The home I left behind

 

in my innocence

i imagined

a beautiful world outside

of bright lights that glitter

far into the night

a wonderous sight

filled with endless pleasure

food, drinks and leisure

until i saw the ugly shadows

lurking behind the smiles

on the faces

of those who hatch evil

in their hearts

scheming to take away

my hard-earned relief

from my toils in daily stress

with heaviness within

I yearned to return

to the home I left behind

only to find

it no longer existed

while I was away

her innocence was stolen

her young heart broken

her character defiled

her purity lost

that sweetness

gone sour

and I moved on

 

Bill, get my surname right will ya?

And also get the check ready...

I've been wanting to do this for a long time.  That's ever since I started blogging or rather, ranting in my blog.  But I dared not because Bill could just get fed up with me and buy up the whole part of the country I live in because he's rich enough to do that 10 times over.  Or he could just buy out my family name.  And the whole lot of us.  That's scary.

You see, Bill's MS Word or Excel or the email Outlook always tries to 'correct' my surname every time I type it out as LC Teh, no matter how carefully I did it.  Then after I go on to finish the rest of the sentence and punch that fullstop, my name has been changed to LC The.  My colleagues tell me the same thing.  They get frustrated every time they try to address me respectfully in a message.  Some even end up addressing me a Mr Tay...which I resent.  How dare anyone change my surname?  My grand dad would turn in his grave if he ever reads my emails.  So in the end some of them simply address me as Tuan, Datuk or simply as LC.

Then I found out how to make my MS Word do my bidding without trying to 'correct' my 'error'.  I simply delete that 'teh' word from AutoCorrect.  But still it's other people who try to send me mesages that rile me up, especially if they don't share my surname.  You see, they make mistakes typing 'teh' instead of 'the' more often than they need to type my surname. 

Anyway, these days I don't mind if Bill buys up the place where I live.  You see, those people who're running the place and those who once ran the place are now at each other's throats (or backsides) while the economy is sinking, sinking, sinking.  Those people who once ran the place almost ran it to the ground.  Now they say those people running it have no experience.  Or they're good at digging up old dirt. 

So what?  You need to dig up some dirt to straighten the place, right?

 

 

Sure you have a driver's licence?

I do have an issue with our current driving instruction/licence policy.  I always thought that learner drivers should have at least 16 hours on-the-road training before they're allowed to take their driving tests.  But that seemed not to be the case.  I estimated the number of hours that my girl went for her lessons to be less than10.  That included the time she left the front gates till the time the instructor dropped her off again at the front gates.  And when she announced she would be going for her test I thought, that's incredible...  


I checked with her instructor and was told, That's the minimum requirement and it has been met.  Not to worry, She'll pass.  


Pass?  Just to pass?  No wonder we have such fantastic statistics!  I shook my head in disbelief, but I had to let it go.


Sure, she passed.  But I wouldn't put her at risk by tossing her the car keys and say, Here, go for a spin to celebrate!   We used to do that.  We had some 16 hours of practice too.  But that was 40 years ago when you could still cross the road if you see a car coming up 50 meters away.  They used to speed at 30 mph and thought that's pretty good.  Now, it would be like beep! and zooom! and someone shouting, hey! you tired of liv.... ?  


And also, those days they don't leave dumpsters in the middle of the road.  Roadkill wasn't a word yet because animals could still outrun cars.  My dogs would come back huffing, puffing and tongues dangling, looking proud they could chase a car for 2 miles.  Nowadays, they don't bother.


You must have heard enough stories about folks passing their driving tests with flying colors, then go home and take down their gates along with part of the garden fence.  Afraid she would have done just that, I pulled the hand-brakes before she stepped on the accelerator.  Also I had to risk getting a heart-attack everytime she approached a T-junction, one hand on the hand-brake handle and the other on an overhead holder.  Both knuckles showing no colors.  OK, that's just for a while until she stepped on the brakes but that's usually too close to the junction or the car in front.  


Anyone thinking of a driving school that teaches new drivers using their own cars instead of those little contraptions from Toys-R-Us?

 

Truth be told

 

A friend tells the truth to protect you, to prevent you from making serious mistakes and creating future problems.

An enemy tells the truth about every little error or indiscretion you make to blow it into a big issue in order to condemn you and bring you down. Or they tell a lie disguised as truth.

The difference is, a friend sometimes has no choice but to lie to shield you from immediate danger while your enemy lies to gain an upper hand over you. Sometimes the difference can be very murky. You got to be wise or street smart enough to know the difference between a lie or the truth, a friend or a foe. Otherwise you get ruined by an enemy or run the risk of losing a friend forever.

When dealing with family, for goodness sake, tell your loved ones the truth no matter how unsavory the truth is, especially that which would directly affect them. Otherwise that fact would come back and bite you in the butt sooner or later.

Sometimes keeping quiet about the truth is equivalent to telling a lie. One example is the One Eyed Mum story that recently went around the internet. My opinion is it's melodramatic but not completely unrealistic. Some mothers are capable of such gross silly notions that they're protecting their kids by shielding them from reality. Fact is, they're causing more harm than good.