A Good Weekend …

1. Jogged a good distance with my wife(Sat and Sun).
2. Attended akikah at my friend’s house.
3. Did not spoil the class lecture although I had to wait for one hour for the students to turn up(Yes one hour!)---weekend class for part-timers is so pathetic!
4. A good reunion in the evening.
5. My daughter Aqeelah was back for the weekend with friend.
6. Took Ariefah to her drama practice.
7. Dropped Ahmad at his friend’s
8. Roasted chicken for lunch.
9. Successfully put up two blinds at the front porch(my primary weekend project)
10. Cleaned up my little garden (favorite!)

11. Drove Aqeelah back to college.
12. Picked up Ariefah and Ahmad back.
13. Stayed for kuliah Maghrib---a good one
14. still have some money left in the bank account (usually it’s gone before the actual month has not even started….)
15. and still got sometime to write up this blog

Nothing fancy but I like it because it’s STRESS FREE----isn’t that what “weekend” is all about!

Where has it gone?

I am talking about my time. I don’t have the time to update my blog anymore. It is so frustrating. The day seems shorter than ever and the night is always the end of the day. Am I getting slower or does the world around me move faster? I am confused now. The thing is that I hate to have that “ things to do” list. People say that to manage your time well you need to have “lists”; so that you can arrange to do this and that properly. I have tried to follow that “things to do today” list and it’s just a daunting task for me. I felt like a slave of your own manifestation. I want to be free and surprise myself with “the last minute” decisions to do this and that. If I felt so lazy than be it; in my terms there is always the next time. Maybe you think that this is not a good habit; but you know what---the heck with it, I live my own life and don’t really give a damn about what other people think. Sounds like a grumpy ol’man, doesn’t it?

Time does fly fast. It would be faster if you wait for something. You wait for your son to get into school or your maid to arrive or your new car to drive. Do you know what would be the craziest and scariest wait of all? You wait for your retirement! Which has been on my mind for so many times. I wanted to avoid it but it just kept coming. For many of us retirement is for old people, very old indeed---it is the beginning of an end, of life!. I guess it is time to embrace the reality of life; the one like any other has the beginning and the end. It sounds so sad, doesn’t it? Well don’t be, because I am happy where I am now which is in the position to embrace the future. I love myself, my family and my friends; life just could not be better. For now I don’t fancy much, just a day without stress would be the happiest day for me.I don’t want to get busy doing other people’s task or making things up so you look busy. From dawn to dusk I would be with my thoughts; taking myself away from the stress-infested world around me.and at home after nine I would tell everyone that Abah has shut off for the day---no more noisy requests or reminders or news (good or bad), everything has to move over to tomorrow. No more business for the day.

I have no time to enjoy the TV anymore; which is my greatest hobby. Maybe some of you might want to know that in the old days the favourite hobby of any child on this planet is to watch TV. Another one is reading but that is just to cover up the fact that you are a lazy bum with no future. It is a rare scene nowadays to see me glued to the TV screen and laughed or cried with the show. For one there are too many channels to choose from, and second, nothing really excites me. With the heavy censorship you could hardly enjoy the exclamation of a feeling such as love…because it’s always sealed with a kiss. And a distorted kiss is just like a monkey puckering her mate…so distasteful. During my college days in the US, I like to watch American football. The game runs for three to four hours and I stayed on to enjoy it for the whole time. I just could not imagine to do that nowadays. I guess life has changed as you grow up. But there are a lot of stupid drama on TV….samarinda, lestari etc. The same old stories with the same old faces doing the some old stupid storyline. I really hate them; it’s very rare to get a good drama on air.


Anyway I cherish my good times with friends and family. I’ve made a few mistakes but most of the time I feel that I was protected. Alhamdulillah. And now I can see myself to be that old man with a white kupiah manning a counter of a kedai runcit in the remote village somewhere in Kelantan …..what a wonderful life!

Time to reconnect?

The use of facebook , tweeter and other social networking has enable us to find and reconnect with old friends,ex-classmates, ex-students and ex-teachers. It is a very exciting moment to reconnect with the past again.After so many years of saying goodbye we have come back to meet again. I have enjoyed the moments in many occasions since I joined FB about a year ago. I have met my old friends again, my students from a decade ago and someone I met somewhere ( I was completely blank about this guy). The way the technology reconnects us all is amazing until you come down to the reality of things. I have experienced from A to Z of this reconnection thing; I mean, after a long while we saw each other again, reminiscent the old good times, consumed our newly re-established relationship with weekly meetings at the mamak stalls until we hated each other’s guts again. We since have gone separate ways again like we used to 20 years ago and God knows whether we have the time to meet again For now I am happy that we don’t see each other anymore. I realized that over the last 10-20 years we have changed. Life has taught us a lot of things about friendships, values, materials, goals ,thinking, and priorities. When we were a teenager/young adult a long time ago we hardly thought of those things; maybe the things we knew were to have good time and kick some ass for fun. Those were the “good times” that we are very excited to talk about when we reconnect. As if we try to escape from our hard and burdened adult life at the moment to the “easy,feeling times” of the yesteryears. There is nothing wrong; in fact I myself was so indulged into the excitements that I forgot to bring myself back to the current point and time. There was maybe a love episode that happened long time ago;and in that there must be love, hatred, broken hearts, and all ingredients of a good love episode. I did not realize that this episode would come back and haunt us all again. Now that we are married and all, a newly found long-lost love is not going to be pretty. The tears after the reunion is not going to heal the old wounds so easily; it will bleed silently with unbearable pain and agony. And believe me, a 40-year-old-man crying like a baby while driving back from a reunion dinner is not a pretty sight ( so don’t drag your spouse to a reunion party…a short story can be a very long one indeed!). There might also be other things start to pop up like the old scores that never been settled, some bullying incidents that you want to get back, loans that never been paid or punishment for things that you did not do. These things will prop up when the dust of excitement settled down.

One thing I learned was that our reconnection should be on our current terms; and not on “the old values”. If you are married now then the reunion activities should include the family; otherwise better not (just to make the story short). But then it’s no fun isn’t it, to have your kids running around when all you want to do is to recall that first love. A bit difficult to say exactly but you weigh down the goods and the bads and make your decision. This reunion thing is also a temporary bluff because after you realized that this guy or that guy never changed then you will have that half smile again and try to find the escape route to the men’s room. You will see someone try too much to show off that he/she is better than anyone else….duh! I really hate that someone.And the last thing to regret is that now you know you are so damn OLD! ….. nice to meet you again Bro!