9 posts tagged “annoyed”

So there's this guy in my French class who barely speaks a word of French. Despite our being in the intermediate class, he has trouble recognising words like "stop", "buy" and "want". Each time the teacher speaks to him, he stares blankly at the teacher's face and waits for a classmate to translate. And when he's called on to answer a question, he speaks in a garbled French-English hybrid that nobody understands.

Usually, I end up helping him out, because for some reason nobody else in the class would. Also, waiting for his confusion to clear up takes a very long time. It's frustrating and I want the class to move on.

Last Saturday the teacher asked him what his aspirations were.

He said, "Je veux..." and then looked at me and asked, "How do I say 'good health'?"
I replied, "Bon sante."
He said, "Je veux bon sante et..." and looked at me again and asked, "How do I say 'I hope'?"
I replied, "J'espere."
Then he said, "J'espere... to find a job that I like."

Then the teacher asked him why he didn't like his job and of course he misunderstood and said something else entirely unrelated and then he said, "You know, Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs."

Are you kidding me? You don't know how to say "I want" and you want to say "Maslow's friggin Hierarchy of Needs"?

Worse, the French teacher had never heard of the Maslovian pyramid. Another classmate, Tim, tried explaining by describing his own hierarchy of needs. The French teacher misunderstood, and thought that the apex of the pyramid represented each individual's ultimate ambition.

And so, being me, I tried explaining that no, in fact, the hierarchy represented the general needs of all mankind -- at the base was food and shelter, at the top more subliminal needs, such as spiritual fulfilment.

And then the teacher misunderstood again and thought that I was talking about my own aspirations. Fuck me for using the word "spiritual". He said, "Ah so Yasmine wants spiritual fulfilment. She is not a Material Girl." And of course everyone in class burst out laughing.

Lesson of the week: If someone's determined to look like an idiot, I really shouldn't volunteer to go down with them.

I feel bad. My mother bought a... I don't even know what to call it, a flowy baju kurung-type thing but more casual for me and I couldn't help but show my dislike for it.

The whole suit is a dark grey with two blue and light grey ribbon-like stripes kind of flowing down the side. The top extends to my knees and it's translucent, and could actually work with pants. But it really doesn't look spectacular in any way to me.

She asked me if I liked it and I said it was ok, and she said, ok only? and I said, yeah, it's nothing special and she said, it costs 150 dollars! and I said, what the hell?!

She kept insisting that this type of clothing was currently in fashion, and I kept replying that I didn't want to look like every goddamn minah in a headscarf. No offense to you if you're one of these girls, but it looks like the kind of thing that would be worn by one of those tudung girls who wear make-up and long skirts and whom everyone describes as "sweet". And, like, hello, I wear stripes or sweaters with drawings of animals on them. I only wear short skirts. I don't do flowy. I definitely don't do sweet.

After rejecting it, I felt bad so I ran out after my mother and said ok ok, I'll wear it to work with pants. Then she said, what about the skirt? I said, I'll wear it to weddings and shit and hari raya next year. And she said, so you'll just wear it once or twice and I'm like, how often do you want me to wear it woman?

Then she made me try it on, and I pointed out that once I put on my headscarf the pretty design bit at the chest will be covered anyway and she said, forget it I'll try to find someone to buy it from me.

So yeah, I feel bad. But I also have to wonder what registers in the head of a woman who has lived with me for 24 years and sees me go to work everyday and washes all my clothes and STILL doesn't know what my taste in clothes run to.

I guess it's understandable, she being the same woman who passes by my bedroom everyday and sees how one entire wall is almost entirely covered with books but still thinks that what I do alone in my room will somehow lead to pregnancy.

Fuck lah. How am I supposed to compensate for this? Oh, I know. Let her handle my wedding couture, 100 percent.

I am already crying at the horror of the thought.

Oh good. I've just realised that my brothers have been stealing things from my room.

I was starting to run out of reasons why I wanted to leave this house as soon as fucking possible.

The website was processing my payment of $354 for the registration fees of my French course when I accidentally closed the window.

My bank account information says the money has already been deducted, but I'm sure that it will never reach Alliance Francaise, and they'll tell me they never got my payment so I'll either have to pay another $354 or forget about the course, and obviously I'll choose not to attend the course because I'm not about to spend $708 on a French course and I'll be $354 poorer for nothing and in future if I ever need to buy a sofa or a fridge or a microwave oven, I'll realise I can't because I once sent $354 spiralling into cyberspace and I was too stupid to sit still and wait for a receipt.

I hate myself.

I went to my maternal grandmother's house today, which is always enjoyable, because the aunts and uncles on my mother's side are cool.

For example, my aunt just now asked me whether the newspapers might be interested in publishing a story about a friend she has, whose family has gone from merely miserable to destitute. I said, "Sure, you can give my friend Sury.ani a call, BH would probably be interested."

Then she said she was thinking of calling TNP, because they give handphones. So I asked, "You want to help your friend or you want a handphone?" And she quickly said, "A handphone."

Later my eight-year-old cousin, the one who said I was ugly, told me, "You cannot get pregnant."
I said, "Huh?"
She said, "You cannot get pregnant until you get married, then you must do some things and then you will get pregnant. You will have a beautiful baby."
I said, "Uh... ok."

I am seriously concerned about the speed at which kids are growing up these days.

The only person who doesn't enjoy the family gatherings is my father, who doesn't like anyone.

In the car on the way home he asked my mother why one of my uncles had gone home so early. My mother said it was probably because he was tired, because he had taken a trip to Johor Bahru earlier today with his family. My father asked why. My mother said they were looking for Hari Raya clothes. This started a discussion between my parents on why my uncle and his family couldn't just buy Hari Raya clothes in Singapore, or get them tailor-made if their particular sizes are so hard to find on local racks.

Which was all fine and well, until my father said that the fact that the family had taken a trip to JB today showed just how misplaced their priorities were. He said that their inability to spot the truly important things in life was the reason why they weren't doing so well financially.

Now he didn't say what these truly important things were, but I can take a guess. His tirade just annoyed the hell out of me. Where do you get off criticising the way families spend time with each other? Especially given the fact that you're not doing such a swell job of bonding with your kids? Especially given the fact that you don't even speak to your own children except when implementing new rules or launching new types of weekly family sessions that they dread and avoid?

I mean, what does taking a day trip to JB with your family have to do with your bank draft?

My colleagues and I arranged to meet up with our ex-interns for dinner tonight, 7.30 p.m. at New York New York. But the four of us got delayed because we had a lot of work, and so we ran a little late.

(The interns, two of them, had worked in our newsroom from March to August. They're both 19, and are now having their school holidays. School resumes for them in two weeks.)

At 7.30 one of the interns called us to say she had already reached the restaurant and that there was a long queue. She asked us if we wanted to eat somewhere else instead. We had a quick discussion and told her: Get in the queue. By the time we reached there, she would probably be at the front of the line already and we wouldn't have to look for another place to eat.

So when we reached New York New York we looked for her in the queue, but she wasn't in it. And by this time, the queue was pretty short. We peered into the restaurant, thinking she had already been seated, but we couldn't spot her.

Sha.ngyuan said, "Oh my God... maybe she didn't queue up after all."

Sha.ffiq started muttering, "I will be so pissed off..."

Est.her and I exchanged dirty looks.

Shangy.uan called the intern then, and -- you got it -- she hadn't queued up. She said she had walked around the mall instead. When Shan.gyuan hung up, all four of us were fuming. I mean, two of us had been fasting all day and all of us had been swamped at work. It had been a long day. We needed food, pronto. We did not need to stand around waiting for another 20 minutes.

A minute later, the intern sauntered up to us with a look of complete nonchalance on her face.

Immediately we started asking, "Why didn't you queue up?"

All she said was, "The queue was very long."

So I said, "Umm that was kind of the point."

And she just replied, "Yeah but it was very long. It was much longer than this when I was here just now."

DUH. If you had lined up when we asked you to we might not even be in the queue anymore. But we all sucked it in and joined the back of the line.

The best part of it is that earlier this afternoon, our editor was handing out free tickets to a 7.15 p.m. screening of Scoop. Est.her, Shang.yuan and I were really tempted to just take the tickets and cancel the dinner date, but the imperative to do "the right thing" made us turn down the tickets.

AND Shangy.uan and I had even tried asking the editor for two extra tickets to give the interns, except we told her they were for our boyfriends, because the editor hates the interns, and we figured it was not likely that she would give us more tickets if she knew they were for the interns.

You know what happened? She said Shangy.uan and I were very self-centered, for only thinking of ourselves and our boyfriends, when Esth.er would be there with us, and Est.her would obviously feel like an outsider and a lamppost if the two of us were wrapped up with our boyfriends while she was around. So she refused to give us two more tickets, and we decided not to go for the movie.

Getting accused of being a self-centered bitch by our boss and giving up free tickets to Woody Allen... so that a 19-year-old can show us just how little she cares. Esth.er and I kept telling each other, "Next time, fuck morality man, go for the free tickets."

But we got our little revenge -- while in the queue we decided to go to Menotti's instead, which costs almost twice as much as New York New York. Nothing too painful for those drawing a steady income, but I could tell it really hurt the broke student's wallet.

(Along the way to Menotti's, she and the other intern, who had joined us while we were in the New York New York queue, actually suggested Cafe Cartel, which has student discounts, but Shan.gyuan and Shaff.iq snapped a very emphatic "NO!")

OK I know I can be mean to Mr Bob sometimes when we're fighting and even that aside, I'm no saint. But I truly despise people who visit other people's blogs just to leave nasty messages.

Someone's been saying really mean things to Naz on her tagboard, and it's really pissing me off. I know the best way to deal with such situations is to ignore the person, but I'm so pissed off I can't help but respond to his/her tags.

I just don't understand why people do it. If you don't like the site, stop reading it lah. Why do people get such a kick out of being mean to people who haven't hurt them in any way?

The weird thing is, Naz writes about really innocuous things on her blog -- her working life, her trip to Thailand, her visit to Comex. She doesn't brag about her life, the fact that boys fall in love with her at first sight of her photo, any of her talents. She could, but she doesn't. The contents of her blog is hardly the kind of thing that would cause you to think, "Oh what a bitch." It infuriates me so much that this person is trying so hard to hurt her when she hasn't done anything to deserve such treatment.

I'm not just saying this because she's my friend. Some of you will understand what I mean -- I'd totally take the side  of the third party if my friend is the one who flings the shit first.

Of course Naz isn't the only casualty of the Internet's massive army of flame-throwing baboons. I've received my fair share of anonymous insults. I just wish I had the spy tools to track down each and every one of them who crosses my or any of my friends' turfs.

The BBC's Ian Pannell in Baghdad said most bombing victims were women queuing for cooking fuel to use throughout the holy Muslim month of Ramadan.
-- Violence sweeps Iraq on Ramadan, BBC News

Not only that, but US officials have predicted increased violence throughout Ramadan. So you can look out for Muslims who are fasting killing other Muslims who are also fasting. What the fuck is wrong with these people? Seriously.

Last weekend my parents gathered my brothers and me around for a talk. If you remember, my parents had had a talk with me alone some weeks back and you know how that went, so I wasn't very happy when they announced this one.

The reason for that last talk was my perceived absence from the family environment; the reason for this one? My 19-year-old cousin has started clubbing and drinking, so I, at all of 24, had to be sat down and reminded to behave.

They told us about her sinful deeds in hushed tones and vague phrases, like government PR people trying to tell you not to write something negative about their policies, while I rolled my eyes and said, "It's normal what."

Predictably -- and in fact I fully expected this -- my mother replied, "So you've done the same?"

I rolled my eyes again (and my eyeballs would get plenty of exercise throughout the one-hour talk) and said, "With an 11 p.m. curfew? I can't have."

Apparently my cousin has scared my parents so badly that they now want to hold weekly family sessions during which we pray together, and then sit around discussing the Quran or hadiths. My father suggested that each week, my brothers and I read a religious book or a hadith and then share with the rest of the family what we'd learnt.

It was imperative for them to keep reminding us of what is right and what is wrong, my parents said, because they didn't want to be held accountable if ever I or my brothers strayed off the path of Islamic righteousness.

My father said that his own brother, my uncle, had blamed my grandparents for his shortcomings, for failing to instill in him a sense of morality. They didn't want their own children to be able to say the same of them if ever we became adulterous, irreligious, disrespectful deadbeats. Or drunk Malay kids.

I think my parents are very insecure of their own parenting skills. I don't think they realise how much my brothers and I understand about Islam compared to the average Singaporean Muslim. I don't think they realise how deeply Muslim they've made us, against our willingness to attend the thousands of religious classes they've sent us to. Against our consciousness even.

They come down too hard on themselves, and on other parents too. Whenever they read or hear about teenagers who have sex in parks or take drugs, they inevitably blame the parents. They don't seem to realise that parents can't control everything.

But what really pisses me off is that they don't seem to know their own children very well. The fact that they think it's possible for me to become a drunken slut that will get pregnant anytime now -- still, despite the fact that my formative, adolescent and post-adolescent years are OVER -- does hurt. That they don't seem to realise that I'm happiest in front of a computer or a book, not in crowds, not in groups of many people and that that rules out a lot of possibilities when it comes to how I spend my free time.

During the talk they asked me what my aspirations were. This was just a couple of days after I wrote that post about not knowing what I wanted to do with my life, so of course my answer was, "I don't know." Not that it would have been any different if I had in fact known. I know better than to tell them these things. They only live to tear down my dreams.

Case in point: After I gave my sulky response, my brother offered his aspirations. He said he wanted to be a doctor and move to the US. I thought it was a good one.

But no, in fact it wasn't. My parents immediately rounded on him and listed all the reasons why it was a bad aspiration. He wasn't doing well in school to begin with. And why move anywhere? Why can't he just stay in Singapore? Being a good Muslim is already so hard in Singapore, what with all the temptations swaying you, what more in the US? And didn't he know that Muslims are discriminated against in the West? People get thrown off airplanes if they have different-coloured skin. He should just stay here and try his best to be a good Muslim. And then my brother said something idiotic about the second coming and this led to a long sermon about the end of the world.

The end of the world. This is what you get when you want to be a doctor in the US. So thank God I didn't say anything about taking up smoking in Paris.

But even without having said much during the session, I managed to get criticised anyway. My mother kept referring to me as "her big headache", "her biggest worry". I suspect this has something to do with the fact that my parole officer keeps reminding us about how dangerous my crack addiction is to my illegitimate unborn child. That or the fact that the love of my life is an intelligent, law-abiding, all around decent Chinese guy with a respectable, stable job. I can't remember, my priorities get mixed up sometimes.

Also during the talk my parents -- and a couple of brothers -- discussed how often I should come and visit when I'm married, and whether I should still have to participate in these weekly sessions. (Note that I wasn't part of this discussion.) The agreement they came to, I think, was that I should come whenever I could. Because I had to be reminded of God, didn't I? And was I really ready to guide another person into the religion?

By the end of the talk, I was completely overflowing with God. Mostly His wrath, I think, and His penchance for vengeance. But at least one good thing came out of it: there's nothing like a talk with my parents to remind me of what I want to do with my life. It basically involves whatever pops into my mind when I ask myself "Where would I rather be right now?" while my eyes are rolled to the back of my head and my parents are talking about how Christian converts in Malaysia shouldn't be allowed to change their ICs and get married. No matter what the situation is, I've found the answer to be rather consistent, give or take a few minor details (parrots in the background, or monkeys?).

And that's why I'm writing this post. To help me remind myself of that answer, whenever I feel lost and confused. It's what you need your parents for.