STORIES, STORIES

My friends and I ventured out to Ipoh this past Labor Day/ Wesak holiday-weekend to test-drive a car – Subhash writes car reviews for a living – and this post is my review of the Chevrolet Malibu. It's a very pretty car. It drove us over 120 miles from Kuala Lumpur to the city of Ipoh, a 2-hour car ride that was very nicely air-conditioned. The car was new-ish, and so it felt nice to be in it, just like how nice any new thing is. New things are best. For a new car, though (this is probably  a 2014, I dunno), it's a bit crappy in that it couldn't play music from any of our phones via Bluetooth. It does have the requisite female robot voice that announced, upon starting the car, that it had finished searching for satellite. Dumb, considering there was no GPS. What shitty robot service. I was excited about going on a road trip to Ipoh, which I'd never really visited (except for a couple of stopovers in the middle of the night on the way to Penang a few months ...

One of the best things about living outside of Jeddah is the myriad of fitness and workout options available to me that I'm naturally not taking advantage of, because I'm a well-trained complainer and self-oppressor. Here in Malaysia, you really have to work hard at making excuses. Look at these two old dudes just chillin like martial arts villains on an early Saturday morning. Like whatevs.   See, excuses adjust, too. They're like those people you hate so much: they have feelings, too, and we have to be considerate about them. In Jeddah, I'd whine about expensive gyms getting in my fitness way. I used to go to Z-Club, where they charged about 3,000 US dollars a year (if you were on a corporate account, you get a USD 1,000 discount on that price). Seriously, wtf. Now, there's a gym upstairs from my office that charges about USD 300 a year, and that's considered a fancy gym. WAIT, there's a free gym in my apartment building. It's a ...

I moved to Malaysia in 2013 to work in publishing. Almost two years of living here means it's time I list down the things I've learned, after the initial fog of novelty has cleared and I've fully immersed into this new lifestyle. Quickly and dirtily, some background info: I come from Jeddah, Saudi Arabia and all my experiences are tied back to that stringent culture, but I'm also Filipino – Southeast Asia is not completely strange to me. I'm apparently shaped by my Islamic upbringing even though I strictly speaking don't adhere to its ideals. This is Item #2 of that list. MIND YOUR LANGUAGE Malaysians speak 3 major languages – Bahasa Malaysia (Malay), Tamil and Chinese (Hokkien or Mandarin), but English is very widely used, which is why it's easy for me to survive here. But knowing English here (as in most other countries where it isn't the first language) is not nearly enough; one has to know the local version of it to truly understand what pe...

I moved to Malaysia in 2013 to work in publishing. Almost two years of living here means it's time I list down the things I've learned, after the initial fog of novelty has cleared and I've fully immersed into this new lifestyle. Quickly and dirtily, some background info: I come from Jeddah, Saudi Arabia and all my experiences are tied back to that stringent culture, but I'm also Filipino – Southeast Asia is not completely strange to me. I'm apparently shaped by my Islamic upbringing even though I strictly speaking don't adhere to its ideals. This is Item #1 of that list. THERE WILL BE SEXIST PIGS I've just come home from a driving class – I'm trying to get a driver's licence, not necessarily because I want to drive, but because  I can . I am not  un-allowed  to. After years of living in a place where I am denied the right to transport myself from Point A to Point B without the assistance of a penis-owner, you'd think I'd be more ec...

"As newspapers and magazines become more obsessed with shorter, breezier stories and visual gimmickry, readers adopt that sensibility as normalcy. We are losing the ability to understand anything that's even vaguely complex."  – Chuck Klosterman, Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs As someone knee-deep in the publishing industry (I'm a publishing executive in the editorial department of a media group here in Malaysia, which, in short form, means that I have my nose buried in all aspects of publication), I nodded so vigorously at this essay by Klosterman. Here's a typical instruction given to our business- and lifestyle-magazine writers all day everyday: "Write smart, write the kind of articles that you want to read. Our audience is sophisticated, intelligent, and very discerning. State everything clearly so that you don't lose your readers. They don't want to have to read complicated sentences, or encounter uncommon words." What this means to...

My writing kit. About 10 Mondays ago, Hning and I decided to enter a competition between the two of us – to write something and submit it to each other every second Monday. Failure to do so would result in a payment of 100 Saudi Riyal to the other, an amount we agreed was enough to cause pain to our broke-ass persons. This literary experiment has caused me to learn a few things about the way I work. AN EXERCISE OF THE MIND Just like working out, writing takes a lot of effort – and makes a lot of room for excuses. Imagine the excuses not to work out given by someone who physically exerts themselves for long hours in their day job. Would those excuses not seem justified and reasonable? As someone who works in the publishing industry, I felt that mine were concrete. Copious amounts of reading and writing copy during the day (and well into the evening most times) is enough to make me want to veg out and away from words the rest of the time. "If I don't get p...

What happens when you spend pretty much your whole life decrying the fact that you are caged, restricted and denied the smallest of freedoms? Here's what happens: that's ALL you know to do – decry. In the harsh light of freedom, you become a zombie and you scuttle back into your apartment and into the comfort zone of the internet and continue the only existence you know – American sitcoms and ranting. True story. To force my adjustment to freedom, I came up with a list of things I should accomplish by the time I turn 31. They were things that I've never done before because of restrictions (either real or imagined), which are now available to me in the Free World (real or imagined). I'm aiming to do at least 30, for its sentimental value, but I have, so far, only done 10 things from the list, and my 31st birthday is a month away. DOOM IS ME. Here's what I've done: VISIT A CEMETERY I've never been to a cemetery. At funerals in Jeddah, we only g...

In Jeddah, I had the privilege (or the curse, according to the elders) of being part of a circle of open-minded young people who can discuss and accept non-Jeddahwi concepts, such as being non-Muslim, non-male/female, non-conservative, non-traditional, non-Arab, non-Saudi, non-whatever WE were. Being outside  of Jeddah as that person means complications – I'm so open-minded, why am I, deep down inside, such a traditionally Jeddahwi chick? This double-think, these double standards, are so alien to people in the free world. So hypocritical. The truth is that however open I am, there are major parts of who I am that believes in the culture of Saudi/Jeddah. My ideals on Respect, Love, Acceptance – they are all Jeddahwi. I can adapt to different cultures because of where I'm from. I can respect anyone's close-minded culture because of how I was raised. I can understand people and their demons because of Jeddah. If there was any place, any time, when you can have a group...

A Letter to Humans I need to learn to love myself wherever I may be, any place, any space in time. I need to respect my existence, my spot on earth. To respect the years I've lived and the things that had to happen to me so that time might move forward and life might happen to those that surround me. To respect the Butterfly Effect of All Things. To respect the unpredictability of human existence, and the predictability of THAT. I need to learn to bring closer to myself the things I own, that I've acquired through work – hard or easy – and to understand the beauty of having belongings and belonging to things in return. I need to give credit to the people in my life – the ones who stay even when they don't have to, the ones who left because they just couldn't. The ones that tried to understand my demons and the ones that ran away in terror. The ones that are like me and those that aren't. The bottomless pit of love and goodness that is the human he...