FUNNYACCENT

I Wondered As I Scrubbed

Earlier tonight while on my knees scrubbing my bath tub and spraying my moss green shower curtain with those orange glo liquid that I bought in a bulk from HomeDepot, I was wondering: How do you clean your $6,000 shower curtain? It's not that I dreamed of having a $6,000 shower curtain, because the most expensive shower curtain I ever paid for was $9.89 from Marshalls. And I thought I was smart to get such a beautiful shower curtain with wicked good deal.

I was just wondering, do you clean it? If you did, how did you do it? Did you use a $300.00 orange glo spray that comes in abeautiful delicate china? Or how long do you use the shower curtain before you throw it away? When I asked: How did you clean it? Of course I didn't mean you. You know what I meant.

Di Wajah Mu Ku Lihat Bulan

" Ohh...Bulan, Mana Ood? Or Ood, Mana Bulan?

I love this song. Thankyou Nizamrahman for sharing this beautiful song with us.

While Waiting for Tea

Unconcious Mutterings Week 246

I say ... and you think ... ?

1. Las Vegas ::  Fake
2. Linus ::  Computer program
3. Struck ::  Blow
4. Movie ::  Home
5. Anxious :: Waiting
6. Bandit :: Outlaw
7. Picks :: Teeth
8. Lasso :: Rope
9. Dinner :: Split Peas Soup
10. Bargain :: Filene Basement

Look Before We Leap

I couldn't agree more with  Dr. Azly Rahman.

Come down to Earth

Azly Rahman Oct 22, 07 1:03pm

E.T. go home! - Bumper sticker in New York City When I was a child in primary school back the early 1970s, there was an alien invasion in my school, Sekolah Temmengong Abdul Rahman, Johor Bahru. A spaceship landed. It was a UFO. During recess, hundreds of kids ran around the soccer field screaming as if they were hearing the last 10 minutes of the broadcast of Orson Welles' The War of the Worlds’. There was total chaos. I recall falling on my face as I jumped across the huge monsoon drain that separates the field from a building leading to the classrooms. I tried to run away from being attacked and taken into the spaceship, into a world of weightlessness in which teh tarik becomes teh terbang. I almost fell into the drain and was helped by my best buddy, Fook Shiang, a bespectacled chap who would roam around with me even into the Chinese graveyard on the north side of the school. I was curious about what a Chinese ghost looked like, having been quite well-versed in how Malay ghosts are presented. Years later I discovered that ghosts, supernatural beings, and aliens are actually big business in Corporate America. Halloween is a great celebration of spiritual awakening – wherein America danced it to the tune of Michael Jackson's ‘Thriller’. In the case of the Johor sighting, kids were talking about seeing a spaceship landing in the middle of the field and about children being shot with laser guns that left them with red spots, just like those you get when bitten by red ants. The invasion and the attack by the aliens on the kingdom of Johor did not stop in the school field. Two of my classmates saw battalions of little creatures (actually not seen by the naked eyes), the size of red ants, marching across the classroom as we were ready to resume class. Some claimed to have been shot in the legs and thighs. In broad daylight we were attacked - in an age when TV was still black and white. That was almost 10 years after Neil Armstrong landed on the moon, in a race with the Soviets. That was the beginning of technological fantasy - that we will one day colonise space when we have devastated the Earth enough. The incident at my school, which I heard was reported by Utusan Melayu, happened almost 50 years before we sent our first space tourist/cosmonaut/space participant aboard the Russian rocket. A giant step for Malaysian but a small step in our understanding of spaces of knowledge and power. Here’s why. Outer space, inner spaces We go in and out of spaces and create these as well. We let the entire nation become mesmerised by our ability to launch a man into space. This could be good education for our kids, so that they may get hooked on rocket science. But science ought to also teach us how to think rationally, promote free inquiry, cultivate academic freedom, address economic disparities, solve our educational problems, haul corrupt leaders to justice easily, how to recognise the rise of totalitarianism, solve the issue of our dispossessed and violent youth, and most of all decolonise our minds and let us live a life free from being colonised by the spaces of knowledge and power. Science ought to be democratised to teach citizens to live in republic that is founded upon scientific socialism and transcultural ethics. But we are still colonised. We let aliens colonise our living rooms; through TV programmess we allow Hollywood to dictate how we should invent our reality. We saw the 1961 Apollo blast-off and thought that only when we have sent a native to the moon would we be recognised as an advanced nation. We are misled by the notion of technological advancement. We have not learned what science for social purposes means and we have not delved into the philosophy of science for the advancement of the Third World nation. We saw Pakistan triumphant in testing its nuclear bomb near Kashmir on May 28, 1998 through the achievement of Nobel Laureate in Physics Abdus Salam, and we thought that an Islamic nation had progressed. Little did we know how Pakistan has evolved as evident in the rule of General Pervez Musharraf. The nation's Nobel Prize-winning scientific achievement has its contradiction. There is so much disparity in the national-cognitive evolution of Pakistan. We must get Malaysia to come down to earth and look at the reality of empty spaces and the spaces in knowledge and power that we have created over the last 50 years. At present we are looking at Outer Space as escapism and a national fascination and alteration of consciousness - so that we may be made to forget the harshness of the daily lives of the people. We create newer grounds for play and fantasy. Now for example, the Johor Kingdom is heading towards another fantasy world - the Disney Project. It will become Johor Darul Disney and Sekolah Temmengong Abdul Rahman will become the Malaysian office of the American project called Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence. Critical thinking is all the more needed to equip the next generation to ‘come down’ from space and through science and technology, build a socially meaningful paradigm of economic development that benefits all races so that to evolve into a nation that prides on bridging the gap between the filthy rich and the abject poor. Who benefits? The world around us and inside of us continues to become more complex. We continue to be given bread and circuses. We continue to be mesmerised by inventions, institutions, and installations that are slowly killing our critical sensibility and eroding our ability to analyse realities that have been invented by those in power. We have been turned into alienated beings amused to death with things we do not need. Our economy has been transformed beyond our control - and we think that this is the only way to ‘progress’. We think ‘progress’ is linear, following what Walt Rostow suggests in his book ‘The Stages of Growth’. The 1960s brought us the hippy movement and the World Bank formula, a precursor of the Reaganomics ethos of the ‘magic of the marketplace’. We were trapped into believing that modernisation means liberation. Now that we are in the post-modern era, we cannot turn back unless we revolt against the rule of instrumental totalitarianism. It has to be a revolution of the mind and a reconstruction of our consciousness. With those many little ‘super corridors’ being installed in major states, what will ‘human development’ mean to us? Where is the concept of ‘development - of the people, by the people, and for the people’? Let us come back to Earth and be grounded in the social reality of things.

Posted by DR. AZLY RAHMAN at 1:10 PM 1 comments

The Joy of Sharing

Sunday was warm and brilliant. It was a combination of the ingredients of late summer and early fall. I noticed a lot of trees along the boardwalk when I ran this morning still have full green leaves. But this tree doesn't play around.

She is like, "This is fall people, time to move on, are you guys coming?

Hundreds of seagulls on the beach and they hardly moved when I ran past them.

A few of them made a half hearted effort to fly away, flipped their wings a couple of times, but then another bird made a noise as saying, "Pay her no mind, she's harmless.'' And they continued to do their business.I guess they have seen me all summer, they know I've just passing their beach.

Before I left the house, I called Ginny to let her know I was ready to leave. We planned to meet at parking lot at Castle Island at 8.00 am.

I met Ginny Wan Zaid and her husband Wan Zaid at Saerah Glick's Hari Raya Open House. When we introduced ourselves, I said she looked familiar. She said, yeah, I think I've met you before. It turned out both of us were at Mr.Wan Hashim's Hari Raya Open House in 2004. Ginny speaks fluent Malay language. She and husband lived in Malaysia for sixteen years.

When she learned Castle Island was my regular running spot, we set the time and date. When I completed my first lap around Castle Island, I headed to a parking lot. A few minutes later I saw Ginny got out of her car. I walked up to her and she said, "Orang tua ni (This old man) is coming with us," lifted her thumb pointed toward her husband, Wand Zaid.

We powerwalked and chatted for about an hour. When they left about an hour later, I ran back to Carson Beach where I spotted hundreds of seagulls in the water. They made so much noise I wondered if they saw a jaw or some sea creatures in the water.

They birds were all together in one part of the water when they started to fly to a shallow part of water on the other side.

Hari Raya Fever

I ate so much at Saerah Glick's Hari Raya open house in Natick I didn't think I could move. I had chicken satay with peanut sauce, nasi impit -pressed rice, fake lemang with beef rendang, a little of this and a little of that between meeting old and new Malaysian faces /sudying/living in New England.

Before

   

                                                                                                                                                                   after

                                              

                                                                                                                                                       Roti Jala

Black glutinous lemang with beef rendang on top

                                                                                                                  Prepared  ingredients for Mee Rebus

Thank you Saerah and David Glick for being a wonderful host. Plenty of food, plenty of caring.

Mask

During a self-disclosure group earlier today, I gave each client a piece of paper with a word MASK circled in the center of the paper. I asked them to do mind mapping. I introduced to them a few months ago and they seemed to enjoy the process.

One of them had 13 words that he associated with MASK.

cheat

conceal

lie

protect

camouflage

deceive

disguise

hide

pretend

regret

cover

ashame

layer

How many masks do you have?

How often do you wear them?

Which one is your favorite?

Passage

My tv set went boink four months ago, and I haven't watched tv ever since. The first two weeks was a little chaotic because I missed Bart in The Simpsons, Ian Wright in GlobeTrekker, Andrew Zimmern in Bizarre Food and JudyDench in As Time Goes By. I even walked down to the Best Buy store on one late Sunday evening three months ago to check out a new flat screen tv.

Halfway through the aisles of big, wide, small and cute TVs, on one of the biggest screen a car crashed into another car and spiralled down to another chaotic scene on the street brought me back to reality. What in heaven name am I doing here? I walked out of the store.

Last Sunday, after I organized a linen closet, I dragged a  24" tv set I owned for three years and dumped it in a dumpster.

When I returned to my living room, the empty space where the tv used to sit stared at me with an expression, "So what am I here for?"

I pulled the four clear plastic container where I keep most of my quilting fabric, and placed them on the empty space. Now, my entertainment center has its purpose.

Spontaneous

Unconscious Mutterings  Week245

I say ... and you think ... ?

1. Illicit ::  Affair
2. Go ::  Leave
3. Jacket ::  cover
4. Blow ::  Fish
5. Coach :: Overweight
6. Effort ::  Try
7. Leadership ::  We have none
8. Snore ::  Passage
9. Fearless ::  Bold
10. Network :: Connection

Learning While Running

I'm back on two hours run after one month break due to a fasting month. I didn't stop running  completely since the fasting month started in mid September, but I ran less and worked out more at the gym. I was a little huff and puff after 70 minutes run, but soon my body picked up the signal that I wasn't going to stop anytime soon.

Once my body caught the rhythm with my breathing, my right foot hit the ground on the fifth count as I breathed out, everything fell into its place. Since I learned Stu Mittleman's running style, I've noticed positive and amazing changes of my feeling toward running.

Running has always been my personal therapist, my thinking and pondering time, but at the same time I blocked out everything around me while I was running.

Taiping Lake Garden, November 2006.

Now, I could hear the wind rubs and gently teases the leaves, I could hear the splashes break the still water surface when the fish leaps to get its catch.

I've learned to distinguish between a male and female footsteps, a big and small size runner behind me or a runner who sprints every 100 meters and slows down and sprints again.

The more I learn about everything around me, the more amaze I've become at little changes I've consciously shifted have changed my perspective.