The lonely becomes the surly

Sorry I've been away yadayadayada. I'm a busy man, deal with it. I mean, why bother apologising when I know I will make the same mistake again, am I right? An apology brings with it the promise that the transgression will not be committed again. But some mistakes, you just know you'll do again, intentionally or not. Then, not only I'll be guilty of screwing up, but I'll also be guilty of lying. Anyway I think that that brand of logical reasoning is one of the reasons why I can't hold a steady relationship. "But, honey, I'm PRETTY SURE I'm gonna do it again. That's why I don't want to say sorry! Then you're gonna accuse me of lying!" Hey if being upfront only turns a guy into cannon-fodder to the women-folk, I estimate a protracted bachelorhood for myself. 

It's now almost a year since I uprooted my life to move to Kelantan. Hold the confetti though. Plus I'm pretty sure confetti and party horns and hats are deemed illegal here for being unIslamic, or I'm just confusing Saudi Arabia for Kelantan. Anyone miss me back home? Anyone? No? Well fuck you too, orang kampung.

As I've repeatedly told, implied, insinuated to you, Jeli is a quiet place. I go the office in the morning, close the door, do my thing, drive home when it's quitting time, and lock the door behind me when I get home. People don't bother me, and more importantly, I avoid getting in other people's hair. Sweet deal, and I like it just the way it is. Perfect. Almost too perfect.

The last time I was sent to somewhere a lot closer to the city for a few days, I found myself getting very irate. There were too many people around, my co-workers annoyed me, and the clients were getting on my nerves with their inane chittering and inconsiderate requests. I didn't feel like talking to people, and I would do my job just so people would avoid trying to talk with me. And when other people eventually stopped trying to talk with me, I would be irate at finding myself actually doing work.

When I go back to my hometown, I would find friends to catch up with, but even then I can't stay long. It would be awkward as hell. Unless there are adult beverages served, of course.

I just wanted to be left alone.

I was never the friendliest guy around, but I think I'm getting surlier here by the day, shutting myself in my cocoon. But it's really comfortable and hassle-free, y'know?

At least for now, I still smile at colleagues and people I pass by, but God forbid they stop and chat. So what's the problem? I don't know. On one hand, it's comfortable. But on the other, I sort of have this feeling that this is not the right way to live. Like, I have an inkling that that's how most serial killers, or Malaysian taxi-drivers start out. 

Anyway, come on science, you're long overdue on that active camouflage.

A long distance relationship

My previous two entries have focused solely on me complaining and being insecure like a bitch. Wah wah wah, blah blah blah. Fair enough. I admit it. But the truth is, I haven’t been completely honest with you. It’s not just the loneliness, sheer and utter boredom that get to me. It’s also the fact that I have been away from my love.

Before I came here, I was very much involved with her. Once a week I would go see her, along with a bunch of friends. We liked to think of it as some sort of a charity work. Sometimes being with her means travelling to other faraway places, spending a lot of money and time and effort. Foolish, you say? No, not exactly. For one, the reclusive me found company in other people who also love her, far and few they might be. Secondly, they found me committed enough to let me within their ranks, and they seemed to respect me for my commitment. And respect is a highly-valued currency in the world of men, especially since what I do for a living is quite a rare talent that not many people possess, surprisingly. Let me tell you, every other aspect of my life had improved because I was happy being with her. My work was top notch, and I was more sociable and diplomatic. This coming from a guy who was borderline suicidal before she took me in. And thirdly and most importantly, I simply love her, without rhyme and reason, the kind of love that defies professional commitment and parents’ disapproval. The kind of love that leads a man to spend most of his hard-earned money, and be punched by a bunch of cowardly cops.

So if I love her, why did I uproot my life to move to Jeli?, you might ask. I don’t know myself. Maybe I foolishly thought a life of solitude would be easy. Maybe I thought a long-distance relationship could work for us. That watching her from afar and seeing her only once in awhile would be enough. Oh the naivety. Maybe it was vanity, the desire to prove that I could be a better a person professionally than she is. Here I am now, 10 months into my tenure in Kelantan, and nowhere closer to that PhD than I was in the beginning. Maybe the idea of having to be away from my love for seven years of my post-study bond terrifies me. I don’t want to simply be a bystander. I want to be in the middle of the action, fucking and burning shit up, and being sucker-punched by middle-aged, armed, uniformed criminals we call Malaysian cops. And the fact that the guys constantly keep posting about me being away from her, almost mockingly even, on my Facebook wall doesn’t help. I guess I’m not as big a recluse as I often make myself seem to other people. I want to come home to her. 

All I can say for sure now is that a man with no passion, for his family, for a cause, or for a woman, is a soon to be dead man. Another thing; kasih sayang is a responsibility which is more or less reciprocal. Cinta on the other hand is almost always one-sided, unfair, but always voluntary in nature, obsessive even, but ultimately more rewarding in the end, even in its one-sidedness. If you find this entry cryptic, I apologise. I want to write about how things are going with me, but I kinda hate expressing all of my feelings. If you don’t understand Bahasa Melayu, then tough luck. Learn it. It’s not that hard. Anyway, sleep on it, friends. I have a job application to fill up.

Fraternity in mortality

There were two men. One I didn’t know as well I should. The other a complete stranger, I am not even sure that he was male. But somehow, in the dead of this rainy Jeli night, I feel a strange affinity to both.

The first one was a relative. He was my mother’s cousin. I called him Pak Su, as he was the youngest among his siblings. Being on my mother’s side, he came from Kedah, But he moved to KL when he started working (as an engineer I think). Soft spoken, dark skinned, gaunt, willowy, almost effeminate. He used to drive a black two-seater Honda. But the keyword here is ‘was’. He passed away almost ten years ago, rather prematurely. Wasn’t married, and obviously had no kid. I remember the day I learnt of his death. In fact, I was the first to learn about it in my immediate family, as my family was supposed to come back from an overseas vacation which I decided not to go with, the day he died. Leukaemia or something. Sickly-looking, that’s the word I was looking for. He was buried, and that’s about it. I know about him now as much as I knew back then. All that’s left of him, as far as I know, is his Honda, which I had last seen in front of his mother, my grand-aunt’s house, around a month ago went I visited my mother’s hometown. Shit, even his mother is still alive. But sometimes, that’s how life is, with the old outliving, and burying, the young.

The other, to say that I know less of him would be outright lying. I never met him. Let’s just say that he’s the former tenant of the house next to mine. I’ve explained about him in an earlier entry. He’s also dead, and when he died, it took people a few days to realise that he was dead. When he died, he died alone. Now his house is abandoned, with a wall missing and facing my kitchen window. But that’s besides the point. He was ill and rarely went out, and lived alone. So it was no surprise, I guess, that he also died alone.

This is where I’m supposed to segue into the point I’m trying to make. But it’s 1.30 in the morning, I’m sleepy and I’ve been drinking a little (fine, a lot), so fuck subtleness. The long-winded point I am trying to make here is I think I am going to share the demise of the two people I just described. Alone, premature or due to a fatal illness. I’m putting my money on lung cancer. Or aneurysm. Or heart attack. Or stroke. One of those illnesses which used to only afflict the elderly, but are now starting to affect the younger generation. I smoke to keep myself distracted from the dreariness of my nights. I don’t exercise at all, because I have been reduced to chasing down instant gratification from the internet, Playstation and cheap booze, and I don’t see myself wanting and being able to commit to the kind of women I am into as long as I’m in Jeli. Wooing a woman has been rendered nigh impossible these days, and I am not a man with a lot of patience to begin with. So if I were to suffer a heart attack while I’m alone at home, that’s it from me.

But there’s also this cousin of mine on my father’s side, who used to be single and lived with his rich mother, and honestly looked kinda sad without having a lot going in his life, until he surprisingly (at least to me) married a Kelantanese woman, took over some of his mother’s enterprise and now has two kids of his own.

All turn to ash

As a kid, I wasn’t much to look at. Scrawny as a stick insect, short-cropped hair and pimples that somehow decided that my face was a really sweet place to hang out on. And due to the fact that being in all-boys boarding school meant that there were no girls that needed impressing, I certainly didn’t dress to impress.
In university, of course there were girls (and surprise, surprise, I had a girlfriend too), so I did dress and look after myself better, but I still wasn’t one of the guys people considered good looking. Just less shabby. The thing is, me being me, I could never quite comprehend this fascination and single-minded obsession with looking good.

The way I see it, you try your damndest hard to look good, spending your money on straightening your hair, getting new clothes every month, hunting through the town for bundle stores for that particular pair of shoes, only for your good looks to wither away from that inescapable disease that is called middle-age. All for nothing. Also, this attention to what’s outside sounds a bit too much like we are trying to hide the terrible aspects of ourselves that is contained within by our mortal body. A misrepresentation of the personal, if you will. But I’m not saying that I’m right and they should wake up, sheeple. No, it could be that I’m just a misanthrope and bitter towards the better-looking population.

And that’s not to say that I dont put any effort into how I look, either. I do. Now that I’m a responsible, working, adult member of the society (supposedly), I can afford to and do spend my money on better attire. But whatever I buy, they are still relatively conservative articles of clothing. You won’t catch me wearing a fedora hat or a fur coat, no sir. I can’t pull fabulous. And my hair, it used to symbolise me really well, in the sense that it was really stubborn and refused to be styled according to the way I wanted. Now that it (and me) is approaching 30s, it seems that it has mellowed out somewhat (also like me?)  and is now more acquiescing towards me.

And you know what? I am now quite good-looking.

it’s just not me. Sometimes I catch the womenfolk just sneaking glances at me when I am in town, and some rather, err, effeminate men doing double-takes at me. Well to be fair I won’t get to tell the ladies to please form an orderly line and contain their excitement anytime soon, but what little visual attention of the feminine variety that I’m starting to receive now is comparatively more than how it used to be.

Even if they are just my imagination, it’s still fine. Why? Because even I myself think that I look good now. I am my worst critique, and my looks is one of the most frequent topics of criticism. But now, I would see the reflection of myself in the car windows of the car that I pass by, just to inspect the angle that my hair is standing at, at that particular moment. And the guy in the window who is looking back at me would be such a handsome SOAB that I could kiss him. No homo.

So how did this transformation came to be? I haven’t had any cosmetic surgeries performed on me, and I most certainly have not read anyone of those ‘love yourself’ self-help books, if you think that the change is just a matter of my perception. If you’ve watched the movie Benjamin Button, there is a scene whereby the title character stands in front of a mirror with his wife, discussing about how that moment is when they are at their physical peak; that’s it’s downhill from there. I think that’s what’s happening to me. I am nearing 30, and all the changes in my physique have converged and congregated at this moment to make me into how I look today; better than how I looked a few years ago. And it’s not just me. This also happens to everyone that has ever lived and walked on this fine earth. We get a small time-window during which, even the ugliest of us look our best. But as hinted by the movie, this also means that it’s downhill from now on for us. For me. And this scares me.

Now that I have this gift of being better looking after spending most of my life not looking much, the idea of having the gift taken away from me in a few years’ time is a bitter pill to swallow. I don’t want to end up looking like the many middle-aged men in their dowdy, ill-fitting work clothes and rotund figure. And it’s not like you can fix it just by wearing young people’s clothes. When you’re old but are dressed up like young, you’ll stick out like a sore thumb. You’ll just look weird. And guess what? After all these years of me thinking of the effort to be physically attractive as hypocritical, it seems that I now like what little attention I get due to my looks. Funny, huh? Well, I’m not laughing.

The only consolation I have to temper my worries with is the fact that I have more of my mother’s genes and the men on their side, my uncles and cousins, when they grow older, don’t grow fat or pot-bellied. They stay lanky and they don’t lose their hair. Whereas men on my father’s side, although they are fair-skinned and quite well-built in their youth, when they hit 40, they’ll start losing hair and gaining weight. Chills!
So think about that, friends. Use this time-window well. To philander, become a model, actor, whatever you want to. You are not good-looking for long and it’s all shit from then on. Bye friends, until the next entry. Sleep tight tonight.

Big Yellow Taxi

So far I’ve written about mostly about how I, a Klang Valley guy am adjusting to my new life in Jeli, a rural area and apart from feeling a little lonely from time to time, I can safely say that I am doing okay. Not great, but could be a lot worse. However, today I want to tell you about one aspect of my new life that I am having troubles adjusting to; the food.

It’s not that their taste is too dissimilar to mine. Even before I moved to Kelantan I used to eat lunch at a nasi campur restaurant owned by a Kelantanese because the budu there was really good. Like pour-it-on-my-nasi-for-kuah good. And tomyam every other night. It’s just that there is very little variety here on account that there are not as many stalls and restaurants here as I’d like. And they tend to offer the same menu. Nasi campur, nasi kerabu, and tomyam. It’s not that I want fancy stuff that is easily available in the cities. Like I told you, I am a man with simple tastes. But there’s only so many times a man can subsist on tomyam in one week, don’t you think so? Even nasi ayam is hard to find here. And it took me three months to find roti canai (in the Jeli town). 

When I was still living in my hometown, I rarely ate fast food. Maybe once a month, once a week was the most often I guess. And there is no fast food joint here in Jeli. You know the old cliché that you never know what you have till it’s gone? That’s how it is with me now. I’ll be sitting at home doing nothing, then I’d get hungry, and ask myself “What am I going to eat?” Then Bam! I’d get a hankering for some Jewish goodness and shed a single hungry, manly tear because the nearest fast food, a Pizza Hut and a KFC is in Tanah Merah. If I am really desperate I’ll hop into my car and drive all the way there, if not I’ll just find some nasi campur, and hum ‘Big Yellow Taxi’ to myself while eating.

At least I can still find fast food if I’m up for a long drive. If my stomach suddenly acts up by reminding me of Bubba Gump or Friday’s, maaaannnn it’s gonna be a long and lonely night. I’d have to literally placate it. “There, there, Papa’ll take you to dinner there when we go balik kampung, okay sweetie? Now finish up this nasi”. And when I do go back to my hometown, oh it’s balas dendam mode indeed. There was this time back home, I ate everything I saw, not necessarily out of hunger, but out of the idea that I didn’t want to miss them when I’m back in Jeli, and later I had to drive back to Jeli with a stomach ache. Whoops.

I am a picky eater in the way that I don’t like to eat the same things too often, I guess, and it got to a point where I only ate proper meals once a day, especially when I didn’t have a fridge to keep easy-to-cook perishable food items like patties and fries. It also got to a point where I lost a lot of weight, and I wasn’t a big guy in any way to begin with. Friends back home would ask why I was so thin when I saw them, even one of my aunts was so worried that she even called me on the phone once just to remind me to eat more regularly.

But if you are concerned about me, don’t. I appreciate it, but don’t rush to the post office with a care package just yet. I have a fridge now, so I can cook if I don’t feel like eating out, and I am eating more regularly. 

That’s about it for now, I’ll write again sometime soon. I hope you guys are doing well, and also eating well. Think of me when you’re eating that steak and drinking that Long Island Tea. Cheers!

A Provincial Life

Hello there fellow readers. It’s been awhile. Been preoccupied with work and stuff. So today I want to share with you what Jeli is about. I mean the title of this blog has the name Jeli in it, but I rarely talk about Jeli and prefer to yak about my personal experience instead. Ah, the ‘Me’ syndrome. The curse of today’s younger generation, yours truly included. So today I want to write about the places in Jeli, where to get the basic necessities, pay for bills and the likes. I know, I know, all this information can be easily googled up within seconds, but do you know of another of our generation’s syndrome? The reluctance to google information up while on the net. So shut up and bear with me, you whino.

Simply put, the populated areas, and the places I frequent in my daily routines in the district of Jeli lies alongside the Jeli – Gerik road. I am starting my directions from Gerik because whenever I go back to Jeli from my hometown, I prefer taking the PLUS highway, exiting the highway at the Kuala Kangsar exit, and from there straight on to Gerik. I would suggest taking the same route if you are interested in visiting Jeli, or Kelantan for that matter. Driving along PLUS is breezy, and the traffic on the subsequent federal roads is not awfully heavy. The alternative route through Temerloh – Kuala Lipis – Gua Musang is too taxing for my liking with the narrow winding roads, busy traffic, and you will spend a lot of time having to travel behind slow-moving lorries without being able to overtake them safely. Starting from the town of Gerik in Perak, travel east along the road, crossing over the lake of Belum, and the Titiwangsa range (a really picturesque drive too, if I may add) for about two hours before entering the district of Jeli and essentially the state of Kelantan. Then if you were to continue along the road for about 30km, you will get to a T-junction with the right turn taking you to the Jeli town. Now this is where the action is, so to speak. There’s the Jeli district police headquarters (IPD), the Jeli hospital, bus station, district council, Petronas (which also moonlights as the local supermarket of sorts), Shell, Muamalat and Agro banks, post office, grocery stores, keymaker’s and the other places you frequent for your basic needs. Whereas for me, I rarely go into the Jeli town myself as I can do most of these things in my neighbourhood and it is a little out of my way.

But back onto the Jeli – Gerik road. The town is only a small part of the district, and as I’ve mentioned, one that I rarely frequent at that. Keep travelling east for another 5km or so, and you will find the Jeli campus of Universiti Malaysia Kelantan on your right. Hard to miss. This is one of the three campuses of this university, with the other two in Kota Bharu and Bachok. And just a little further down the road is the Jeli Inn and R&R, on both sides of the road where I also send my laundry. The laundry’s service is quite good, in that if I send my clothes before 11am, I might be able to get them back on the same day, on my way back from work in the evening. And there are also some food stalls and grocers at the R&R, which I stop by from time to time for cigarettes, and also to chat with the really friendly dude who mans the counter. I wish more shopkeepers are as friendly as he is. And just beyond the R&R is the Jeli MRSM.

If you go further on, you will see the many kampungs lining the sides of the road; I only remember the names of Kg Gemang and Kg Dabong. After about 5 more km, you will see on your left a relatively big hardware store; Mustapha dan Anak-anak, owned by a rather financially successful Jeli clan with other business interests as well. In fact, one of their younger family members is my former boarding school mate and he and his father were the ones who helped me get in touch with my current landlord when I first got here, and for that I am grateful. It’s quite amusing to note that that friend of mine has been away from Jeli since he was 13 and now works in Klang Valley whereas I have moved the opposite direction. And a few hundred metres down the road is a rather innocuous looking river with a rather sinister name; Sg Satan. I assure you, there’s nothing sinister looking about this narrow river, but for some strange reason I keep picturing a bunch of black-metal fans turning up here from time to time for their pilgrimage, and Harian Metro, Mastika and Bacaria reporters surreptitiously following not too far behind. I haven’t encountered any dismembered black goat carcasses, though. At least not yet.

One of the biggest kampungs in the area; Kg Ayer Lanas lies one kilometre down the road, to its right. Here you will find a Pasar Tani right by the junction, a few more grocery shops further inside the neighbourhood, with one being owned by the aforementioned Mustapha clan, another post office and a police station. If you continue east along the road, you will find the neighbouring town of Bukit Bunga (5 km from Ayer Lanas), then a junction (20 km) that takes you to the border towns of Rantau Panjang and Golok which is also the shorter route to Kota Bharu from Jeli. The town of Tanah Merah lies 30 km down the road.

That’s about all there is with the places in Jeli that I frequent almost daily. You can find what you need if you know where to look, and I am a man of simple tastes. I mean I don’t even have a TV. Although it bothers me that I still haven’t found a mechanic nearby. One of my worst nightmares? My car breaking down. So hit me up when you’re in town or just passing by. I’ll show you around the place.

Zaman tanpa ISA

Hey guys. It's been awhile. Sorry. Truth is,  I got myself a new PS3. So I got distracted from writing, work and many other admittedly more important responsibilities. But a request from a loyal reader got me back in the mood (although not immediately).

This post marks the seventh post I've written for my fledgling blog, and it's apt that this post, in a way, is related to this blog. Around a month ago (told you it's been awhile) I attended a meeting at the HQ of my employers in Bachok (~20km from KB). Everyone in the department was there. By the way, the distance from Jeli to Bachok is around 100km. My department holds a meeting at least once every month. I know it sounds kind of far, but you get used to it after awhile, yknow? Especially when the nearest town from Jeli is Tanah Merah; 40km away. And also the boss unofficially closes one eye on me arriving half an hour late to the meeting (I'm just a small fry, so they will start without me everytime I'm late. Fine by me)

So everytime there's a meeting that I have to attend at the HQ, the routine is I'll wake up half an hour later than I should, rush into the toilet, try to dress up all handsome-like as quickly as possible and drive like a madman for a 100km while muttering all shades of curses at whomever is blocking my way by not driving like a madman on the single-lane, single carriageway road from Jeli to Bachok.

So during this meeting, things were a lot weird. My department had always been rife with internal politicking and petty bickering, but hey, whose workplace isn't, right? But during this meeting, something was off. My boss, who up to that point, had always more or less tried to avoid badmouthing other employees publicly, was on full on verbal attack mode. Simply put, according to my colleagues, there was this one female former colleague who purportedly had attached herself to the top management and tried to use our department to do her job and to advance her career. I don't want to pay too much attention to this, because I only heard from one side, and she wasn't present in the meeting. So my boss was indirectly making insinuations of her, cracking inside jokes about her and pretty much everything short of mentioning the lady's name. And everyone else agreed with him, laughing at his indirect jokes. Awkward much? I incredulously signalled my friend F who was seated across the table from me with my eyes and we pretty much had this conversation without uttering even a single word.

"WTF is going on? He's insinuating about her right? During a MEETING?"

"Trust me, this IS happening"

It was quite uncharacteristic for him because I had not seen him do that in a meeting prior to that, and I think it was unprofessional, especially so for a head of department, regardless of how angry he was at her and if he was in the right.

But that wasn't to be the end of it. My boss moved on to the topic of Facebook rants on work-related topics, why we shouldn't do it and so on. Which I totally agree with. If you have a problem at work, or anywhere else for the matter, you should be confronting and facing it instead of facebook-ing about it (get it get it? Har-dee-har) It's unprofessional is what I'm and he was trying to get at. But what he mentioned next sent chills down my spine.

Without mentioning any names, he told everyone present at the meeting about a new employee of the organisation who supposedly went online to state how he is a starborn who has descended from the night sky to bring light to the darkness and desolation of this arid land (okay, it sounded better in Bahasa Melayu but I could't remember the exact words), which could be interpreted as how the person in question wants to be the supposed saviour of Kelantan, to lift it out of the dark ages. He then added that the new guy was in one of the more artistic departments. WHAT. THE. FUCK.

I have a blog (the one you're reading now) on my experiences of working and living in one of the territories of Kelantan, sometimes I write about how some aspects of life are markedly different in Jeli than in my hometown, things that can be misconstrued by people with poor reading skills as demeaning to Jeli and its residents, and I have an M.A. So imagine how bright red I must have looked all of a sudden in the meeting, wondering whether my boss was talking about me and this blog, and whether everyone else's subsequent laughter in the meeting was actually directed at me. Had I badmouthed Kelantan, or talked smack about the people, and someone from work had read it?

The meeting soon ended and after the post-meeting refreshments (that's what I like about the meetings; the free food), I approached F and pulled her aside, away from prying eyes and eavesdropping ears. No doubt she could see my paranoia and nervousness all over my face and I didn't even have to ask the question. "Hahah, I knew you were gonna get paranoid, but no, they were not talking about you. It was some of the upper management people who was roped in by the boss. Guy's not from around here, so what he had done apparently pissed off many of the local staff"

Phheeewwww what a relief it was to be exonerated. I mean I was pretty sure I have not demeaned Kelantan in this blog, but like I said, some people interpret everything they see and read into what they want to believe. And sometimes I think the more vocal section of the Kelantanese have the tendency to view themselves as victims of persecution by the majority of Malaysia in a "woe is me" fashion a little too much. Hence the indignity that my colleagues felt towards the new guy's online musing. Secondly, don't they realise that this guy is an artistic type? What he had written could have been for him a work of art, in the sense that it is fictitious and not real. When Mamat Khalid made 'Zombi Kampung Pisang', Perakians were not up in arms and they did not bring out the pitchforks because they think it was insulting to the state, didn't they? And let's not go into the literary concept of 'persona'. Come on, he didn't even mention the name of Kelantan at all. He was basically vaguebook-ing, like what 90% of people on Facebook are doing nowadays. And my colleagues were simply reading what they wanted to read and jumping into conclusions.

Well, I do realise that even though I had not criticised Kelantan and any of the locals in any of my earlier posts, now that I'm writing about my colleagues' over-reaction to someone else's online writing, I am starting to sound critical. So be it. I am only making an honest observation, without any intent of malice whatsoever.

But having said that, is anyone hiring back home?