'that is human nature'

It must be pretty bad or thought to be pretty bad when people say ’that’s human nature’ and they are no doubt referring to something unworthy someone did.

Come to think of it, I never heard this phrase ‘human nature’ been applied to a good deed, have you? We are so poorly thought by us and we condemn certain acts and attitude as inhumane…….

What is it then to be human? To have faults: ‘I’m only human, you know’……

To be better is angel. To be worse is beast, a monster or a devil. I do not know about devils but look at how we hurt or injured animal…are we only being human?

Gladiators were both professional and amateur fighters in ancient Rome fought  to entertain ‘civilized’ spectators. These fights took place in an arena:  man vs man and man against animals in combat that was at times to the death.  Bull fight in Spain: bull fighters (matador)s who got turn on by the roaring spectators while harming and injuring, before the bull dropped to its knees and dying, but if the bull fails to die the matador may use a sword with a short cross piece at the end which he stabs into the bull's neck severing the spinal cord and the fight is over.’ Laga ayam, sabung ayam , laga ayam sampai mati?? (cock fights) are more popular with Asians.

As in warfare: Wars of organized, armed, and often prolonged conflict carried on between states/nations or parties^, typified by extreme aggression and social separation and usually with high death and again …that’s human nature they said.

Read the stories about monsters and beast with an open mind, they are innocent creatures kill only for food unlike the human heroes who go about killing them or themselves as in wars are significantly for glory…

We talk about the rat race and call a real low down specimen of humanity a rat. When a man shows fear we ask: is he a man or a mouse or he is a chicken hearted or is chickening out…

A conman is a fox, a playboy a wolf. Inconsiderate and dangerous driver are road hogs, stubbornness in man are mulish or pig headed. A selfish and stupidly prejudiced person is a pig, as in ‘male chauvinist pig’ (MCP)…this last phrase is most unfair to pigs.

When a woman show an undesirable trait she is labeled a cat, shrew, dragon, vixen or minx and the word bitch has been so debased by human associations (as in SOB) that you can hardly ever use any more in  original straightforward sense of female dog. This is a gross injustice of comparisons towards those animals.

In scandalous remarks: For the English the wolf (Casanovas) is dangerous only to females. For the Chinese he is generally harmful and his special sin is ingratitude. The Malay equivalent of the English wolf is the crocodile. (buaya tembaga..)

We said someone is a snake, only mean he is lazy. Call an English man a dog, he may even be flattered by admitting he is abit of a dog but try calling a Malay man anything with canine connection and you may find yourself running for cover to escape his anger. (tp cuba panggil dia ayam jantan....ada yg suka)

I wonder what the animal use as insults when they argue: my beautiful feline with her …..

‘You…you…Male idiot fuc$%&g human being @#@%&…you!’

Hmmmmm……..

We are who we have loved.

How we behave with our current partner has a lot to do with what we learnt from past relationship.

Leodi: if things might turn out differently with the first date gone well, (either you or me) will you be here working with me now Nina?

Perhaps, he was referring to when I’d known  Mich during our students’ days in Sydney and he, with his own  Mary O’Toole during his students days in Ireland …...

As for me some spark flew. We ended up as a couple but it all ended up in tears. It taught me a little more about what love is and more importantly what love is not.

Mich went back to Mal after his final exams  and was married to someone else and so did I in Sydney six months later.

(Mich was married for eight years before his divorce and my own marriage lasted thirteen months…and the experience gave me a better idea of what I must do or must not do- in that quest to find ‘true’ love but by fate our life journey crosses and we are now working in the same surveying team)      

Me: I am glad it didn’t work out, as I would have missed out a wonderful relationship I had with you, before I met 'him'. I define relationship as anything with some kind of emotional connection between the respective man/woman. We are I believe, the sum of relationships past.

What we are now and how we behave with each other is, to an extent, shaped by whom we had shared our life with before. Whom we choose to marry has also to do with the lesson on love from past relationship.

My list:

Ø        Don’t underestimate kindness, gentleness and patience in a man. (he might turn into an angry cobra..)

Ø        If you don’t love the way he looks, the way he sounds and the way he speaks, forget about marriage because       that’s the first and last thing you are going to see and hear every day for the rest of your life.

      (he speaks Javanese…I will definitely twist my tongue to French…)

Ø       If he doesn’t share your sense of humour, you are going to have a frustrating and boring life together.

Ø       If there’s anything about him that you view with disquiet at the start of the relationship- the way he eats (to me it is what he likes to eat), the way his lips twisted when he smiles ( hehehehe…), his gaze (could practice poking those eyes with my index finger )-reconsider because that disquiet might one day turn into disgust.

Ø      Only marry someone you won’t mind sharing your most precious possession with. ( Does that include Billi…)

Ø      If you are not able to sit in a room without a TV, stare into each other’s eyes and talk and talk for hours on end about nothing in particular, it is not a good sign. 

     ( he is a diehard MU fan and my papa, mama and bros are diehard Liverpool fan….will I survive the ordeal?)

Ø       A man who kicks your cat is not the man for you. ( he doesn’t like cats. And I will kick him thousands even if he is merely pushing my cat away)

Ø      Be sensitive.( I will avoid talking about things that might cross the line and hurt him…eg.….F)

Ø      You can’t make someone love you just because you love him.

  Keep an open mind. (you could only afford to love him but not marry him)

Ø     Don’t get overwhelmed by a man’s fancy car, fancy house or fancy clothes. (It is the person inside the car, house and clothes that matters…as i could earn and buy things myself)

Ø     Finally, never borrow your boy friend money. (He doesn’t want it back and it will be a source of friction and you are in his debt.

When I asked him, lessons from past love, it was a much shorter list.

He would marry a woman he fancies, who’s considerate, who gets him, who loves him and whom he has absolutely no doubts about marrying her….

.

Tender Tussle

Is there a woman in the world who never sigh: Oh Man! while rolling her eyes And is there a Man who never torn in despair and growled: Huh Woman!

......but in their sigh and growl there are always notes of affection between them.

What are the men’s complaints about us women in their life?

They say, a woman, is impossible to please and understand. She begs you to forget her but cried when you tried your best. She asks you to go out with others and runs amok if you do.

She wants you honest, to know the real you, naughty, past and all. God! if you do tell all, she will never let you hear the end of it.

She: Is that girl pretty?

If you agree, the storm will break and you will not know what hit you. She complains you never bring her little present but if you did she is convinced you have been unfaithful to her.

Tell her you lost your job, blown your savings sky high or you been sentence to prison, she will stand firmly by your side. But forget her birthday or the date of your first meeting, and she will throw your things out the window and go home to mama.

A woman wants consistant  reassurance that she is loved but when you feel a surge of  tenderness and reach out to express it, she would often say:

 Hey I have a headache. What a lousy day.

She comes to bed with cream plastered face and feels hurt not to see the ardent glow in your eyes.

She spends half the month’s marketing money on cheap sales and expect you  to praise her financial expertise.

She declares she loves you as you are, faults included but spends more of  her waking hours yakking to reform  you.

She has hundreds strategies...she hints, coaxes, grumbles, pouts, sulks even goes on strikes to get her ways.

You are helpless because you know she does it all for your sake. You are her world. Your only rival for her devotion is the squalling infant she swears is the spitting image of you....

AND the womens’ grouses against men in their life.....

A man, they say, is Natures eternal challenge to womankind. Just as she feels she is beginning to understand him. He changes completely and eludes her grasp.

He is born contrary. Chase him, and he runs for his life. Give him up for lost and he comes after you, all intensed and wild eyed.

He does whatever he likes, goes wherever he pleases and you must not question him. But try doing one percent of what he does and he flies into a jealous rage.

A man is always right. The more wrong he is the more important it is for you to say that he is right.

He must always feel he is the boss. The slightest argument from you and  he suspects you are trying to ‘wear his trousers’.

He tells you to be direct, as he is a reasonable creature, open minded and flexible but it’s those feminine wiles are your only hope for success.

He stomps into the house in muddy football boots and scatters cigarette ash on the new carpets but then yells at you and the kids because his special desk has been slightly moved.

You buy branded shirt and ties but the next time he takes you out he insists on wearing his old shirt. When you beg him to smoke less, he says he wants a short sweet life. He hates you to make a fuss but when he has a slight fever, he would be mortally wounded if you do not fuss over him

He is amorous at the oddest times, when you are busy cooking or minding the baby but try setting a romantic candlelit dinner with music, he falls a sleep in his chair.

He cranes his neck looking at girls in skimpy minis and plunging neckline but his woman must be decorously dressed ALWAYS.

He spends his time working, chasing hobby, gallwanting with his cronies or staring at the tv ignoring you completely but expect you ti light up the moment he looks at you.

He expects you to be his wife, sweetheart, friend, counselor, mother, sister, secretary and to switch from one role to another according to his moods.

I guess Men and Women were never meant to understand each other.

If ever they do, married life would lose its flavor.

It is just obscenely wrong....

When I was in my early primary years in the early ‘90s I saw pictures which are new but familiar as those I saw when I was in my pre- school. Stark images of children with protruding ribs and distended stomachs, their sad eyes pleading into the camera. Families crawling on parched earth in search of water and food. People shrinking into human skeletons.

Mama: Those are people and children of Africa starving, their land is without rain for two years and besieged by ongoing conflicts that have ravaged food production and infrastructure and impeded aid and  the famine spreading touching many parts of East African lands. Tens of thousands of people, mostly children, have already died and there are an estimated 12 million people on the brink of starvation.

During that crisis, images of the starving prompted a mass outpouring of support from around the globe and inspired fundraising efforts like the celebrity recording of We Are the World. It will be interesting to see how the world responded that time.

The images of those people left my mind as I was busy with my study schedules in high school, pre U and university years. And in the past two decades I grew up with the rise of up-sizing, super-sizing and all-you-can-eat options at restaurants and fast-food outlets, and overeating and overindulgence have become increasingly normalized. Obesity is increasingly becoming an epidemic and food waste has reached staggering proportion, the crucial situation in East Africa is hard to comprehend.

More and more Malaysians are keeping awake till late to indulge in what is becoming a top national pastime – tucking it in at 24-hour eating joints, practically eating round-the-clock  at mamak shops close to and way past midnight  to satisfy the cravings of Malaysians who are gorging on calorie-packed late night meals with hardly a care – and getting obese in the process.

Statistics show that the prevalence of obesity among Malaysian adults increased by a staggering 250% over a 10-year period from 1996 while the number of overweight has increased by 70%.

Besides, about 38% of youngsters aged between 12 and 18 were classified as overweight.

It is time for us to focus on moderate eating, less waste and an appreciation of the bounty of food that is readily available to us.

Not everyone is so lucky.

Mothers in Southern Sudan are feeding their children leaves to stop them starving to death. They crushed foliage torn from trees then boiled it over fires outside their huts, draining the green-tinged water before their children devoured their sole meal for the day with their hands. They’ll get diarrhea from eating these but chomping on bitter leaves used as food is of last resort in here. We seen how thin they are and this is all they have had to eat since I don’t really know when.

One four-year-old boy sprawled naked on the earth after collapsing from hunger, his breath coming in faint gasps after refusing to eat the leaves as other infants wailed with hunger in the shade of a nearby tree.

Maybe someone knows more than I do about this—what I see here is just obscenely wrong.

My might have been.

Looking back at the crossroads in my life, I would imagine where I would be today if I had taken the other road than this….

The more sensible thought: for the fact remains I took the road I took and here I am and there is nothing I can do about it. This is only true, for each realistic person I know, there are a dozen who shares my weakness for the game of might have been.

Suppose if I had sign up for Arts instead of Science where would I be this moment?

Reality is here I am….on an oilfield far away from home working on surveys and drills. But if I were to pursue my first choice during my tertiary education level, I might be sitting in my own posh clinic prescribing pills and potions to the psychosomatic rich.

Or will I just as likely slogging soullessly on temporary jobs with fellow failures and drop-outs if I didn’t make it at all… scary.

I am here in this part of the world is because of my profession. Before, I used to read and watch features of hunger and starvation but to participate in the real sense is really breaking me to pieces now. Hunger does not result from lack of food but from some disruption in the distribution of the food itself usually due to poverty, military conflict or the denial of food to people as a weapon of denial during war or as political pressure against a given group.

There is enough food available in the world average of four pound of food per person daily. But most cases of chronic malnutrition result from problems in the distribution of a nation wealth and resources. The greatest failing of our modern world is in its inability to feed the hungry considering hunger is not cause by lack of food but the failure of distribution on reaching them and it become even more of a crime against humanity. Standing between the food and the people is a civil war where more than a million population had died of starvation and they are mostly children.

On both sides the terrible weapon is increasingly food not bullet.