festivus season

part of living in a foreign country is giving up the cues related to the traditions at home. this might not always be the case, if i were living in europe easter would be a shared tradition with the same springtime cues of softening weather and newly grown flowers. but attempting to get into the christmas spirit by listening to the playfulness of monkeys in the jungle, competing to be heard over the muezzin's melodic adhan (call to prayers), is harder than it sounds.

tropical days, monsoon storms and sweaty nights all hinder the ability for an american to sense the impending return of the giving season. after spending an afternoon of frustration at a local temple of commerce. the strange part of the trip was realizing that other than a few other mat salleh, no one else there was christmas shopping. there were lit trees, fake presents, signs of santa and carols playing over speakers, but most people were there to do back to school shopping.

the trip began and ended in the cork screwed patterns of congestion which derive from asian expectations of difficult lives. the roads, parking garages and escalators which are keys to the malls here all move in patterns of reversed decent. i was reminded of dante's inferno, the decline into the levels of hell with the warning "abandon all hope, ye who enter here" can only be appreciated after a trip to malaysia's malls. liberal arts students in catholic colleges back home should be required to travel here before exams. it is the only way to truly understand the meaning of the divine comedy.

i have pending invitations to holiday parties. one i think i will miss is tonight, it is for the dongzhi (extreme winter) festival. the invitation came from an tamil mom who is making tangyuan for her chinese kids. the whole yin and yang aspect of this holiday has a strong draw, but the need to celebrate the lengthening of the days when the difference between winter and summer is only 20 extra minutes of equally intense sunlight is lost on me. the symbolism of reunion that the sticky balls of rice evoke might be better savored alone.

tomorrow night i am going to a festivus party. a celebration will be hosted by an iranian amercian athiest and will be celebrated with stark lack of decorations, airing of grievances and feats of strength. this is clearly a no miss event that is core to the expat holiday season. the guys back in the US add in street hockey and liberal use of alcohol, this will be replaced by low contact wii sports and culturally sensitive non-haraam beverages. as long as someone raises their voice and possibly throws food, it should provide the feeling of a trip home for the holidays.

this will bring me to the end of week hunt for legal turkey. the normally halal favorite of benjamin franklin has a reputation of improper murder in malaysia. the symbolism of needing to search for dinner with an approved death certificate, on the celebration of a prophet's birth does make me smile. what would a holiday be without a question of the legality of the main dish.

i will end the day listening to the jungle outside, hearing rumblings of distant thunder and thinking about christmas morning in the US. as i watch the sparkles of light through clouds i will think about opening of presents, shoveling of walks, driving to the in-laws to exchange gifts and trade custody of kids. the true nature of christmas is best understood while watching it from half a world away, yet another event that is only truly experienced by watching it from the outside.

winter solstice is the shortest day of the year. it is celebrated across the globe in many different ways. the semi-dry festivus for the rest of us is the one i am looking forward to, for others i should just look away.

saying nothing

it’s been months since i have published. the time has passed and i have had random moments and thoughts, but they have passed without being considered. i have been busy, i have written but allowed the words to be lost in a crash and unrecovered when restarting, i have gotten close and then reconsidered the desire to hit continue. something has stopped me from writing; i can’t seem to commit to the process. i need to figure out what, because my writing had become more than just a thing to do in a café.

i was given some advice last year. the advice was that my writing was too long. i needed to keep it short and get to the point. the advice was professional, and made sense coming from someone who read all my emails on a blackberry, but it has impacted this writing also. i no longer have the time to sit and craft a long message that no one is going to read. i enjoy the process, but it feels like a waste. i feel the muse moving away, pushed because she is impatient. she wants to get to the point, but it was never about getting to the point; it was seeing where the journey would take us. the muse has been driven away by the boredom and frustration of waiting and i remain on the wandering path.

i read a book a few weeks ago on a plane. the book started as a discussion of why talk therapy is a better solution to alternative psychological states than drugs. the basic premise was that talking allows people in need to get in touch with the deeper cause of their issues. when patients come in to discuss a recent tragedy, they tend to also discuss long ago events. they spend time passing through their lives one painful memory at a time. the author was advocating a culture of listening rather than medicating as a solution to finding solutions.

beginning to write was a way to talk things out. at a time when i was experiencing so many new things, and reconsidering many old, i found digital words to be therapeutic. capturing the moment, thinking through the entire thought, felt right. too many moments had simply passed away and were fading over time. it felt empowering to stop and remember, to realize that new moments were happening and would not just fade as easily into the past. events could be shared, if not immediately then someday in the future when someone took the time to listen.

but part of writing is about trust. trusting yourself to let go and allow yourself to open up, and trusting your readers to listen to your words and not filter then through their preconceptions. we all have cognitive structure bias, those thought patterns that allow us to skim along and make fast judgments in a chaotic world. we hear what we expect to hear, see what we expect to see and add or subtract as needed to fit the world into our comfortable pre-conceived forms.

the issues start when you realize that your readers do not have the same bias as your own. i had a college professor who did an exhibit the semester after i took his art appreciation class. i went to the exhibit with a friend and we stood in front of the work displaying willows on a snow covered field. my friend commented that the work was just about white trees, but i sensed something different. the professor had lost his wife and daughter in a car accident a year before, and as i looked at the center trees, i saw the blackness of the deep forest behind. the work was about the dark depth and the importance of the individual trees, two that i sensed to be missing from the stand on that cold winter day after a new snowfall.

other people’s biases impact our work, they stop them from seeing the truth, and after a while you wonder if there is any reason to keep talking. if they are just going to read their lives into the work, why do you keep making the effort? if you do work you may not publish; no risk of going public ruining it. you need to learn to stack your art in the corner and let it wait for a difference audience.

maybe i have been avoiding writing because i had nothing to say, or maybe because i didn’t trust myself to open up enough to make the process worthwhile. but it could also be that the thoughts are not ready to be added to the cornered pile.

then again, the real issue could be that sitting and doing nothing is easier than working on something that would be read through filters of bias.

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there is an old irish saying: "say nothing, till you hear more". sometimes, less really is more.

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planning relaxation

the end of ramadhan is closing in. next weekend is a double-long weekend, and those of us who do not need to "balik kampung" have made our plans to exit the smallest of the asian capitals in search of relaxation. in my case the plans are a trip to asian bohemia. the trip has been suggested, tentative, mostly-committed, replaced, tentative, mostly-cancelled and finally booked. the expected relaxation is based on the prospect of being able to order foods and have them resemble the origin cuisine, as well as sitting in a brew pub and playing checkers. it is sad that i need to fly three hours to a country with a barely working economy to get fresh beer and an acceptable italian dinner.

this morning started with a quick dash to the embassy for a visa. the standard method of doing this is to have a travel agent have a runner pick up and drop off your passport. these professional line-standers, make the process appear simple and efficient. the busy professional focuses on their work and life while someone else negotiates the bureaucratic minutia.

this didn't work for me for two reasons, first is my general horror at the idea of handing my passport over to anyone who leaves eye contact. my passport is my history, and my future, i have no interest in having it lost because i was too lazy or spoiled to stand in a line. i keep my passport in two places, locked in a safe and hung around my neck. the need to hand the passport over to a face behind a glass wall is stressful, but to hand it to a random guy on a motorcycle who i don't know, that one is just too much for me.

the second reason is that my malaysian IC expires this week. i have been approved for my new IC, have the visa in my passport and am now ready for step three in the process. step three is where i need to give my passport and IC back to the government for the second time in the process. this will allow them to swap one piece of plastic with my picture and title for another. i need my passport and IC to keep me legal in malaysia. a secondary, but real, benefit is that as i enter and exit i get to use the "expat" carpeted lane, rather than the "other passports" cattle queue. with the exception of blocked lanes caused by the abu dhabi womens cricket team, having this express lane is major plus.

so the morning was planned for a quick dash. the embassy "officially" opens at 9:00, so i went to have a coffee and do email before that. i had visions of slipping in after the initial rush, paying to expedite the process from the standard 2 day, to the much more convenient "right now visa". the fees are paid in RM, and compared to the simplicity of getting a entry visa in the bali airport, they are expensive. then again, the visa i just got for china was even more expensive, could it be the more communist a country is the higher they have jacked up the fees?

when i pulled up to the embassy at 10 AM, the crowd of visa waiters sweltering in the sun could be seen from two blocks away. they were pressed against the locked gate, and spilling into the street. i avoided the crush and sun, but that put me at the back of the line. by the time i got a deli-counter number i was 30 tickets back in the queue. given the complete lack of respect for the ticketing system, people just forcing their way to the window and conducting business, it was clear that the quick dash was out of the question.

all in all, it's done; step one, that is. the "right now" visa is apparently no longer available. the clerk told me it was never possible. i reminded her that she was the one that helped me with it two years ago. she smiled and said, "it is no longer available, they now must to go back to vietnam for processing". the salary impacts of taking away the chance to process "expedited" visas locally was a source of pain; if the grimace of regret that accompanied the smile was any indication.

i need to return to have a hopefully approved visa added to my passport. that is two days in the future. in the mean time, there is work-work that will more than fill up the week, an IC to have replaced and i noticed a lack of open space in the passport. it looks like i need to go to the american embassy and get the second set of extension of the pages in the past 4 years. visas that take up a full page are a serious waste of space. needing a new set of pages is one more impact of planning a relaxing weekend away.

wednesday morning is then another sweaty wait at the communist embassy with no visible security, and then a trip to the capitalist embassy where service is smooth and easy, but the process to pass though security is a minimum to two scans and the prospect of a cavity search. the communists have a thin wooden door, and the capitalists have ten foot thick walls. i am not really sure which system is better, they both have elements that could help the other.

can someone explain to me why i am not using a line-stander? this really is a lot of process so i can go to a comfortable cafe and have breakfast that includes sausage made from the animal god created for the breakfast plate. relaxation, simplicity, cafes on the lake, brewpubs, pho and music CDs for RM 1 (USD 0.28)....

yup, its worth the process.

toppatha muffin

i was watching sea-angel eat a muffin this morning, it was wrapped in a tall sheaf of paper and was presented as one cone like shape. the comment was that the muffin was strange, the fact that it was pink was enough for me to know that, but it was the taste and shape that caused the comment. it made me think of the top-of-the-muffin episode from sienfeld, part of which was the hint that taking the top of the muffin, the part most agree is the best, and leaving the bottom is a sign of upper-class greed and veblenish conspicuous consumption.

i have recently made a change in my morning habits. i have stopped stopping for a pancake and a series of chawan kecil and have replaced that with a faster stop for bungkhus caffeine in the malaysianized-seattle style. along with my americano i have found a banana chocolate chip muffin is the perferred source for morning calories and taste. but i have also found that much like the second round of espresso at the bar, the bottom of the muffin is just too much.

i love this muffin, it's better than the muffins starbucks has in the US. those are overly sweet or sadly low in fat and taste. starbucks here is also sadly halal. this is strange to me given the clientele in my sbux who are almost exclusively chinese and expat. the store i am going to is one of the first sbux in the country and has a small but loyal following. i have tried to argue the logic of catering to the market and providing something in some locations that will make the customers you have happy, while not impacting those you don't have. maybe i need to do some market surveys to prove the point, someone needs to lead this charge.

the muffins are good, but just too much. i don't want them smaller, but i have not figured out what do to with the bottoms on the days that enjoyment is second to calorie control. i was reviewing a document with someone, and offered the bottom of the muffin. as a gentlemen, i could have offered the top, but i did not expect acceptance of the offer, and the top is honestly why i purchased the muffin. there was acceptance, with a questioned look of "just the bottom?" she then proceeded to finish the bottom with a gusto and clear appreciation for the sweetness.

so this is the question i have been going over in my head? is it better to offer to share the bottom of the muffin or to suppress the pains and keep the bag closed until you are past the difficult point of sharing what might not be seen as a genuine offer. my grand mother would have said that i should have offered to top of the muffin and eaten the bottom. i could have, but the thought of passing on the top and taking the bottom would be all the more painful if the top was then brushed off. offering to share comes with the triple risk of acceptance, displeasure or rejection. we are taught that acceptance of an offer is a good thing, but when the top of the muffin is involved, do you really think that is the case?

the odd taste and shape of the pink muffin is clearly that there is no depth of muffin culture in the country. a few malay-ified chains are bringing muffins in, but the roots of this penetration are not deep enough for people to know the difference between good and bad. the choke hold of paper wrapper had done the ultimate harm of making the entire muffin into the less prised "bottom-of-the-muffin". the bakery has come up with a way to counter the culture of gastronomic greed that comes from focusing on tops which have naturally exploded out of the pan and cooked with wider exposure to the ovens heat. these higher demands produce the better quality of the exceptional tops.

the cramped version we saw was sadly malaysian. kept encased in paper, hidden from the heat, not allowed to expand and grow beyond the restrictive wrapper. no one in an open and honest environment would actually want a bottom only of the muffin, and here we have the clear example where rather than having the exceptional allowed to show itself, all are being kept in the lowest common denominator restricted space.

if you won't help me get starbucks to carry a breakfast sandwich not built on chicken hotdogs, please help me with this. let people know that malaysians will not except bottom of the muffins only. help create a culture where its acceptable to have tops and bottoms.

if you help, i will listen to my nana and be more open with my muffin. i won't just offer the bottom, it will be the fair (or at least game theory based) "i split, you pick", or even the other way around. team work is needed when dividing the top of the muffin.