responding to the ebbs and flows of my chemical circuitry. If I am indefinitely happy and contented, then I would have no need of the books I covet and love.

But we have no soma in our boring old world. The closest thing I will ever come to a permanent soma holiday of my own is to spend the rest of my years reading by the hillside and basking in the orange glow of a McLeod Ganj sunset. Now, isn't that a life to die for?

Don't you just love how the sky is red and blue at the same time?

Lotus-deficient,

k0k s3n w4i

Limits

2011-09-01T19:12:00.002+08:00

"If you never say your name out loud to anyone,
They can never ever call you by it"

Better (2006) by Regina Spektor

Sleep comes effortlessly to me these days after I joined the labour pool. I used to think of myself as a habitual insomniac, but all it took to cure me all along was simply a day of honest hard work. Yesterday, I woke up at 7:00PM from a work-induced coma, wasting my half holiday in one those little slices of death. The alarm clock on my cellphone had been mysteriously switched off by whatever agent that animates me whilst I hovered in the limbo between sleep and death - I have no memory of performing the act at all.

I did a twin of what we call in the biz as EOD calls, or "every-other-day calls". It meant that I was on-call both on Sunday and Tuesday, totaling 64 hours in 4 days. What more, in my stuporous post-call state, I initially assented to taking a third call today but ultimately managed to backpedal in time to escape it. I am, however, on-call tomorrow again.

I need a recess, not necessarily from work but from people. The nature of my job requires me to treat with other human beings on an almost constant basis and I'm feeling an ache of longing for a bit of me-alone-time. The other ache I'm feeling comes from the constraints - the limits, if you will - of my life. I ask myself often: is this all there is to it? The answer is no, but only if I dare. In the 25 nascent years of my life, I already boast a lengthy string of bad life decisions, and I suffer daily under their sovereignty. I heard of a story of a house officer working in my hospital who recently did a disappearing act but he was eventually tracked down and admitted for a bit of shrinking. I've been following his blog for awhile now, not knowing he was the Notorious Vanishing Houseman but realised today that the two are one of the same. Why, I even unwittingly spoke to him in the Malaysian Atheists, Freethinkers, and Agnostics page a couple of weeks ago.

They think he's nuts. Does it make me nuts too if I think that what he did made perfect sense to me?

Last month, a 24-week-old child was born, only to die almost immediately after. It's as if the sole purpose of its mayfly life is to mock everything we do in the medical profession. I must never forget that haunting look of impotence etched on the face of every doctor in that room that day.

There,

k0k s3n w4i

Superstitions in the Sarawak General Hospital

2011-08-28T08:00:00.009+08:00

"The general root of superstition is that men observe when things hit, and not when they miss; and commit to memory the one, and forget and pass over the other."

Sir Francis Bacon

The man created the scientific method. Represent!

Twice or thrice a week, I would be put "on-call", which means that I would start working at about 6:00 am on one day and finish at 5:00 pm in the next. There are "bad calls" (in which the doctor on-call would get little to no sleep because of the glut of patients to attend to due to unforeseeable complications) and "good calls" (when one gets paid for sleeping mostly). So as you can see, there are many unpredictable elements which ultimately dictates how good or bad a call can be - and when there's a situation in which a lot of variables lie outside our control, superstitions would mushroom precipitously on its moist, slutty soil.

"That is what prayers are for," the Long Suffering Girlfriend™ once told me. "After doing everything you can, you pray that those things that you can't do anything about would go your way."

I've been working in the Sarawak General Hospital for little more than a month and already have I learned a sizeable number of silly superstitions associated with being on call. One of the first ones I learned is to avoid wearing anything red in colour - not even red undies. I can imagine how that started: a house officer must have had an especially bad call at some point in the past and was looking for things to blame that could have caused it.

"I am wearing a red shirt! That must be it!" he declared (perhaps even jokingly), and thus this particular bit of bunkum get passed on as oral tradition amongst the medical staff of the hospital forever after. It's a pitfall of human thinking to try and turn something inherently undivinable, like bad calls, into something that can be easily manipulated like the colours of one's attire - and many who aren't given to thinking rationally would readily fall into such stupid exercises. We are pattern-seeking animals, and that particular mental faculty have served us well throughout the history of our species. It's what allows us to engage in higher brain functions like planning, predicting and innovating. Imagine if our ancestors did not realise that seeds would grow into food crops, or that seasons come in cycles - we'd still be hunting gazelles on the savannah. I'd even go as far as to say that recognising patterns is the very cornerstone of modern medical practices because that's pretty much how we diagnose diseases and treat them. However, our tendency to seek patterns can get overactive sometimes. That is why we think that clasping our hands together and mumbling to an invisible deity helps to make our wishes come true. That is why we see divine faces in pizza pans and grilled cheese sandwiches.

Of course, after the colour red had been banished from the hospital on call nights, people realised that bad calls still happen. A right-thinking person would immediately realise that not wearing red does jack squat in determining the nature of one's calls - but right-thinking persons are frightfully scarce in the medical field. Another bright penny of a house officer who had a terrible call (but was wearing blue at the time) must have thought to himself: "I'm not wearing red, so why am I still having bad ca... I know! I did not take my shower as soon as my call started! I must shower as early as I can from now on!"

Showering early is in fact a real superstition in the Sarawak General Hospital Unquestionable Guide to Having Good Calls, I shit you not. If you ask the senior nurses (which are literally old wives), they would even recommend that you shower with flowers for extra bad-call-repelling effect. This is why superstitions grow in number rather than decrease when they don't appear to work - people just keep making up new variables to control. The doors to the ward must be kept closed. If you're having a good call, you must not comment on it or you'll jinx it into a bad one. The in-tray for new patients must be turned upside down, so as to avoid inviting more. Women in labour must not wear anything circular in their hair (hairbands, scrunchies, etc) or they will have a difficult childbirth. Blah, blah and blah.

Every time someone drop me a new pearl of superstitious wisdom, I always ask: Do you seriously believe in it? Some would sheepishly say that they don't - not really - but they were just playing along for fun. Mostly, the answer I get is, "Well, sometimes it's very true."

Holy mackerel fucking a pair of daschunds on a hotdog bun! Are they even listening to themselves? Sometimes it's very true? How about sometimes, bad calls just fucking happen? Ever thought of it that way?

Imagine that instead of bad or good calls, we are talking about the head or tail sides of a tossed coin. According to their brand of magic logic, if you avoid wearing anything red, shower early in the evening, and fulfill the thousands of other superstitious commandments, your coin will sometimes come up heads. Doesn't it scare you that the people whose job is to save lives have such a poor relationship with reality?

The Sarawak General Hospital, where superstitions are born but never ever die.

Besides that, pretty much every doctor working in the Sarawak General is assigned with the labels "hot" or "cold" (the terminology may defer in other centres). A hot doctor is someone who attracts difficult, rare or complicated patients and emergencies, while a cold one doesn't and is therefore a desirable person to work with during calls. The funny thing is when someone who was designated as hot gets a good call night, people wouldn't notice - or simply remark how uncharacteristically relaxing the call was for him or her - rather than realising that the hot and cold thing is just a lorry of manure.

Yesterday, I had a conversation with a colleague right before my call, and I asked her if we are equipped to perform deliveries in the maternity ward - y'know, just in case I couldn't get a patient sent down to the labour ward in time. I also expressed worry that a couple of rather complicated patients will be giving me headaches throughout the night, and joked (in private) that maybe one of the twins in an expectant had died in utero because I was having trouble monitoring the little pipsqueak on the cardiotocograph.

"You shouldn't say things like that!" she chastised me. "Now that you said it, those things may actually happen. Haven't you heard of the law of attraction?"

Oh brother, Fuck Rhonda Byrne and that fucking Secret of hers. Yes, I've heard of the so-called "law of attraction", and I've experienced that same bollocks throughout my life in its myriad versions. You see, I'm given to indulging in black humour and I frequently joke about people dying or getting hurt in gruesome manners. As a result, I have always received shocked rebukes and beseechments that I should touch or knock on wood right that instance, young man. I'm pleased to say that I have never complied with such moronic requests. By the way, no one ever met their demise or gotten hurt just because I fucking said so. If the law of attraction is a real thing, everyone would be zooming around in ridiculously expensive cars, no one would be starving in Africa, and every football team would be winning every game they played in ever.

"Do you really believe in the law of attraction?" I asked.

"Yes!" she said. "It's very true sometimes." There's that word again: sometimes.

"You'd think that if it's a law, it would be always true - like the laws of gravity or the laws of thermodynamics - instead of being true sometimes. Shouldn't that be true of all real, predictive, scientific laws?" I commented drily.

"Kok, why must you always be so scientific?" She laughed, as if I just said the silliest thing she ever heard.

That night, no one deposited their babies in the maternity ward and both the twins came out screaming and kicking into our very overpopulated world. It was also the best call I ever had.

Only sane man,

k0k s3n w4i

Life in Progress

2011-08-24T22:12:00.011+08:00

"Hold the city to your ears
You can hear the winds come in"

Believe Me (2010) by Ellie Goulding

This blog has not been abandoned - the ghost of its former blogger still resides here. I apologise for the famine of new posts, but I had been cruelly separated from the teats of the internet by completely foreseeable circumstances. You see, I had finally moved out of the spare room of my former college mates (now coworkers) and now resides at an address that shares a name with a very posh property on the British Monopoly board. I have yet to reestablish a permanent, devoted connection to the One True Goddess, the World Wide Web, so expect further spotty updates.

I'm loving my new place. It's got an automatic gate, double doors, two-storeys with an obscene amount of square feet, a compound that is big enough to park three cars, and a backyard which is half as spacious. It's located five minutes away from the heart of Kuching town, the hospital where I work, and the least embarrassing mall in the state of Sarawak. It also has a burglar alarm system, a four-piece sofa set, a refrigerator, a microwave oven, a gas stove, a washing machine and a broken telly which no one wants to watch anyway. I live with two other doctors who I did not know a month ago and each of us got our own private bathrooms attached to our fully-furnished, air-conditioned bedrooms. Most importantly of all, my shower has one of those fancy hotel faucets that magically rains hot water when you turn it one way, and cold when you turn it the other way. I have yet to solve the mystery as to where the hot water originates from, and I suspect I will not bother finding that out until it stops coming on demand.

Anyway, I'm only paying RM 400 a month for all that (RM 300, if we can rope in another tenant). The moment I found this place, I stopped looking. True story.

My new room. I stitched this from two pictures - the photo, not the room.

Another accessory to my new life is my new car - a freshly baked Myvi filled with that inexplicably gratifying new car smell. The plate has letters which will score 19 points in a game of Scrabble followed by four numbers that I have yet to memorise. Then again, I still have not memorised my girlfriend's phone number either even after seeing her for ~~two~~ ~~five~~ ~~four~~ some years.

My father did most of the liaising with the car sales-bloke owing to how little time I have to spend outside of my new job - which I was completely grateful for except for a few hilarious hiccoughs. Initially, the Dad suggested that I purchase the car after the Chinese Hungry Ghost Month, and my response was basically a blasé declaration that I don't believe in the existence of spirits except those that make me uncharacteristically happy when I consume them in immoderate measures.

After that, I found out that he had asked the salesman to avoid getting a car plate number with fours in it (because they are homophones of the word "die" in Chinese). I immediately voided that weird little request and told the salesman that if he can get a plate that is all fours, I'd totally want it. Or thirteens, because I have a soft spot for unloved numbers.

I wanted it in orange actually, but Perodua hates happy colours.

Yes, orange is my favourite colour. That, and electric blue.

I'm seriously considering repainting the bonnet, the roof and the hatch at the back at some yet undetermined future date (y'know, to differentiate it from the bajillions of Myvis currently on the road and to make it easy for me to spot it in a crowded parking lot). To decide which colour that would contrast grey most strikingly, I inverted the colours of a picture of my car and found out that the opposite of grey... is another shade of grey. My palm met my face followed my the marriage of my forehead with the desk at my own stupidity. Of course it is!

Anyway, does anyone have a colour to suggest? I'm thinking of a blindingly bright shade of orange, but I'm not known to be a great thinker at the best of times.

Playing The Sims for realsies,

k0k s3n w4i

The Mind-Soul Gambit

2011-08-17T12:00:00.000+08:00

"I have lived with the prospect of an early death for the last 49 years. I’m not afraid of death, but I’m in no hurry to die. I have so much I want to do first. I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark."

Stephen Hawking

According to one of the smartest genii in the world, if you believe in the afterlife, you are a gullible coward.

In my few short years as an outed outspoken atheist, I have encountered all manners of asinine arguments for the existence of God, gods and the general incorporeal, but one which struck me as particularly groan-worthy is the assertion that the human consciousness is somehow proof that all of us possess a soul. I've seen this hoary old chestnut printed in how-to-debate-atheists pamphlets and proselytisers' edition Bibles, and I suspect that when a theist uses this argument, he probably expects to fluster me with what he considers to be an exceptionally clever "gotcha".

On the contrary, it only signal to me that I am dealing with ~~an utter lummox~~ a particularly inexperienced god-botherer who is profoundly ignorant on how the brain works. I usually get this line of argument from Christians but on the rare occasion, I have also crossed words with Muslims who want a slice of the stupid pie too,

Why do some religious people believe in God but not in prepositions?

I have brought up most of the main talking points in my comment above, but I like to cover a bit more ground here in this post.

Dualism.

The belief that our mind is a separate phenomenon from our material bodies is called mind/body dualism and it's a really antiquated idea which had been around since the barmy old days when the Earth was still flat and diseases were still caused by malevolent ghosties. The manifestations of this concept ranges from those who claim that all our mental faculties (consciousness, the conscience, our ability to do sums, et cetera) is a product of spirit stuff colloquially referred to as the "soul" - to people who merely think that this soul substance is just the seat of our consciousness. While I have always enjoyed struggling with the philosophical underpinnings of the Platonic theory of Forms (which I first encountered in the momentous sci-fi novel Anathem as the Hylaean Theoric World), dualism is probably the least fruitful idea to have been inspired by it.

I'm baffled when this unproven, hypothetical, immaterial mind or soul was simply declared by religious people to be "immortal", but I really shouldn't be surprised since they frequently skip inconvenient steps in their logical reasonings anyway. Then, they make an even more stupendous leap of logic by saying since this immortal soul exists, therefore there must be a God, a Heaven and a Hell, and they are exactly as described in the Bible or the Qur'an. This is what a lot of them consider to be a sophisticated argument for God, but look at it: it's just an assumption built upon an assumption built upon an assumption built upon yet another assumption. Holy crap! Holy crap indeed.

The less "sophisticated" apologists simply use dualism as a rhetorical wedge to try and get unbelievers to admit to believing in an alleged supernatural construct, when the mind is anything but. They somehow think that God would be less hard to shove down someone's throat after they've jammed this funnel into their mouths. No doubt, some just swallowed their garbage like a bitch, but anyone who has even the slightest knowledge of basic neuroscience will not be impressed. Read my points in the picture above; for all intents and purposes, there is no mind or consciousness without the organic brain, and there is no evidence which implies that we need anything more than our organic brain to generate all of our mental functions.

Religious Experiences as Mental Phenomena.

I think that attempting to use the human mind as a proof of God and the supernatural is a rather self-defeating strategy because it is actually a rather powerful argument against the spiritual leanings of religion.

Physicians have known for decades that epilepsy (especially temporal lobe epilepsy) can induce strong religious experiences, even causing an increase in religiosity in between seizures. This suggests that psychic phenomena such a the sensation of "being touched by God" (which have actually persuaded more than a few patients to convert) are far more likely to be malfunctions in brain rather than anything genuinely ethereal. Such seizures have also been known to cause subjective experiences of feeling like one is outside of one's body or the presence of powerful unseens entities like gods and devils. What is even more damning is that such experiences can be replicated in the lab using transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). Furthermore, evidence have shown that some individuals are simply more susceptible to being magnetically fooled into feeling spiritual and uplifted compared to others (having more "talent for religion", so to speak) and this is reflected in society where there exists both theists and atheists, and everything in between.

In other words, it's really all in your head.

How many times have we heard believers say that they are convinced of the existence of God because of some "transformative personal experiences" they once had, even when they have no concrete proof that their religion is true? It turns out that what they felt can easily be explained scientifically. They probably had a few cerebral "hiccups", that is all.

One of the most striking evidence for the organic basis of consciousness is the sensation that we reside inside our own body. Most of us take it for granted and does not even realise that a mental process is required to maintain that illusion (yes, you heard me). By using TMS on the temporoparietal junction, scientists have managed to successfully interrupt this process, resulting in the test subjects feeling like they have been displaced outside of their own bodies. That's very, very cool science.

Even something as highly abstract as morality (traditionally a domain claimed by the religious) have its basis in the little grey cells. The brainiacs at MIT have found out that by using TMS, you can even affect a person's moral and ethical judgments. Is the goodness of heart from our eternal soul bestowed by God himself so easily hijacked with a weak magnetic field? Are magnets God's kryptonite?

I don't know about you but it seems to me that the more we learn about the human brain and its mind, the more we realise that it's really nothing more - and nothing less - than an unimaginably sophisticated computer. There are a great deal of wondrous, unexplained things within our material world, and we are learning more about them all the time. I wonder how believers ever learn anything if they think they already have all the answers in between the pages of some ancient texts written by pre-scientific yahoos?

Oh, and how unimaginative it is - how unsatisfactory! - when their answer to everything is "Goddidit."

Soulless but not mindless,

k0k s3n w4i

Good News, Everyone!

2011-08-13T22:49:00.011+08:00

"There are no men like me. There's only me."

Jamie Lannister in A Clash of Kings (1998)

For my 25th Name Day, I ordered the present I have promised myself earlier this year from a bookstore here in Kuching.

Hell yeah!

It arrived just a couple of weeks ago and I'm already about a quarter of the way through it. I would very much like to take a two-day leave from work and meditate on the tome cover to cover in one long unbroken marathon - that's the best way to digest an epic, if you ask me - but that would also mean I would sooner have to start weathering another few years of waiting for my next fix of A Song and Ice and Fire while hoping that George R. R. Martin remains hale and would not pull a Robert Jordan or a Terry Pratchett. So far, the book is burning rather slowly and that's a bit uncharacteristic for the series in general, but it remains just as engrossing as ever.

Oh, when will The Winds of Winter blow through my life?

I also just finished watching the Game of Thrones HBO miniseries based on the first book before I relocated to Kuching and I must say it surpassed all expectations I harboured for it. I will not hesitate to recommend it to anyone who have not read the books, and to everyone who had.

On a completely unrelated note, I was apparently named the "Blogger of the Week" on DiGi's myInternet homepage last week - something I was unaware of till quite recently. How dare they award me accolades without informing me?!

The important question is: did I win an iPhone 4 or iPad 2?

The bloke or sheila charged with cooking up a cookie-cutter introduction to my weblog clearly hadn't a clue what he or she was talking about. For example, I am no longer a medical student from Malacca but is currently a house officer in the general hospital in Kuching; a major oversight on his or her part considering that most of my recent posts orbited around the renovations in my alleged life. Also, he or she evidently only read my latest post at the time of writing, which was the one about Eddie Izzard.

Um, if there is a good, non-stupid, gender-neutral substitute phrase or word for "he or she" or "him or her", please let me know. And no, I will not consider "shkle", you crazy Futurama fans.

Anyway, I confess that the half-assed measure by which my personal site was described did not feed very effectively into my delusions of grandeur. Besides, any description of your truly is not complete without the inclusions of words such as "godless" or "can be a bit of an asshole". I certainly approve of and appreciate the comparison of my person to a delicious sundae, though.

P.S. I was never one for promoting my blog since I mostly write for my own amusement, but if you like what I'm doing here and think that more people should know about it, do kindly +1, tweet or share my posts on Facebook. These buttons at the bottom of my every post are begging to be clicked on.

k0k bL0k's Blogger of the Forever,

k0k s3n w4i

We are Small People

2011-08-09T22:14:00.016+08:00

"I’ll leave the door on the latch
If you ever come back, if you ever come back
There will be a light in the hall and the key under the mat
If you ever come back
There will be a smile on my face and the kettle on
And it will be just like you were never gone
There will be a light in the hall and the key under the mat
If you ever come back, if you ever come back now
If you ever come back, if you ever come back now"

If You Ever Come Back (2010) by The Script

She was a waifish and anaemic creature, and she carried a freakishly distended abdomen which looks like it doesn't belong on her body at all. She is what we refer to as an "unbooked" mother; someone who have not submitted herself for regular checkups during the entire course of her pregnancy and had only turned up when her unborn child insisted on coming out at an inopportune moment in time. I was struck by the impression that to this particular impending mother, no time at all is opportune.

"Unmarried," the nurse informed me in a conspiratorial whisper as I walked into the labour theatre, and what a theatre it was. A show was playing and it's one of life's little tragedies. She was attended to by midwives and their apprentices, and they were suppose to give her encouragement to push. I said "suppose" because what they were doing were not at all encouraging no matter how hard one stretches the definition of the word. They slapped and pinched her when she was slow to comply with their instructions, and sometimes when she wasn't. When they re-position her limbs, the did it with a malicious forcefulness that made me flinch. One midwife in particular was practically punching her in the belly, trying to force the baby out from above. Their words were as sharp and hard as table corners, if table corners could spit demeaning insults into your face. I could tell that they absolutely despise her. I could tell that they think they are better than her, and that she is not deserving of their service. I scanned the floor, searching, because I was certain that I would find the carcass of professionalism lying in a corner somewhere in an advanced stage of decomposition.

Boris Pasternak said, "At the moment of childbirth, every woman has the same aura of isolation, as though she was abandoned, alone." Those words were hauntingly true in that room that night. Here is a girl weeping in pain and also probably because of many other things. In my mind, I imagined a wide-eyed, trusting romantic who have yet to outgrow fairy stories and happily-ever-afters; a girl who loved without reserve, daring to hold nothing back. I imagined a sociopathic older man who used her and then left her with his bastard growing in her womb. I imagined a pair of parents who are ashamed of their wayward daughter, while frequently and openly showing her just how much. In her immediate community and circle of friends, she had ceased to be human being but is now a cautionary tale and a buttery slice of gossip that goes down well with tea and biscuits.

Now, a roomful of caregivers whose very job is to give her care decided that they rather be her judges, jury and executioners while she's hurting more than she ever hurt from the birthing of an unforgettable reminder of her first real mistake. The human condition has many nadirs, and surely she was in one of them. Utterly abandoned. Utterly alone.

Her accoucheuse conveniently neglected to anaesthetise her sore and torn vagina when she was sewing her up but yet oddlly enough, she felt justified in scolding the girl whenever she yelped and whined in pain with every bite of the needle. Empathy and prejudice has an inverse relationship. The nurse had forgotten that the girl she was attending to is as much a human being as she is - or as recent events suggested; probably even more so. The nurse had forgotten that someday, each and everyone of us will find ourselves in our very own metaphorical labour theatres, utterly abandoned and alone.

She is just seventeen, a child, and already a casualty of circumstances. In our traditional, puritanical Asian country, she is a pariah and a leper; a disgrace to the unearned good name of her family. This is why I have never given a fuck about the mores of society because they have always felt wrongheaded to me. If you ask me, it's the behaviour of the self-righteous, prejudicial bullies who mistreated her which we should repudiate and lapidate instead. Not the victim. Not her.

The girl was later referred to me for a postnatal review and the first thing I did was to apologise to her for how she was treated during one of the most difficult moments of her life. I did it because I felt I owed her that. Then, I asked her if she would like something to drink.

"Yes," she said timorously, and so I went to the pantry to make her a mug of Milo. There are many medicines in the hospital's pharmacopoeia but none is quite as restorative, wholesome or beloved as a hot chocolate drink. That's something they didn't teach us in med school, and I thought that that's a pity. She thanked me for it, and for the first time in her long, cold and cruel night, she smiled.

You know what? That smile made me want to change the world.

Trying to be the difference,
k0k s3n w4i

What You Should Know Before Getting Yourself Knocked Up

2011-08-06T17:02:00.016+08:00

"I have always wanted to act ever since I was a little girl. I would put a blanket under my shirt and pretend that I was pregnant. Then, I would go through childbirth."

Dakota Fanning

I often find myself stricken by how unnatural natural childbirth is and after working for three weeks in the labour ward, I am becoming increasingly convinced of that notion. Pregnancy is perilous from conception to delivery. An embryo can get itself implanted in a woman's tube instead of the uterus and tear it apart, causing substantial internal bleeding (and death). A woman can be afflicted with eclampsia from the fifth month till weeks after the baby was expelled, and that can cause seizures (and death). The placenta can anchor itself far too low in the womb or get dislodged, and that also predisposes to massive hemorrhages (and death). Our intelligence have left us with freakishly large heads while our upright posture cursed us with dangerously narrow birth canals, and that can arrest a baby's passage through it (resulting in death). The mother can also suffer from severe infections (and death) if some nasty bugs make it through the amnion. Even after the baby comes out, severe blood loss can still complicate things (therefore death). I'm not even going to go into the even longer list of other less-directly-fatal diseases that pregnancy can cause like anaemia, diabetes and hypertension. Evolutionarily speaking, we are perched upon a very precarious position of cutbacks and compromises. I fear that very soon, we will be like English Bulldogs; 95% of which can only whelp through a Caesarean section.

The procedure of birthing in a Malaysian government hospital is, frankly speaking, quite devoid of any kind of dignity for the mothers in labour. When you come to us, we will give you an enema so you don't get faeces all over yourself when you are trying to shit your kid out. We put a rubber tube up your pee hole to get rid of your urine so your bladder won't be in the way. We stab your veins so we can hydrate you and if the need arises, transfuse you with blood. Every two hours or so, a random stranger will pop in and stick his or her fingers up your kitty to see how much your cervix has opened and how far the foetus have progressed. When you are finally ready to push your little bastard out, your hindquarters will be exposed to everyone in the room (which includes medical students and student nurses). They will study your nether regions with great interest while you squirt amniotic fluid, blood, mucous, piss and crap all over your bed like an animal. Your midwife or obstetrician may also give you an "episiotomy", which is a very uninformative way of saying that he or she will take a pair of scissors to your vagina with extreme prejudice (without any form of anaesthesia, of course). The alternative is to allow your freakishly bigheaded baby to rip you ragged on its way out. Mind you that I'm only divulging what is normally done to mothers in labour, and I have not even go into the details of just how fucking painful it is for a human being to come out through your pelvis.

This is one of the reasons why I do not want to have any children - I simply cannot put anyone I love through all that.

Also, I hate kids.

Not to mention that it will also ruin the Long-Suffering Girlfriend™'s svelte figure.

Not father material,

k0k s3n w4i

From Hell

2011-08-02T21:08:00.003+08:00

"There's no escape
No sleep tonight
You won't get no sleep tonight"

No Sleep Tonight (2005) by The Faders

I'm in my third week of Life holding down the unenviable position of a House Officer in the Sarawak General Hospital while holding on to the soundness of my mind. For my first ever posting, I was paradropped far behind enemy lines into Obstetrics and Gynaecology to fend for my life, and for the first time, I truly appreciate just how microbial my present position in life is. In just one short day, I had all my self-respect and dignity wrung right out of me. I am now subject to the whims and moods of my immediate superiors, the Medical Officers, who are in turn subject to the mercy of the Registrars. The Registrars bow to the Specialists, and the Specialists answer to the Consultant. Shit rains down from above often and bountifully.

My initial 10 days were called "tagging", which had me in the hospital from 6:30 am till 10:00 pm learning the ropes, knots and whatnots. After which, my average working day starts at 6:30 am and, if I'm lucky, ends at 5:00 pm. Two or more times a week, I will be "on-call", two words which are no where close to describing a solid 35-hour stretch of non-stop servitude. When they tell me that slavery had been abolished, and I ask "when?"

Object in the picture may no longer look so well-fed and well-rested.

The only thing keeping me going is a week-old memory of a patient I attended to at 3:00 am in the morning. She told me that I am a good doctor, not knowing how much that meant to me.

"It's my job," I said to her. Yes, it's my job now, however much I loath it. I want very much to quit it and write, but writing isn't going to feed me.

Or help pay for my new car.

P.S. Last Sunday, a staff nurse asked me if this is my fourth or fifth posting. She was surprised to find out that it is my first, and told me she thought that I am very efficient. If someone would say something like this to me at least once a week, I think I might just pull through my 2 years of housemanship without plunging a scalpel into my carotids.

Unicellular,

k0k s3n w4i

Eddie Izzard is My Hero

2011-07-25T12:00:00.006+08:00

"So then God created the world, and on the first day he created light and air and fish and jam and soup and potatoes and haircuts and arguments and small things and rabbits and people with noses and jam – more jam, perhaps – and soot and flies and tobogganing and showers and toasters and grandmothers and, uh … Belgium."

Eddie Izzard in Glorious (1997)

Eddie Izzard is one of my favourite stand-up comedians, but most people in Malaysia would probably only know him as the voice of Reepicheep in The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, if they know him at all. His British, absurdist, surrealistic, stream-of-consciousness comic sensibilities may not be for everyone's cup of bees, but even when his routines fail, they fail hilariously. Huge portions of his shows are ad-libbed (or at least they appear to be) owing to his dyslexia which makes it very difficult for him to work from a script. His exploratory tangents frequently take on entire lives of their own and he often rely on his audience - which he interacts with freely - to remind him what he was going on about before he sidetracked himself. It gets me every time when he says with a huge sheepish smile on stage: "I've forgotten my entire show!"

He's also a transvestite and did most of his shows in high heels, ladies' apparel, and a large, unapologetic amount of makeup. He does however fancy girls (and rightly pointed out that most trannies are heterosexual) and have described himself at different times as an "executive" or "action" transvestite, a "male tomboy", a "lesbian trapped in a man's body", and a "complete boy plus half a girl".

"Women wear what they want and so do I," he explained, and it's impossible to argue with that logic.

Eddie Izzard on his Stripped tour, when he's in "blokey mode".

Recently, I read a story about him which made him one of my favourite persons in the world.

There's a necessary preamble to this tale. In November 2008, more than 10 coordinated shooting and bombing attacks were carried out by Muslim jihadists across Mumbai including Cama Hospital (a women and children's hospital) and the Taj Mahal Palace and Tower luxury hotel. A 28-year-old Englishman from Hampstead, Will Pike, was staying there in the Taj Mahal Palace with his girlfriend at the time of the terrorist strike. Fearing for their lives, they tried to escape by making a prison-break rope from bedsheets, curtains and towels and lowering it down from their 3rd floor room, 60-feet above street level. Will went first, fearing that it might not hold - and by Murphy, it didn't.

"Clearly I never did my Boy Scout knot badge because my knots were rubbish. The last thing I remember was falling. The next thing I was on the ground looking at the bone shards sticking out of my wrist," Will commented with characteristic British stiff-upper-lipped-ness, which was admirable considering that he ended up not being to ever walk again after his nasty tumble. He did however expressed disappointment that his unfortunate collision with the pavement had forced him and his girlfriend to give up their tickets to Eddie Izzard's show at the Lyric Theatre.

Will's father, Nigel Pike, wrote to Eddie Izzard asking if the cross-dressing comic could send a note to his son to cheer the lad up. Izzard refused.

"Quoi?"

Instead, he turned up unannounced at Will's room in the spinal unit of a London hospital and performed his entire 90-minute act by Will's bedside.

Oh bugger, I think some jam just flew into my eyes. His publicist and spokeswoman, when asked, said that the visit was a private affair (essentially saying 'It's none of your beeswax') and declined to offer further comments. I couldn't find any interviews in which Eddie Izzard references this incident either.

In that same year, Eddie Izzard also ran 43 marathons in 51 days taking in 27 miles a day on average, 6 days a week for 7 straight weeks covering 1,100 miles across the United Kingdom to raise money for Sport Relief, a charity for the underprivileged in the UK and the world's poorest countries. He was 47 years old at the time and had no prior experience in long distance running. At this point, I'm actually far more impressed by his physical feat than his philanthropy.

I love how his outfit was so colour-coordinated.

Eddie Izzard is also an atheist. He said, "I was warming the material up in New York, where one night, literally on stage, I realised I didn’t believe in God at all." That happened during his Stripped tour in 2008, preceding his involvement in Sport Relief and his heartwarming impromptu private performance for Will Pike. While he had always mined religion (Christianity in particular) for comedic material, he always used them in such a silly, good-natured manner that I never suspected that he's a non-believer until I actually read about it.

"God killed my mother too soon and Hitler too late," said Izzard in the only time he divulged bleaker thoughts on the question of God's nonexistence.

Quite apart from atheistic intellectuals and rational polemicists like Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris and others godless big-names that most contemporary atheists draw inspiration from, Eddie Izzard is my atheist hero. He embodies two of the qualities which I feel are most underrepresented and under-appreciated in the atheist community: Humour and humanity. We have those things in abundance. We should put them on display where people can see them.

P.S. I first learned about him watching an interview of Regina Spektor (one of my other favourite persons in the world) where she recounted a story about her freaking out backstage. Eddie Izzard, who was there, emptied a bag of crisps and then told her to breathe into it, telling her paternally that he gets terrible stage frights too. And I would instantly like anyone who is nice to Regina Spektor because she is the single cutest, most darling creature on this planet.

Would like cake please,

k0k s3n w4i

The Thaumaturgical Decline Principle

2011-07-21T23:43:00.001+08:00

"Faith is deciding to allow yourself to believe something your intellect would otherwise cause you to reject - otherwise there's no need for faith."

Anonymous

In Matthew 18:3, Jesus said, "And said, Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven."

Have you ever talked to a kid? I mean, seriously sat down and talked to one? They would believe pretty much anything you tell them. Don't take my word for it - experiment yourself Calvin's Dad-style! Fill their impressionable little heads with fairy folks, monsters, dragons, unicorns, superheroes, aliens, magic, and Lovecraftian mind-breaking horrors; they will drink it all up like it's the very word of God itself. When I was little boy, my father fed me rubbish like how I should always ask permission from wandering spirits and tell them to move aside when I want to pee outdoors, or they would steal my boy-bits away. He also told me that if I point at the moon, my finger would bleed and fall off. It took me years and years before I fully exorcised myself of those superstitious kookery. The very first time I dared to even point at the moon was when I was in high school! Imagine that! And I still catch myself automatically asking spooks to move out of the way of my stream of urine when I'm not paying attention. You can say that I'm pretty much scarred for life.

Jesus' line about becoming little children may sound cute, but I have always subconsciously read it as, "You have to be a real gullible moron to believe me." Hey, don't get pissed at me for saying that! A Christian gave me my first Bible - he asked me to judge for myself the worth of God's teachings and not rely on what other people say about it. I'm only following instructions.

Besides, Jesus was right. How else can you believe in the ~~ridiculous~~ miraculous stories about talking snakes, parting seas, virgin births, and men who came back from death if you're not an unquestioning, incredulous infant?

Any hypotheses on why this is so?

The Qur'an elected a different tact. In Surat Al-'Isrā', verse 59, Allah said "And nothing has prevented Us from sending signs except that the former peoples denied them. And We gave Thamud the she-camel as a visible sign, but they wronged her. And We send not the signs except as a warning."

Muhammad was never witnessed by anyone to perform any miracles. The reason given by Allah was pretty much "We can totally do it (and trust us, we've totally done it before), but we chose not to now because you're not going to believe them anyway." How convenient. That thought popped into my mind very frequently every time I read the Qur'an. It's all so convenient.

We simply have to take his word for it that the book was conveyed entirely to him by Allah via the angel Jibrīl. We also have to believe him when he said that he did indeed ride a magic handsome white animal (that's slightly bigger than a donkey) to the "farthest mosque" where he lead other prophets such as Adam, Moses and Jesus in prayer before ascending to heaven to haggle with Allah over the number of prayers Muslims must fulfill per day. All of that makes perfect sense to Mohammedans all over the world it seems.

Hey, don't proclaim a jihad on my ass for that! The muslimah I first discussed Islamic theology with told me to read the Qur'an on my own and see its beautiful truths for myself. It's not my fault that you don't like the not-so-pretty conclusions I've reached.

Somehow, when I don't agree with the believers, it's always me who got it wrong. How very convenient also.

And thus concludes today's lesson on the comparison between the world's two biggest competing religions and what they have to say about faith and miracles. As it turns out, it all boils down to, "Believe us without any proof, or our God will torture you for eternity!" Questions?

Wouldn't fool himself,

k0k s3n w4i

Mostly Quiet

2011-07-17T14:55:00.000+08:00

"I am humbled in this city
There seems to be an endless sea of people like us
Wakeful dreamers, I pass them on the sunlit streets
In our rooms filled with laughter
We make hope from every small disaster"

Painting by Chagall (2006) by The Weepies

What is the visual equivalent of dropping eaves?

There is this restaurant I haunt in the late evenings when I get these cravings for minced pork porridge at Plaza Mahkota which I'm missing now after I got mailed off to the other side of Malaysia. There's a few places like it in Malacca where the proprietors know me on sight and my usual order from memory because I am always distinctively alone. I'm only in my twenties but already I am falling into habitual patterns and the proverbial comfort of old shoes.

A few weeks ago, I was there and had my usual bowl of minced pork porridge - hold the offal and cilantro, please - when a family seated at a table in front of mine caught my chronically faraway eyes. It was nuclear, Chinese and peopled by three; a young father and a mother, and their six or seven-year-old daughter. It's a common variation of the same theme, except the parents spoke only with their hands.

The child chattered animatedly and audibly about cute inconsequentials, while her Mom and Dad reply in a signed language, which she appeared to understand. I don't know why, but I find them endlessly watchable. I guess it's the same reason why listening to the "halfalogue" of someone talking on a cellphone is so much more distracting (and sometimes annoying) compared to a proper back-and-forth conversation or a monologue, as psychologists from Cornell University have found out. That effect caught my notice, but it's not what held my attention captive.

It always felt a bit like I'm rudely intruding into the private lives of strangers when I allow myself to have thoughts about them, but I couldn't help but wonder how the parents met each other. Was it in a sign language class, a support group or at their mutual workplace? Did they, like me, find love on the internet, or were they introduced to one another by friends who thought they were a match made in silence? I may never understand but I imagine that being mute would define one's identity indelibly. It must be like being born a man or a woman; it shouldn't matter, except it does. I want to know what it's like to have the love of someone who does not see what marks you apart from the rest of the world as a disability, but as a shared experience. If for a day, I could live the silent man's life, married to his silent wife, I would.

I also thought about the little girl growing up with parents who cannot speak, and wondered if it impeded the development of her language skills. Was she raised with the help of grandparents or uncles and aunts during that crucial period of her young life when she was learning how to express herself verbally, something her parents could never teach her? If someone would make an honest film about this family, I would watch it - I would be grateful for that little glimpse into their inner lives, and cherish it as much as I did Last Train Home about a family fractured by economical circumstances in the fast changing face of China, and The Kids Are All Right, which told the story of a married lesbian couple and the two children they mothered with the help of a sperm donor. I really appreciate these variations of the same theme; these multifaceted diversity of the human condition.

I noticed that she acted as the voice of her parents. She made the orders and then later, the payment. When they were leaving, the lo pan of the shop came to their table to chat with them (he couldn't sign, but that didn't stop him from trying his hands at a crude game of charades). The lo pan's daughter later joined in and I found out, to my surprise, she knows sign language too. Perhaps they are related, or are friends - or maybe she has a loved one who is mute as well. I don't know why, but I'm endlessly fascinated by how deep and rich and utterly human other people's stories can be. We forget these things often. Some people never remember.

There are times when I let myself suppose a future in which I have kids of my own, and my encounter with the mostly quiet family was one of those times. I wanted to call it wishful thinking, but I don't think that that's quite it. The other day, I asked the Long-Suffering Girlfriend™ if she thinks I would make a good father.

Without the slightest wisp of hesitation, she said, "No." It really shouldn't, but it still made me feel a little sad.

P.S. As I was writing this in a Starbucks coffeehouse, I was sitting beside another family of three; an Indian father, a Chinese mother, and a child that defies and destroys the illusory lines dividing the races.

Has a voice,

k0k s3n w4i

The Zen of Sparrows and Destinies

2011-07-14T12:00:00.022+08:00

"Well you're art, you fell into this part
You play the victim perfectly holding your beating heart
You used to be so smart
You fluttered round the yard making your magic"

Electric Bird (2008) by Sia

I am reminded recently by Stephen Tobolowsky in the latest episode of his podcast of a story I learned when I used to be a practicing Buddhist. It is a Zen parable about a man who wanted to embarrass a wise Zen master, so he caught a little bird and held it in his hand behind his back. He then asked the master to guess if the bird is alive or dead. If the master guessed that the bird is dead, he would let it fly away. If the master guessed that the bird is alive, he would squeeze the life out of it with his fist and let it fall.

"The bird is whatever you wish it to be," said the sage, putting on a pair of shades. "Its fate is in your hand." ~~He then walked away in all Zen-like with The Who screaming YEAAAAAAH! in the background.~~

On the night before I left for my new life in Kuching, something remarkable happened. It was past midnight and I was in an upstairs bedroom in my grandmother's house when a sparrow appeared out of nowhere and fluttered frantically round and round the restricted airspace, colliding often into the walls and ceiling.

I switched off the overhead fan because I don't really fancy having bloody bits of bird splattered all over the room. When the feathered fugitive finally crash-landed from fatigue, I gently scooped it up with a towel. I felt its warm, tiny ribcage pulsing against my palm as it respires at an alarmingly rapid rhythm. It was so alive, so afraid. Then, I had an epiphany. I suddenly realised that I was holding more than a bird in my hand. I was holding a life.

A bird in a towel is worth...

I don't believe in signs and omens, but I can appreciate coincidences and accidental metaphors when I see them. My new job in Kuching requires me to figuratively hold the lives of many people in my hands, something which I am not quite sure I am ready to do just yet. I doubt myself constantly and I hate to think how much I could have accomplished in my life so far had I been a little more sure of myself. I haven't begun performing my duties as a house officer just yet (that would be tomorrow), and the only thing staving off my overwhelming urge to vanish and live like a hobo on the streets is a few simple words which Eddie Izzard said:

"You got to believe you can be a stand-up before you can be a stand-up.
You got to believe you can act before you can act.
You got to believe can be an astronaut before you can be an astronaut.
But you got to believe."

At the moment, I feel the loss of control of my own fate acutely, just like the bird in the bully's hand. I do not even yet know which of the six departments I will be arbitrarily posted in first. More than anything else, the uncertainty is pushing furiously at my reflex to surrender. The bird I caught did not struggle because it had accepted its doom.

I eventually released it back into the wilderness of suburbia, of course. After all, I'm not a psychopath or a child (yes, most people haven't realise how similar that two groups of people really are). But catching a sparrow and then setting it free isn't at all an uncommon incident; I have even rescued a grounded bat and a lost frog in the past. What was truly bizarre was that after I let that sparrow out through the front door and returned to the same bedroom, a second sparrow materialised out of thin air and and gave an encore performance in déjà vu. This one wasn't so lucky. Before I could even react, it collided with a blade of the fan with a sickening concussive thunk and plummeted limply onto the parquet floor. Guano guano guano.

I was on it at immediately and found it dazed but thankfully, very much alive. Birds, it seems, are hardier than they look. This second one did not struggle as well but then again, it had just experienced the equivalent of a steel girder falling squarely onto a 5-year-old kid at terminal velocity. The fact that it didn't end up as a crimson stain on the wall was a miracle.

"Is this Bird Heaven?"

I gave it a brief once-over to see if it was injured in any way, but I couldn't find any damage - but it might be because I was only trained to give medical exams to just one species of flightless hominids. Still, it did not appear to exhibit tenderness in any of the places I prodded it in, and was capable of perching on my finger. I opened my mouth as if I intended to put it in my mouth, but it wasn't at all impressed. Might have sustained some temporary brain damage there, methought.

"Ohnoes, it's Bird Hell!"

Artsy mataphor-laden shot.

It looks much older and more worn out compared to Sparrow #1.

Do you know that modern birds belongs in the phylogenetic clade of Theropoda? It means that they are technically dinosaurs and a lot of theropod dinosaurs like velociraptors, are actually feathered, if you don't already know that. Nowadays, I can't watch Jurassic Park without being put off by their inaccurate lizard depiction, and whenever I look at a bird, I always get a little catch in my breath when I remember what they really are. Do you know that some birds - chickens, for example - still retain genes which code for teeth in their genome? And that they can be switched back on at will using engineered viruses, producing atavistic hens with teeth? It's a very cool mark of their saurian evolutionary heritage.

After awhile, Sparrow #2 apparently recovered enough of its senses to attempt an escape, but being stupid, it didn't know how to. I had to recapture my small avian friend after it got tired flying into walls and mirrors, and brought it to a real aperture. It must have suspected a trick because it just wouldn't let go of my finger and fly out into the night (though it's membership in a diurnal species probably had something to do with that as well). I bobbed my hand up and down to shake it loose, but still it clutched stubbornly to my knuckle.

"But it's dark out and I don't want to go, Mommy!"

I'm not particularly prepared to venture out into a whole new world as well, but sooner or later, all of us must let ourselves fall before we can fly, right? I just got to believe that I can do it. That's the trick of it.

And then it flew away, leaving it all behind.

Like a bird,

k0k s3n w4i

Walk This Mile in My Shoes

2011-07-11T23:47:00.009+08:00

"The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God. They are corrupt, they have done abominable works, there is none that doeth good."

Psalm 14:1

In case you're wondering, I made it across the South China Sea safely and is now squatting in the backroom of my friends' place in the City of Cats - at least till I can find a foothold of my own. Yin Yee, along with a rather enervated post-call Inn Shan, came to pick me up from the airport. Then, for the rest of the day, the two of them plus Nickson showed me around town and helped me with my shopping. Yew Kong lent me the car he just bought from Nickson for me to get my affairs in order - which consists almost exclusively of filling up oodles and oodles of forms in various locations. That's what adulthood is all about you know - filling up forms.

I'm going to be blogging guerrilla-style mostly from now on i.e. writing quick and dirty pieces. I'll get to my point immediately: it's not easy being an atheist in a religious nation. Every time I'm made to recite the National Principles, I'm reminded that a "true" Malaysian has to possess a belief in God. Every time I read the Bible or the Qur'an, I'm reminded of how most people's belief system discriminates against someone such as myself, calling us foolish, wicked, and a huge assortment of other derogatory adjectives from the get-go. We aren't judged by our deeds, but by our inability or unwillingness to believe in something without hard evidence. The next time you encounter an atheist who says nasty things about religion, remember that it's the holy books of the faithful that started the mudslinging first.

The course I attended preceding my induction into civil service reminded me yet again recently of my status as a persona non grata in my own country. It was during a talk about leadership that this came up.

Translation: A VISIONARY LEADER
1. Obedience to God

According to the government officer giving the lecture, an atheist can never be a visionary leader. In his mind, an atheist literally do not have the first thing it takes to lead. This is the sort of discrimination against a minority group which we happily allow to happen in Malaysia and in other parts of the world where people wear their faith in an invisible cosmic superbeing on their sleeves like it's going out of fashion. Imagine for a second that the officer's PowerPoint presentation had insisted instead that someone of African descent, or a woman, or a dwarf cannot be a visionary leader. There would be an automatic uproarious backlash against him, but because most people are conditioned by their FUCKED UP RELIGION to think so poorly of atheists, no one saw anything wrong with his blatant bigotry.

If you ever wondered why atheists are so pissed-off most of the time, this is why. This is also why conscientious atheists tend to support women's and gay rights - issues which I speak about often in this website. I know what it's like to be freely discriminated against in most cultures in the world. I know what it feels like to be marginalised by the teachings of religion.

My group at the Induction Course.

There is famous statement by a Lutheran Pastor, Martin Niemöller, which I like. It reads,

"First they came for the communists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a communist.
Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Jew.
Then they came for me
and there was no one left to speak out for me."

It said nothing about atheists, women or homosexuals, but the it's the spirit of the message that counts. Would you speak out for atheists? If there's one thing which can change our minds about religious people, this has to be it.

A non-visionary non-leader,
k0k s3n w4i

Big Brother, I Love You

2011-07-09T15:12:00.007+08:00

"But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother."

Nineteen Eighty-Four (1948) by George Orwell

Right this moment, an insanely huge throng of yellow-clad Malaysians is demonstrating in our capital city braving tear gas, water cannons and potential police brutality under the banner of the BERSIH 2.0 rally, and Malaysians in cities all around the world are doing the same - minus the possibility of being arrested for daring to exercise their right to assemble and to speak. And what are the seditious, unreasonable, unpatriotic demands of the BERSIH demonstrators which got our Big Brother so riled up? Why, they want measures to be taken to ensure that the next General Election will be a clean affair! How dare they!

The government have cracked down mercilessly on the demonstrators when they did it in 2006, and leading up to 2011's repeat (this time, it's bigger and yellower on several orders of magnitude), the authorities have thwarted the baaad people organising this event at every turn they could. Considering the magnitude of support BERSIH gets from the People of Malaysia, I think the government had committed a grave political cock-up in choosing to oppose it. Anyone with two brain cells to rub together in the ministry should have realised that the best possible action to take is to place themselves in support of it alongside the Opposition parties from the very beginning.

Right now, it looks like they are against instituting a fair electoral process. Jolly well done, good sirs!

I just returned from a four-day induction course organised by the Ministry of Health to initiate me into civil servitude and since I'm flying to the far side of Malaysia in the wee hours of the morning on the morrow to report for duty, I simply couldn't avail myself to be a head and a presence in the marching multitude - as much as I would love to. I offer instead my voice here. Now, I wonder if my employment with the government will be jeopardised by this heinous act of thoughtcrime?

On a related tangent, this slide was presented to us during a talk in the induction course on the conduct expected of civil officers a couple of days ago,

Translation: CONDUCT
An officer must be loyal to the king, country and government at all times.
Examples of breach of conduct:
Conspiring with enemies of the state.
Badmouthing/belittling government policies.
Breaking the law with the intention of opposing the government.

Tomorrow at 7:00 AM, I will be boarding the next flight to the rest of my life, and probably for most of it, I will be serving my country in my capacity as a physician. It's great that they are paying for my plane tickets and on my part, I've chosen to fly with the cheaper AirAsia rather than the amenities-included Malaysia Airlines (which costs double) like a fucking asshole bent on pinching every penny possible from taxpayers' money.

Goodbye, Malacca. Hello, Kuching.

P.S. For my foreign readers, "bersih" means "clean" in the Malay language.

Ready to help,

k0k s3n w4i

I Graduated to the Rousing Refrain of the Imperial March

2011-07-05T10:00:00.012+08:00

"Obviously a strongly elongated penis is the solution."

Dr Alexander Arkhipkin

No, I'm not going to divulge the context of this fantastic quote.

On the 2nd of July, 1843, Samuel Hahnemann, creator of the quack alternative medicine system known as homeopathy, died and left the world a worse place than he found it. 168 years later, more than two-hundred new medical doctors graduated in my home city of Malacca and some of them will probably not be a complete waste of oxygen on this planet.

I did not want to attend my own graduation day initially, but I feared that my parents may not let me stay alive for very long had I shirked my filial duty of suiting up in an anachronistic ceremonial robe and putting on a silly square hat for the purpose of being photographed by them as proof to friends and relatives that they have begotten something narrowly better than a fart bubble in our end of the gene pool.

During the ceremony, I was seated beside Sanjeev, my Seychellois batchmate and fellow atheist, but he wasn't one for much stimulating conversation that afternoon, unfortunately. He was good only for groaning every five minutes about how hungover he was. Anyhow, he could have graduated with distinction had he not attended his viva voce drunk off his horse but just for pulling that stunt, he had eternally earned the respect of everybody who knew him - and he, brilliant chap that he is, knew which honours were higher.

As expected, there were boring scripted speeches read by important personages wearing even sillier looking Tudor bonnets. Next came the part that parents had been waiting for: the presentation of our degree scrolls as our names were declared aloud by the Dean of the Indian half of our college, whose Indian tongue struggled valiantly to pronounce our exotic Malaysian names (I mean this in good humour since I am rather fond of the guy). The Chinese students with the surname "Ng" bore the worst brunt of the butchering - it was consistently corrupted to "Angie". No one sought to correct him the entire time because presumably, they thought it was a hoot.

Then, the generically ostentatious orchestral fanfare playing throughout the proceedings over the PA system changed and the Star Wars Main Theme started blaring heroically in its stead. Right after that, The Imperial March played with sinister pomp as new doctors continued to step up solemnly on stage to receive their accolades. And yes, it was as hilarious as you can imagine.

I heard mutterings amongst my colleagues about how inappropriate it was that the leitmotif of one of the greatest movie villains of all time accompanied what was the most important moment of their lives (to date). It was, after all, the song the Band of the Welsh Guard played as a not-so-covert insult when King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, an infamous abuser of human rights and asshole of some note, visited the United Kingdom.

Not me. I think it was glorious and it made me glad that I didn't miss my graduation day after all. If I had a Darth Vader helmet with me at the time, I swear I would have worn it on stage. Now, I can tell everyone that I graduated from med school to the rousing refrain of The Imperial Fucking March.

After all, I already got the evil black robe bit down pat.

The lot of us then did not take the Hippocratic Oath as was erroneously announced (which was a bummer because I was so looking forward to swearing to Apollo, Asclepius, Hygeia, Panaceia and all the other Greek gods) but took instead the Physicians' Oath codified in the Declaration of Geneva. It was alright except for the line that went: "I will maintain the utmost respect for human life from the time of conception, even under threat, I will not use my medical knowledge contrary to the laws of humanity."

I omitted my pronouncement of the part about respecting human life from "the time of conception" since modern medical practice, even in relatively religious Malaysia, necessitates that I don't. I wouldn't be able to prescribe emergency contraception or allow the destruction of leftover embryos in fertility clinics without being an oath breaker otherwise. I think it's time they update the wording of that oath, even though it's mostly just lip service in these cynical days.

My father arrived just as my mother and grandmother was leaving, cunningly missing the boring bits of the programme and turning up only to participate in a Kodak moment with me.

Later that evening, I celebrated with a few of my favourite individuals from med school by eating out at a Korean restaurant and then going to Shaki's suite at the Equatorial Melaka to have one last night of reckless alcoholism. We watched Inglourious Basterds and A Nightmare on Elm Street 4 on telly; the latter being an excellent film to watch when you are inebriated while the former is just excellent. Then, we talked passionately about all the video games we have ever played in our lives. I vaguely remember going out for breakfast with Voon at about 3:00 AM, and then calling room service for a corkscrew at four. Next morning, I woke up in the bathtub.

It was the most fun I ever had in a long, long time. Today, I will be attending an induction course at Port Dickson at 2:00 PM which will officially initiate me into the medical fraternity; into the adult world of salaries, taxes, mortgages and expectations. It came like a zephyr, beneath my notice, but I have come of age.

Searched his feelings,

k0k s3n w4i

An Idea of Home

2011-07-02T00:18:00.001+08:00

"Every house where love abides
And friendship is a guest,
Is surely home, and home sweet home
For there the heart can rest."

Henry Van Dyke

I owe thanks to Tenzin Dolkar (who I like to think of as my one and only Tibetan reader) for introducing me to her good friend, Pema, when she found out that I was going on holiday in her hometown back in April. It was a shame that I did not get to meet Tenzin too since she no longer lives in McLeod Ganj, but life's unfair like that. Contrary to the curmudgeonly, misanthropic image I tend to project, I genuinely do enjoy meeting new people and having meaningful conversations with them.

Pema was a delight and a darling. She's sweet, chatty, hospitable, and knows practically everyone in town. Out of the four weeks I spent roving about Western Himalayan region, three of them were spent in Dharamsala and the surrounding towns and villages - and in that time, I had met up with Pema about four times over a cuppa or a bite. We spoke at length about a great many pertinent subjects like regional and international politics, Tibetan culture, local attractions, human rights, medicine, religion, books, films, and food (of course). We also had words about that pervasive, pulsing issue close to every exiled Tibetan's heart: the dream of a free Tibet.

Pema has very realistic and pragmatic views on the matter. She knew the People's Republic of China will never unclench its greedy claws around her people's land or grant Tibetans true autonomy in their own governance, but still she strives for it. I agree with her almost unreservedly, but a dialogue between two minds mirroring one another is seldom fruitful and never interesting. So, I went meta - I wanted to quiz her about the thoughts behind her thoughts. Terry Pratchett's Tiffany Aching satirical fantasy series for children has this immensely sensible concepts of First Sight and Second Thoughts which not nearly enough adults know about (but should). First Sight is the ability to see what's there instead of what you think is there. Second Thoughts are the thoughts you think about the way you think.

"Do you want Tibet freed?" I asked her point blank over coffee at Moon Peak Cafe.

"Of course!" she told me emphatically. "It's my homeland!"

I enquired further. I asked if she was born there.

"No, I was born here in India," she said.

"Have you ever been to to Tibet?"

"No..." She then smiled, understanding what I was getting at. "It's odd but somehow, I feel a very strong connection to that place."

Pema, my Tibetan Spirit Guide™, enjoys her anonymity
so I photoshopped a Vajrapani mask over her face.

That is what I truly find fascinating. She has in mind a home in a country she was not born in, and yearns to return to a land that had never heard her footfalls. Why? Why indeed.

My life story parallels Pema's but with a radically different perspective. I am ethnically Chinese and my grandparents came to the Malay Archipelago from villages in China I cannot even name, let alone pronounce. I was born here in Malaysia, and I grew up breathing Malaysian air and drinking Malaysian water. At no point in my entire existence do I even entertain the thought of China as my home. I feel absolutely no longing for the patch of dirt which some dead stranger related to me by blood happened to have been birthed on. Unlike some Malaysian Chinese who harbour borrowed pride of China's every successes and would reflexively defend China's every transgression in the world's eye, I find almost everything about the People's Republic deplorable; their values running counter to everything I cherish and stand for.

When I first landed on Indian soil in 2006 with more than a hundred other Malaysians, I realised for the first time just how powerful the idea of a home can be. Homesickness was a visible, tangible disease around campus. I've heard of how my colleagues - some of them grown men - cry themselves to shambles in their hostel beds at night, moaning like stuck pigs for a mere physical location they feel sentimental for. Eventually, a few cracked under the duress and chose to quit medical school before the first semester was up just to return to familiarity. It their first time away from home for any substantial period of time, you see, and the shock proved to be too much for them to withstand. It ironic that some of these homesick Malaysians descended from Indian migrants, and India is actually their ancestral crib.

Meanwhile, I also noticed that I am completely immune to homesickness and one has to wonder if it's because I'm deficient in some ways in the attic. If I am a Tibetan refugee, do I have it in my heart to ache for Tibet?

Perhaps, it's just the way I think about the way I think. My idea of home is protean. Sometimes, it's a person - a lover - and the warmth between her arms, and in other times, it's a state of mind. A home may mean the whole world to many but the whole wide world is home to me. Those are words I live by. The rest, if that's how one chooses to parse it, are simply details.

What does "home" mean to you?

P.S. Thanks you, Pema and Tenzin, for helping to make McLeod Ganj a home for me.

Always home,

k0k s3n w4i

Atheists in an Alehouse

2011-06-28T22:41:00.014+08:00

"The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men
Gang aft agley"

To a Mouse (1785) by Robert Burns

Ever wonder what a cabal of atheists do when they get together?

Last Saturday, a Sabbath according to Jewish traditions and some Christians denominations, members of the Malaysian Atheists, Freethinkers, Agnostics (and their friends) had one of their sporadic meetings at the Craft Brews Brewhouse & Restaurant at Mutiara Damansara, Petaling Jaya. I arrived at the soiree a wee bit late, and I figured that since I didn't inform anyone that I was going to turn up in the first place, I'm allowed to be as tardy as I like. Right before the meet, I had tea with Jen and her man-friend - both of which happen to be non-religious - and I'd love to have them come as well, but I didn't think they are into unholy, godless assemblies as a spectator sport.

I tried to talk Terri into attending too since she is a member of MAFA but she was feeling less than enthusiastic about the proposition. I was hoping she would change her mind since there is always a real famine of the feminine in groups like ours.

Godless sausage fest (pictures courtesy of Ramon Fadli).

The only woman there was Ie Tzan's girlfriend who, as far as I know, isn't a member. The failed atheist meet I organised in Penang last March actually boasted a better girl-to-guy ratio (2:3) even if it didn't have a stellar atheist-to-theist ratio (also 2:3). The deficiency of female participation is a well-known chronic problem of atheist and sceptical societies everywhere in the world, and it have baffled us for decades. While there are no real shortage of women who are critical-thinking, science-minded secularists (no lack of prominent ones either), most don't seem to feel passionate enough take up a more active role for the cause.

The meets held in and around the Klang Valley region almost always command a decent turnout - which makes sense since metropolitan communities have a greater access to information and are consistently better educated, and those social elements correlate well with the rejection of religion and superstitions. Most of us present were either respectable professionals or university students which, to our collective surprise, were quite unlike the debauched, depraved, deceitful, devil-worshipping, baby-devouring criminals that most religious traditions demonised us as. I mean, could the Bible and Qur'an be wrong about us?!

Whoa, we should totally try to be more evil to help them despise us more easily!

About 15 to 20 people showed, coming and leaving in a revolving door fashion so we couldn't feasibly get everybody in the group shot. There are also members who are still "in the closet" for occupational or lawful purposes, so they couldn't be photographed either.

Terence (far left) organised this one.

We do plot and scheme, but being the intellectually independent individuals and unherdable cats we are, it's almost impossible to get us to arrive at any proper consensus. All the agendas proposed were defeated (except our devious plan for more future gatherings and more future beer - that one received unanimous support), but we still had a jolly good time hanging out. It's not often that we find ourselves in the company of literate and lettered people that have a working knowledge of philosophy, theology, cosmology, biology, psychology, ethics and human rights issues. It's almost a necessity for all of us to be well-informed laypeople on these subjects for us to survive one another. Seriously, every time you contribute anything to a discussion between rational, sceptical atheists, you must be prepared to back it up because we really have a very low tolerance for bullshit. Yes, there are irrational, unsceptical atheists as well, but they don't usually last very long.

And yes, as everyone probably suspects, we also swapped stories about our encounters with missionaries and holier-than-thou religious acquaintances who tried to witness to us, and had hearty laughs at their expense. There were some anger as well, since being unjustifiably condemned by most people around us as wicked heathens deserving of eternal torture in hellfire really doesn't do a lot to help our disposition.

As far as I can tell, our goals should be quite agreeable to most people, and it boggles my mind that they aren't universally applauded. We strive for a truly secular government which does not favour any one faith over another; the freedom of expression and the freedom of religion; the upholding of human rights and gender equality; and the promotion of science and critical thinking. In the case of our members who are Muslim only in name, we wish to fight for their right to leave Islam.

Now, it'll be nice if we can just agree on how we are going to achieve all those outstanding objectives.

All dressed up with nowhere to go,

k0k s3n w4i

Starbucks Invents Best Beverage in the Universe

2011-06-28T03:31:00.001+08:00

"I hope you don't mind
I hope you don't mind
That I put down in words
How wonderful life is
Now you're in the world"

Your Song (2011) by Ellie Goulding

Yes, I prefer it over Elton John's 1970 original. Bite me.

It's Starbucks' spanking new Black Sesame Green Tea Cream Frappuccino®!

I foresee a future in which I am impoverished but ecstatic.

It's basically just their regular green tea frap with black sesame powder blended in and black sesame sprinkles on top. It was already a delicious drink to begin with but now it's ♪maaagiiicaaal♫

I can't think of a single thing in the world which a liberal application of black sesame wouldn't instantly improve.

Will open for sesame,

k0k s3n w4i

The Powerlessness of Prayer

2011-06-25T23:22:00.028+08:00

"Prayer must never be answered: if it is, it ceases to be prayer and becomes correspondence."

Oscar Wilde

In 2006, the largest and most scientifically rigorous study to date investigating the power of prayer was published in the American Heart Journal by Dr Herbert Benson et al. The research efforts were funded and supported by the John Templeton Foundation which, according to their own mission statement, finds its purpose in serving "as a philanthropic catalyst for discoveries relating to the Big Questions of human purpose and ultimate reality," whatever the hell that means.

However, if you look into what the foundation's been up to, then you would get a better handle on what they are really trying to do. They have an annual big cash give-out called the Templeton Prize worth $1.5 million which they award to a "living person who has made an exceptional contribution to affirming life's spiritual dimension" and past recipients include that vile shrivelled fruit bat, Mother Teresa, and anti-Semitic Evangelist Billy Graham. The Foundation also gives out a $100,000 Epiphany Prize for "inspiring movie and TV" but the only winners had been religious (usually Christian) films like The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and The Passion of the Christ.

What I'm trying to say is, the Templeton Foundation is heavily biased towards affirming a spiritual and religious worldview. They funded this study with the expectation that it will prove that prayer works.

So this is how it went down: 1802 patients from six hospitals recovering from coronory bypass surgery were enrolled into this study. They were then divvied into three groups:

604 patients received prayer after being informed they may or may not receive prayers.
597 patients did not receive prayer after being informed they may or may not receive prayer.
601 patients received prayer after being informed they would receive it.

This is my favourite LOLcat.

The members of three separate Christian groups were recruited to provide the prayers. Intercessory prayer was provided for 14 days, starting on the night before the surgery. The results are as follow:

In the first two groups which are uncertain whether they would be receiving prayers or not, post-operative complications occurred in 52% (315/604) of patients who received intercessory prayer versus 51% (304/597) of those who did not. There is no statistically significant difference.
In the third group which knew that they are being prayed for, 59% (352/601) of them experienced complications.
Major events and 30-day mortality were similar across the 3 groups.

The conclusions of this research paper (and lessons one can learn from it) are:

Prayer does not affect the course of illnesses. Don't bother praying for sick people.
If you must pray anyway, don't tell the recipient that you're doing it because the mere knowledge of it can cause them to be worse off.

Quod erat demonstrandum. Now, I can actually advice the loved ones of patients who are undergoing coronary artery bypass grafting to restrain themselves from praying, and it would be the ethical thing to do.

This is my second favourite LOLcat.

No doubt those who want to believe that speaking to God can affect our lives in any tangible ways will have a million rationalisations on the ready to discredit this rather damning study into the futility of their favourite pastime - but I'm just glad that they can't dismiss this as an effort by us wily atheists to discredit Christianity since everyone involved in it actually did believe in the transformative and transcendental power of prayers from the get go.

One of the tritest, ripest bullshit that Christians often offer to explain the obvious failure of prayers is the assertion that God does not give you what you want but rather, what you need. I called bullshit because if you simply look into the Bible at Matthew 21:22, Jesus clearly said, "If you believe, you will receive whatever you ask for in prayer." The exact spirit of these words is echoed in Mark 11:24. In context, Jesus said this after cursing a fig tree to wither and die because it wasn't bearing fruits for him (it didn't matter to the Son of God™ that it wasn't the season for figs yet, of course), therefore indicating a comparable miracle is possible through prayer. Jesus also said that you can ask a mountain to throw itself into the sea and it will happen; he was pretty damn unequivocal about that. I like to see the Pope try it - move some mountains - but he seems capable only in moving paedophile priests around so we can't catch them.

The question is, why are modern Christians constantly trying to downplay the impressive effects of prayer which Jesus himself promised and turned it into something wishy-washy and invisible like the granting of strength and wisdom to cope with difficult situations, and the recovery of lost objects? I mean, I get those same boons too even though I've never prayed in my entire life! Doesn't anyone find this highly suspect?

You know what I think? I think it's because Christians themselves know deep down inside that nothing substantial can ever be achieved through prayers.

Another perennial favourite of Christian apologists is the excuse that prayers sometimes aren't answered because it is contrary to God's Ineffable Plan™. It's basically saying no matter what you ask for, things will still happen they way they would have. If that's true, then what's the point of praying in the first place?

Never mind that the very idea of speaking to an omnipotent, omniscient superbeing is absurd to begin with - even after it's scientifically proven that prayer is useless, most Christians will never be intellectually honest enough to admit that they got it wrong. Had the Templeton Foundation's study into intercessory prayer turned up a positive result, they would have shouted it from every pulpit in the world as proof of the truth of Christianity.

Unfortunately, it disagrees with the a priori beliefs they hold, so the eyes of Christendom do not see it; its ears do not hear. Its mouths, however, will continue to whisper to a God that either doesn't care or isn't there.

P.S. I do wonder why knowing that people are praying for you can have a detrimental effect. I had initially thought that the reverse is true, but I stand corrected now.

Study of the Therapeutic Effects of Intercessory Prayer (STEP) in cardiac bypass patients: A multicenter randomized trial of uncertainty and certainty of receiving intercessory prayer

Largest Study of Third-Party Prayer Suggests Such Prayer Not Effective In Reducing Complications Following Heart Surgery

Has a special relationship with reality,

k0k s3n w4i

Attack the Block: A Review

2011-06-24T16:11:00.007+08:00

"That's an alien, bruv, believe it."

Pest in Attack the Block (2011)

I'm absolutely convinced that London is the seediest, most dangerous place on the face of the planet. It seems to me that it's populated almost exclusively by feral chavs, neo-Nazis, migrant jihadists, and gangbangers drowning in inner city desperation and pulling everyone else down with them. That is, if British films like Harry Brown, Fish Tank, Four Lions, and KiDULTHOOD are any indication. Now, we have Attack the Block which opened up with a quintet of teenage chavs on BMX bikes mugging a defenceless nurse.

I say we should just nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.

The film looks nothing like this.

Attack the Block is the directorial debut of Joe Cornish, friend of the terrific trio of Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg, and Nick Frost (who has a very minor supporting role here) and it's B-grade alien invasion chavsploitation flick. If that premise interests you even the least bit, then you might want to check it out.

This film only has a budget of £8 million, and having no conception of how expensive making a film of this calibre can be, I think it looks frightfully cheap and schlocky. It also has absolutely star power to speak of (with Nick Frost being the only talent with any name at all) so it must have saved lots on the actors' paychecks as well. So, I had to wonder: Why do the alien beings featured in Attack of the Block look like animated two-dimensional silhouettes of gorillas that a sleep-deprived amateur animator can whip up it in a single day on his laptop? Seriously, the creatures were essentially walking furry black holes which no light can escape from but unlike blackholes, they have no weight to speak of and therefore feel like they don't even exist within the scenes.

I'm guessing the creature design was a cheat - y'know, to get away from animating convincing-looking fur and sinews. Since the events of the film took place at night rendering it impossible for anyone to see the aliens at all, they added blue glowing fangs as a workaround.

I'm also not a fan of the shaky cam used to shoot many of the action sequences in this movie, and I'm speaking as someone who didn't even notice that Paul Greengrass was using that same technique in the Bourne films until someone told me it made them queasy. The camera frequently move far, far too close in proximity to the actors and the epileptic cuts all combined to make a lot of scenes incomprehensible.

From left to right: Jerome (Leonn Jones), Biggz (Simon Howard),
Moses (John Boyega), Pest (Alex Esmail) and Dennis (Franz Drameh)

It says a lot for the rest of the film that I ended up enjoying it ultimately. The dialogues were amusing triffles one would expect from the mouth of stupid teenage hoodlums but made all the more amusing with by their British street slang. And since I don't really like any of them, I could happily enjoy seeing them getting eviscerated graphically one by one by the alien creatures.

They tried to create a bit of a redemptive character arc for Moses, the head of his ragtag bunch of chavs, but it ultimately didn't really work for me. Since I've been beaten up once by a pair of youths robbing me on the streets at night before (one of them kicked me in the teeth), I find it quite impossible to summon any sympathy for juvenile delinquents anymore.

I'm going to divulge a bit of spoilers in the next paragraph. Just skip to the last paragraph if you haven't seen the movie.

Ron (Nick Frost) and Brewis (Luke Treadaway).

An astrobiologist watching Attack the Block will probably cry angry tears because the alien invasion makes no damn scientific or logical sense at all. How did the complex organisms survive entry into our atmosphere sans spacecraft without being completely fried to tarry balls of crisps by air compression? And if they can survive that, how can they be killed by something as relatively inconsequential as a gas explosion? I have a really high threshold for the suspension of disbelief, but the least I ask of any work of speculative fiction is that they remain internally consistent. I was actually expecting Moses' plan to fail hilariously and for the creatures to tear him into tiny bite-sized pieces of chav meat, and was quite disappointed when it didn't happen.

Despite my negativity, I did have a good time with Attack the Block. What I don't get is the 89% rating it garnered on Rotten Tomatoes. It's really not that good, folks, but if you're a Mat Rempit, I can see how you would dig the hell out of this film. The ones in my cinema certainly did.

Don't like chavs,

k0k s3n w4i

The Genitalia of Hindu Worship

2011-06-22T19:16:00.005+08:00

"Religion is like a penis.
It's fine to have one.
It's fine to be proud of it.
But please don't whip it out in public and start waving it around,
And please don't try to shove it down my children's throats."

Seen on a T-shirt

Addendum: Yours isn't better than everyone else's, regardless of what you may think.

One of my earliest primers in comparative religion came from a large, hardcover book called Myths and Legends by Bellingham, Whittaker and Grant which I bought when I was in high school because I was such a huge mythology junkie back then. It is essentially a complete idiot's guide to Norse, Greek, Chinese, Japanese and Indian stories of divinity with lots of excellent colour photographs of religious relics and arts in it. However, it is by no means encyclopaedic as it left out Middle Eastern mythoi such as Christianity and Islam, which are the two most popular superstitious belief systems in the world today.

I brought this up because pretty much everything I know about Hinduism came from between the pages of that book. In it, I first learned about Shiva Nataraja, the Lord of the Dance and the Paragon of Paradoxes, which I still consider one of the coolest gods ever conceived by the minds of humankind. However, in my readings, I also found out some stuff about Shaivistic worship which are downright goofy.

Highlighted text reads: "But Shiva is most often worshipped as the
lingam. The lingam is usually a cylinder of dark, shiny stone with a curved
top set in a circular receptacle, or yoni, the symbol of female sexuality."

Page 152 of my copy of Myths and Legends says: "Shiva is a very ancient god. He is still extremely popular today and is often worshipped in the form of a lingam, a stone phallus."

Alongside the androgynous Ardhanarishvara (the Lord who is half-woman), the lingam is an iconograph of Shiva I have always kept an eye out for. It supposedly represents his awesome "male creative energy", which is an euphemism if I ever seen one. When I was in Shiv-Bhumi, the earthly Abode of Shiva in Bharmour, I was seeing lingams everywhere in the Chaurasi Temple complex which boasts no less than 84 of Shiva's godly tallywhacker littering the compound. It made me feel slightly violated, like I was being spiritually bukkake-ta the whole time I was there.

The most impressive shrine in the compound is the 6th century Manimahesh temple...

The tinsel streamers undulating in the breeze like sperms weren't helping to put me at ease at all.

... which houses Shiva's thick black lingam.

"Kneel and worship my monolithic ebony rod, mortals!"

Come to think of it, even the stone Śikhara-style temple is shaped like a mega-sized rock-solid schlong.

And what more, it's ribbed for her pleasure.

Look at how wide its corona, I mean, roof is. And it's so ~~long~~ tall that it's almost a skyraper. Skyscraper! I meant to say skyscraper!

Okay, moving on.

The iconographical counterpart of the lingam is the yoni, which is the Sanskrit word for the female genitalia, and it is thought to be a symbol for the divine feminine, the source of all that exists, and it looks like a minimalistic square womb with a vaginal passage leading out of it (if you remember, I have actually mentioned the yoni in passing in one of my older posts about the Jesus Fish). When the source of existence, yoni, is conjugalated with the creative force, lingam, it becomes the abstract symbol of creation itself: the linga-yoni.

Here's one I found in the same temple courtyard,

Um, that is NOT how sex works, kids.

The orange stuff covering Shiva's rigid manhood is kumkum, a powder used for social and religious markings in Hindu culture. Devotees would rub the lingam and then anoint their foreheads with their kumkum-stained fingers, making a mark called a tilaka. I don't even need to try - the jokes practically write themselves now.

And thus concludes today's lesson on the beliefs and practices of a major world religion. Isn't learning fun?

For the post describing my thrilling trip to Bharmour, follow this link: Landslides! Rockfalls! And the Road to Bharmour.

An avid 'Where's Willy?' player,
k0k s3n w4i

Meets and Treats with Seb and Terri

2011-06-20T18:42:00.019+08:00

"The Internet is like alcohol in some sense. It accentuates what you would do anyway. If you want to be a loner, you can be more alone. If you want to connect, it makes it easier to connect."

Esther Dyson

Last Thursday, I drove up to Putrajaya to register myself with the Malaysian Medical Council, and seeing that Cyberjaya is practically next door, I decided to pay someone I've never met before a visit.

Sebastian and I.

Sebastian (alias McGarmott from the Cinematic Concerns blog) had graciously offered to give me a guided tour of the visual effects studio he works for and I, being a self-described film buff, find that offer oh-so-impossible to resist. The company is called the Rhythm and Hues Studios, a renowned Academy Award-winning international outfit behind films such as Babe, the first (and best) Narnia film, and The Golden Compass. They have a branch in Malaysia which was recently involved in the making of X-Men: First Class, among other Hollywood projects such as the 2nd and 3rd Alvin and the Chipmunks movies and Hop.

This is where the magic happens.

As someone who haven't the faintest idea how computer-generated special effects are created, the hour-long private lecture that Seb gave me was a real eye-opener indeed. Being a child of the CG-age of cinema, I've allowed myself to take it all for granted but some of the things he told me really defibrillated my sense of wonder and appreciation. Take for example the scene in X-Men: First Class where Charles and Erik played chess on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial with the Washington Monument towering before them - I had assumed that it was shot on site but it turns out that the only thing that's actually present in the set is the staircase. Someone once told me that if the audience is able to tell that there's CGI in a given scene, the visual effect artists have already failed.

Another example that Seb gave me was that scene where Emma Frost walked to the glass window in her CIA holding cell and cut out a perfectly circular hole with her diamond finger, and what was done there was a cool piece of CG sleight of hand. The reason the actress, January Jones, was capable of tracing such a perfect circle was because the circle was already there, and the visual effect artists' job was to remove it from every frame until it's suppose to appear. It supposedly took six weeks to achieve due to the camera's and the actress' movements.

One of the current projects Rhythm and Hues is working on at the mo is Ang Lee's cinematic adaptation of Yann Martel's Life of Pi. I haven't read the book, but now I'm going to.

This is where they watch as the magic is happening.

Seb and I have been in correspondence for several months now and I always welcome conversations with erudite, well-spoken and intelligent individuals (so few are available these days, s'pity). I was a bit bummed out that we couldn't hang out longer after lunch, him having to tend to his job and all, but I suppose there's still the future and all its promising possibilities?

If anyone wants to pop into the Rhythm & Hues studio in Cyberjaya, you'd be happy to know that they do official tours (guidelines and contact info through that link). To reserve a tour, you'd have to give a minimum of two weeks notice but since I already know someone on the inside, I got away with simply sending Seb a Facebook message in the evening before.

Sigh, why is everyone's jobs much more fun and cooler than mine?

***

After parting ways with Sebastian, I drove to KLCC for another date I had lined up that day with another friend - someone who I have also interacted with on the web only before now.

Terri and I.

Terri is a friend of Beve, and I don't believe we were ever properly introduced. She's an English Lit major at the University of Edinburgh and she's currently interning back here in balmy ol' Malaysia in the office of a DAP Member of Parliament whose name I have forgotten at least three times by now.

And she brought me a treat she baked herself! I have no idea what it was but I can tell you it's very, very edible.

If I have to try, I'd say it's a moist, chewy, matcha-flavoured cupcake.

I was struck by how much her behaviour and speech pattern resembled Beve, except that she's a lot more hyper and animated compared to her. I, on the other, hand had rather run-down batteries by the time she turned up at 6:30 PM. It had been an exceptionally long day for me. The drive up to Putrajaya, my business with the Council, my tour of Sebastian's studio, my getting a wee bit lost between Cyberjaya and the Kuala Lumpur City Centre, and my two-hour long book-hunt at Kinokuniya - it all took a lot of wind out of my sails. When I eventually caught up with my rendezvous with Terri, I brain was already hankering for a long, hot shower and a good night's sleep.

Note to self: remember never to meet more than one new person in a day. I had to struggle to even maintain eye-contact when I was talking to her (I don't know about the lot of you, but making eye-contact had always been a deliberate, energy-consuming action for me). And the expectation of having to drive back to Malacca on the dark, hypnotic highway afterwards was a rather daunting and intrusive companion.

We were suppose to have dinner at Hajime, my favourite Japanese restaurant which was nearby but it had apparently folded (I later found out that it had moved to Jalan Delima under the new name of Cocotei). So, I drove us back to KLCC and supped at this Belgian café which she recommended.

Terri was entertaining company. The same can't be said for myself since I made her tear up twice and throw up once (don't ask). She confessed that she was a little disappointed meeting me in real life, and the last time anyone said something like that to me was the Long-Suffering Girlfriend™. I'm not sure what she expected of me though. Another feet of height? Better hair? A Christopher Lee baritone and a professorial English accent?

On the brighter side of things, I guess her impression of me can only go uphill from here.

***

So, at which point does a friend of a friend or an acquaintance becomes a friend? I guess it's when you decide they are. There's a nostalgic piece of prose popularly attributed to the current Dalai Lama and George Carlin called The Paradox of Our Age about how much better the past is compared to these brave new times, but it was in fact written by a Bob Moorehead. You've probably gotten it in a chain letter before from your mother when you accidentally let her find out your e-mail address. A line from it reads,

"We build more computers to hold more information to produce more copies than ever, but have less communication."

It's all sappy, rose-coloured poppycock, of course. There's this pervasive sentiment that humanity have become so enamoured with technology like cellphones and the internet that they have forgotten to connect with other human beings is frankly absurd. If anything, we are communicating more robustly than ever before and often with people we would never otherwise meet if the world wide web never existed. When I went on a month-long backpacking trip to India, a Tibetan reader of my blog introduced me to her friend living in one of the towns I was visiting. When I was looking for other atheists in Malaysia, I found a whole community of people much like me on Facebook.

Seriously, how did people live before the Internet went online? How impoverished, how provincial their lives must have been!

Drunk on the soma of the age,

k0k s3n w4i

A Tale of Illusions and Self-Deception

2011-06-17T01:17:00.004+08:00

"A man is his own easiest dupe, for what he wishes to be true he generally believes to be true."

Demosthenes

This is a true story from my college days in Taylor's about that one time when I looked up and saw Jesus Christ's face appear before my eyes. I was told that that would happen, and it really did.

There is one other character in this little tale and she was a classmate and a dear friend of mine. Let us call her Rachel. There is a few things you should know about her. Rachel is a petite, friendly, outgoing girl who was pretty much one of the guys. She is also one of the most intelligent students in my class and a brilliant conversationalist, but the most pertinent thing about Rachel is that she was very, very Christian. She frequently invites her heathen friends to church and churchy events. Her parents (I'm not kidding) forbade her to read the Harry Potter books because they believe J. K. Rowling glorifies witchcraft - but she told me she reads them anyway behind their backs. She rejects evolutionary biology and when I asked her how she reconciled her rejection with the Cambridge A-Levels Biology syllabus, she told me that she's only studying it to be successful in life and hence, "glorify God's name" - what ever that means. She was the first person I ever discussed religion with and she was very helpful when I was just starting out in my study of Christianity and the Bible.

So, this is how it went: I was in the library, sitting at one of the computers when I witnessed the face of her Lord and Saviour emerge out of the whiteness of the ceiling - like magic! I closed my eyes and lo, I could still see his face! It seemed to be seared onto the black of my eyelids, luminescent and ghostly. I wanted very much to share what I saw, and Rachel was the first and only person to jump to my mind.

"Hey, I looked up at the ceiling and saw Jesus!" I wrote in a text and sent it off. Her reply returned almost immediately.

"Oh my God, do you need someone to talk to?!" she asked. "I'm at church now."

Oh dear, that was not how I thought she would react. I had expected her to be sceptical; to suspect a bluff and to promptly call it. Then we would both laugh about what a terrible scamp I was. I was a devout Buddhist back in those days but if anyone messages to tell me that he saw Buddha, I only had two words to say: 'Yeah' followed by 'right'.

Anyhow, I wasn't lying. I really did see Jesus' (or at least, a bearded man's) face materialise out of thin air, but it was only after staring for 30 seconds at a special image featured in a webpage for optical illusions.

Stare at it for about half to one minute. Focus on the four dots in the middle.
After that, shift your gaze onto any blank, white surface - wall, ceiling or paper.

When done right, the effect can be quite startling. This type of optical illusion is called an afterimage, and you usually encounter it in your everyday life as the bright glow that seems to hover in your line of sight after looking at a bright light source such as the sun for few seconds. What happens is that the photoreceptors on your retina adapt or 'tire' and stop responding after being steadily stimulated over a period of time. So, when you divert your eyes to a blank surface, those adapted photoreceptors send out a weaker signal when compared to the ones surrounding it. Hence, the illusion of an inverted ghost image.

I told Rachel the full story of what actually happened. It's hard to tell if someone is annoyed, offended or disappointed through texts, but I assumed she was all of those things.

"I really thought you had a genuine vision," she said. I wonder if she had prematurely shared the good news of my miraculous sighting of the Messiah with her church friends. It would have been rather embarrassing, to say the least.

But suppose that I played along. Suppose that instead of coming clean on my little joke, I embellished my story further by saying that the vision came to me when I was praying (like she advised me to). I daresay she wouldn't find any aspect of my testimony wanting at all. All her life, Rachel wanted to, and do believe that the transformative power of Jesus' love is real. She had shared stories with me about unbelievers who had been "touched" while they were at church and subsequently converted to Christianity. The fact that Jesus actually appeared to me made perfect sense to her. From her point of view, it was like, duh.

She wouldn't ask, for example, how I knew how the historical Jesus looked like. She wouldn't ask if I was on any mind-altering substances at the time either, which was a very likely possibility since it's y'know, college. After all, she didn't even ask me if I was just joking or messing with her - and that was the first thing she should have done. If I had allowed it, she might even introduce me to her pastor and all her church friends, and all of them would no doubt celebrate my "vision" as a proof of the glorious powers of the Holy Spirit. I would bet good money that they wouldn't challenge me on my claim either.

This incident reminds me of the infamous Project Alpha orchestrated by stage magician and celebrity sceptic, James Randi in which he infiltrated two young amateur magicians, Banachek and Edwards, into a paranormal research program. The pair were trained so well by Randi that out of 300 applicants, they alone were selected as subjects. They managed to convince the researchers for four years through more than 160 hours of experimentation that they actually possess psychic powers. The kicker is that Randi actually told the two boys to simply confess if the researchers ever ask them if they were simply performing tricks. That question was never asked.

In fact, even after Randi publicly admitted that he the two youths were actually a plant of his, one of the parapsychologists went so far as to claim that Banachek and Edwards genuinely had psychic powers but were merely lying about being magicians. It's because he was so confident that he was too smart, too well-educated to have been so well and truly bamboozled.

Now, I have heard so many claims from believers about this miracle or that. I have heard stories about how the faithful would speak in tongues and get caught up in rapturous convulsions of ecstasy. I have heard about faith healers who had allegedly made the blind see and the lame walk. I have heard accounts of statues of the Virgin Mary weeping tears and crying blood; about Catholic saints whose bodies are incorruptible and would not rot. The believers claim that these are the proof of God's power, and that they couldn't all be hoaxes. But why not?

I wonder why they are so sure that they couldn't be hoodwinked since even in my limited experience, they have proven that they couldn't even see through the tiniest of tricks - or should I say, they wouldn't see through the tiniest of tricks?

It's so easy for anyone to be fooled when they want to be fooled so badly, and It's almost impossible to be sceptical about supernatural beliefs when they are your own supernatural beliefs. This is why when the faithful come to show me proof or evidence that their religion is true, I am always unimpressed. Over the years, I have grown quite familiar their standards for evidence.

Frankly speaking, they have no standards at all.

Would ask questions,

k0k s3n w4i

The Weird Meats of Tibet

2011-06-14T20:12:00.000+08:00

"Vegetarianism is harmless enough though it is apt to fill a man with wind and self-righteousness."

Robert Hutchison, address to the
British Medical Association, 1930

After mucking about in McLeod Ganj for a couple of weeks, I've grown rather familiar with a lot of the usual suspects of Tibetan cuisine like thukpa, momo, tsampa, phingsha, tingmo and laping (particularly the dry, yellow ones which I really liked). I've even had Tibetan butter tea or pocha before which was ~~quite horrible~~ none too suitable for my palate, but I still remain ready to give anything new a try. On that note, I went to my ever-helpful Tibetan Spirit Guide™ to see if she had anything a little bit more uh, exotic to recommend to me.

That's when I first learned about lowa khatsa, one of her favourite dishes. I wrote it down in my notebook so I could order it the next time I find myself in a Tibetan restaurant.

And I did.

Oooh, what is it?

It's spicy bits of fried LUNG. Surprise!

I am not a fan of animal innards. With the exception of a piece of barbecued goat liver straight from the cooking fire which I ate when I was trekking in the Thar Desert a few years ago, I've never taken a real shine to any internal organs of any animals. It's not that I'm squeamish or anything - I just don't like the taste and texture of viscera. Now, lung... I've never eaten that before. I never thought I'd acquire a taste for pig's blood tofu either, but I did.

For those who are curious as to what manner of creature the lung were appropriated from: it's goat. Or at least that's what the waiter told me. I'm not sure if it's a dish prepared exclusively using goat lungs or if any lung would do just fine though.

The texture of the lowa was spongy and squishy, like deep fried bean curd but airier (it's filled with hollow cavities after all). It reminds me of the time when I was in the first year of med school and the lecturer invited me to squeeze a whole human lung just for fun. I still remember the little bubbles of formaldehyde frothing out of the bronchus. Chewing on a wad of lowa feels very much like that except instead of my palms, I'm getting that sensation in my mouth. Some people might find that upsetting, but I bet it's not as upsetting as that time when my Ex-Grrrfriend™ swallowed a piece of human fat (remind me to tell you that story sometime).

There was no extraordinary lung-ey flavour which I could ascertain, but it was quite heavily spiced after all. As a whole, it tasted okay but I was too busy noticing the alien texture to notice much of anything else about it. I wouldn't shun it if it's on the table, but I am sure I wouldn't be in a hurry to order it again on my own volition.

Another Tibetan delight which the Tibetan Spirit Guide™ got me to try is gyurma which she described enigmatically as "Tibetan sausage".

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is what gyurma looks like.

They looked exactly the dismembered ends of cancerous penes deep-fried in oil. Go ahead. Google 'penile squamous cell carcinoma' if you dare.

Then again, I'm pretty sure Chinese sausages or lapcheong (which I consider to be delicious) look equally unappetising to people who are unused to its how it looks like. Anyway, gyurma is described in Wikipedia as Tibetan blood sausages with yak or sheep blood and roasted barley flour or rice as filler, a fact I wasn't privy to when I tucked in.

The sausage skin was rather tough and rubbery, like several layers of condoms melted together, while the inside was firm (but not uniformly so). All in all, it was a rather dry affair. Unlike lapcheong which has a very strong savoury and sweet fragrant taste, the gyurma I had was bland, surprising considering its very in-your-face appearance. I experimented with salt, vinegar and hot sauce, but the results were less than exciting.

Since I've only tried the the above two dishes only once, I'm not sure if what I had was how they usually taste like - but in my defense, I did order them from a certain restaurant that the Tibetan Spirit Guide™ vouched for. Still, I can't possibly like everything that comes out of a Tibetan kitchen right?

Especially when they are pieces of fried lung and blood sausages. Heck, I don't even like everything that comes out of a Chinese kitchen! Yes, I'm looking at you, chicken feet. You are bloody disgusting.

Strange meats before him,

k0k s3n w4i