Which Reality Do You Prefer?

"No. No no this can't be true!" my mom exclaimed, her hand covering her gaping mouth out of disbelief. "I couldn't have lost that much weight! 4 kilos in less than two weeks!"

Her eyes were glued to the numbers on the screen of the weighing scale, not quite believing what she was seeing, yet not wanting the scale to be wrong either. We were both using the scale at a pharmacy as we unanimously decided that a scale at home is not healthy for our peace of mind.

"Really? Let me try let me try let me try," I said, eager to get on the scale to see what ridiculous number it will churn out for me. Maybe it will tell me that I weigh as much as I was 10 years back. Haha that'd be funny.

"No. No no no no this machine HAS to be correct!" I declared, with utmost conviction. "It's telling me that I've lost 2 kilos. If this machine cheats by 4 kilos like you said, that means I've put on 2 kilos since puasa. So this machine BETTER BE RELIABLE."

"Yeah, there's nothing wrong with you being right this time," my mom agreed, and we both walked away from the pharmacy that evening, being satisfied.

Showing Some Love For Bieber

Ok fine. I'm ready to admit this.

Now I get what's the big deal with Justin Bieber. It might have taken me longer than other females, ranging from 3 year-old-Barbie-dolls-crazed child to 55-year-old-grandma with sagging skin on her upper arms, to get swept away by the Bieber Fever but I've figured it out. Finally.

It's his hair.

It's that dirty blonde mop on top of his head! It's just so....cute.

(While I am writing this, and I swear it's not a lie, a commercial popped on the TV screen, featuring that babyface known across the world, crooning that infamous earworm of 'baby baby baby ooooh' that you occasionally caught yourself humming along to, even though you thought you were indifferent to the Bieber Fever but no mister, you are wrong, apparently you are not spared from the epidemic, just like the rest of us.)

It just dawned on me in the most profound way one day, as I was sitting around, contemplating on the future of mankind, and other serious stuff, when Bieber's 'inyminymynimolover' song found it's way to the back of my head and continued to play over and over without my consent. It got me to thinking, that if a 16-year-old-boy could get away with that haircut looking pretty, like a cheeky yet innocent 13-year-old pre-pubescent girl, an early 20s like me who refuses to grow up past 16 can surely pull off the Bieber look with ease, being a girl to start with.

So off to the hair salon. Did a little Bieber dance and the hairstylist understood right away what I was after. Chop snip chop snip snip. It took her about half an hour, as she carefully perfected the slopes and the angles of the bob.

The result? I LOVE IT. I love it so much I screamed in the chair once I saw the final result in the mirror in front of me, that got other customers alarmed and ready to leave as they thought the hairdresser accidentally cut my ear off. When they saw that it was just me really happy with my haircut, their attention turned back to the magazine in their lap.

Numero uno reason to like it : I feel 3 kilos lighter. Really. Screw fad diets that never work other than messing up with your metabolism.

Second of all, it takes off 10 years of my age. I look 13! It's a great thing since I always end up,unintentionally, doing stupid things, that only an oblivious pre-adolescent who doesn't know better can pull off without inviting weird looks from onlookers that seem to whisper 'is she retarded or something?'. The next time I spill my drinks/sauce while tripping over nothing in a fast food restaurant, I can go like, "Cut me some slack I have Bieber hair!" Or when someone mentions about a significant event in world history that I don't know of, I can just shrug and point to my Bieber hair.

Third, it doesn't require much attention to look like how it's suppose to. I swear, all I ever need to do after shower is just dry it with towel and let it be. That's all it need; just let it be. Once the hair dries, I just need to comb it with my fingers, 3 to 4 strokes are enough. If I need to prep it up, all I need to do is shake my head and it'll look like a pretty mess, specifically meant to look that way by a hair designer.

There. I've proven myself, I'm not a Bieber hater.

Something good did come out of the whole Bieber-craze after all.

Resident Evil

This is the way I remember how it went. And how it exactly went.

We were on a train. Not an express train but a choo-choo train, the one typically painted in bright colours attracting kids, choo-chooing at less than 10km/h around zoos or theme-parks. The four of us were sitting in a row; boyfriend at the farthest left, me beside him, and then Hour and Ferris.

All of us was so thrilled (at least I know I was) to board on the train that will take us to the top of the hill, where we would get to feed the silver-leaf monkeys, and interact with them. They are not the typical long-tailed macaques, famed as trouble-makers that you normally see in the park or by the road-side. These are the silver-leaf monkeys (or known as lutungs by the locals), their fur is silvery and they are more adorable than their mischievous counterparts, kera.

The main plan was to catch a boat ride during dusk to watch the fireflies in Sungai Kuantan, Kuala Selangor. What a spectacular sight. Trees after trees along the river came to life with tiny dots of synchronized blinking lights. If someone tells me that those are fairies, perched at the end of the leaves, dancing to the sound of the night, I would have believed him (What can I say, I'm a sucker for such things). It was almost magical. A must-do in anyone's book, especially those who still keep a place in their heart for life's unexpected wonders. I would recommend paying the firefly colonies in Kuala Selangor a visit over those in Pengerang because of its abundance and the old-fashioned atmosphere created by the traditional, manually operated boats.

I managed to drag my friends to start the journey a little bit early than we were supposed to so we could make a stop at Bukit Melawati to see the lutungs. All the way in the car, I have been raving about how excited I was to bond with these monkeys that I suspect my friends, bored out of their skull with my endless ramblings about these hairy primates, have secretly complotted to leave me there forever once we arrive. The troops in Bukit Melawati are especially known for their tame nature as they are so used to contact with human. Hundreds of these monkeys roam free in the vicinity of the hill, never causing harm to visitors.

But in any family, there's bound to be a black sheep, ready to stir some trouble up.

So I was sitting on the train, my hand clutching the plastic bag containing the string beans, which we have purchased before the train ride to feed them later. Now, what I am going to tell next might sound like it has been fabricated that it borders on being utterly fictitious but let me assure you that this is an actual eye-witness account. It really happened and I saw it with my own two-eyes.

I was anticipating the appearance of these friendly primates when suddenly out of nowhere, a lutung, which looks like it has been infected by the zombie disease, with watery blood-shot eyes and slimy saliva dripping from its mouth, jumped onto the train and got hold of my boy’s legs, its razor-sharp teeth on display for further intimidation. It shrieked and trashed around frantically, out of control, its leather paw now squashing my left thigh. Naturally we freaked out, we screamed, like pre-pubescent girls screaming for Justin Bieber (he would say I was the only one screaming, but actually he did too), which was pretty understandable (not the screaming-for-Bieber-part) considering the dire situation we were in at that time.

We were just seconds away from being turned into zombies, me and my boyfriend, doomed to haunt the hill forever, which would then have to be closed to public, the hill would be a memorial, marking the story of two lovers who had met a tragic fate. Man, we could have been bigger than Romeo and Juliet. Or even Sid and Nancy.

Luckily, common sense got the better of me. I quickly realized that the zombie lutung was after food, and apart from our flesh and blood, it would probably settle for the string beans that I was holding in the plastic bag in my hand. Without wasting any more time, I dangled the plastic bag in front of him to get his attention, and I strategically threw the bag out of the train.

My plan miraculously worked. The zombie took the bait. He let go of my boy’s leg and jumped off the train, scurrying to get the beans. The four of us exhaled in relief.

If only Milla Jovovich was there, she would have asked me to join her zombie-busting team pronto.

Hanging By A Thread

"Get me down! NOW! NOWWWW!" I screamed as my life was literally hanging by a thread from a three-storey-high wall. Through half-shut eyes, I caught a glimpse of people walking by under me, looking like Lego people, tiny miniature people walking on the ground, reminding me that it's quite a long way to fall from where I was hanging.

Up until that point, I never thought I had a problem with vertigo. When I first fell in love with wall-climbing, I thought I was going to, in time, climb my way up the Rocky Mountain without breaking a sweat. Now I'm not so sure.

After I was belayed down to safety, my heart still pounding hard from the near-death experience, my boyfriend, stunned by my intense reaction, asked, "What happened?"

"I was scared shitless, that's what happened." But if you think that that is going to stop me from going up that wall again, you just don't know me at all.

Introducing, the biggest scaredy-cat who's always overestimating the guts that she has (which if translated into physical mass is smaller than whatever's hanging on the belly of Taylor Swift) and only realizes her lack of balls once she reaches the point of no return, in this case, being suspended 15m of the ground.

The route looks easy and it just kills me that I wasn't able to reach for that hold, placed strategically so that it is just about 2 cm out of my grasp. If only I was just 2 cm taller…. The forth time I tried, I decided to use another approach, which was to aim for the feature in the wall, that's curiously shaped like a part of a female genitalia. Bad move. My fingers just couldn't hold on to the feature long enough for me to make my next move. Four times being hurled violently mid-air like some crash-test dummy was enough to turn me into a puddle of acrophobia.

Since my fingers were already shaking out of fatigue, and vertigo had the best of me, I relented and decided to switch places with my boyfriend.

Off he went.

He was doing pretty well. I was cheering for him, trying to be the supportive girlfriend even though my inside was screaming just how unfair it was that the 20 cm height difference between us makes all the difference as he was easily able to reach for holds after holds. We are so competitive it’sa wonder we haven’t eaten each other’s heads off by now.

At 80˚ angle, the wall is actually leaning towards the ground. Though it is unnoticeable by the naked eyes, once you are trying to scale up the wall, the slight slant of the wall would make you feel as if the gravity force acting to pull you down has doubled, even tripled.

Then, suddenly, he too crumbled at the hand of the evil spirit of the wall, as his hands and his legs, no longer able to fight against the force of nature, slipped from the artificial rocks. I was having my heads lost up in the clouds about 5 seconds prior to that but the effect was already evident, when he plummeted about 2 meters from the higher spot on the wall since I didn’t tightened the safety rope as he climbed up.

Poor 7-year-old kid was the victim of my carelessness when my boyfriend accidentally kicked him in the head on his way down during the sudden drop. It wasn’t a kick in the actual sense, more like my boy’s legs coming into contact with the kid’s helmet, without a serious impact. Nevertheless, it’s a good thing kids were required to wear helmets there. The scrawny, geeky kid screamed rather dramatically, so that the entire hall could hear him “ARE YOU TRYING TO KILL ME?”

“No, but next time I will,” my boyfriend muttered under his breath.

The kid proceeded to crawl all the way to the end of the room, only got up on his legs when he was sure that he was well away from all danger. He shot us a dirty look.

“You know, this is nothing compared to bungee-jumping…” my boyfriend pointed out in a rather sarcastic tone. Deep inside, I knew he was happy that I turned out to not to be so indifferent to heights after all, since that means there’s a chance that he wouldn’t be dragged into accompanying me to take a 200m plunge with only a rope tight to our legs that’s keeping us from crossing over to the side where the deads are. Bungee-jumping has long been on top of my to-do-list and he has never approved of it because ‘you jump, I jump’ was part of the deal.

“No way. No friggin way. I’m crossing it out of my list. In fact, I’m crossing it out of my mental list right now. There. Crossed. Scrawled over. And over. The only way I was going to bungee-jump after this is if someone drags me to the jumping platform and pushes me over.”

I could sense him smiling from ear-to-ear from inside.