Thinner

Tonight, I'm going to have:

• a bacon, avocado, and tomato sandwich
• About a pound of crinkle cut fries
• however much is left of my cheddar potato soup mix
• and a salad with cranberries and blue cheese.

I'm down to 100-101 pounds (about 46 kilos) by my bathroom scale =P I love eating but I also love cooking (even though I'm nowhere near as good at it as my friend Nick) and the upshot of that is that when I don't cook, I don't eat. It's not that I'm a food snob either, I'll happily eat junk food, but the frugal eldest-child-of-pastor-with-4-kids side of me says that frozen chicken pot pies are actually horrible value for money.

It's so flippin' cold here and I have no insulation. The only nice thing about being skinny is being able to needle my boyfriend's bitchy female housemates with it.

No time to cook nice, no time to blog...*sigh* I like my classes but I'm going to be glad when the semester's over and I can just focus on work at work and do other things at home, not focus on classwork at work and work at home.

No, I've never read the Stephen King book Thinner but it sounds interesting and Ken blogged about it a while ago...

My Ah Kong

My parents are up in Penang for the English-speaking Methodist Church's Annual Conference. They didn't say where they were staying but I figured it would be in Ma's parents' house by default so I called.

They were out but my Ah Kong picked up the phone. The conversation was a bit garbled but the old man's still sharp. When I asked him how Ah Mah was, he said her "central nervous system no good". I asked what he does and he said he goes "marketing" (that's the Malaysian idiom for "going grocery shopping at the market"; seriously, I love it 'cos it sounds so cool) three or four times a week. Although my mum's not too keen on it, I think he still rides his motorcycle.

When the Japanese invaded China he was there for university since at the time even Malayan-born Chinese were still considered Chinese citizens. He got recruited to be an officer and ended up training men twice his age. Later when he came back he was a schoolteacher. After he retired it was too boring so he tried being a mechanic. That didn't work so he went to culinary school and started his own catering business and ran cooking classes. (Man, those Chinese New Year banquets with the ping-pong table pulled out to make room for all the fantastic dishes and relatives...) He also made and sold fruit-fly traps, kitchen utensils, and those funny foot acupressure boards on the side. He's slowed down now but he's still fun to talk to.

Thank God for one intact grandparent. My father's father was dead long before I was born. He died of prostate cancer diagnosed late; my dad likes to complain about how these traditional old Chinamen are stubborn about having their blood drawn. My grandmothers are in the late stages of Alzheimer's Disease, and being young and cocky I think I'd rather take poison than be like that. When I'm old, I want to be like my Ah Kong.

Decision Time!

So I did say I hate politics, especially US politics, but I do love filling out questionnaires.

This website (MyElectionDecision.org) was developed by some people from the Psych department of my alma mater. It shows you sets of eight unattributed quotations on 5 issues: Energy, Iraq, Immigration, Healthcare, and Economic Issues.

Apparently if I was American and paying attention, I'd vote for John Edwards *phew* Hillary Clinton came out second on my list; I thought I was going to die if the survey told me I should vote for that harridan. Bill Richardson was my #3 and I have no idea who he is (followed by Barack Obama).

I'm def pro-immigration. I still don't want to settle in the USA for the long term, but am very much of the opinion that other people should be able to if they want. And if you don't have foreign labour, who's going to mop your floors, pick your oranges, and win all your Nobel Prizes for you? *runs away*

Malaysian politics wiki?

My cousin Jerng sent me a long and somewhat rambling log of a conversation between a Malaysian and someone from the UK. I don't go in much for esoteric activism strategies, but the part that caught my interest was the idea of starting a wiki for Malaysian law and politics, like the Opening Politics UK website. I like the idea...what do you guys think?

I'm not much of a political person, but I do like to stay informed. I developed an allergy against too much blah blah blah between going to a liberal arts college and dating [last year] a guy who now writes for TPMCafe.

Free rice!

Cool stuff: a website called FreeRice that throws multiple-choice vocabulary questions with adaptive difficulty levels a la GRE at visitors, and simultaneously allows them to donate ad revenue to alleviate starvation by showing small banner ads under the questions. I answered 30 right and 3 wrong and am at level 46/50 so far *syiok sendiri.

Have a go:

No fleas?

Set out a pan of water with a light overnight to attract bugs. Results so far: no fleas, but one fruit fly? I'm pretty sure they're not biting me, my shampoo doesn't smell that realistic.

Fleas?

Ah shit. I think I have fleas.

Or at least, my cat has fleas and they're taking advantage.

Something's attacking me. The funny thing is that I groom her regularly and haven't seen anything.

More tomorrow...or the day after...or whenever I get this figured out =P

Doing shots

"Angela and I are going for flu shots at two. Wanna come?"
"Two seems a little early to quit work, but...sure."
"No, we're going to come back afterwards."
"So we're going to be all wasted in lab?"
[blur momentarily]
"I said FLU SHOTS, not shots."

Harriet Beecher Stowe Is A Bitch

The cast: Eight graduate students in various stages of education.
KRISTA, our hostess, a Spanish major who's a total Harry Potter fanatic
DAVE, her fiance, a mathematician
KATRINA, her housemate, a speech pathologist
BEN, a student of 19th-century German
LIS, a petite, chirpy pianist
CHRISTOPHER, a mediaevalist who looks the part
LEE - I think he studies Russian
me

The scene: Krista and Katrina's apartment, crouched over a guys-versus-girls game of It Was a Dark and Stormy Night. This is a relatively new board game which involves guessing either the title or the author of a book whose first lines are read from a randomly drawn card.

So far the girls are well ahead (gender stereotypes, anyone?). We've landed more often on Novels: 1900-1950 more often than we would have liked and on Children's Books and Science Fiction not enough, but Krista and I have saved two turns in a row by guessing "Hemingway" and "Fitzgerald" semi-facetiously and turning out right.

The guys roll and land on Novels: before 1900. Krista draws and reads

"In Which the Reader Is Introduced to a Man of Humanity. Late in the afternoon of a chilly day in February, two gentlemen were sitting alone over their wine, in a well-furnished dining parlor, in the town of P----, in Kentucky. There were no servants present, and the gentlemen, with chairs closely approaching, seemed to be discussing some subject with great earnestness."

resulting in a moment of bafflement before the argument breaks out.

"It sounds like Tolstoy. He does that letter-followed-by-dash naming."
"But it's in Kentucky!"
"What year?" someone asks.
"1852," Krista reads.
"Mark Twain with the 'man of humanity'? [Twain is the universal answer to any American novel before 1900, apparently] He was kinda preachy in some of his short stories."
"Yeah, but this is a novel."
"Wait...could it be Uncle Tom's Cabin, you know, by Harriet Beecher Stowe? Kentucky is a border state," Ben suggests.

The girls, who have all glanced at the card, exchange a look of brief panic which changes to glee when Christopher, head in hands, mutters, "No, no, that's too late for Uncle Tom."
There's more back-and-forth for several minutes until Christopher yelps at Lee "You saved us with Dante, what's this one?"
Lee shakes his head. (The guys got a poem earlier that sounded awfully like "The Road Less Travelled" but turned out to be "The Divine Comedy" or something.)
"Twain, then?"
"I guess so."
"Twain."
Shrugs. "Twain."

"Uncle Tom's Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe," Krista announces, smug as a cat in the cream.
"YOU WERE FREAKING KIDDING ME!" Ben yells at Christopher.
"I'm gonna go hide in the kitchen." As he retreats behind the fridge, the rest of us are treated to a frustrated screech of "HARRIET BEECHER STOWE, YOU BITCH!"
"Now that would make a great first line," says Dave.