Christmas Day (and Boxing Day) post (again, one day late).

Word of the day: "omophagy"

Merry Christmas.

Today, as Christmas passed, I spent the day vegetating at home, still desperately trying to prod my RAM stick back to life. Okay, that didn't come out the way I wanted it to. But let's just say that my family doesn't isn't culturally inclined towards festive celebrations of any sort, other than Chinese New Year. And Ching Ming, which, while not exactly festive in nature, usually turns out to be jolly good fun romping in the graveyard with my cousins.

Received two Christmas SMSs, one Christmas postcard. No gifts - big surprise there. None sent out, of course, as per usual practice, but did congenially ICQ a few long-absent or distant friends, in an attempt to inject festive virtual jollity into my life.

Christmas Eve night was spent at a friend's cousin's newly-opened bar in KL. Obviously, it was packed, given that the city was full of revellers thronging the streets hunting for anyplace that served liquor and had a reasonably festive mood. In addition, my friend's parents and family were there, which, while somewhat inhibiting the conversational matter, meant that there was a free flow of beer and food, which more than made up for it. A few of us smoked Cohiba Siglo V cigars, as a sort of phallic macho compensation for the patheticness of our lives, but the Christmas spirit was enough to drive away the bleak psychoanalytic aspect of this activity, and instead we basked in the warm glow of Cuban tobacco.

I note that my addiction to 100 Plus is growing steadily. In the last year since coming home, I've consumed more 100 Plus than I have in my whole life. Maybe it's because I really don't drink enough water in the normal day, so I need some isotonic goodness to bring about a semblance of homeostasis. Or maybe I'm just prone to new dependencies. Whatever - it's healthier than my previous Coke addiction (which got so bad in University, I was buying 10 3-liter bottles of Coke at a time, and refusing to drink water). Although I've elicited a few quizzical remarks from the people I regularly go to lunch or breakfast with for my unbending insistence on ordering it at all times.

I think America's obsession with security may be getting a bit trying, particularly for people of Arabic or Malaysian persuasion. A friend of mine was relating to me how he was on a coast-to-coast flight with a Palestinian friend of his one time, a few months after Sept-11. He related how they missed every single one of their connecting flights (coast-to-coast flight in America usually meaning several skips and hops between major airline hubs), because visibly armed soldiers insisted on doing full body searches of his Palestinian comrade. He related bleakly how they insisted the Palestinian remove his shoes, get his body patted down and sniffed at O'Hara.. at one point entering a toilet after a search, only to emerge to be confronted by ANOTHER soldier and another cursory search.....

Two-thirds of the way, the Palestinian told my friend, "Fuck it, you go ahead by flight. I'm catching a bus." He shoved a bag full of notes and materials into my friend's hands, and darted out to the nearby Greyhound terminal. Later, as my friend was boarding, bemusedly, he heard a voice over the airport intercom: "Will XXX please proceed to the security terminal at ..."

As it transpired, the cameras had recorded the Palestinian handing over the materials, and they had detained him at the bus interchange, herded him back to the airport, summoned my friend back, and proceeded to ransack the contents of the bag. They even ran their fingers along the edges of transparency slides they were using as presentation material and other paper documents to ensure that they weren't sharp enough to use as weapons. Yes, those paper cuts can be deadly.

Finally, when they returned from the convention, the Palestinian told my friend, "Please don't tell my wife about all the shit we went through - I'd rather she not know there were at least six different pairs of hands groping my balls throughout this flight."

On the night of Christmas Day, I received a bemused phone call from my father. Now, he had gone to play golf with my uncles, culminating in their usual all-night mahjong session. Now, while the uncle's apartment they ended up playing at was well-stocked with snacks, (this uncle shuttling back and forth between Singapore and Malaysia regularly, the flat served more as a transit point than an actual home), there was little in the way of real food, and mahjong was so engrossing that they were unwilling to sally out for proper sustenance. The wives had point-blank refused to tah pao for them, instead delegating the job generationally downward. Resignedly, I called my cousin to organise a relief convoy, and we brought several packets of Hokkien mee and or-chay over for their consumption. When we arrived, they reluctantly tore themselves away from the mahjong table. Magically, once they were away from the hypnotic clacking of the tiles, their humanity was restored, and fleshly needs started to register in their consciousness once again, and they fell upon the food like starving Ethiopians on a Michael-Jackson endorsed sack of grain. Maybe I have a future as a UN aid worker.

Out of courtesy, I sat around, which wasn't too onerous, because the house was supplied with some very good Wensleydale and Camembert, and uncle was breaking out a great bottle of Pauillac. So it wasn't a total waste of my time, and there was the novelty of being able to surf the net on a Fujitsu plasma screen TV (broadband connection via PC with TV-out jacked into the TV). Although at one point there was a brief interregnum because my uncle wanted to show us a bunch of jpgs from his digital camera, and we couldn't figure out how to put all 100 or so pictures into a slide-show. The PC was a Win 95 box; so we could not avail ourselves of Win XP's shell built- in nifty thumbnail viewer. There were no graphics software we could use installed. The digicam software installed seemed to be equipped only for USB transfer. As a result, it ended up with me clicking on each damn file in Windows Explorer in succession, maximizing the screen, while the uncles ooh-ed and aah-ed the magnificent photographs from around China.

Boxing Day now, and back to work. Half the staff is gone, and today the boss called us in for some incredibly bureaucratic nitpicking point of detail, which, admittedly somewhat important, could have been resolved with a decisive order instead of two hours of waffling and fudging over all kinds of points of order and alternative permutations. In the end, the simplest course of action was chosen, but it was another sobering view into the dinosaur-slow nervous system of a corporate bureaucracy.

A couple of very hot saleswomen came in to sell fixed-line and mobile phone subscriptions, and as always, I was astonished at the sheer amount of chutzpah these slick salespeople possess - walking into offices willy-nilly to flog their junk. However, the power of a good looking babe, in stockings, with a slightly-lower-than-usual neckline was clearly enough to diminish my colleagues' (the males, at any rate) sense of corporate responsibility and they walked around. Even my rather ascetic boss, whom I was expecting to throw out these interlopers on their ass, seemed to soften slightly and actually conversed at length with them on the topic of to obtaining massive ISD savings and 50% off on all fixed-rate calls in perpetuity.

I was tempted, I admit (largely by the fact that it seemed like a pretty damned good package; the phone plan I mean, not the salesgirls), but in the end, moral righteousness prevailed. That, and the fact that the company they recommend has an ugly service reputation.

The few women in the office today watched this whole saga with a touch of resigned, cynical amusement. It's worth noting that these salesgirls went straight to the managers' cubicles (mostly male), and ignored all of us poor, lowly-paid executives. I guess the commission on our pitiful mobile bills (I heard that these salespeople are actually getting paid a percentage of the customers' bill upon signing up) wasn't worth the hassle. Too bad, it would have been a nice change to have a good-looking female trying to persuade me for something, rather than the other way around.

Gabriel: The Transcendant One said that "Nothing can change the nature of a man." And look where that got him.. er.. it. And I'm not censoring my past. *takes on "portentious-Delphaic-cadences-while-typing" (possible if you hit the keys just right) mode* MY PAST IS WRITTEN LIKE SCARS INTO MY SOUL.
*end "portentious-Delphaic-cadences-while-typing" mode*

I know a guy who can talk in capital letters (like Terry Pratchett's Death), and it's majorly cool at karaoke sessions.

More of the freakettes crawling from the parquet. Have fun in Britanna, Gabriel. Don't get your head bashed in by a soccer hooligan.