Too Many Damned Questions

“Don’t you just hate it when you have to spend 10 minutes explaining a 10-second phone call?” fumed Jamal as he slammed down his riding gloves on the table. We all looked at him knowingly as we pushed aside our teh tariks out of a shared sense of commiseration. Despite his strapping six-foot-two frame and Rambo-style demeanour, Jamal was no playboy and was as likely to cheat on his wife as Melaka would receive six inches of snow tomorrow night. Everyone knew this; everyone, of course, except his wife.

Maybe it’s his 200-mile-per-hour Suzuki Hayabusa that’s parked under a nearby tree. Maybe it’s his softer-than-marshmallows heart. Maybe it’s his disarmingly intense smile. Maybe these are the things that are driving his wife to believe (erroneously) in horror scenarios of him copulating with every female in sight if given half a chance.

But maybe it’s not anything to do with him at all.

The rest of us are nothing like Jamal. We all drive beat-up old Protons that do 0-60 kph in about a week, look like Rodney Dangerfield after a horrific traffic accident and are about as suave as baboons at a ballroom dancing competition. Yet every single one of us switch our mobiles to silent-mode (or turn them off altogether) when we go home after work.

And why is this so?

No, it’s not because stray vixens in heat, smitten by our stunning good looks and overwhelmed by our sexual prowess are likely to call us during dinner. Get real, OK? Even if we had sexually-compliant, nubile nymphomaniacs stashed away at a luxury condo somewhere, we’d be smart enough to tell them not to call us at home, right?

No, the real reason we live such sad lives (risk missing calls no matter how important) is because we don’t want to go through what Jamal has had to go through: spend 10 minutes explaining a 10-second phone call. Yes, folks! It doesn’t get sadder than this. But for the sake of domestic peace – and keeping our sanity (what’s left of it) intact – this is what we have to do. Explaining to our bosses (or clients) why we didn’t answer his call is always much easier than explaining the conversation (had we answered the call) to she-who-must-be-obeyed. At least, our bosses (or clients) will have, at the most, maybe five questions!

A fellow blogger, a smooth operator known as Uncle Lee, maintains that women are to be loved, not understood. I subscribe to this whole-heartedly, too. But I’ll let you in on a secret: men need to be UNDERSTOOD. No, we are not so unreasonable as to demand to be understood in our totality. This is too much. All we need women to understand is that we cannot stomach having to face an inquisition for even the most minor of things.

As a friend of mine puts it, we have a tough enough time hunting mouse-deer and fighting sabre-toothed tigers. We have little patience with “Why are you home late today?” and its 25 or so supplementary questions. Maybe we should just bypass the questions and instead go straight to, “No, dear! I am not 30 minutes later than usual because I met this slut on the way home and decided to bonk her silly first. And how was your day, dear?”

My comrade-in-arms, Tommy Yewfigure, is partly right when he says that women ask too many damned questions. The damned questions are only part of it. Worse are the implications behind the questions. Somehow, they are not merely requests for further information, are they? The questions invariably assume that somehow, somewhere and at some time we’ve been up to no bloody good. And if we are sloppy in answering these questions, we’ll be rewarded with yet another barrage of questions (replete with their not-so-nice implications).

In case there’s any doubt, let me explain. We don’t really mind the questions (as long as you limit them to two or three); what really drive us up the walls are the loaded ones. Of course, saying this will not just stop them from asking loaded questions. Instead it will lead them to clam-up altogether and not to talk to us at all.

So, what are we to do? Of course, I suggested to my friends that we just grin, bear it and think of England. It was either that or become gay. To this Jamal quipped, “OK, if we do, the one who draws the shortest straw gets Bangkai!”

Note: This post was partly inspired by my friend Tommy Yew and also partly by fellow-MRSMer Oldstock (whose story appears here)

Somebody Else’s Simple Pleasures

Here I am picking up on one of my favourite bloggers’ posts, Andrea Whatever, when she wrote about simple pleasures. No, I am not going to write about my simple pleasures. They are quite bland and excruciatingly dull. Just how interesting can boiling one’s guitar strings so that they will sound new be? Yeah, just about a notch or two higher than cataloguing the relative merits of blue-black inks from different manufacturers (which I thoroughly enjoy). Instead, I am going to write about the simple pleasures of a few people I know.

Carpet-bombed, Napalmed and Bayoneted

In an embarrassingly public row between a husband and a wife (what’s new?) I overheard the man – obviously battle-scarred and shell-shocked from years of hen-pecking – say (or was it plead?), “It’s not that I have no control over my money; it’s the unexpected things that come up and take it all away that I have no control over!”

Whoa! This guy probably summed-up my life’s story in one mad-scramble-for-the-life-raft of a sentence. My heart bled for him.

With high-energy death rays pouring out of her eyes, she shot out a gavel-pounding, “Then you should have been smart enough to plan for the unexpected!”

Double-whammy

Wrestling the morning rush-hour traffic at Jalan Semantan, I tuned in to Light and Easy FM hoping to acquire some measure of relief from the stress having to do battle with well-heeled but selfish half-wits driving big, fancy cars – people to whom queue-jumping is a badge of honour. But what came over the speakers was equally (if not more) stressful: a female radio personality was taking calls as to whether it is reasonable to expect a man to change after marriage.

This should be amusing.

Is ‘Permasalahan’ Even A Word?

OK, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that I’m no expert in Bahasa Melayu (Malaysia?). But I think I have sense enough to know that the word “PERMASALAHAN” should not even exist. It does, though – as can be seen by the number of people using the word nowadays. It is increasing at a rate that is almost as fast as the the increase in the population of illegal Indonesian immigrants in Malaysia.

Jilat

It was the Hari Raya holidays and I was half asleep on my recliner – busily digesting about a ton of lemang – when my five year old son come up to me and asked, “Ayah, cuba ayah jawab teka-teki ni!” Frankly, I was in no mood for riddles. But the enthusiasm in his eyes was simply too much to throw a wet blanket over. So I turned to him and said, “OK, sayang. Mari Ayah jawab.”

Not being a very cerebral kind of guy, riddles just stump me even on the best of days. But I was not about to disappoint a very excited 5-year old – especially when he was my son. Contrary to popular belief, I don’t (normally) eat babies for breakfast. So I cranked-up my brain, heard the sputtering as it struggled to come to life and put my feeble mental faculties into gear. I was ready. Or so I thought!

This Girl Can Play

I was editing a string of badly written stories for a local paper yesterday – thinking (hoping?) that the world would end in the next ten minutes – when I heard a guitar being played like I’ve not heard it being played for a very, very long time. I mean, it was like someone had learnt to cut through all the fluff and set about to play the damned instrument like it was meant to be played.

The Day I Almost Lost A Friend

When I used to flog life insurance for a living, we used to break our fast at the office. Firstly, being bachelors, there was nothing and nobody waiting for us at home. Secondly, the office WAS the closest thing we had to a home.

Like always, we waited for the break of fast by ribbing each other to death. The telly in the training room would soon broadcast the ‘Azan’ signalling that it was time gorge on whatever it was we had bought from the Bazaar Ramadan nearby.

On that day, my dear friend A had decided to plant himself in front of the telly in the training room to wait for the Azan. The rest of us, as usual, preferred to goof-off outside on the agency floor. So, off A went to the training room with his bagful of donuts and a Big Gulp he had bought from the local 7-Eleven.

It’s A Train

People tell me there’s always light at the end of the tunnel. Of course there is! In my case, this light is usually a runaway train intent on splattering me all over the walls of the tunnel.

When this happens – and it’s been happening a lot lately – I hanker for a time when things had been very much simpler. It was a time when I had precious little to call my own: no money, no women – but best of all, no worries. All I needed were my guitar, a quiet busking pitch near Tottenham Court Road tube station and a gaggle of buxom Italian tourists who, for some reason, were always quite happy to throw money (and a few other things as well) my way.

Talking in My Sleep

A conversation at the Bangkai household during breakfast yesterday:

Wife: Did you know you talk in your sleep?

Bangkai: (Gasp! I could be in a lot of trouble here. I’ll go on buttering my toast and pretend I didn’t hear her.)