No wonder I'm a mess

Flashback #BST47835G

When I was in primary school there was this one question a teacher asked the class. It was during the religious studies period and being a heathen non-believer I was in the class of leftovers. Yes yes, I know I'm going to hell. I've been told many a time already. Don't bother, I've heard it. Even from my own girlfriend 2 relationships ago. She told me with a look that said that it was so sad it had to happen because I was going to burn even if I didn't really deserve to but I could save myself if I wanted to.

Please. Gimme a fucking break.

I told her she's only a christian because she was born into a christian family and she'd been fed propaganda in church all her life. I told her that I thought her sister who's a devout christian was a insufferable bitch and a hypocrite. That got her to thinking because she couldn't disagree with me there. I'm not saying religion is wrong. We'd all like something to fall back on when all that's left is hope. All I would like is a little more thought and brain processing thrown in.

Anyway, back to the question. The question was, what are the world's seven continents. I could name all seven so I put up my hand and provided North America. One down, six to go right? Wrong. The dumb cow screwed up her face, thought real hard and then told me that no, North America is not a continent.

It is of my opinion that if you are teaching primary school, you don't ask little kids a question you don't even know the answer to yourself. I was perplexed. This was a teacher. Scion of information and knowledge. Then another kid put up his hand and informed dear teechur that North America is indeed one of the world's continents. She accepted that from that kid.

When you're in school there are the kids that the teachers tend to favour cos they're more outspoken and hardworking. Hardworking doesn't equate intelligent. All you do in school is regurgitate lessons. I was one of the more quiet ones. I was one of them kids that didn't want attention while wanting it secretly. Self esteem issues you understand.

Anyway I remember one incident involving one of these fucking teacher's pets. The teacher marking the English essays came to show my class teacher one pet's essay. In a word it was shit. There was the teacher pointing out the mistakes, the little bastard giggling and my class teacher tut-tutting. Anyway, conclusion. She 'give chance' to the little bastard. I quote, "Sooooo lucky. I give chance." There were other kids who really tried their best but found it hard going. English isn't used in many a household here. They got a lot worse marks for their essays despite trying while the giggling little cunt got away with it when he didn't give a shit.

Anyway, it ain't over. How this little cunt further improved his standing with the class teacher was to rat on me. I wasn't particularly interested in what the teacher was saying once during class. It wasn't a lesson and I was more interested in a new story book. So I was reading the book under the desk (the book was under the desk Einstein, not me) and this little bitch was sucking up to the teacher by standing by her desk giving her love while she talked and then walked over to my desk and dobbed me in.

I would have loved to have smacked him a good one but that would have only landed me in worse trouble because you don't beat up tattle tale teacher's pets and get away with it. Anyway to top it off, this teacher didn't like me at all for some reason and loved to pick on me. This was pure joy to her. Anyway, I ended up in deep shit and it went all the way to the headmistress. That's how the headmistress, Mrs. Loke came to know me. Two years later, she was probably the only adult in the school to believe in me and my potential. Too bad the very next year I moved up to secondary school where I suppose I sunk again. I also suppose all I needed was for someone to believe in me. I did mention self esteem issues didn't I?

No wonder I'm a mess.

Jackass Got Nuthin' On Me

I've just seen the second Jackass movie. The first one was already pretty weird and the second went to new heights. I can deal with the painful and strange. I'm just not very keen on the disgusting. Leaving aside the stunts which involved feces (human or otherwise) and other bodily wastes, it's pretty much good brainless humour.

Which is why kids in America have been doing really stupid things while one of their dimwitted buddies holds the camcorder.

But this is not a post about that.

This is a flashback.

When I was really young I fell down the stairs. From the top of the stairs to the landing in the middle. By some freak chance I fell just like a stuntman would. The roll was perfect. After crashing and rolling down the first set of stairs I remember standing up and wondering how I managed to roll down the stairs completely unharmed. My mum was sitting on the sofa wide eyed and open mouthed. I think she was really really relieved to see me stand up and walk without fuss. However, as curious as one is at such an age (3 years old I think), I had to see if it could be done again. Before my mum could do anything sensible I promptly threw myself down the next set of stairs. The result was about the same.

I got to the end of the stairs.

The only difference was this time I really hurt myself. I remember howling away while being comforted by my mum. I think mum was more perplexed than anything else really. I also think that's when my sister decided I was the dimwitted one in the family and proceeded to treat me as such until our teenage years.

So yeh.... before Johnny Knoxville and Bam Margera thought about doing shit where you get yourself hurt, well bugrem, I was already doing it.

What does it mean?!?!?

This posting is one of reminiscence. It took place when I was 14, a Form 2 student in St. Michael's Institution in Ipoh. We had a change of class teacher midway through the year and among the subjects she taught was English. In a government school it isn't difficult to be a star student in English given the ridiculously low standard of the subject taught.

Well, our new teacher, Mrs. Samuel was still early in her tenure as a SMI teacher and like most new teachers would have liked to learn that the class she had was a good class and not full of trouble makers. She was having us for English one fine day and I killed two birds with one stone while appearing completely innocent.

We were doing words ending with 'graphy' and already on the board were words like geography and photography. I could have been a smartass and given her 'cinematography' but felt like being quiet that day. Enter Lum Kai Hoong, my classmate, eager beaver to make a good impression on our new teacher. He asked me for a word and I gave him one. He shot his hand into the air and waited expectantly. Mrs Samuel turned a happy (class had been going well) benevolent eye on him and asked him what his word was. He shot to his feet gave her a winning smile and almost shouted out "pornography!!!". Of course being Malaysian, he pronounced it "Porno-Grafee".

That's when Mrs Samuel's smile became fixed.

Once he'd noticed, his smile became rather fixed as well. In the stunned (and also puzzled) silence of the class I had great difficulty smothering what was a quiet chuckle threatening to turn into loud gaffaws.

Still wearing the fixed smile Mrs Samuel turned away and asked if anyone else had a word ending in 'graphy'. Kai Hoong sat slowly down, his face a picture and was silent for about 2 seconds. Naturally he noticed 'his' word wasn't added to the words already written on the blackboard. After the 2 seconds had lasped, he turned on me in complete panic demanding to know what the word meant.

It was 19 years ago.

I still laugh about it every few years or so. I'm sharing it with you now.

Why yes, I do read

I received a message on friendster sometime back:

> Hi ya
> Read your profile. Kind of intriguing... since I rarely meet guys who read much.

What sort of age have we arrived at if male book readers are rare and at a premium? Note surreptitious wink here.

I did answer and I thought I'd post my answer here:

Hullo,Nice of you to write me. Your prolfile says you're 86 years old. You look remarkably good for one at that age. What's your secret?

I'm teasing. Why your age is significant to answering your message will be apparent as we go along.

I'm already 32 and at an age where there are huge gaps and differences with those younger than myself.I grew up when there were only 2 channels on TV never mind dedicated viewing channels. I didn't watch much TV as a result. Also in my teens I was restricted to a one hour show a week limitation by my parents. It did ensure I wasn't glued to the TV the whole day. I was usually looking for something to do.

There was no Astro. There were no playstations nor x-boxes. No cell phones. The emphasis on entertainment and amusement for children back then was more pure, more physical and more interactive on a personal level. I hung out with the neighbourhood kids and played football, rode bicycles and played many other games, a lot of it improvised.I did grow up surrounded by books. I really mean a lot of books. More than a hundred Enid Blyton books, the entire Peter and Jane series and other assorted books. My parents' books, which I was to progress to, numbered in the hundreds. Authors like Gerald Durrell, James Herriot, Roald Dahl, P.G. Wodehouse, James Joyce, J.R.R. Tolkien to name a few, are not to be sneezed at. I left my mother's Mills and Boons alone though. They were horrible little things and never racy enough.

That I have grown up to be pierced and tattooed, rock and metal loving guitar player, OTT footballer and porn connoisseur does not surprise me. I was heading that way throughout my formative years. I do however have a foundation of being brought up in a cultured environment. Music, art, books, nature.

So yeah, I read a lot.

- Sen

Growing Up Bullied

Kids are fucking little monsters. What I mean is, of course they're not engaging in coital activity with small supernatural entities, rather, kids are fucking little monsters. Note how I cleverly cleared things up with the clever use of italics. I should explain myself right? Of course I should. Just so I don't get buried by hate mail.

The urge to dominate is a primitive instinct to establish social order. Sometimes it means who gets sex and who doesn't. I'm sorry. I mean it establishes mating and procreational rights. It's not exclusive to primates though one of the best examples you might see of this behaviour is at night clubs. These days all you have to do to be Alpha Male is to be white. Or at least half white.

But anyway. Back to it.

Kids themselves tend to have their own social order. A lot of what you come across is the need to empower themselves. That's why they run around in groups cos there's strength in numbers. In the group itself you can bet your ass they have their own social order. It's never the smartest kid. It'll be the biggest kid. Individually, kids will bully other kids to get that sweet high of the all important power rush. That's why kids like to play with toy guns. Cos on TV when you've got the gun and no one else does, they yo bitches - while you still got the gun. Don't lose the gun okay?

Kids target kids who are different. Of course the smaller weaker kids are natural targets. They resort to another one of nature's wonderful things. It's called symbiosis. It's a fancy word but it happens everywhere. Even in prison. When a big dood is happy harry cos he's got himself a cell bitch and his cell bitch is assured of being protected from the other inmates, that's symbiosis.

Carrying on, all you have to be to be bullied is different. The only different kids that don't get bullied are those that are already shaving in pre-school and have nicknames like 'Mongo'. Then again, they probably get it from other Mongos from higher grades. Eventually they group together to extort lunch money. Mongos Inc is now a gang. To be different, all you got to be is one of the following: smart, stupid, ugly, beautiful, retarded, disabled, weak, rich, poor, the wrong color, six fingers, one eye.... you get the drift.

All it is is a natural process of growing up. Kids need boundaries, guidance and example. If a kid is a rotten kid, blame the parents. There's something wrong there. Beating seven kinds of crap out of a kid at home for misbehaving doesn't work either. Now that that social order's established it fuels the urge for this kid to do some establishing of his own so he establishes royally on his younger sister who in turn does her bit in the classroom. Especially if there's no cat at home to kick.

My parents decided that my sister and I would grow up like any other kid. This means we pretended that living in a house where my bedroom was bigger than the living room in some of my friends' houses was normal. I was given less allowance than my small-house-living friends. To learn the value of money apparently. In all, it must have worked. I'm a stingy bastard when it comes to money. As the younger of two I tended to try to dominate my peers except that I was one of the smallest kids around and I was frightened of everything. I got beat up by my sister at home and the cats at home had died by then but I assure you that was nothing to do with me. Just the recipe for a complete bastard by 21 but no one accounted for my mum. My mother may not have done a perfect job but I think she did a damn good one. We were brought up with a proper balance of love and discipline and with enough protection from outside influences that we were protected but no so much that we became dependant on that. I love my father. I carry many of his personality traits myself and learnt a lot from him. All I'm saying is is that it was my mother that did all the delicate balancing.

As for being the rich kid. I paid my dues. I was put on a school bus like any normal kid. Every other kid on the bus lived in a low cost housing area. They'd be on the bus and I'd get picked up. These little bastards were like ninjas. I'll tell you why. It first started with the verbal assault. They'd talk loudly amongst each other about me and I'll bet you it wasn't about how nice my parents' house is. Luckily for me my cantonese is shit. My cantonese is still shit 25 years on so you can imagine I didn't know diddly squat back then. I was one of those sensitive cry babies. It would have really hurt my feelings if I understood them. I always had my head down and I didn't ever say a thing. That didn't change when the physical assault started. I got punched, kicked and slapped around like a little bitch but I never reacted. Could be what saved me, could be what condemned me to more of the same. Anyway, the fucking little monsters would fuck me up quietly enough just so the bus driver wouldn't notice. Right little ninjas those bloody kids.

When I was 12, I grew seven inches in that one year I was in Standard 6. I went from something like 4 feet 5 inches to 5 feet 2 inches. In a single year. This is the single most important thing that happened to me as far as bullying was concerned. One, it chilled me out totally. I didn't need to bully anyone anymore. I didn't have to be able to fend for myself either. I was one of the biggest kids in class. I could fend like anything if I needed to. And I didn't. I didn't need to. But. When I was 12, I beat up, no, I royally beat up one of my classmates. I beat this kid so bad it was the last physical fight I ever had in school. No one messed with me after that. Talk about stupid, the kid I smashed was the aggressor and I don't mean he just called me names.

I stopped growing when I was 14 and reached the height of 5' 7". That bummed me out but from the perspective of this blog posting, I was already a giant. Kids remember. To this day, some of my friends from school still think I'm taller than they are when they overtook me about 15 years ago.

Which comes to the main theme of all this. There're mean people out there. People who are mean just for the sake of being mean. Even nice people can be mean. I'm nice. But I can be mean. Usually to someone who can't retaliate. In the end, all of us, every single one of us. Look at how people behave towards one another, in life, in love, in business, everything. Look back at everything I've written so far and tell me adults don't do the same shit. In the end, we're all just a bunch of fucking kids.