just my ducking luck

what do you call a duck that refuses to be called a duck?

I here refer to that popular line, if it sounds/walks/looks like a duck to end.

Real ducks don’t talk back (at least not in a language we humans can comprehend) so it really doesn’t matter what they think.

But what if said duck finds the term ‘duck’ offensive, and reacts violently to its use?

Placating terms like ‘waterborne fowl’ or ‘creature rendered yellow in popular culture’ are too weak and take too much time to get to the point.

I suppose silence is an option. We could all pretend nothing’s quacking

subbed people

with apologies to the migration agents in the audience, I’m not going to pay an extra cent than I have to for a visa.

With graduation over, the next thing to achieve in the goal trinity is a job. A task that warrants its painful reputation; first because of scarcity, and secondly because it is so damned hard to figure out how to get work rights.

No, sniggering agents, be off.

Try to figure out the IMIA website for yourself, and see if you can find hope within the bureaucracy.

For my purposes, I need a ‘subclass 487’ visa. Armed with anecdotal assurance from friends, I visited the website for more information.

I could find a list of required documents.

I could find associated costs.

But I couldn’t find a nominated occupation that was related to my occupation.

Whoa. Not good. Hurry, call their number.

Which gets you put on hold for a long time; occasionally a chirpy lady reminds you that someone will get to you as soon as possible.

Fingers rap table nervously.

Quo vadis?

time to par-tay

two and a half years after my B.Com studies self-destructed, I received my final results for my Comms degree at RMIT.

My academic transcript won’t be stellar but to be honest , I really can’t be bothered with that.

What is important to me is that it’s done. Now I can move on.

The door’s now unlocked.

Time to start walking

simply decide

faced with difficulty, we sometimes offer people excuses.

But we also offer those same excuses, and maybe more, to ourselves.

We blame the world, god, the universe instead of rolling our sleeves and doing the hard work of finding our way out of those difficulties.

One day, you'll run out of excuses to give out, even to yourself.

It'll be very sad if that's the only person left on that day to hear them

you don't strike up conversations in emotional wastelands

did a radio interview recently for 3zzz, my first for a long time now.

What I like about playing an interviewer on radio is the expectation to make the interview exciting.

You feel it, the interviewee feels it, so you both work under this great pressure of making the chat interesting for all the listeners out there.

Even the nervous guests, i find, fight hard against their nervousness to present attractive titbits of themselves because they willfully buy into the idea of the exciting interview.

Now let's move away from the studios and into a plain undecorated meeting room, which suspiciously feels like it could also be used to interrogate suspects. There's a bookcase without any books in the room, and just enough space to push the chair back so you can stand up.

And the interview begins.
It's clinical and precise, what is this, who, where; and never lingers enough on a subject for you to probe what your interlocutor feels about it. No, you get shot down, and next item on the list.

The tricks you use in the studio:eye contact, mirroring, affirming, which could scrape some emotion from the dullest of subjects, does not stand a chance here. Your advances are
crushed like a can in middle of a busy highway of disapproving looks.

So no, don't crack funny anecdotes in front of potential employers

pictures from KL

in a fit of artiness, I rented Fellini’s Roma from the library. Too high brow for me unfortunately, with its streaming sequences of Rome alternating between the past and the 1970s. I couldn’t find a plot to latch on but I managed to watch it anyway, gently dragged by the luscious depictions of food, people, and places of Roma throughout the 20th century.

Would a ‘KL’ work?

The city may not have the millennia of history and culture, nor a moniker not ascribed to it by some government hack.

Yet it has character.

It is rough and restless, and fertile for the generations of people who have flocked to live between its two rivers.

KL is a city where people pray on hot tarmac on Fridays because there’s no space inside the mosque, next to a gushing, filthy, ghost of a river, which really is a giant drain with declarations of love sprayed on its sides.

A city where everyone wants a car so they can all complain of the years of life lost waiting out traffic jams on roads which are marginally safer than driving blind by a little bit.

A city where people yap the night away complaining about how poor they are next to severely sunburnt  foreign workers painting lines on the road.

A city filled with godly symbols, sounds, and names, a reason perhaps for the distaste of man-made laws.

A beautiful city that breathes and thrives through all its mud

not quite Taylor Swift levels of drama, but getting there

A subject I'm doing this semester requires me to write journal entries derived from the philosophic thought discussed in the week's lecture.

I can't believe how bleak my personal life sounds on paper. I wish I was hamming it up, but I'm writing it quite straight forward with little embellishments (save for style).

I think after a certain point, you normalise the higher levels of drama and don't think about it any more.

kau ingat masalah kau selesai kalau kau sedih?

Not bad at all

It’s not that bad you know.

A week now¹, without Facebook or MSN.²

Life does not, indeed, revolve around the internet.

Sure you lose the immediacy when it comes to knowing the latest going-ons in people’s lives, but that can be easily overcome.

If something is truly worth knowing about, you’ll find out about it soon enough. Provided there’s some effort on your part.

Maybe my mother was right after all.

But then again, even she's on Facebook.

Hmm.

Forgoing the convenience of Facebook also gives you double the motivation to actually ask for someone’s contact details when you meet them.

:)

1. New experiment: No FB/MSN for a month, following the long term success of the 'no coffee' experience.

2.Twitter doesn't count - I use it more as a news aggregator than anything else. That includes selective twitter updates as well. It's not cheating if I'm not interacting with you.

---

I'm thinking of putting a splash of colour(s) on the site's layout. What do you think?
The Spartan look's getting old.