Fatty Fatty Bom Bom

The fatty bom bommery that overcame my life in December has YET to come to an end.

Today I ate TWO prosperity burgers... thank god I opted for no curly fries on both accounts and at least I'm exercising again.

That being said, I've put on 7 kilos since Dec 1st. DAMN KOOBZ!

ok ok ok

tomorrow I get back on the quinoa. Enough of this gluttony

Now for a poker update of the game in Klang...

EVERYONE from the office cobra-ed. Congratulations guys! You lived up to your lofty expectations.

Anyway, I went (pork and poker, remember?) and had some awesome pork and then had an awesome game and won RM200. I was the big winner for the night and very happy about how it all went. It was nice to go to Dare's house and take all his money from him... coz last week Dare played poker for the first time and took RM450 for us, but he cleaned us out... he took the WHOLE pot. No one could cash out. They didn't make it to the door. Dare killed it.

I did feel bad about taking Chonson's money though. She's such a sweetie patootie.

Gong Xi Fa Cai (gimme all yer money)

My littlest brother is obsessed with his iPod touch. He's also obsessed with his Nintendo Wii, the best of YouTube, photo tagging on Facebook, and Texas Hold 'Em Poker.

How the hell did Texas Hold'Em become so gawdamn popular? It's been taking over KL for at least a solid year now, and its really picking up steam this Chinese New Year.

I had resisted for a long time, just like I try to resist so many things that have a strong popular groundswell to them. I guess sometimes I like to think that I'm cooler than everyone else; so if 10 people are taking part in something, then they must be the masses and and stupid, and because I don't partake in the masses, then I am cool and special and unique.

WRONG

Hold' Em is frikkin awesome. In fact, I'm only writing this blog between hands on a 90 player Sit n' Go tournament on Full Tilt poker (download the app from http://www.fulltilt.com)

*********15 minutes later***********

OK, I lost.

FUCK.

Now I'm pissed off because I'm trying to teach myself patient poker playing, to stop giving in to the tantazlingly big pots that may come up. Then I didn't want to blog because I'm all pissed off, but then I remembered that I'm blogging as a writing exercise, so that I can get use to WRITING again... rather than the normal sell-cigarettes-to-your-children work that I do. SO I'm going to continue blogging for tonight. Where was I? Oh yeah. So now I'm addicted to poker, which is brilliant, considering I'm quitting smoking, cutting down on drinking and womanizing... nothing like a little gambling to fill up all my free time.

I picked up the gambling bug sometime in 2008 when my Roti Canai Crazy Cousins from New York came to visit and on a whim we decided to show them Genting. Hercules and myself had never been to the casino before and figured that this would be a great time to ch-ch-ch-check it out... so upward ho to Ringding (which is what Roti Canai Crazy Cousin #2 kept calling it because he's soooooo American).

I was my normal frugal self and decided to only play RM100, and picked roulette because hey, how hard could it be to pick RED or BLACK? We kept going like this on the RM5 bet tables until I was down to my last chip and said ohhhwadahell, i'll just pick a number and lets see what 'eppens.

1 Red, straight up.

I hit, and the payout was 35:1. for a RM5 bet, i made RM175.

SO MANY CHIPS!

WAHHHHHHH! I knew something was wrong, instantly. Something had clicked inside my head. An employee of my Brain had just checked the box next to "GAMBLING" on the clipboard of my life. I was hooked.

I gave Hercules some chips and then ka-ching, HE hit. It was ON like the Kong of Donkeys. My RCCCousins were done playing and were getting bored, but my bro and I sat there like proper losers and kept going and going and going. I ended up winning around RM1000 off of my initial RM100 investment, and Hercules did even better. Beginner's luck is a bitch though, because not more than TWO WEEKS LATER, we were feeling rich and itchy again so we took a late night trip up to the Highlands at 11pm with a car full of dudes and found ourselves at the casino. That was a pretty bad night. My first RM100 was gone in less than 10 minutes. Not long after, I was down RM200... and then RM500.

WHY DO THEY HAVE ATMS IN CASINOS!!!!????

Which was a really bad idea, because it was a tight month in the first place. I was interested in winning a free car payment for the month since i didn't really have money for much else, and there I was RM500 in the hole. No free car payment, but further compounded by No utilities, No cable bill, and No phone bill for the month.

Hercules was freaking out. The carload of friends were being irritating and saying we should head back. It was about 3am. It felt disgusting. It felt really irresponsible, slightly illegal, and I felt like my parents would ground me. The only solution was to win it back with the last RM20 I had in my fanny pack.

Maybe it was the fanny pack? Maybe the Gods of Gambling and the Ghouls of Genting were getting back at me for being so arrogant as to bring a fanny pack to the casino, in hopes of putting all my winnings in there, like some kind of old Taiwanese woman.

As an aside, did you know that Genting has a reputation for being one of the most haunted places in the country? Apparently from the slew of troubled souls who have hurled themselves off the side of the mountain from crippling gambling debts. The casino is said to be FULL of ghosts, heck the whole damn resort is said to be haunted beyond belief. They say that the regular gamblers always carry sweets in their pockets for the ghouls hiding under the tables. Keeps them from munching on your chips.

ANYWAY, I ditched my brother and the friends, turned off my phone, and found a table in the corner of the room and sat down and bet VERY carefully, and slowly but slowly but never surely but definitely slowly won my money back, and finally left Genting at 5am with my winnings for the evening...

RM30.

Which was less than what it cost me to drive up there in the first bloody place, but at least I was 30 up and not 500 down... and I had my dignity. Which is a lie. Coz I lost my dignity too.

We haven't been back since, but that initial joy of winning lots of money was what turned me on to even being receptive to listening to my 12 year old brother explaining to me how Hold 'em Poker works. A few weeks later we hosted a poker night for the cousins, a small RM25 buy in at 50sen a chip. I think I lost RM75, but I was definitely hooked. A few months later, I've now played poker for 4 nights in a row, thanks to this glorious holiday called Chinese New Year.

God Bless the Chinese for their love of pork, their beautiful women, and their unabashed worship of prosperity and money. Chinese people LOVE their gambling, so there has been a lot of poker invitations floating around recently. I'm proud to say that I'm up so far. Not much, I've won about RM200 in the last coupla days, but it's still better than being in the red. Today alone I played two different sessions with two different groups of people.

Tomorrow will be a big night. Heading down to Klang, the Den of Lions, for a kick-ass game with one of the producers from work at his family's open house. That will be some proper Chinese New Year kungfu shit going down. His family, who are from Klang, are making some homemade bak kut teh, followed by some gambling.

Yes.
Yes.
YES.

pork and poker.

like whisky and ice.

yummy.

I don't like the structure of this post. I feel like I'm rambling... but at least I blogged, and my fingers got a work out.

Happy Chinese New Year of the Ox. Let's hope everything works out this year. Obama's in power, the world is on tenterhooks, and the summer of my discontent is proving to be most humid and sweaty.

peace

Skinnamarinky Dinky Dink

Mira, the gorgeous photographer/socialite/fashionista tagged me in a very interesting note about herself today where she revealed her love for Sharon, Lois, and Bram's Elephant show and it instantly hurtled me back in time to my days of sitting in front of the tv (which NEVER had clear reception... not for my first 15 years of my life did I have clear television) and singing along to SKINNAMARINKY DINKY DINKKKKKKK SKINNAMARINKY DOOOO



What an awesome show it was. It made me remember all kinds of other brilliant shows I used to watch as a kid.

Oh oh.

WATCH OUT!

HERE COMES THE 80'S RETRO TV SHOW INTRO/OUTRO VIDEOS c/o YOUTUBE!

First comes Fraggle Rock, which has such a... hmmm, lack of a better word... ROCKING theme song.



Next up, Gummi Bears! I used to have a crush on the blonde one. I guess my thing for short haired girls started young, eh? eh?



What about Duck Tales? D-D-D-Danger lurks behind you! There's a stranger out to find you! Actually ah, ACTUALLY AH... why are these theme songs so damn good? Just listen to the quality of the vocals, the instrumentation, everything. These were really good songs. What the hell has happened to the quality TV show theme song? Gone going gone everything gone giveadamn.



StarCom was underrated but overawesome. The big "technological breakthrough" of this sci-fi series used to be... MAGNETS! The toys were so FUCKING COOL.



I will play a linking game with the next three shows. First we'll start with BraveStarr, where both the heroes were in fact minorities. Marshall BraveStarr was Native American and his horse, if i remember correctly, was supposed to be a black guy. Kinda like a Samuel L. Jackson, but equine. So anyway, cowboy/space age, but still very rooted in the spaghetti western kinda feel. The bad guys in this show were really scary.



Followed by SABRE RIDER AND THE STAR SHERIFFS! Another brilliant show. Less free range, more space age, but still very cowboy nonetheless. Here you start to see the unicolor uniform theme starting to show up.



Followed by the ultimate in the unicolor uniform theme, and now not western at all, but totally wild and animalistic and and and... I'LL FORM THE HEAD!



and and and whattabout VEHICLE VOLTRON? Who did you like better, butter? Actually I liked the lions. They were bad-ass... but Vehicle Voltron was a close second.



The ultimate vehicle show though, had to be MASK. This is another great song.



The Visionaries were shortlived, but it was a bloody good cartoon and the intro is really rocking. I remember two of the chants...

"Mist filled pits, dark, dank, unclear. Fill all before me with frost-bitten FEAR!"

"Three suns aligned, pour forth thier light. Fill this archers bow with MIGHT!"



and last, but not least, because Obama is being inaugurated right now... i wanted to remind all of you to, POWER EXTREME.



I'm sure you've got millions more. care to remind me?

K

Selling Imagination

My first attempt at DOPing. Got a lot to learn, especially lights, focus, color, composition, and pretty much everything else.

Created during the Astro-Nida Short Courses 2008.

Sorry about the pillar-boxing. We exported it as 16:9 but when it came to youtube, it did this kakaration to it.

bleargh.

Blueberry

Zahir gave me the link to this. It's frikkin brilliant, really.

Somethings Happened

Somethings happened to me.

I don't know what it is. I don't know whether you want to call it growing up, or growing old, or trying to deal with the uncertainties of the future. I don't know whether its depression or just a changing of the guards/moods.

I went to a birthday party last Saturday night at an art gallery in a quiet neighborhood of KL. It was a beautiful house with beautiful artwork all over the walls. The host was truly an icon of KL cool and actually I was quite flattered to be invited. Swimming pool, free flowing booze, an alternative crowd, designers, artists, actors... the closest thing to bohemia that we have here, and I felt so socially awkward and retarded that I got up and left.

I've never felt socially inept before. I could not communicate with anyone, couldn't connect, and frankly couldn't get out of there faster. I don't think it was the other partygoers. I routinely watched groups of strangers meet, go through their introductions, and then have a good time, or at least feign a half decent one... and there I was, the Hot Air King of Christmas Past, who couldn't sustain a conversation longer than 3 minutes. Fuck it, i didn't even want to.

But wait, does any of this matter? No, not really. Will my ability to schmooze in a party decide whether I'm going to heaven or hell? Oh, I'm a hindu. I'm coming back... so even more so, NO.

Somehow I knew this moment was coming. I feel more out of touch with people than ever before. Surely and definitely not slowly, I'm losing the desire to stay in touch, to actually communicate, to call old/new friends, to write e-mails, to Flickr, to get stoned, to drink (which is so far the slowest of all desires to disappear to be honest). I'm becoming so... insular that I'm resorting to blogging again.

What DO I like?

I like playing poker.
I like my garden. The balcony project lives on.
I like looking at the sun in the morning and in the evening.
I like going for runs.
I like cleaning my room.
I like every time I manage to control my temper and actually say/do nice things for my family.
I like managing my finances.
I like hypermiling (572km to one full tank!)
I like porn.
I like maguro.
I like my music collection (and e-mailing out songs to people).
I like telling the truth more.
I like talking less.
I like most of my colleagues.
I like not shaving so much.
I like being home early.
I like sleeping early.
I like Jln Tun Razak during rush hour.
I like not having testicular cancer and that the lump was benign.

What would I LIKE to do?

I'd like to meditate
I'd like to scuba dive
I'd like to find the right pots for my garden
I'd like to find the right frames for my things that need framing
I'd like to spend more time with my little brothers
I'd like to spend more time with my dog
I'd like to eat healthier
I'd like to quit smoking once and for all
I'd like to finally write that film
I'd like to finally be rid of certain ghosts, or rather, stop inviting them back into my life
I'd like to work abroad
I'd like to make the transition from AD to director already

Now that I've listed this stuff down, I realise that there isn't much that I do in my life right now that is stuff that I don't like. That list takes up nearly 95% of my time. I don't attend plays, screenings, launches, dances, exhibitions, birthday parties, reunions, meetings. I don't do anything that isn't work or me. Then this is a positive change, yes? no?

Why do I feel constrained? Isn't life supposed to be a combination of responsibility and doing the things you want to/enjoy doing? I'm doing that now. How come I feel more imprisoned than ever before?

In a nutshell, I'm scared, and unhappy... but have also never been more optimistic about a start to the year than this one. 2009 is going to rock, the same way 2008 did, and 07, and 06, and 05. I think I'm out of my dark days. I think this is something different. This feels a lot less angsty, or rather the angst is manifesting itself differently. No more wailing and melodrama.

Now it's more like sitting on a rock, looking at a beautiful view, taking it all in, but not really knowing what to do with it all, since I'm not allowed to get off the rock in the first place.

Fucking rock

If I do start blogging regularly, I'm going to try and not have all the posts be like this one.

Promise.