Reaching Out

My dad: SY-ah... the rubbish ah.... you must keep clean!

Me: wtf
[takes a moment to think it over]
he must mean that I need to sort out the recycling in my rubbish bin in my room more closely??? but ??? i just had a period, how am i supposed to keep it clean??? isn't the nature of rubbish that it's just... not clean??
[decides to not engage]

A few minutes later:

My dad: hey, look at this lizard skeleton I found in the cabinet! [shows it off]

[I'm still too tired so it doesn't occur to me to take a picture even though it IS pretty cool]

My dad: I'm going to rehydrate it! [and yes it is exactly the tone of Steve Irwin's "ah'm gonna wrassle it!" here]

Me: [brain fritzes]

well I've been having a shit month, or two, or however long it's been since I last blogged. I started out strong waking up at 4am, getting dressed in new clothes, and working for a good five hours before having a mid-afternoon nap. Somewhere along the way though, this half-sleep here, half-sleep there took a toll on my system, and I also lost focus, because living with my parents is extremely hard on my system, and I've lost more nights and days than I can keep track of. I haven't been able to write new words for a long time that's not an email. I've been logging fewer hours, partly because I don't have that much work to do, partly because my concentration is so shot. I did request my mother order fluoxetine but the result was she gave me so much shit and then tried to share her half-dose sertraline with me and when I said "no, I've tried it and it does not work" she got all very indignant like 'what! why not!' and i just... do not know how to explain to a pharmacist that not all medications work the same way for different people.

Instead I've been spending a lot of time reading manhwa on Manganelo, and read a couple of shitty translations of light novels which are far more entertaining and easier to read than most everything being recommended to me on the Anglophone market right now. My attention span for non-paying entertainment can be kept by short lines and pretty pictures, it turns out. If it ain't for work, I ain't reading more than a paragraph.

--

The other day was the first day in what feels like months that I wrote some new fiction, and it's fanfic, but I'm pretty okay with that. I also finally started an AO3 account and dipping my feet in there, although I've never been much for deeply-engaged fandom, so I'm just posting some older works and re-reading old favourites.

--

Lately I've been sleeping around 3am, waking at 11am, although I'm functional mostly in the afternoons and while the nighttime would be a good time to interface with people, it's a crapshoot whether I can. I've been a shitty WisCon concom member as a result, and scheduling delays are all my fault.

The Movement Control Order has been extended into June, and anyway US immigration services have been suspended regardless, plus it's not like Tachyon is re-opening the office anytime soon, so it's WFH still.

--

My mother has been a giant fucking pill. She took it in her head to sew some new cushion covers, which for some reason became a DRAMA AND A HALF because she kept yelling at the maids to do the basting for her (she calls it "tagging" because that's how she learned it 30 years ago, so it took me some time to figure out what the hell she was talking about) and she had the maids do it to "save time" except of course, for all the time she's spent yelling at them, it would have been less time for her to do it herself.

--

My room's a/c is broken! I've been sharing the a/c from my brother's room--we share a bathroom and walk-in closet (though the closet is blocked off on my side because he keeps storing stuff in there), so we just keep the closet doors open and he blows a fan into my room so I can get cool air. During the afternoons, if we're working in the dining room together, we'll turn on the a/c there too. It's a nice relief because the temps have been averaging 33'c - 36'c and it makes me so tired all the time (and is probably partly responsible for my jacked up sleep habits).

--

As a family we've been watching movies or whatever in the living room together on Saturdays. So far we've watched the Phantom of the Opera broadcast, Saving Face (FINALLY!) and last weekend it was a Liver + Lung musical about 1860s Penang. My mother continues to be an awful spectator, but at least as a family we've been enjoying the shows. Saving Face in particular was a HUGE favourite: my dad and brother laughed a ton, and in general it's a charming movie, so yay! I love love love love it, huge thanks to glass_icarus who first posted about it way back when.

I've asked my brother to get the 1998 CATS musical, since my parents and I got to see the new movie in November but don't remember the old musical much. We'll watch that this weekend.

Have stayed at completely different places in the last three days: Corral Creek Cabins was in the mountains right by Kern River, then Sequoia Riverfront Cabins was a weird place which WAS right by a river, not across the road from one, and its front desk was a general store about a mile away, and now in a beachfront resort in San Simeon. My brother has been driving us a lot. We've been radio-surfing a lot.

Tomorrow we'll head to Santa Cruz, and hit up Monterey on the way, and after a couple of nights in Santa Cruz, we'll go to San Francisco.

I'm really liking the beachfront place. The front office gave us two rooms, one with a view of the ocean downstairs, and one upstairs with a fireplace. And I snagged the downstairs immediately because I wanted to work at a desk with a view of the sea. It's not been working, of course, because I spent most of the evening texting with A instead of working. But hope spring eternal?? We don't have to check out until noon anyway.

Apparently when I'm home and downstairs working, I cannot be left alone to my own devices because one parent or another is always talking to me if they happen to be home. I've been distracted by my dad so many times this morning I let loose a long, angry little "fuuuuuuccccckkkk." Which is par for the course! But Dad was all "gee... hard words." NO YA THINK?

It's especially annoying since I work best in the mornings atm, given how really hot the afternoons get and I'm just tired all the time after noon.

But I did get started on my dissertation stuff. Re-reading stuff in my proposal, and I realized there's a bunch of things I just cannot do while I'm here. So I might go back early August after all, so I can get to writing. For now, though, I'll just read all the articles I've downloaded and start synthesizing some ideas. Hopefully I'll have enough scribbles to really get started once I'm back in California, and will have exploded my proposal a bit more.

Some of the comments make me realize just how vastly far apart my writing style is from my adviser's... she's got "this is a convoluted sentence with ten ideas in it" and I go "well, yes, that's the point, because all told breaking them down is not for the proposal to do and anyway, I come from Twitterland where economy of words is important."

SIGH.

OK, back from Penang! Yesterday we picked Ray up and drove bravely on. Took us about four and a half hours, and we made a stop at Ong Cheng Huat in Sungai Dua for lunch around 2.30. They deep-fry spring chickens there, you see, and it's delicious. It's also hard to find unless you know what you're looking for, because it's in a slip road and actually behind some residential houses in an industrial area.

We then went to find my Auntie Mimi in her nursing home. She's worse than the last time I visited; this time she practically did not recognize me. It's kind of sad situation; it's an understaffed institution and I feel everyone's sitting around waiting to die or something. There're no activities, nothing to give the residents any mental stimulation. My aunt is the kind of person who needs a lot of mental stimulation, and without it, her dementia has become a lot worse. She's also losing threads of memory that she never lost before, like who her brothers are, how many kids they had. She thought I was her sister (which I take to be a sign of how much weight I've gained) and forgot she had a niece, much less two. When I said goodbye, she practically waved me off, already tired of me questioning her, and I just had... this terrible terrible feeling inside. I tried to hug her but she was in no mood for it.

Ugh.

Anyway, we went to an aunt's house to stay. She's currently out of the country, attending her youngest daughter's graduation, but her mom was there, my Sook Poh as we call her. We hung out in the living room chatting with her the best we could: she speaks Cantonese and Penang Hokkien (and of course understands some English and Malay). Ray speaks a bit of Penang Hokkien, and Roy and I stumbled with Cantonese and English the best we could. It's the first time Ray's met her, too. We had dinner with Uncle Jimmy, wandered around for apung.

Sook Poh was shocked to hear we were only staying for one night. She'd given me a set of keys with an autogate controller with the full expectation that we were hanging out for much longer, sigh.

I didn't sleep well, had to pee, and then had a nightmare about yelling at my mom who had come to WisCon and was going around asking me intrusive questions about my friends, IN THE SAFER SPACE no less, after which it was a lot of being worried about something terrible happening (in the vein of her harassing my friends and triggering them in some way). Ray getting up for morning prayers got me out of the dream, thank goodness.

Roy had trouble getting out of bed, but we were on the road by around 8.30am. (Sook Poh looked so sad as we left. Sigh.) We hit up some food first , then went to Mount Erskine to find the columbarium where our grandparents' ashes are kept.

Roy and I found Grandpa and Grandma fairly easily, so Ray got her first ever look at our grandparents' ashes. They died before she was born (I have 9 years on her; she's the youngest of my generational cohort) and she'd never been (partly because her dad died when she was really young too, so her mom doesn't really know where the ashes are). What with the family trying to keep track of the family tree lately, I thought it'd be nice to make sure she got to see the place at least.

We had a lot of time, and our last stop, Ai Linn Boh's coffee shop, didn't open until noon, so we headed downtown to Armenian St and saw Hock Teik Cheng Sin temple (and the preparations for the Tua Peh Kong festival) (he's a local prosperity deity), the Khoo Kongsi (they have a very impressive family court that's practically a tiny town), the Nyonya beading shop I've been meaning to go to for years (40 years of beading, and he makes the shoes from scratch. It was super awesome; he showed us works in progress, past examples, some of his process. It was so terrific), and another nearby shop that the beading guy told us to go to because the lady there gives classes (she wasn't in, but her brother was and called her for us, and he has kids on the US side of the pond too). Grown-ups are so great.

We hung out in a hipster cafe for a bit, where I learned about the Depressed Cake Shop which is a festival program to raise awareness of mental illness. The Wifi at the hipster cafe was kind of shit, but Ti Kuan Yin tea is pretty nice. My brother had a lamb harissa which was pretty delish.

(Somewhere in the midst of this were exhortations from my dad to buy some fruits for my Auntie Mimi so Roy had taken off to buy some oranges.)

Around 11.30am, we headed out to Tanjung Tokong to find Ai Linn Boh. I called Uncle Jimmy to let him know that we were on the way, and also to ask which dialect she speaks (the night before, he offered to call her to let her know that we were coming). She runs, with her son and new daughter-in-law (I missed the wedding because I was in Singapore), a coffee shop, one of those affairs in a canteen area by a housing estate. They sell kaya toast and various beverages. They also make their own kaya, every morning. Just as we were settling in, Roy asked me which one she was, because the last time he saw her was years and years ago, and I was like, "she's the one on the phone, she must be, because she's now looking at us, quick, wave, I bet that's Uncle Jimmy on the phone."

So, that was cool! She was very pleased to see us too. We waved at our newly-married cousin. Uncle Jimmy came by. We got three servings of toast with butter and kaya (they now serve three types of bread so it was imperative that we tried one of each) AND two half-boiled eggs each. We were so wired on sugar for a while and I am still crashing.

There was also a box with a couple of horseshoe crabs flailing about in it which was both fascinating and freaky. Roy bought them for RM8 and we went to a nearby beach (I never knew that the coffee shop was literally 20 meters away from a beach) to set them free.

(Somewhere in the middle of this, we told Uncle Jimmy of the plan to stop by the nursing home once more to drop off the oranges Roy bought, and he sighed a long-suffering sigh, told us about the time he brought her fruits: "she wouldn't eat them AT ALL. And then she wouldn't let anyone take them away! So they basically rotted the whole time." So we changed our mind and headed straight home, super late.)

The way home was pretty uneventful; a couple of pit stops, a prayer stop. I fell asleep early on and my head was tilted back, so I pretty much snorted myself awake, which was kind of an awful sensation. (I put the back down and put my feet up and that helped a lot with the dozing.)

On the way down from Penang, there's a stop at Gunung Tempurung, which has a drain leading to a tiny river. In the drain, there tends to be a whole flock of butterflies. Not just ANY butterflies, though! These are Rajah Brooke's Birdwing Butterflies, which are about 2 - 3 inches wide with a glorious black and green wingspan (and red bodies) (they're a sexy butterfly). So, that was pretty cool. I'd glad I got to catch them; the day was kind of rainy.

We got to Shah Alam by around 8pm to drop Ray off, and Dad had cooked fried fish (pomfret, fuck yeah) so yeah, we got home in good time.

The oranges were delicious, my brother and I agree that they are sweet, but my parents think they are sour, and we have no idea what accounts for this.

I had dinner last night with cousins from my dad's side, who we don't often see. Growing up, they were just as far away from us as cousins from my mom's side, but we saw them less often. Which bugs me. I asked my dad once, why don't we have meals with them more often? He said, "well, it's kind of hard to eat with them, since they're Muslim." Which made no sense to me, because we live in a Muslim country, and you actually have to look for the NON-halal restaurants.

Anyway, it was a great dinner. My cousin graduated from an interior design diploma a few months ago, and then finished her piano exams, and thus now qualifies as a teacher, so that's what she's been doing. She's also twenty-one, and tiny. I mean, like, 4' 8" or something. Cute as a button.

I saw her again today; her friend got her to her job interview this morning (she got hired, obvsly), then they swung by to get me out to Shah Alam. My family doesn't go out there too often; it's an unspoken thing that Shah Alam is predominantly Malay, so it kind of makes a lot of middle-class Chinese people uncomfortable.

Anyway, my aunt, cousin, cousin's friend and I went out for a Nyonya lunch (fried siakap and inchi-kabin, nom), then we went fabric shopping. It turns out my aunt and cousin also sew! I got to try out their Very Old Sewing Machine, even. It's so old it's not even electric. Takes a bit of doing though; you gotta get it going first before you start pedaling. It's fascinating.

We went to Jakel, which is a five-storey fabric store. I mostly wanted to get some stuff for a dress for my friend's wedding in December. I got a nice mint-y green thing, with a matching darker green songket material. Merdeka sale day means bopping an RM33/m price down to RM25/m. I also got myself some lycra material, and even lycra lace! Yay! That stuff should be able to make some ten pairs of underwear XD

We meant to go to Nagoya, but they had to go home to pray first (my uncle converted to Islam when in Saudi Arabia, so his family is Muslim with varying levels of piousness), and we rested instead. I showed Ray (my cousin) pictures of our aunt-cousin in Portland, who also sews, and explained bra mechanics to her (Ray, being so small, will probably had to start making her own stuff).

So, yeah, a good day. I'm hoping to get up to Penang sometime, and take Ray along, because she's never been to the columbrium where our grandparents' ashes are held.

My brother sent me and my dad Amy Chua's racist screed on how her abusive parenting skills are better and inherently Chinese, because he'd "never thought about it that way before" and I had to remind them both that it's racist, Orientalist, and abusive on several levels, plus it's a fucked up, terrible interpretation of Chinese ancestor worship. My dad emailed back laughing and said apparently my mom thinks she had a hand at all in my getting cum laude in my BA.

( cut for personal angry stuff )

IN SUM, FUCK THIS SHIT. I AM GOING TO SCHOOL TO FINISH MY ESSAY FOR NISI, MY PROPOSAL, AND READ JUDITH BUTLER.

So like, my mom is totally greedy.

Jha says:
D:
my mom is GREEDY
Caitlin - has an awesome place for next year! <3 says:
D:
What happened now^
?*
Jha says:
i asked my dad this afternoon to buy me a packet of prawn crackers
let me explain to you why this is important
these prawn crackers are EPIC
Caitlin - has an awesome place for next year! <3 says:
And you probably haven't been able to get them here, right?
Jha says:
like, one cracker can be AS BIG AS MY HAND
Caitlin - has an awesome place for next year! <3 says:
Whoa!
Jha says:
THATS HOW EPIC THESE CRACKERS ARE
so my dad very nicely got me one
Caitlin - has an awesome place for next year! <3 says:
(Okay, is it just me, or did FWD get hacked or something? *stares confusedly at random weird page appearing*)
Yay!
Jha says:
and he bought mango for my mum
which is, you know, awesome and all
Caitlin - has an awesome place for next year! <3 says:
Yeah
Jha says:
so i went out for dinner with a friend
had a great time!
Caitlin - has an awesome place for next year! <3 says:
yAY!
Yay!*
Jha says:
THE TEEN READERS SECTION IS WAY MORE INTERESTING THAN THE ACTUAL FANTASY SCIENC FICTION SECTIONS
NOT FAIR
SHERLOCK HOLMES IN MALAY
WTF FTW
Caitlin - has an awesome place for next year! <3 says:
Huh?
Jha says:
yeah, we went to the bookstore
XD
Caitlin - has an awesome place for next year! <3 says:
Ahhhhhhhhhhh
Jha says:
at the local mall
which is a piddly mall
Caitlin - has an awesome place for next year! <3 says:
lol
Jha says:
and thus, has a piddly bookstore
ANYWAY
yeah, awesome fun was had
Caitlin - has an awesome place for next year! <3 says:
(Srsly, though, go to FWD and look at it. :/ )
Yay!
Jha says:
but i decided to cut it short because i felt really bad about having doorkeys
Caitlin - has an awesome place for next year! <3 says:
Why was having doorkeys bad?
Jha says:
oh dear
they;ve definitely been hacked
Caitlin - has an awesome place for next year! <3 says:
Yeah
D:
Jha says:
because, well, the maids dont have their own
Caitlin - has an awesome place for next year! <3 says:
Ahhhhh
Jha says:
normall i put these keys out in the shoe cabinet so they always have access
but this time i forgot
Caitlin - has an awesome place for next year! <3 says:
Ah, gotcha.
Jha says:
so i came home early to make sure my mum and the maids werent locked out
went upstairs, found her
dad called
and he's like
did mum find the mango? he asks
and i say, yes, she did! because i could see the bowl on the table with the mango
AND UNDERNEATH
AN EMPTY PACKET
DEVOID OF PRAWN CRACKERS
Caitlin - has an awesome place for next year! <3 says:
D:
Jha says:
DDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD:
Caitlin - has an awesome place for next year! <3 says:
DDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD:
Jha says:
"MUM ATE MY PRAWN CRACKERS!!!!!"
..... and then they both laughed
T_T
DDDDD:
Caitlin - has an awesome place for next year! <3 says:
DDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD:
NO FAIR FOR YOU
That's so not cool.
Jha says:
anyway
it;s not lkike
a serious serious i am sad and upset and depressed
it's actuially really funny
Caitlin - has an awesome place for next year! <3 says:
XD
Also still unfair. XD
Jha says:
like =DD: sort of way
Caitlin - has an awesome place for next year! <3 says:
Yeah
Jha says:
so yeah
that's my exciting story of the evening


I went back out and got two more packets of prawn crackers. The lady at the cashier recognized me. "You finished already?" and I said MY MUM ATE IT BEFORE I GOT TO IT. And she laughed.