Anyone who grew up with me knows this, that I’m a big sports person, not just as a vociferous fan, but as a vociferous participant too (these same people also know that I’m a compulsive talker, and that in my world, a gag order from a judge would be the same thing as a death sentence). Despite being fond of activity, the past few months, have been a bit of a sad thing. Since taking on my book, I’ve sat glued to the computer, from the early hours to the wee hours. And the effects have started to show.

For one, my joints have started to creak. If I were to gracefully sway my body from one side to the other, the way a ballerina goes through her warm ups, you’d be treated to a symphony of cricks and cracks, almost as if a car were slowly rolling over a flat sheet of bubble wrap. It really is worth a listen. Really.

To add to my woes, my knees have lost strength, and I’m a lot less sure about doing the things I once knew I could do. So pirouettes are out of the question (they used to be out of question before, now they are even more out of the question).

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I attended a funeral the day before Chinese New Year. He was of friend of mine since childhood—same Sunday school, same Church, same Secondary School. For a year, I sat beside him in class, when we were sixteen. So I’m sure, a big piece of him had been imbibed in me.

Paul left in his wake, and at his wake, a wife and two kids–one was 4-years old, the other 2, the same age as my Oliver.

Sometimes, when I’m gone for a few hours, Oliver asks, “Where’s Daddy? Daddy come back. Now!!”

How do you tell a kid that age, that Daddy’s not coming back? Ever.

It really gets you thinking, when someone your age gets a heart attack and drops dead. You stop taking things for granted. For awhile anyway, when the memory is still fresh.

The death of a friend also sends you a message that you’d better start smelling the roses before they make them into wreaths for you. And it reminds you that you should say your I love Yous frequently; if not in words, through your actions. It also tells you not to squander a good thing, and that life is short, so eat your vegetables, and wear your sunscreen. There is no need to make your existence here shorter than it already is.

I read The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari about a month back. It was probably the most cheesy book I’ve ever picked up, but I must say, I gleaned a lot of useful things from it. As the book had suggested that we all do, I’ve incorporated meditation into part of my daily. It’s amazing how the simple act of focusing your mind someplace else triggers physical change through your body. Meditation makes you aware of many things. Often, I don’t realise that I’m walking with my shoulders scrunched up and tense; my neck, stiff like an aroused penis.

I’m sure there are different ways to meditate. I do mine in a quiet room with the lights turned off, Lisa Gerrard’s Sanvean playing in the background. Eyes closed, I breathe deeply once the music starts, and my body magically relaxes. Suddenly, you feel alive once more, as if your blood, which without your permission stopped flowing some time during the day, started to flow again. Often, my mind wanders, just like in church. But I let it. Fighting it, I feel, is unnatural, and strenuous, and would defeat the purpose of the whole exercise. As you can probably tell, I make a lot of this stuff up as I go.

The monk manual also suggested that I engage in rigorous exercise, daily. But to go in head first was ill advised, not in my fragile state. Anything more rigorous than climbing a single flight of stairs would probably cause my limbs to dislodge from my body and crumble into pieces, the way wooden blocks tumble following a wrong Jenga move.

So, to jumpstart my exercise regimen… Correction. So, to slowly move my exercise regimen into gear, I chose to do strengthening exercises first—stretches, lunges, some yoga and the like. It really has helped, and I’m a lot less wobbly these days.

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After two weeks of mild conditioning, I felt my body was ready to take on something bigger. No, not Roseanne Barr.

I went for a jog this morning. The route took me from the house to the park, a lap around the park, a walking lap to catch my breath, another running lap, and after that, I dragged my feet to the roadside stall for breakfast, across the street from my house.

Again, as almost every time in the past, I was the only Chinese fella there. I ordered an ice tea and unfolded myself a Nasi Lemak. Their version here is unique; they have a small square of salt fish embedded into the rice, and it is sublime. There was a dead ant in my rice. I ate it without a second thought. I think that only happens on Tuesday mornings (Man Vs Wild is on at 8 every Monday night).

The stall filled up quickly after I took my seat, to the point where a Malay guy had no choice but to share my table with me. He ordered a Roti Tampal. I had never heard of it before and was curious. Translated, it meant ‘patched bread’. I waited in anticipation for his Unidentified Food Object to arrive. When it finally did, I couldn’t quite make it out. It looked like there was some kind of coconut layer married to a piece of Roti Canai. The guy didn’t look like he welcomed any questions, so I paid for my meal and left.

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My writing has taken up a very prominent center in my life. On my jog, I was thinking of my book. Well, of that and of my burning thighs. Quite often, when I meditate, my mind wanders to the book as well. The same thing happens when I’m going through my stretches, or taking a dump, lathering my body, lathering my teeth, trying to sleep, while driving, while gardening, while watching TV.

This morning, while walking back to the house after breakfast, I realised I did not once think of my book over breakfast. And it was nice. Like a burden had been lifted off my shoulders. I asked myself how it happened and came to this conclusion: I was too busy thinking about what the other people thought of me, sitting there, almost alone, a thorn among the Kembojas. In that moment, it occurred to me, that in this country, more important things than the bread needed to be patched.

Komtar. If you’ve not watched this movie, you must. It is a story of how a group of Penangites in flip flops and imitation Crocs rise up against a legion of Nike-wearing westerners attempting to refurbish a dated building in the Pearl of the Orient.

The 3D version features silhouettes of the audience in the foreground watching the movie at the theater.

It’s scary when you realise how easily friends can be won or lost by a mere flick of the tongue. And no, I’m not only referring to cunnilingus.

Kim, an ex-colleague and good friend of mine, had lent me the movie Gran Torino, which I watched and utterly enjoyed. A part of me really aspired to one day be like Walt, the character Clint Eastwood played in the movie. In it he was a bitter old grump, a war veteran who doesn’t get along with anyone, and just says whatever the fuck he wants to say in reckless abandon. The first quarter of the movie kept me wondering what crawled up his ass and died.

Post movie damage
After watching the movie, I realised this about myself. I bottle up a lot of my feelings, and it festers and eats away at my insides. And then it occured to me, almost as if I just had an epiphany, but not quite.  “I should be more like Walt,” a voice spoke in my head.

I think it would be very liberating to exercise Walt’s level of free expression. Imagine the pressure release. The relief. Just that in itself would be enough to stave off cancer, ulcers and other malignancies, and probably tack on a few years to my life. Well… unless of course I am inflicted with the prematurity of getting shot, which was kinda what happened in the movie to Walt.

Being forward about my forwardness
Reflecting inward upon myself, I’ve come to realise that I’m actually more free with my comments than the average person, and would probably score an 8 if I were to rate my forwardness.

Well, ‘forwardness’ was not really the word I was looking for. But fuck it. My brain’s stuck. It’s my blog. And I’ll say what I want to say.

The reason why I felt ‘forwardness’ was the wrong word is because I tend to sugar coat things a lot, which as you can see, is not a very forward thing, an anti-thesis almost. This happens especially when I’m making a negative reveal to the person, to dampen the blow. I guess what I’m trying to say is,  if shit needs to be said, I’ll say it, but in a nice way.

Struck by a bolt of nothing
Will digress for bit… as a weirdity just entered my mind with regards to the topic of ‘anti-thesis’, which from my understanding of the word refers to two opposites, as in hot and cold, black and white. Isn’t it odd that where speaking your mind is concerned, to be sharp and to be blunt are so closely paralleled?

Being Walt
The beauty of being Walt is that he is not burdened by the tedium of having to choose the right words, and just says the first thing that enters his mind. The ability to convey things as they are just seems so emancipatory, and feels like it would require a whole lot less effort than playing political footsie.

When I think of political correctness, the scene that pops into my head is that of a boxer dancing in circles around his opponent, a boxer who so badly wants to land a punch but is wrought with timidity, bound by the stranglehold of self doubt, one who weighs the consequences of his actions a little too much to be committal.

I’m in no way advocating political incorrectness. I just sometimes marvel at the amount of energy we exhaust trying not to say the things we want to say.

Being Me
Being upfront with my remarks has been a personal trait/flaw I’ve carried since my youth. It has won me the friends I carry today, a handful of whom I regard as my very best. Sadly, it is that same forwardness that has made me my biggest enemies, possibly from their failure to recognise that my remarks are made with their interests at heart, not mine. Perhaps the failure was my own for not being eloquent enough in my communication. And perhaps, being human, I really was being a jerk, and it was probably smart of them to banish me from their lives.

I think I wear my heart on my sleeve. Well, I guess just me writing this post for the whole world to see is testament to that. The folly of wearing your heart on your sleeve is that people have access to that inner you, and you leave yourself vulnerable to those you surround yourself with, not all of whom have your welfare in mind.

I’ve had my heart broken many times, and each time I’ve told myself that I should peripherise myself with walls of some sort, or at least be on high alert when I’m in unfamiliar company. But somehow, I feel that you lose your genuiness once you choose to be guarded, and besides, it is normally the ones you have allowed within your walls who will most severely hurt you.

To keep a watchful eye on those closest to me just doesn’t feel quite right. Personally, I think getting hurt is a part of life, and you just need to deal with the body blows when they land. And if someone you trust betrays you, and you find yourself beyond a threshold of hurt you can tolerate, you can always turn to asphyxiation during masturbation, and hope you slip up.

Being nice
Forwardness should not only be confined to criticism. One can be forward with their praise as well. Often, we are quick to criticise, and slow to praise. And over time we become so used to criticising that it becomes awkward to drop a nice word or two to a person you care about… or even a stranger.

Praise, however, sometimes needs to be meted out cautiously, especially to the opposite sex, or it may be construed as flirting. A girl I knew, who for all my years of knowing her had only wore pants, chose to one day wear a skirt. I thought she had really nice legs and I told her so. Although we’d always been real buddy with each other, things were never quite right since that day. (May be I should have vacuumed my drool to the back of my throat before speaking, rather than mid-sentence.)

A weekend ago at the mall, Sophie was with Oliver, up at a pet store that was accessible only by stairs, and I was put in charge of watching the stroller. A stranger,  a girl in her mid-to-late 20s, came over to tell me that she really enjoyed watching my interactions with my son.

I was taken by surprise and didn’t really know how to respond to that comment. I think I replied “Well, thank you.”

She ended our brief encounter with “I just thought you should know,” and she walked away.

This was not the first time I’ve had something like that happen to me, and this is what I’ve learned from these delightful random occurrences. You never, ever forget them. You carry them close to your person, as you would little gems in a velvet pouch.

It always feels nice to deposit little gems into other people’s pouch. And I’ve often told people that it makes my day making theirs. But there are days when you just feel you have no more to give, and those days can even stretch for months. Those are often the days when Sophie would ask me, “What’s wrong?” and I’d just write it off as being stuck in a blah mood.

Back in the now
I sit here hurt as I write this. Stuck in one of my blah days. I’ve often wondered if I should retract my heart from my sleeve, back into the safe confines of my chest where God intended it to be in the first place. (A deep heaviness set on me as I completed the last sentence. It just had ‘giving up’ written all over it.)

“ What would Walt do? What would that tough son of a bitch say?” I’m smiling even before knowing the answer to that question.

Well, he’d probably say to me, “Stop being such a sissy and suck it up you pussy.” And he’d snarl.

Ha, ha. May be I’ll just be me a little bit longer.

Although it is really liberating to speak one’s mind, I think many still choose abstinence over reprieve. And they allow an ever growing compilation of regrets to callus within them, unaware that relief lies a flick of the tongue away, and if words fail them, may be even at their fingertips.

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