It’s 2:25 am. I’m barely hanging on to my sanity.
My wife woke me up to scratch her foot. After about ten minutes of scratching, I decided to cure the cause of the symptom, so I thought I’d wipe her foot with a towel. I wet one corner of a bath towel. While I was rubbing her foot with it, she kept complaining about how I was doing it wrong and shouldn’t be cleaning her whole foot and only cleaning the itch. Then she moved on to how I was giving her a fungal infection by wetting her foot, so I moved on to dry her foot with the dry part of the towel but she insisted that the towel was wet so we had a big row about whether or not the towel was wet. I know, it was so stupid but that’s what we were fighting about. It’s wet. It’s dry. It’s wet. It’s dry. It feels wet. Come on! It’s dry.
I was screaming. She was using her victimised-Mickey Mouse voice. It wasn’t pretty. She wouldn’t let me dry her foot any further so I could tell her mind was set on being the victim and growing a whole new fungal community on her foot over the next few days to prove her point. Nothing I could do about that. Meanwhile, my screaming had woken up the baby. She fed him from the breast to put him back to sleep. I was afraid he wasn’t getting enough milk, but I can never mention that because she takes it as an insult to her womanhood, a challenge to her abilities as a mother, an affront to the long lineage of breastfeeding women in her family, and a slap-in-the-face to women in general. I just quietly made the baby some milk to feed him with. He’s been rejecting the milk bottle and formula milk recently and at the best of times would only drink it as he’s drifting off to sleep. I warmed the milk up and as I approached to feed him, my wife screamed.
“Don’t wake him up. What’s wrong with you? You’ve done enough damage already.”
In summary, I can't win.
Wasn’t going to actually post this, but then I thought what the heck, it's a good snapshot of my life at the moment. I'll look back and laugh at this, I think.
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June 11, 2008
Sorry for the lack of updates again. I’ve kind of lost track of where this blog was going. Like many blogs, this started out as a place to organise and file away complaints and maybe rationalise and justify the crummier feelings I have. Well, I’ve not run out of complaints just yet, but I did start caring about what people thought.
We just came back from a holiday in NZ, and it was wonderful and beautiful of course. But now I really feel very tired and it’s true what they say – you really do need a good rest after a vacation. I had this whole blog sort of written in my head about that, but it stayed in my head because I decided nobody likes the guy who whines about his vacation.
I thought about leaving out the vacation bit and just focusing about how tired I am but then it seemed hypocritical to expand that kind of effort on the topic, not to mention unmotivated and self-victimising.
I also had something about how we were turning into consumer automatons and how our material possessions were enslaving us. Not very original, I admit, but it really was something I felt passionate about. Then I thought about it a bit further and I could see how, to some folks, it might seem like we were bragging about what we had, or worse, just whining for no good reason.
I thought about writing down some of the dumb things that I’ve been saying or my wife has been saying but then I decided that was more reality than either of us could handle at this point.
Then, I was going to write about how my wife was considering spending more time with the baby and what this meant for us, but then I thought about how somebody from her workplace might read that and interpret it. So that entry went straight to the recycle bin.
I also had a few not very politically-correct things to say about parenthood but then I thought about how people would react and you know I’m really not feeling ready to tackle that ideological behemoth just yet.
So thanks for reading this, but I’ve really got nothing to say at the moment. Sorry. I’ll come up with something soon, hopefully. I’ll either find something to say that is meaningful to everyone or I’ll cut back on the caring and just lash out. I’m not sure which of the two will happen first, but I have a hunch.
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I think I’m going to cut down on the use of analogies from now on. I do realise that they are very hip at the moment and can instantaneously make a person sound knowledgeable, witty and charming. However, it annoys me whenever someone stretches one really far to “prove” a point.
I’ve thought about it and the only situation that warrants the use an analogy to bring home a point is when one has run out of examples and facts. Analogies feed on emotions rather than logic. If you can come up with one quick enough, you will appear spontaneous, funny and clever and win the audience even if your logic is faulty. Often, a person is led to belief that their point has been “proven” by their clever use of analogies – which is another way of saying analogies make idiots think they’re smarter than they really are.
I cannot argue with the entertainment value of analogies, but apart from that, I don’t see them carrying all that much weight – not unless they are very closely related to and carry useful meaning to the topic at hand. But then again, if they were that accurate, I’m not sure if they can still be called analogies.
They are still very much in vogue now, but in a few years time, they will be passé – first in humour and then slowly, in general use. If you don’t believe me, find your favourite comedian now and catch them using an analogy now, and record them. Come back in a couple years and listen to it and see if you don’t say, “Wow. I used to find that funny?”
Trust me, they’re on their way out. You read it here first.
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As mentioned earlier, we were getting our election updates on Saturday from MalaysiaKini.com and its mirror sites. The traditional media (all the TV stations and many of the newspaper web sites) were several hours behind in their reporting. Utusan was also giving very up-to-date reports that day.
Malaysia Kini made their web site free for one week to give the public a source of independent news so that they could make more informed choices at the election. Today is the last day it is free. Give it a read. If you like it, subscribe to it. Don't be left out of the loop like this poor guy.
My wife is already subscribed, so I can read over her shoulder.
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Before the elections on Saturday, many people were telling me that they thought Barisan Nasional wouldn't get a 2/3 majority of parliamentary seats like it had always done in the past. I was contrarian and thought that they surely would - partly because I didn't dare to hope otherwise, and partly because I was skeptical of the so-called new transparency implemented by the Electoral Commission.
My wife and I stayed up late reading about all the BN's shock defeats across the country on MalaysiaKini.com. I want to say it was a pleasant surprise to finally receive the news at 2.42 am that the BN had finally lost its 2/3 majority but the wait was actually really nerve-racking. Now my faith in the EC and in parliamentary democracy is somewhat restored.
We've had a day to let everything sink in. Everybody I see and meet are still talking about how shocked they are at the way the BN lost. The truth is they still won by a comfortable (simple) majority. Forget about the historical context for a moment and just see the present for what it is. Then you'll realise that the BN is still our ruling coalition - only, with an opposition presence, which is no big deal in a real democracy.
The fact that we have been trusting our ruling party with a big enough majority for them to change the constitution willy nilly for 51 years is actually then the extraodinary part.
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