and so i’m back home, lovingly wrapped in the familiar mid-year haze and the sounds of the tau foo far man trundling through the suburban afternoon. i’ve been home for a little less than a week now, and my activity spent so far can be summarized as a heady mix of slothful and irresponsible. four days of unadulterated sleep, eat and play have done much for my soul! i would gladly extend this hedonism, but alas, work knocks on my door.

i love my new job! actually, it’s probably too early to assert that, because it’s only my third day on the internship. can’t talk much about the job as usual (at least this time there wasn’t a discretion contract to sign), but it’s been all sorts of fantastic so far. well-defined hours, a wide spectrum of tasks, flexibility to choose what i want to be involved in, exciting and meaningful work, and a great boss — he took me out with some other colleagues yesterday for a bak kut teh lunch at a secret spot in old klang road. bak kut teh!!! i dont see how lunchtime gets any better than this! plus i get my own room at the office, and my colleagues keep feeding me various snacks. best! :D

also, there has been a new addition to my household:

2 month old male pomeranian, nameless as of now, belongs to Tall Brother and his girlfriend. this comes after many years of me begging my parents to let me keep a dog, which for as long as i can remember has been met with dismissive and unreasonable rejection. and they thought it fine to mention the new puppy to me only mere hours before i was to fly back. so, being the green-eyed monster that i am, i was feeling quite resentful throughout the flight, and vowed to not talk to the dog when i see it at home. BUT THEN they brought it with them to the airport, all swaddled in soft cloth, looking absolutely angelic – and it was love at first sight. how does one not love something that looks like that! i mean, look at it:

sigh. defeated by cuteness. now i have to play with it every day or i can’t sleep. i also have to excuse myself early from my appointments so that i can go home and see it. even the fact that it has no name is quite cute.

in other news, i just picked up a Blackberry yesterday. i havent played with it too much yet, but some preliminary comparisons with the iPhone 4 are that the BB’s OS is more robust and takes functional to a new level. but being a fairly new user on both phones, i have to say that the iPhone is much more new user friendly. i didnt once have to look at the manual when i got the iPhone, but there was a lot of fiddling around with the BB before i knew what went where (eg how do i close all apps simultaneously??). the BB reminds me of using a PC after spending some time on a Macbook — too many clicks needed and a lot of clutter when i’m trying to do something simple. i do think that once you go touch screen, you can’t ever go back (or at least that’s the case for me), and customizable touch screens are going to be a bare necessity for smartphones in time to come. but then again i’m quite n00b when it comes to this stuff :) so i’m going to play around with the BB for a little bit more before i verbalize any further opinions. but if someone could tell me how i can quickly and painlessly transfer my contacts from the phone memory (inbuilt memory, not SIM or SD card memory) of my former Nokia N82 to the BB, i would be very grateful. currently i have all the contacts copied to the SD card as well, and sending via bluetooth seems to not work for some reason. i’d like to avoid going to a store, but if i must then i guess i must…

oh before i forget! dear folks, are there any new eats in the Klang Valley that are absolute must-tries? i’ve been hitting up all my old favourites in the past week, but i hear the dining and hawker scene has sprouted some new limbs lately with places like solaris, brickfields and hartamas undergoing some metamorphoses. i actually haven’t been to cristang yet, so i suppose that’s my next to-do. i’d muchly appreciate more suggestions of places that have just opened, or even old places that have revamped themselves!

also, just one last time:

test blogging from my new iPhone. yes, I have joined the legion of Steve Jobs’ bright eyed and bushy tailed. liking the device very much so far, but like I tweeted recently, the iPhone 4 isn’t perfect until FaceTime can be used on 3G and there is an app that allows the phone to expel air conditioning from the speaker vents. but ok la still quite awesome cos it feels like a new world has just unfolded at my fingertips.

am attaching a photo of the Brooklyn bridge against a shimmering manhattan canvas. Kafka and I went to dinner last night in Brooklyn, and the view from our table was just spectacular. the restaurant rests on a barge anchored to the concrete shores of the East River, floating just under the majestic Brooklyn Bridge and ensconcing diners in the marvel of lower manhattan from afar. I have this recurrent dream where I wake up alone in an apartment tinted dark blue with this city’s amorphous skyline. the view from my bedroom window is always the same yet never feels familiar. it’s just one of those entities in life that will always be so gorgeous to the eye, but just a little painful to reflect upon.

i’ll be home in KL by two days. summer in New York has been exciting and relaxing but as always I can’t wait to be back in the familiar folds of friends, family and sang har meen.

could get used to this blogging from phone thing!

aiyak lari margins. will fix from home… on my macbook. haha.

Saya sebuah kereta Proton. Saya dilahir …

my undying cynicism of people’s intentions will one day be the death of me. it is a sort of cautious suspicion that appears to be rather useful artillery in this dog-eat-dog world that spins on an axis of the survival of the fittest… but as my own history will tell me — and i’m sure the history of many others out there — such artillery is only useful if it comes with some sort of a compass. it is an ongoing theme in my life: i am constantly trusting all the worst friends (people), and subjecting the ones who love me most to an increasingly harrowing gauntlet of tests. it’s not that i don’t love them too. in most cases i think i love them more than they love me. but it’s almost like i can’t quite understand why they love me, and why they are here in my life. it’s sort of why girls love asking their perplexed (and often frustrated) boyfriends why he loves her. ‘i just do’ doesn’t quite cut it. it’s not that we’re vain, or stirring shit – we just want to know if you really know who we are. ‘because you’re cute, pretty, smart, kind’ doesn’t cut it either. every 5th girl on the street probably has that combination and there’s nothing at all amazing about it, as well as nothing thoughtful about such an analysis. someone once told me that he knew he loved her when she yelled at him for not registering to vote. i thought that was all kinds of wonderful, even if she made him sleep on the couch for a night.

i knew i loved him when:

1 – he canceled a date with me at the last possible minute to help his mother with grocery shopping

2 – we were looking at shooting stars outside my house, in the restless night, and he ‘gave’ me two shooting stars because i was sad that i’d spotted two less shooting stars than he had

3 – the 7th or so time that he came home to get me for lunch, and it occurred to me that this was going to happen every day for as long as we both wanted

4 – as we were breaking up, in the yellow cab, i moved to kiss him on the cheek and he turned away and said, please don’t do that

i always say that i will learn how to just blog whenever i want to, instead of accumulating stories or leaving my thoughts to marinate for too long — but i never do. which has resulted in a blog that’s been stagnant for the most part as of late. some days i toy with the idea of shutting down quaintly.net, but almost immediately it morphs into something quite comical. i think i’m just pathologically lazy (and a procrastinator). and like the rest of us who are growing up, i’m spending less and less time on the internet, and more time in the real world. also, less and less time in my own head, and more time in the real world. it’s a strange feeling. i’m perpetually feeling like i’m out of my element and drifting away. but the dreams that come to me in the spidery threads of the early mornings have been keeping me true to myself. today i dreamt that we were both in the same store, and as i was leaving and he was entering, we caught each other’s eyes. no hugs, kisses, nothing. just a sky blue tshirt and two smiles- but before i knew it we were fighting and a slap was thrown. a stunned face. and then i woke up to the most comfortable bed in the world, and a sensation that felt dangerously like a heart attack.

i’m learning to do lots of things, as well as unlearning. i’m learning how to hold back from saying too much, yet unlearning how to be cynical and suspicious of people’s intentions. they kind of work in opposite directions but i dont think it’s impossible to strike that balance if i can find the right force to use on both sides of the equation. okay bye late for dinner.