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I wrote once about the only Malay Malaysian in my village who had been kind enough to offer me halal chicken. I, at last, had a chance to get to know him better last night. He came to my unit asking for ginger and sesame oil. He wanted to cook chicken rice. After that I went to his unit to taste his cooking. OMG! He’s such a good cook. I, on the other hand, most of the time, struggled to finished the food that I cooked!

What was so interesting last night was, I found out that his mother is (or should I say ‘will be’) my colleague. And he always spends his time in his mother’s office in my faculty. Hmmm…the world is such a small place…

Since the semester break started I’m not quite in a good mood, hence the the lack of motivation to do anything.

Last night, I said to Billy that I wanted to lie down on the golf course behind my apartment and watch the full moon. Billy wanted to come with me. So we went to the golf course but the grass was wet from the dew. We went back home and fetched Billy’s unused bed cover and some apples and oranges. We chose a spot on the golf course and spread the bed cover and watched the moon. What a crazy night-time picnic in the middle of a golf course!

Billy said the longer he stared at the moon, the bigger the moon became. And he said, “The moon is laughing”

I finished reading ‘The Malay Dilemma’ by Tun Dr. Mahathir Mohamad. Although the book was published about 30 years ago, some of the Malay dilemma remains unsolved. I felt so sad when I read the book and I almost cried.

Thus I’ve decided to have a business, no matter how small it is, when I got back. May it be selling nasi lemak or whatever, as long as it is a business. At least, I can nurture the culture of entrepreneurship in the younger generations. Hey remember “Kelab Usahawan Muda”? Any ex-member wanna join me in this supposedly-hopefully-will-come-true business?

Despite the incident during the weekend, I managed to spend most of my time doing beneficial activities, at least in my point of view.

I saw two movies, ‘The Village’ in the cinema and ‘As Good As It Gets’ on TV. I read two books, both are non-fiction. The books are ‘Finding Flow : The Psychology of Engagement of Everyday Life’ by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and ‘The New Deal for Asia’ by Tun Dr. Mahathir.

I didn’t know that ‘Finding Flow is actually a motivational book, if I knew I wouldn’t have read it. This is because despite all the new ideas any motivational book suggest in order for human to lead a better life, deep down inside I believe that the answer to lead a better life is already mentioned in Islam. Thus I can’t help but to think that everything I read in ‘Finding Flow’ is not actually new to me. Other than that, with some knowledge about other major religions of the world, I feel that the author was just applying the same concept in a different manner.

I love ‘The New deal for Asia’. It describes how Malaysia managed to survive during the economic downtown in 1997/98. The epilogue is the best part and reminded me of Michael Moore’s ‘Bowling for Columbine” which I had the chance to see here in Oz. I borrowed the DVD from the library. It seems that Tun has the same notion of the Western Civilisation as Michael Moore. Thus I borrowed ‘Stupid White Men’ by Michael Moore. I must find the time to read it.

By the way, I had picked up ‘Tom Sawyer’ that I requested from the library. Oh my God…the book that I got was printed in 1920, despite the ancientness of the book; it is still in a good condition. I just love the book because it is so fragile and smells good. And true there are pictures of Tom Sawyer barefoot. Another book is on the way, I just requested it today. It is ‘The Malay Dilemma’ by Tun. We had the book back at home but when my mom transferred all the old books to the store room I couldn’t find it anymore. Wonder why suddenly I like to read political stuffs…

Somehow I think reading non-fiction once is a while is good. I should start reading the journal articles for my e-health course tomorrow, they are also non-fiction reading materials ;). Before I end my entry today I would like to quote an article from Utusan Malaysia. Don’t worry, none of us bloggers are in the category mentioned…

Kelmarin, semasa melancarkan buku Our Ways karya Ismail Husin, Tun Dr. Mahathir Mohamad meluahkan rasa kecewanya dengan sikap malas menulis di kalangan rakyat Malaysia.

Memang sudah banyak kali beliau meminta mereka yang melalui pelbagai pengalaman dalam hidup mencatatkan apa yang dilalui itu supaya ia boleh dipelajari serta diambil iktibar oleh orang lain.

Malangnya, seruan beliau masih belum mendapat sambutan. Kata Dr. Mahathir, jika mereka yang berkenaan itu tidak mahu menulis, setidak-tidaknya mereka hendaklah sedia diwawancara supaya pengalaman mereka dapat direkodkan.

This weekend, I went to a movie for the first time in Ipswich. I went with a new found friend Pauline from Singapore, a self-confessed ‘kaki wayang’. We saw ‘The Village’.

The cinema was empty except for a dozen or so people just like a ‘pawagam’ in Alor Setar. TGV in Bukit Raja was never this empty. While I was enjoying the movie, someone threw a popcorn box full of used paper serviette onto my head. I was so shocked. I turned back and saw a boy of 6 or 7 years of age pointing to apparently another child next to him who was hiding behind my seat. I’d noticed the two rascals earlier playing in the back seats while others were trying to absorb the movie. I never thought what happened as an act of racism, it was just children playing pranks, until the boy called me an aboriginal. To add to my surprise, there was a grown man with the children, whom I supposed is the parent. He never gave a damn of what the children did, and I really believed that he approved their behaviours. I just ignored them. But they kept on disturbing Pauline by throwing pop corn at her and pulling her jacket, partly because she responded to what they did by yelling at them. At last she couldn’t take it anymore and complained to the cinema worker who thankfully asked the children and their parent to leave. They left and on their way out, one of the boy mocked Pauline by yelling fake Mandarin at her. And I saw the movie until the end with disturb thoughts lingering in my mind.

How children as young as 6 or 7 can be so racist? I think it simply because the parents teach them. If what had happened is not an act of racism, and only children playing pranks, why were we the target? Why the parent didn’t stop the kids? I’m so sad that adults would want to contaminate innocent minds of children just because they feel insecure about themselves and feel threaten by aboriginal people. Maybe they just feel insecure and threaten by someone who doesn’t look like them. Some of my friends had told me about how racist some people in Ipswich can be but I never believed them until this incident happened to me.

The other thoughts that I’ve been thinking since then is how people never guess that I’m Malay from Malaysia. People had guessed that I’m from Thailand, and my Indian friend thought I was an Indian when he first saw me. And in the cinema, people had mistaken me for an Aboriginal man. But I never really care about that, but I guess if I look like a white man, people won’t disturb me in the cinema.

Anyway, about the movie, I like it very much although I feel the need to see it again because I cannot concentrate on the last part of it due to the incident. Surely I will not see the movie in Ipswich. I am planning to go with Lin in Brisbane. Ah, I can’t wait until tomorrow to tell Lin and Nicole about this incident...

In my Uni, it is normal to see people walking around without shoes. Students walk barefoot to class, in the library and in the café. Practically anywhere in Ipswich you can see people walk around barefoot either in the supermarkets or the petrol stations. Walking barefoot compliments relax and easy culture of Queenslanders. The waitress in Café 8 is always cool and is never in hurry even if there is a long line of people waiting to order food. And to my surprise people are so relax and none of them mind to wait so long. Maybe Australia is so vast yet it has a small population thus no one feels the need to compete for space resulting in this ‘slow’ culture.

Anyway, looking at people walking barefoot reminds me of Tom Sawyer. I read Tom Sawyer when I was very young and now I don’t even remember the story. All I can remember is the picture of Tom Sawyer, barefoot and painting wooden fence. I should borrow Tom Sawyer from the library…

This morning, Lin and I presented a movie that we made as one of the assignments of Interaction Design course.

The movie focuses on human gestures, and from a set of video clips filmed by the students, we derived a family of gestures which has a specific theme. Then we combined the clips and made a movie to communicate the theme that we had selected. Lin and I had finished most part of the movie last week, but yesterday as we came to the lab to add the soundtrack, we decided to change the movie into a silent movie.

Actually we had discussed about making the movie as silent movie before, but none of us were serious about that, until yesterday when we found this royalty free music that they used to have in silent movies, if you ever see Charlie Chaplin you’ll surely know how the music sounds like. So we decided to be playful and didn’t really care about the finished product. What the heck I thought we were enjoying ourselves during the process of making the movie. Thus we used the music, and changed all the clips into black and white and added some effects so that they looked old and jumpy.

And this morning, we presented the silent movie. To my amazement people like the movie and they laughed at the funny parts of it. Stephen laughed a lot and he said he enjoyed watching the movie (hmm…I still feel rude when I call Dr. Viller by his first name). What a relief! We were not serious when we were making it and never really expected people will enjoy watching it as much as we enjoyed making it. One of the master students said the our movie is ‘numero uno’…;)

Anyway, despite the joy that I feel today, I learn a very valuable lesson. Media, especially TV, is a very powerful tool. Some of the funny clips that we used in our movie also appeared in other students’ movies but from my observation people didn’t laugh when they saw the clips. For example, there’s this one clip where a guy is playing with his puppy, and people laughed when went they saw the clip in our movie. But in other students’ movies which was presented in a more serious manner, the guy and the puppy didn’t have the funny effect. This shows that TV/movie/video can control how we interpret events by using images, sound, and text. Media can influence the way we feel about certain things. Media is a powerful propaganda tool. Though I may sound a little bit preachy but I would like to say “DON’T WATCH THE EVENING NEWS!” Hmm… as if I can practice what I just said…

I updated my blog on Wednesday, but to my amazement the new entry did not appear on my blog. This is not the first time it happened. I would like to classify what had happened as Denial of Service (DOS) and I am thinking of changing to a new blog provider. Maybe I should have my blog on the space the Uni provides for me. Don't know whether I have the time to do that though.

Have you guys seen the new iMac G5? I'm so thrill with the new design. The first time I saw it I really asked myself where the hell is the desktop? And now I have to decide whether to buy iBook or iMac G5. But the best decision I think for the moment is not to buy a new computer. Maybe I should wait until summer cause now I don't know whether I have time even to make a decision about buying a computer.

Coffee. Ah...Coffee. Back in Shah Alam I had this cheap drip coffee machine my mom gave me and I used to buy really expensive ungrounded coffee bean thus I could have freshly grounded flat white at least twice a day. Now the only coffee that I can make at home is instant coffee. So I have to resort to Mr. Bean capuchino sold in Uni which cost me A$2.90. The problem is that now I find myself in need of Mr. Bean everyday. Although I think that it is such a waste to spend A$2.90 for coffee everyday I have no choice due to my addiction to this legal addictive stimulant. Now I don't even have time to go to Mr. Bean!

Wonder why I still have time to update this blog...hmmm...

I saw a lot of Proton here lately. I was quite surprise. Then my classmate, Lin from Myanmar said that there's a Proton showroom in Brisbane. No wonder...

When I go back to Malaysia, I will definitely have to buy a National car, the only car that I can afford. Unless by any mean I suddenly got rich. And I complained to Lin that Proton cars usually have minor but irritating faults, such as the power window failure, and people always have to go back and forth to the service centre for the first few months. Then Lin told me about his country. He told me that his government has stop importing cars, but at the same time Myanmar doesn't have the ability to produce cars. So the price of cars are sky high and only the very rich can own cars.He made me realize that I should be grateful. In my house in Malaysia, there are 5 cars in the yard, one for each family member. All of the cars are National cars. I believe that this situation is not possible 10 years ago and how much our country has improved.

To my surprise, Lin also has a very great respect for Tun Dr. Mahathir and Pak Lah. He told me that he prays everyday for Pak Lah to continue to bring peace and stability to South East Asia. He believes that our country leadership will change the situation in Myanmar. Phew...now I'm so grateful to be a Malaysian...

I posted an entry to my blog about the river festival in Brisbane. Tapi entahlah, sekejap ada, sekejap takdak. Pelik...

Here in Oz, I always find myself in a situation where I can't find the correct english word to use in conversation. And sometimes I feel confused and not aware whether I speak in Malay or English. There's only one Malay Malaysian here in my village and we don't get the chance to meet often, although he's been so kind as to share his halal chicken with me. But that's another story. Thus I only speak Malay to myself. Cakap sorang2...

So I met this Malay Malaysian guy in St. Lucia, I started to talk to him. And his reply seemed strange to me. I thought there was something wrong here. Then I figured it out...God, he was speaking in Malay, why the hell was I talking to him in English? I felt quite ashamed of myself...this cultural change is not easy...