The Philanthropical Sony Music Malaysia People

"We talked about music; he was into punk
Told me all the bands that I liked were junk"

Caught in the Crowd (2009) by Kate Miller-Heidke

This post will teach you how to easily get your paws on two free music albums of your choice from Sony Music.
Update: The throat of the giveaway has been cut. If you haven't already submitted your entry, it's already too late.

It recently came to my attention just how ridiculously disconnected I am from the current music scene when I was hanging out with some of my med school colleagues who were discussing the Pitbull concert they attended - and I was like, "You guys were at a concert? Performed by a dog? Freaking A!"

"I gave a concert? Where?!"

My taste in music is a bit of a curiosity to most people because the vast majority of my playlist is populated by obscure indie artistes, 90's pop punk bands, soundtracks of games and movies, the occasional Brit charter, Russian pop, French R&B and tracks from an eclectic collection of not-very-mainstream genres like folk, anti-folk, electronica, close harmony, Christian ska, Simlish, jazz revivalism and silly theme songs from kid's TV shows, just to name a few. Ages have passed and empires have fallen since I've last turned on the FM radio and tuned into a Malaysian radio station.

The closest brush I got to popular music in recent times was the TV musical Glee (which I've only watched till the Sectionals episode). It enabled me to get in on a "Who is your favourite Glee character and why?" contest hosted on Jen's blog not to long ago where she was giving away 5 Glee plastic folders to the 5 best entries, courtesy of Sony Music Malaysia. I was one of the winners and I gave my prize to the girlfriend, who is a far bigger Gleek than I am. The word "gleek" is also a slang verb meaning: "to build up saliva in the salivary glands using some stimulus, like sour food or yawning, and then pressing the tongue upon the glands, causing the saliva to shoot out, usually at an impressive distance."

You learn new things everyday, eh?

Please excuse the abysmal quality of this picture. My long distance girlfriend has a shitty camera.

Yesterday, while I was enjoying my post-dinner nap, Jen rang me and woke me up with news of yet more free loot haemorrhaging from Sony Music Malaysia's office at Solaris Dutamas - near the Pink Sage Diner where Phoebs and I double-dated Jen and David three weeks ago. There's a reason why I call Jen the Patron Saint of Bargains and Freebies, you know. This time, they are dishing out not one but TWO music albums to ANY and EVERY blogger who would extend his or her fingers over the keyboard and do a writeup mentioning their Facebook page!

Too easy! My opinion is that the Sony Music Malaysia page is a great source of music and entertainment news and is an excellent place to stick around in case they ever feel that generous itch again to bury people with even more giveaways - and judging from my admittedly limited experience with them so far, that's just another page in the diary for Sony Music Malaysia. Still, for such warm, accessible and benevolent folks, I think it's a shame that they did not put a face (or faces) to their Facebook page. All they have for profile pics are a couple of dispassionate shots of their office space.

There's also the proviso that I have to be a fan of their Facebook page, whatever that means. That posed a rather challenging hurdle for me because I have absolutely no flippin' idea how Facebook works - so I dialed Jen not two hours ago for help.

"So, um, how do I go about being a fan of the Sony Music Malaysia page on this Facebook thing?" I asked sheepishly. I had this vague impression in my mind that I was suppose to stare intently at my computer monitor with the hope that my intention to join their fandom would get across by osmosis.

"You are hopeless," she laughed. "Just click on the 'Like' button!"

Naturally, the albums would have to be recorded by artistes or groups signed to their label, so I dropped by Wikipedia to see if any of their talents fall within my eccentric set of musical interest. I lucked out because my favourite electronica and synthpop songstress, Imogen Heap, just happens to be a Sony BMG artiste! Most of you would know her as the "Mmm watcha say" chick which that Auto-Tuned twit Jason Derülo sampled in his debut single, Whatcha Say. Me? I was a fan since her Frou Frou days.

And I would do anything, anything at all for the deluxe or bonus track version of her 2009 album, Ellipse,

She killed a flock of angels and stole their halos? I never did get cover arts for music albums.

Making up my mind for my second choice proved to be a much tougher proposition and no name seemed to leap out at me from the Wiki list of Sony Music artistes. I was deliberating between Lenka's self titled album and something from the Turkish alt-rock, hip hop fusion band maNga (which was the second-placer at Eurovision 2010, justifiably losing out to the awesome Lena Meyer-Landrut) when I finally decided to just randomly pick someone I have never heard of before. A chance click introduced me to Aussie Kate Miller-Heidke who, according to her Wiki page, is a classically trained lead opera vocalist turned alternative popstar. That got my attention alright and a quick YouTube raid showed me what a real class act she is. Besides, I have had nothing but great experiences with most of the Australian female singer-songwriters I've ever listened to - and I'm saying this as a big fan of Lisa Mitchell and Missy Higgins here.

So yeah, I want Kate Miller-Heidke's 2009 live album, Live at The Hi-Fi. Looks to me it has a good mix of tracks from her two studio albums and then some.

She only got my attention because I can't pronounce one of her last names. Hide-key? Head-kay? What?

And you too, dear readers, can also join the grab-fest if you are living in Malaysia, owns a Facebook account and writes a weblog. You can get the details here in either Jen's post or Sony Music Malaysia's facebook note. The short of it is; write something about the Sony Music Malaysia Facebook page, 'Like' it, post the permalink in the comments section of Jen's post along with your real world name and contact details (e-mail address or phone number) and consider yourself the proud new owner of two original Sony music CD's of your choosing. Remember, this is NOT a competition. Everybody who participates WILL win. I'd hurry, if I'm you Oops, it's all over. This is why you should always listen closely to everything I say.

This has been your favourite bringer of good tidings, signing off.



P.S. By the way, did I mention that I use Sony's NWZ-S616F MP3 player unlike all the iPod zombies out there?



Will write for free music,
k0k s3n w4i

Sake Room of Seberang Jaya

"Nouvelle Cuisine, roughly translated, means: I can't believe I paid ninety-six dollars and I'm still hungry."

Mike Kalin

This is suppose to be a review of Sake Room, a Japanese restaurant which I had on my exhaustively researched hit "eat" list back when I was in the Pulau Pinang mainland doing my orthopaedic elective but first, an anecdote! I direct your attention to this photograph,

Phoebe versus inebriation.

This rosy cheeked lass is the result of an alchemical experiment combining the girlfriend with an indeterminate volume of Japanese rice wine. That's my girl, alright; she would light up redder than Chinese New Year if she had so much as a few small sips of an alcopop. It's what we medical types refer to as the alcohol flush reaction or the Asian Flush - because we orientals are total weaksauce lightweights when it comes to liquoring our gills. About a third of all Chinese, Japanese and Koreans displays this syndrome; a club which I am happy to report does not include my membership.

We headed thereafter to the Sunway Carnival Mall which was pretty much just across the road from Sake Room because Phoebs needed to shop for a new pair of glasses. At the optometrist's, a Chinese sales clerk who was so Chinese that he probably just swam here across the South China Sea that very morning came up to Phoebe and went, "You duink be-er arh?" quite loudly

Oh boy, you should have seen how credulous he looked with his eyes magnified several times through his thick spectacles. Phoebs, made even redder by the embarrassment, was like 'No-lah, no-lah' as she tried to escape the clerk and the shop. I nearly cracked a rib laughing.

*cough*

Right, let's get down to business here.

Welcome to Sake Room, Sushi & Lounge.

I would like to have dined here a couple more times to develop a more well-rounded impression before writing a review, but time and money are luxuries I had in short supply back when I was semi-vacationing in Seberang Perai. Anyway, allow me to introduce to you the cause of Phoebe's little comedic moment with the sales clerk,

Strawberry-infused sake.

It cost a figure somewhere between RM 30 to RM 40 - the memory bank's a little short on specifics right now. It came in this funky glass bottle which has a little hollow bubble projecting into it from the exterior to allow the ice in the bucket to chill the sake quicker without diluting the content (if anyone knows what this species of glassware is called, please give me an education). Phoebs and I actually wanted to try the pineapple-infused version but unfortunately, we only had the choice of having either strawberry or plum that day.

It's great that a waitress came periodically to fill our glasses. Just thought I should mention the great service.

And they serve it in little clinkers like this one.

My experiences with sake is admittedly infrequent but I thought the infusion was quite drinkable, if a bit cloying (I had my heart set on the pineapple one, you see). It's produced using a super special secret house recipe and it takes about 2 weeks to produce 3 litres of the liquor. The taste is faintly reminiscent of strawberry-flavoured cough syrups so I'm sure this won't go down well with most people. As an apéritif though, it worked great and totally primed my stomach for the main,

Bento, bento!

You'll find it listed under bento sets section of the menu as "unagi kabayaki & chicken wasabi pepper" and it'll set you back at RM 40. I'm sure what they meant was "wasabi pepper chicken" and the term "unagi kabayaki" always appeared a little redundant to me since kabayaki is already colloquially used to refer to dishes which have unagi in them. And since we're on the subject of redundancy; bento sets. Also, I like menus which give colourful and meaningful descriptions of food items - particularly in specialty restaurants serving food that have weird foreign names - and Sake Room's catalogue is a little short on details. I'm a Japanese food veteran so I already have a working glossary of edible Nipponese words in my head but your everyday diner might find the gibberish somewhat intimidating.

The eel was competently assembled - crisp on the outside, and tender on the inside - and the unagi tare used to flavour it struck what I thought was a good balance between savoury and sweet. It's not the best I've had but after eating nothing but bad incarnations of this dish for months, this was almost a godsend. The peppery wasabi-accented chicken was the more outstanding component of this bento, if you ask me, but I chalk this up to my personal addiction to all things flavoured green and mean. The generous sprinkling of black and white sesame seeds certainly helped too - but you haven't heard the last of them yet.

The bento also included a good half-cup serving of yasai itame (essentially sauteed cabbage), a gyoza, some appetising tsukemono (mostly gari), lots of edamame, a hearty bowl of miso soup and a serving of sticky Japanese short-grain rice. Supposedly, the set also comes with some tamago but it was strangely absent from mine. I did not pursue the matter because I'm not that big a fan of the sweetened omelette (plus, I was already feeling kind of stuffed). Heck, I'm not even that big a fan of eggs in general. Aside from that, they also seemed to have completely forgotten about my dessert which was part of the deal. This, I could not let slip. More on this later.

It is a pretty filling combo and is worth every penny I paid, I can tell you. Folks who constantly complain that Japanese food portions are too small take note.

Udon, udon!

Phoebs ordered "tempura udon" from their noodle menu and thankfully, it wasn't what I thought it meant (battered and deep fried Japanese wheat noodle, anyone?). It actually consists two separate dishes. The first, in the above photograph, is a bowl of udon garnished with katsuobushi (bonito flakes), nori, a cap of mushroom and a pair of naruto kamaboko slices (those white fishcakes with pink spirals on them). It wasn't bad but it won't exactly blow your mind either.

The second is this; all of five glorious, golden ebi tempura,

They feel the need to throw a dash of sesame seeds on this too, for some reason.

Say what you will about Sake Room but they aren't the stingy fucks most Japanese restaurateurs are. What their shrimps lacked in girth and length they made up with sheer number. However, they do not have that light, unique fluffiness which characterises your regular tempura dishes - not that that's a bad thing because the prawn to batter ratio here is definitely higher. As a rule, I rarely order tempura stuff anyway when I go to Japanese restaurants because I consider the process to be ruinous to the original flavour of whatever food it is that's involved. And most of the time, all one can taste is the batter anyway.

The udon bowl and the ebi tempura totalled RM 20.

Phoebs and I also shared this weird looking makizushi,

As you can probably tell, the pieces are ginormous.

This form of rolled and cut sushi is also called makimono, a term which Sake Room favoured. Simply called the "crispy roll", it's part of the restaurant's designer makimono line and it'll will cost you RM 18. It is also delicious - if you're an idiot.

Oh, it was probably enough to fill a guy like me up on its own and if you're not a fusspot, you'd probably consider it a pretty decent, righteous, churchgoing and god-fearing sushi. Its blurb claims that it contains unagi, asparagus, avocado and cream cheese (and if you look at the picture, there's also all that tobiko - flying fish roe - which they have neglected to mention in their menu) and the whole roll was deep fried tempura-style. It's just one of those things which sounds good on paper but when executed...

My assessment of it is this: you're not going to taste much more than the cream cheese, the batter and the copious amount of rice in it. The cream cheese in particular was overpowering, as much as I love the stuff under different circumstances. The unagi and the tobiko? I swear you won't even know they are there.

I notice that a unwarrantably large proportion of their designer makizushis also contain cream cheese in them, no doubt pandering to the majority of people's partiality to it. While I can't say outright that the rest also sucked testicles, I would advice people to stay clear of them - or at least tell them to ease up on the dairy and rice.

On the plus side, the maki came with a side of gari (that pink pickled ginger thing) which I love. In Japanese restaurants which allow their customers a bottomless unrestricted supply, I can literally just sit there and munch disturbingly large quantities of it while I am between orders. The quality of their wasabi was also good, and the accompanying hot sauce was top notch; prudently spicy, faintly sour and fragrant because of the sesame seeds - which also peppered the plate, if you notice.

What's up with this place's obsession with sesame seeds anyway? There's such thing as too much of a good thing, you know. Case in point,

At this point I was like "Not again!"

This is the dessert which was suppose to come with my bento set meal that totally slipped their minds. It's hard to tell but it's apparently green tea ice-cream, served tastefully in a cocktail glass. I was informed that it was homemade and that they ground premium green tea leaves in their blend. I'm no expert on the art of ice-cream making, but I presume that it's probably easier to fine-tune the flavour if one uses matcha (finely-milled Japanese green tea) to make it. That's what Starbucks use in their Green Tea Frappuccinos, if I'm not mistaken.

I bring this up because the Sake Room's green tea ice-cream is tasteless. That inherent blandness is compounded by the obnoxious presence of yet more sesame seeds dumped onto it like it's going out of fashion. Come to think of it, it makes for a pretty decent sesame ice-cream because that's the only damn thing I could taste. However, as a green tea ice-cream, it's an utter and complete failure. Looks outstanding though.

By the way, I absolutely love kurogoma (black sesame) ice-cream and I inquire about its availability in every Japanese restaurant I visit, but I'm afraid it's none too common in Malaysia.

How it looks like on the outside.

I won't say that this review is my definitive word on Sake Room since I've visited it only once. My overall impression is that this place was slightly overrated by some blogs (and grossly overrated by others) but it's still better than either Sushi King or Sakae Sushi. Price-wise, it won't break you and their servings are very generous. I personally like the sombre and laid back lighting they employ since it also doubles up as a lounge. It's a great place for conversations over a drink with one's friends or a lover. As for the taste, they generally float above the average depth of the pool but the kitchen crew seems to have a tendency to go overboard with the sesame seeds and cream cheese. It makes me think that they are trying to conceal or make up for some shortcomings in either their ingredients or cooking skills - not that that's necessarily the case, of course.

Also, free Wi-Fi.

I'd definitely return if I have the chance, if only to give it a fairer shake of an appraisal. And to get my hands on some pineapple-infused sake if it's the last thing I do!

Namesakes. Now don't any of you come and ask me what a na-me-sa-ke is.

You can find Sake Room in a southerly direction from the Sunway Carnival Mall in Seberang Jaya, just opposite the road from a Billion Supermarket and two doors away from the Roxbury Bistro & Pub. And if that's not specific enough for you,

No 17, Jalan Todak 3,
Pusat Seberang Jaya,
Seberang Jaya,
13700 Penang

The not terribly precise GPS coordinates as determined using Google Earth are 5°23'47.12"N, 100°23'49.69"E. To contact them, dial +604-3992717 or +6012-5201212 (ask for a Melissa Liew, who is also the creative force behind the establishment). They are open for business from 11:00 am till late from Tuesday to Saturday. They switch to a more bar-like or cocktail lounge atmosphere after 10:00 pm on these days, whatever that means. On Sundays, it's 3:00 pm to midnight. They are presumably closed on Monday, since I can't get any info on their hours for that day 4:00 pm till late every day of the week. While they probably have no chance at a halal license since they serve alcoholic beverages, it is useful to know that they don't use any pork products whatsoever in the premises.

Sigh.



For the sake of sake,
k0k s3n w4i

Sunny Sunday Day in the Sun

"Weekends are a bit like rainbows; they look good from a distance but disappear when you get up close to them."

John Shirley

Guess where I snapped this picture from.

Just to prove to everyone that I do not actually melt in sunlight (or gourd forbids, sparkle), I crawled out of what Beve refers to as my "cave" today and drove to town to see what the real world has become in my absence from it. I'm a habitual mall rat so my destination was naturally a mall of some shape and description which could provide everything I need - and I have needs of lunch, a place to do spot of reading and possibly a movie, should the fancy take me. I'd call my friends and check if anyone's up for a bite and a matinée, but frankly, I was quite unwilling to put myself through the headache of doing that. It's quite telling really, how okay I feel about the idea of doing things on my lonesome. Many consider it quite unacceptable.

But enough of my many neuroses. I discovered that Hatten Square had opened its doors recently, in a manner of speaking,

Automatic parking systems are apparently quite the draw. The less we have to deal with stoopid hoomans the better, right?

I like the fact that the privilege to leave one's car somewhere for a few hours is still quite an affordable proposition in smallish town Malacca, but as Mandy Moore insisted quite ominously through my earphones; "All good things/Come to an end."

Personally, I know of a good, shaded parking space near the Dataran Pahlawan mall that is completely free-of-charge and is unoccupied about 90% of the time I look for it. Of course, I'm not going to divulge where it is - you can't blame me for not wanting to compete with more people than I necessarily have to.

Another chance discovery was this,

Good thing I was in a mall where pants are readily available - because I just came in the one I was wearing.

I wonder how many of my readers still remained from back when I wrote about the same book fair last year. Yeah, it's the travelling Times warehouse clearance sale and it's back! While I know that the titles they carry are unlikely to have improved over last year's selection, there's just something magical about seeing tens of thousands of dirt cheap paperbacks and hardbacks decked out so obscenely like so many street corner prostitutes in Calcutta's red light district (not that I know anything about that, ahem). You'll never know what gems you might dust off from the pile, just like how sometimes you might get a venereal disease free hooker. There are 3 for RM 30 deals, 3 for RM 20 and price-cuts for individual volumes up to 70%. There's also a blanket 30% off on all alleged bestsellers so you can probably get your Dan Browns, Cecilia Aherns, Mitch Alboms and Stupid Sparkly Vampire Novels cheaply here.

It started yesterday, I think, not that that's important - but if you want to put your hands on some discount lits, you might want to do so before the 20th of this month when the party stops. It is June now, isn't it? Sweet bejesus, these date things are such a pain the ass.

Weight Loss Surgery for Dummies; hey, this one actually looks like it might be in demand!

The Complete Idiot's Guide to Surviving Divorce; they need to write one on avoiding marriage in the first place, if you ask me.

There was a couple of titles I really, really wanted to get but even after having their prices taken down a peg, my wallet still neighed like a disapproving horse. One of them was Stephen Jay Gould's Full House: The Spread of Excellence From Plato to Darwin,

Yeah, it's still expensive even when it's going at almost half-price.

You might occasionally catch me using words like "punctuated equilibrium" and "spandrels" when I talk about evolution and if you don't already know this; the late great Stephen Jay Gould was the scientist who developed the the theory of punctuated equilibrium and introduced the architectural term "spandrel" into evolutionary biology to describe phenotypic evolutionary byproducts.

The other one which caught my attention was The Last Human: A Guide to Twenty-Two Species of Extinct Humans,

If you recall, I have quite an interest in human evolution and evolutionary anthropology too.

Argh, it's such a dilemma. I'm still fattening the piggy for Gluckman, Beedle and Hanson's Principles of Evolutionary Medicine which I'm planning to order through Amazon.com (via Kinokuniya) next - I've had my eyes on it for the longest time, mind you - and yet there I was, debating whether or not to put the porker to the slaughter for that two books. Sigh, the Puppini Sisters know just how I feel - that's why I keep them on my MP3 player, you know, for moments I have to physically drag myself away from things I really want to buy; "Looked for my limousine, once more it's not there/I can't believe I'm not a millionaire."

What, your life don't have a soundtrack? What sort of half-assed effort at living are you trying here?

Anyhow, you didn't think I would actually leave the book sale empty-handed, did you?

That's like 10 bucks apiece.

The apparently untitled book by Valerio Massimo Manfredi is actually called Tyrant. I don't have much expectations for it, though. Aside from his phenomenal semi-fictionalised Alexander trilogy, none of his other works really stand out on the bookshelf.

The one which I really wanted to buy was Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma. I have quite an active obsession with the modern commercialised food culture. I watched every documentary there is about the subject from Spurlock's Super Size Me to the recent 2008 Academy nominated, Food, Inc. I even saw Unser täglich Brot (Our Daily Bread), that German one which has no voice-over whatsoever and is basically just a series of impassive, unnarrated agricultural and food processing footages. I invite anyone who likes to eat anything to check any of these excellent films out. You might never eat the same again.

Speaking of food, here's where I lunched,

Wong Kok Char Chan Teng, I believe it's called.

It's one of those Hong Kong-styled restaurants which kept mushrooming all over the place like the undead in a zombie apocalypse - and like zombies, most of them are quite rotten. I keep wondering why Kim Gary is so tardy in making their move on the Malaccan F&B market when there's an obvious niche to be filled here which is currently being occupied unsatisfactorily by these incompetent, copycat, me-too outlets.

The honeydew plus mango plus frogspawn dessert thing I had.

Crispy noodle with prawns and mixed mushroom cream sauce.

It was decent enough a dish and the peppery mushroom cream sauce was quite a treat. My only misgiving about this is the three orange crustaceans floating in it like a trio of bloated corpses. As a rule, I don't customarily eat animals which do not live on land - and if anything has a shell on it (e.g. crabs, tortoises, bombs), the odds are good that I wouldn't like it. If I have Phoebs around, I usually just give her all of these weird beasties that sometimes come with the real food I order. And how does one peel a prawn anyway?

Not wanting to waste them, I simply popped the prawns into my gob (shell and all), chewed and swallowed while my brain went "WHAT THE FUCK, WHAT THE FUCK, WHAT THE FUCK!" the whole time. Even the thought of it sends shivers down my spine now, ugh.

This has been yet another utterly pointless post by me. Thank you for wasting your time here. 'Preciated.



A waste of space just like everyone else,
k0k s3n w4i

Fork and Spoon

"Goodbye, my almost lover
Goodbye, my hopeless dream"

Almost Lover (2007) by A Fine Frenzy

"The centre of my universe is me, and the rest of the world is in orbit."

I was fifteen but could pass for twelve, scrawny little thing that I was. This time, I found myself in a forest at an hour far from midnight and farther still from dawn. I was led there with instructions to keep my head down low and my eyes shut tight. Then, a whisper came with an order for me to sit down on the kerb of an asphalt jogging lane. "Keep head down, keep eyes closed," I was told and the whisperer left me there; I could hear the rustle of his footfalls fade away. The cold of the woodland night suddenly dropped a smidgen, and I hugged my legs close to me, forehead resting on my knees. The trees I could not see crowded around me in the dark, breathing down my neck.

Time is a putty when you're in isolation, a strangely malleable animal when unwatched. I noticed that the air felt emptier without the weight of man-made noises but I waited not in utter silence. I could hear the murmur of zephyrs weaving through the canopy and I could hear a strange, rhythmic tap-tap striking the bed of desiccated leaves which blanketed the forest floor, sometimes sinisterly close, sometimes far away. The forest had a presence and I could sense it. It was alive and somnambulant; walking in a waking dream, and the tap-tapping was its footsteps.

Rain? The rational mind protested.

I got my answer almost immediately when a dead leaf dislodged by the mischief of breezes sailed down onto my head. 'Tap' went the metaphorical pin, startling me and breaking my voluntary blindness. With my eyes opened, I realised that the darkness was within me, not without. I saw a gray world bathed in translucent shadows and widely-spaced trees, more cathedral than sepulchral. Moonlight filtered serenely down through the foliage and I saw that I wasn't as alone as I was led to think. There were other kids like me sitting on the kerb by the jogging path, separated only by 10-metre intervals.

To my right was Spoon, pondering her kneecaps.

"That's 'cause I'm shaped like one," she explained once upon a time when I asked her why she called herself that. As a description, it was apt - she's practically just a head on a slender stem - but I like words like 'elfin' or 'impish' better; they paint a more meaningful portrait of her. Her eyes were bright and her smile was mischievous. At fifteen, she looked ten - her body had yet to shed the innocent androgyny of a child. To encapsulate her in a single sentence, she was the cutest girl I knew - cute in the way children sometimes are when they aren't monstrous little shits.

I signed up for a 3-day camp at the Recreational Forest in my capacity as a Red Crescent Society member (crescent because the cross was too Christian for the daulah islamiyah that is Malaysia). Spoon was there for the heck of it, as far as I could tell. She was not a member of the Society and she only got a place because one her best friends was part of the organising committee. As luck would have it, Spoon and I found each other in the same group, where everyone else besides were strangers.

Deserting each of us individually in the forest in the dead of night was part of the camp's "character-building" itinerary. There were also the obstacle courses and the ghastly nighttime jungle treks (where at one point, we had to wade across a waist-deep, leech infested stream at 2:00 am). We were rationed, at most, two to four hours of pillow time a night. Why a tiny girl like her put herself through such an ordeal is beyond my ken. I must ask her this one day.

It felt like hours before the camp counselors rounded the lot of us up from our stint of abandonment in the forest. Right then, I thought we could finally head back to camp to rest when I realised that we were being herded in the general direction of away from our cabins and out to the edge of the woods.

"Pair up," ordered one of the many sadistic beasts prancing about under the guise of a camp counselor. "You are going to have to find your way back to camp on your own in twos."

Spoon was naturally my partner for this, as she was for every camp activity which required twosomes. Many mistook us for lovers, and many boys asked if that's true. No, we weren't, I told them. One boy actually perked up at my denial and said, "So you wouldn't mind if I go after her, right?" That same boy would later wink at her across the mess table at breakfast. She retched quite violently in reply.

The pairs were released a few minutes between each so by the time Spoon and I set off, the couple which preceded us was nowhere to be seen or heard. We walked side by side in silence, feeling tense because we thought some counselors might be hiding behind a tree, waiting to ambush-scare us. Nothing of the sort happened though. What did happen, however, came completely unanticipated - like a thief in the night.

A small hand found mine and it held my fingers gingerly, as if unsure. The contact sent an effervescent wave of static electricity through my body and left me at a loss for response. I neither withdrew my hand nor did I reciprocate her grip - my right arm simply hung limply by my side as if it had forgotten how to move. It felt like several sunlit days to me but time, as I've learned, is a strangely moody creature. It could not possibly have lasted longer than a minute.

Then, as inexplicably as it began, it ended. Her hand melted away, leaving mine feeling oddly naked, my heart oddly cold.

At camp, in a clearing outside of our cabins, we waited for the stragglers to return. Spoon and I still had not spoken. There was a spell in the cold, night air which would shatter with the force of a single word. We sat leaning quietly on each other's backs as wild thoughts buzzed dizzyingly in my head. I fancy I could feel her heartbeat tap-tapping against me, like the forest but much quicker. Or was it my heart? Was I waiting for something else to happen? Was she?

Whatever it was, it never arrived.

I would be a year or more later after that extraordinary night in the forest before Spoon and I talked about it for the very first time. At this point, she was already dating a boy and I was in the middle of a two-year long chase of a girl who would later become the Ex-Grrrfriend™. Time had laid itself, an ocean, between us.

"So, why did you hold my hand?" I asked with self-surprising candour and I still ask myself today if I had accidentally fallen for her without knowing it. Oh, what different lives we might be leading today had a single word been spoken differently or a timelier gesture made! I live an alarmingly great portion of my waking Present in the Past, poring over the muddled mess of decisions which led me Here. Life seems so straight a walk to me but yet every time I look behind, all I can see are the forks and crossroads I trampled past without noticing they were even there. I would like to say yes - yes, I had fallen in love with her, if momentarily, when our fingers met. But the truth is, I don't know. I'll never know, and thinking about it is a true exercise in pointlessness if there ever was one. That scrawny fifteen year-old boy belongs now to a lifetime apart; his mind estranged from my psyche, his secrets are his to keep.

I noticed that she neither asked me where nor when. She knew precisely what I meant.

"I didn't," she said. "It was you who held my hand."

"But there are some things which have no orbit. They come - and then they go."

Stabbed by a fork,
k0k s3n w4i

Another Tee to Sleep In

"According to a new survey, women say they feel more comfortable undressing in front of men than they do undressing in front of other women. They say that women are too judgmental, where, of course, men are just grateful."

Robert De Niro

The Mother just returned from a weekend vacation from somewhere or other (I didn't ask) and brought home a souvenir for me. It's a T-shirt.

I can't possibly wear this,

LOLWUT?!

It's WHITE in colour! Everybody knows I don't wear white!



P.S. It's also too big.

P.P.S. I know this is another atypically dwarfish post from me but bear with it - this has been a ridiculously busy week. In fact, I have to drive to McD's in a minute or two to pull yet another all-nighter... Oh wait, she went to Phuket. I just noticed that that's printed on the shirt.



Wishes he had gone into law instead,
k0k s3n w4i