Pickles n' Tickles by JJ

WHILE I was at the store earlier, paying for my purchases, a lady popped up next to me and kept staring at my cheap NaRaYa  purse (right) I got from Bangkok months ago. In her hands, she was slowly unzipping a black and gold  Prada . It wasn't even her turn to pay +  she was supposed to wait  behind me, not next to me. Never mind if my US$5 NaRaYa came out of a pony-fur Gucci , she still gave me the dirty look because if I went around with a printed cloth purse, the  Gucci could be a fake, right ? Much like the looks I got from the runners with shoes on when I was out on my barefoot runs recently ! Not that I was bothered by any of it :)  So yeah. Going  back-to-basic with my feet and in my efforts to try the Stoxen Human Spring Approach  to running again, I attempted running barefoot. Twice, on different tracks. The first was a nice, rubber track most of the way and the second attempt had me on a fair combination of rubber, concrete and pa...

I know that I shouldn't be making assumptions and whatnot ( and I'm not ) while investigations are being carried out on the recent fire at the Villagio Mall in Doha, Qatar but hey, I can't help thinking about it. It did kill  19 people including 13 children after all.   According to some media reports, the water sprinklers and fire alarm systems were not working, and the floor planning made it a Herculean task for help to reach the nursery on the first floor. Also killed were some teachers and fire department personnels.  Pix from here  I was watching some videos of this incident on YouTube. Endless clouds of black smoke spiralled wildly over the mall's roof and there were some clips on rescuers carrying out children who seemed lifeless. What a tragedy. Imagine finding your kid dead in a diaper just hours after you've fed and sent him to a nursery. I've walked in that mall so many times before, and every time I did, I've always silently wondered abo...

ON Facebook last week, a friend had expressed her disappointment and devastation over a theft in her office. Someone had actually stolen her laptop . I mean, who steals a colleague's laptop , right ? It's not like grabbing a pen or a stapler from someone's desk on the way back from the loo (although if anyone steals my Mont Blanc, I'll be sure to unleash one of my favourite spells.  In this case, I'd hope for the thief, assuming it's a man, to have a permanent erection). She had a valid reason to be upset alright. For some reason, I was upset too, especially over a reaction by one of her friends to her status update. This guy came on, laughed out loud and said nothing nice at all to a friend who's lost her work and frantically trying to meet her deadlines. Seriously. What do you do with your lappy when you step out of your cubicle for a little break ? It's not like she is working in a makeshift office at the back of a dodgy rubber processing factory ...

I don't know about you but I tend to curl up into this pathetic ball of self pity when I'm really ill ( which is rare ). This is when I indulge in thinking like a close family of mine, by which I mean this is the only time I could verify the genetic connection I have with this person who perpetually thinks that the world is against his good self 24/7. Urgh. So yeah. I'm feeling like the world owes me everything right now that I am ill! Oops, I don't rant but this seems just like a start of one! Big sorry.  Well, there isn't much that I can do apart from slurping my dad's chicken broth quite grumpily. I can't talk much to anyone although I'm surrounded by people I like. Talking does literally take my breath away at this point. However, I do find the daily  nebuliser treatments blissful as long as they last even if they cut my appetite for food.  I'm also pretty much drugged up every waking moment that I'm shaking even as I'm typing this ou...

My friend Karen and her five-year daughter, *Cahaya Rain (CR) always have these interesting conversations between them. Some of the conversations intrigue me.  Karen : W hat would you like to be when you grow up? CR : Haven't I told you before ??? A teacher ! Karen : Ok. Ok. You can carry on the family tradition ! Daddy's mum and both grandmas were teachers and headmistresses. And my mum was a teacher. Where would you like to work ? You could work anywhere in the world as a teacher.  CR : Garden School, of course ! ( pensive for a while ) I've changed my mind, I don't want to grow up.  Karen : Why ??  CR : Because if I grow up, you'll die.  Karen : What do you mean ? CR : You were grown up when your mum died, so I don't want to grow up ! Karen : Hey, she didn't die because I grew up, she died because she had an accident.  CR : So where is she now ?  Karen : Oh. She's up in the sky in Heaven. It's a great place.  CR : If it...

DURING a night out yesterday, I met this dude - a friend of a friend. A shy guy. A man of few words.  " So what do you do for a living ? " I do initiate conversations, you know...especially after a cognac or two.   " I'm a designer for an insurance company." " Oh nice. You design their ad campaigns ? " Seriously. How fun can it be to design ads for an insurance company . " No. I design the policies." " You mean you design insurance policies as in the products that insurance agents force on people like me ?"  Here's when I perked up.  " Yeah. I design those. Boring work ".  " Boring? Well yeah. Perhaps.  But I don't randomly meet people who design those. You must be smart. So tell me. How come you get to design insurance policies and I don't. " Interesting.  He laughed.  " I had no choice. Nothing interested me in school. I just happened to be fairly good in math."   ...

Wuthering Heights next to some teen vamp books. Think about it. Heathcliff and Catherine are kind of vampirical in their craze for each other, no? I CAME across this while wandering around in a book store yesterday. Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights in the Teen Read section ? I don't know of any teenagers who read  this classic anymore, what with fine literature like * Twilight and all occupying the prime display areas in the store these days. Who reads D.H Lawrence anymore, right ?  :) I must have read Wuthering Heights for at least 10 - 15 times, with the favourite passages read much more, when I was a teenager. I have two of the same book because the first one had started falling apart after some time. I knew the pages with my favourite Catherine and Heathcliff speeches by heart and often found myself dwelling on them the more I read it. Oh well. It was one of my literature books in school but I liked it better than the rest for its dark story and characters who are j...

TWO nights ago, I had the pleasure of attending an Italian wine dinner at this restaurant in the city. Good stuff. Fine wine with a Michelin star chef in the house. I was feeling a little anti-social that evening, so I wasn't sure if the lanky caucasians occupying most of the seats across the dining hall were actually Italians. The five-foot (more or less) tall chef, on the other hand, couldn't have been more Italian that he already was :)  My attention fell on this lady. With her, you'd know she's Italian a mile away. Loud and animated with lots of hand gesture, hearty laughter with an interesting, curly accent when she spoke. She had a sense of humour and I mean, she really was funny with all of that put together.  "This wine is from a vintage to remember. But I tell you, you drink wine to forget, not to remember.  "To forget your boss, your husband or whoever you want to forget," she said, holding up a particular range of Italian red.  I was smil...

LOVELY Miss  Azra  has tagged me. It's fun once in a while to do this sort of thing and questions here seem doable too. I'll try to keep my answers short and sweet, resisting the urge to ramble since it's all about Me, Myself and I ! 1. What is your favourite saying, or motto ?  It doesn't matter. Don't worry about it.  Basically, I just try to see the positives in most shitty situations. Realistically.   2. What is your dream job ?  It ranges from being a tour guide, a travel writer and a secret agent to a medical rep, a rose picker for Chanel gardens in France and an English teacher to those under 12. I'm allergic to teenagers. 3. What part of the world do you have little interest in travelling to ? And which part of the world is next on your list ?  I have little interest in Jakarta and Bangladesh, or any place where the temperature is -45 Deg Celcius for most of the year.  My dream destination is Africa. Next on list is eithe...

DO people generally become more cynical as they grow older, or is it just me ? I can't help constantly analysing a situation over and over again if I think something is really wrong. Maybe it's just a need to question in me.  Like when the state of local tourism upsets me, I complain. No, really. It even makes me angry and I'm quite embarrassed sometimes for all the products which are bundled-up in sub-standard packages when they have such great potentials among local and foreign tourists. Couple of weeks ago, I was on a local tour in the Kuala Langat district for some reason. Not exactly a place I'd voluntarily want to hang out but in that one day of going about the area, I noticed that efforts to promote the destinations were really just what you could term as half-baked. I visited a museum which had an exhibition space that was probably smaller than a jail cell (O kay, I'm exaggerating but really, why bother with it when it doesn't exactly WOW you. I was d...

NAYATI has been found ! Yes, the 12-year-old who made headlines the past week and had the nation and half the world worried about him was found a couple of days ago, safe and sound. He is a brave little boy. I guess all that positive energy directed at having him back home safe has paid off. My weekend has just begun with me staring into the rather choppy waves of Pantai Tengah in Langkawi. Sue me, but holiday or not, part of relaxing for me definitely involves some bit of worldly connections like the Internet! I was pretty damn upset when I learnt that there was no WiFi in the rooms when I arrived here yesterday. Things are looking good at Frangipani Resort and Spa today though. Not too many tourists taking up these lazy chairs and the sound of waves is beginning to do some bit of damage control to my sanity after last night :)    A new day... Mich and I, not too groggy today A nice blue day Mich doing her thing I should learn to be just candid Such a s...