The Trip Starts When You Pack Your Bag

Sunday night 11PM. My mate Ian rang me up.
"Shall we go up tomorrow?" he asked.
"Forecast looks bad, it's probably going to be flat," I said.

Ten minutes later, he rang again. "Fuck it, let's just go up. Worst scenario we'll just go for a paddle!"

Fighting a cold that had started since morning, I started packing. The trip has already started!

My excitement prevented me from falling asleep, but at 5AM I was already up.

Monday morning drive on the hazy road, early morning carb-rich breakfast then the drive to the spots, my cold has vanished into thin air.

The salty tang in the air, the grainy sand beneath our feet. A secret spot, four of us in the water. Waist-high wall peeling left and right. It wasn't perfect but we were too happy to care. To have the boards on our feet, to have salt water splashing on our faces, to look far to the horizon waiting, that was a gift. Four hours and a sunburn on my cheeks later, the tide was going out and it was too shallow to do anything. Up we packed, contented and couldn't ask for more.

On the drive back, we stopped by the local market to pick up some vegetables, bananas, watermelons, and mushrooms before heading home, heads filled with nothing else but a dream of another day like this.

A Long Sad Weekend

It's official.
There will be no surf this coming long public holiday weekend.
Flat as a lake it will be.


All the wait and anticipation! The bubbling excitement! The crammed work hours just so I can surf like heaven this weekend! Alas alas, Neptune king and the north-east swell! No gift for us this week!

No midnight six-hour drive to destination! No early morning eye rub jumping out of bed! My four days, what am I to do with them? I might just use them to go back to work! Cruel weather! Long has been my wait and now this!

An almost-flat but happier day from a year ago. When you can't choose you take anything.

My Bamboo Tree

My last two posts have been rather mellow, dealing with the pain of loss. Blame it on my mother who threw away my bamboo plants that I have kept at the corner of my flat for more than two years. My bamboo which has grown from some 30cms green sticks to this foliage of flushed green.

The damage started when the National Environment Agency came to inspect my flat for the possible breeding ground of Aedes Aegypti mosquitoes. Both my folks happened to be around then and, worried about the possible $200 fine which will be imposed should larvae of Aedes Aegypti be found, they bugged me for the next two weeks to change the water where the bamboo resided happily to a pot of soil. From then on it all went downhill.

The new leaves started to withered and yellowed. When I looked at my bamboo daily I wondered if this particular type of bamboo would survive the harsh soil condition as they have always been spotted to be left in a vase of water.

Then my sis was infected with dengue. That was the guillotine for my poor bamboo. My family decided that my bamboo was the definite hiding ground for those damn mosquitoes and posed the ultimatum to discard the terror. My brother even pointed that it was my fault my sis was having dengue, that it was all because of my bamboo.

To avoid global melt down I let my mom get rid of it.

Goodbye my bamboo tree. I will miss talking to you.

Once Upon a Time at the Line-Up

I used to know a surferboy. Long is his hair and burned by the sun is his skin. We first met while surfing side by side and he asked me my name. We surfed together for over two years: across the strait, in Bali's water, in China Beach, even in the chlorine water of man-made surf pool.

He came back yesterday. I sent him off early this morning.

It would've been so much easier to come home. Mais non. Je peux pas.

波はどこへ帰るのか

Last night while I was on Messenger a long-lost surf friend started a chat with me.

She used to be my surf-buddy. I knew her on my first year of surf and since then we had gone for several surf trips together and countless surf trips across the strait. We had sat at the line up together singing songs of the sea and listening to whispers of wind and the crashing of waves. We have walked many miles, from one point to another, surfboards in hands and soles burnt by hot asphalt or sand. We have given waves to one another, laughed when wiping out, gave high fives for each good ride caught, ogled at surferboys, and got mad with the cab drivers for making us late to the ferry terminal.

She was a better surfer than me, just for the fact that she will not hesitate to go in no matter what the water condition is. I won points only on the basis that I observed the rule of right of way and I'd look left right front and back before taking any wave where she would've taken any wave and dropped in on anyone. She always have cuts and stitches because of this.

She told me then that we must have been sisters in our past life, borne to poor fishermen parents, where we would travel miles to look for fish. I thought she should've injected more optimism in her dream of our past life but she liked that story.

And then she started her dragon boat thingy. I knew why she did that. She was desperate to find her direction before it becomes too late. But instead of sitting down and have a proper look at it she started running around like a chicken with tail on fire. And then she never came to surf anymore. And then she only called me once when she needed me to be her visa guarantor. The last time I heard of her was from some other surf friend who said that she was going back to Japan.

So last night she typed to me.

She said that she had been thinking about me since she returned to Japan. She still said that she doesn't know what to do in her life and that she'd rather die. I have been wanting her to sit down and deal with this honestly with herself but she has always buried her head in the sand. She said it's hard for people to change so don't expect it. She said thanks for all the things I've done for her and she wished me happiness.

Two years ago we still talked of surfing together when we are old grandmothers. Last night I couldn't even ask her if we'll ever be at the line up together again.

I guess things just do change.

Where There is Smoke There is Fire

The annual forest burning festival is on again. Year after year, Indonesia burns acres of her forest away, as the cheapest way to clear lands ensure the expansion of palm oil, wood pulp and other rubber industries. Come September-October every year, expect haze of different thickness and choke level to envelope both Singapore and Malaysia.

Last Friday I came out of the office at 9PM to fog-filled streets. Visibility was so bad it was reminiscent of London. Only that my eyes started to become teary and my lungs choked. It was like in a chamber filled with second-hand smoke, and there was nowhere to run. Later on I found out that the PSI (Pollutants Standard Index) was at 150 at that hour, which, according to government measure causes "mild aggravation symptoms among susceptible persons and transient symptoms of irritation in some of the healthy population." Increase the PSI another 50 points and it will cause "moderate aggravation of symptoms and decreased tolerance." Should it shoot up to 300, be ready for "early onset of certain diseases." It has also been recommended lately that the "general population should reduce vigorous outdoor activity."

The highest ever recorded PSI was in September 1997 when it hit 226, the year that forest fire released 2.57 gigatonnes of Carbon Dioxide into the atmosphere.

And the problem comes back year after year because it is very difficult to prosecute offenders, particularly the big plantation companies. Local authorities do not enforce regulations, and officials are confused about just which agency has jurisdiction over fire issues.

Like the saying goes "doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different result, that is insanity."

Welcome to ignorance, apathy and corruption.

My dad used to say to us, "Go play outside where the air is fresh!". It seems now Glade Air Freshener vision has come true: "The air is cleaner inside".

Such Great Heights

My favourite song, Ben Folds' cover. This was suppposed to be some impromptu performance where they just picked random instruments and jammed this out. I like the lead singer because he reminds me of Jack Nicholson. In spite of his bad hair.

Night of the Living Crawlies

My friend told me her theory that every living adult has a worm or two in his or her guts.

I protested. I don't like the idea that while I'm sleeping, some slimy creatures of hideous monstrosity crawl inside my intestines roaming my guts, popping out its head out every now and then out of my nostrils or behinds. I don't like the idea that when I'm eating, I'm indirectly feeding that creature inside, and that it gets the best of the vitamins and minerals out of the food I eat, leaving my body the empty roughage for the bulk.

My friend insisted that it is true. She asked me , "Have you ever felt some tickling in your throat, one time or other? Or some indescribable tickle up your arse at night?"

I thought for a while before I said yes.

"That's your worm trying to come out," she assured me. "That's their tails you are feeling."

God, why do you have to create creatures such as worms and flukes to infest our guts? I can live with those poor earth worms crawling out of the earth after a night's rain, showing the world their pitiful pinkish segmented bodies wriggling away (by the way, earthworms are hermaphrodites). But worms crawling in human's guts, attaching their hooks and suckers in my intestines and dispensing their proglottids from time to time to accomodate their lengths inside me is a totally different matter altogether.

Why I started thinking about worm-infestation was because I suspected that I might just got my gastric flu from some raw fish salad I ate at the food stall near my work place. I hate myself for eating it. It was definitely fresh water fish, whose preparation and hygiene frankly escaped my mind. For all I know it could be the salmonella or some other rotovirus which got into me from those chunks of flesh. But it could also be some worm larvae now that my imagination has been fired up. The symptoms are the same: abdominal discomfort, diarrhoea, vomiting, and weight loss.

Check this out: That is one motherfxxxing tapeworm inside a carp, which is a very common freshwater fish eaten in Asia.

I read in an article in the Guardian years before about some girls who are desperate to lose weight swallowing 'diet pills' containing tapeworms. They would let the tapeworms suck every food items that they eat until they reach their desired weight, then they would swallow some anti-worm medicines to expel the worms. Ingenious. I don't know how true it is but I can't imagine myself doing that. Consciously swallowing tapeworms. It requires guts.

Of course my mother would ask me if I'd swallow one of those in the event that I was being forced to should I be in some kind of roman prisons. She loves these hypothetical questions where I would be subjected to various forms of tortures and I had to choose what to do. She told me the story from some olden movie she watched with my grandad, that of a roman prisoner being fed a burger filled with worms. Because the dungeon was dark the starving prisoner had no idea and would just chew on it. She told me that story while we were having dinner when I was about eight. But I thought, didn't the worms smell?

Anyway, back to the tapeworms. Here is an interesting story I found on this guy who suffered from some tapeworm infection. http://fray.com/drugs/worm/

I certainly hope that my friend is wrong, that those tickles are just some inexplicable bodily functions that humans have to experience every now and then.

Oh, and she said too, that sometimes when you feel those tickles on your soles, as if some small creatures are wriggling their way into your skin, well, it is of those worm larvae. In the tropics worm eggs are everywhere in the air and are just waiting for hosts to enter into. You step onto one of those and there they go burrowing themselves into your skin.