We have a digital clock sitting on the counter. It is platinum in colour, with the logo of Petronas at the top. It was given to my fater as a gift, though for what reason i have no idea. The funny thing is that there is another clock which is of the same type, model, and auxillary functions sitting in the kitchen back in Ipoh, and it is also a gift, from another company. I guess now we all know where companies look to when deciding to send people gifts. Still, i don't know what kind of gift it was inteded to be, since they are sending a chinese a clock. Call it a time piece, call it a digital time telling device, it is still the same.(For a Chinese sending a clock is an insult, it means waiting for you to die) Nevertheless, it is light, and it has many functions, and so i took it with me to Australia, looking at it even now. Most of the functions i approve of, and things like the day and date and month is immensely useful. The thing that made me wonder though, is the thermometer. A clock like this is not meant to be kept outdoors, because the plastic may very well melt, but nowadays who looks at the thermometer indoors? whats more, the gift was intended to be used in Malaysia, the place where thermometers have been driven to near extinction, save hospitals where they do anal probes, har har.
Kitchens. I personally feel that a kitchen can never have too much sauces, or too much spices. Get a bored person together with a lot of spices and seasonings and usually new foods will be born. Fun stuff, those. Me, i only have a meager can of mixed herbs, which taste i am getting fairly sick of. If only i can have a fresh supply of spring onions and ginger and coriander and chilli and basil and oregano. Those things works wonders on a bland meal. And lets not forget the tomatoes. Red is good. My kitchen is a mess now, because i haven't taken the trouble to clean it properly. And when i think about having to cook everyday my will just dissipates. Cleaning wise, that is. I still enjoy the cooking, and mom is right: when i feel too bored and it is dinner time, cooking up something new is always a nice diversion.
Tomatoes. Wonderful red orbs. I love the stuff. Buying them raw and eating them as fruits is what i like to do. And i do not eat it for its "flavanoids, which has been scientifically proven (gosh i hate those terms) to have antioxidant properties, blahblah". I eat tomatoes, because it tastes like a tomato, which is reasonable, given that it is a tomato, and i LIKE tomatoes. I get irritated when people gasp and go AH MY GAWD YOU EAT THOSE THINGS RAW!! In fact, i get irritated when they act all surprised that you can eat certain things a certain way. Like what they eat is the only legal and proper foods and all other people who eat other foods are freaks.
Eating. I am someone who eats almost anything. Only thing i don't like is slimy stuff, like ladies fingers. And the main reason why i hate the stuff is cuz it is slimy. Let me digress: i eat foods for the sake of the food, hunger comes a close second. I eat to enjoy, to savor the flavour, to admire how everything is combined together, and how the texture makes it so good. Enter the slime. The slime covers my whole tongue, saturating it with one flavor only. It is slick, and makes my tongue slippery. It is the texture that is an anti-texture, numbing my whole mouth. Yetch. And people wonder why i don't take ladies fingers. There is a basis to why people think mucus is disgusting, you know. I can proudly say though, i am able to take most foods and enjoy it. Makes life much more interesting that way when you can have more oppurtunities to enjoy ourself at meal times. You have to eat around 3 times a day isn't it? might as well make a a pleasurable experience.
Life. Somehow, i think people over-glorify life. They make it all sacred-like, but they still eat meat, still kill pests, still eat grain that has probably been splattered with pesticide, still take a bath! Hahaha. The fact is, life is everywhere, but it can end anytime. Be it a human life, a microbe, a giraffe, a cell, or a chick (you know who you are). The moment we live, we die. The only thing that has even a semblence to immortality are cancer cells, and a fat lot of good they do to you. "DON'T TRY TO PLAY WITH LIFE!!! THATS PLAYING GOD!!! YOU WILL BE CAST TO HELL!!! WHO ARE YOU TO KILL INNOCENT BLASTULAS??!!!" Those always makes me angry. Sure, thats killing, sure, that could be a human being. Think of the potential! Don't take a bath then. Your body skin is teeming with bacteria, and they can be beneficial, or commensal, or downright dangerous. But they are a life right? That baby might someday become a leader in world wide peace. S/He could also be a serial murderer. That strain of bacteria might hold the clue to curing aids. Hell, given another 10 year it might mutate to be beneficial to us, maybe even curing our skins of acne. Who knows? What are you bitching about? Its none of your business. If you don't want people playing with life, then don't have sex. Don't have children. We have been playing with life all throughout human agricultural history. Taming wolves. We are changing their evolution. We are changing their very existance into something else. Sheep, cows, horses. Humans have dictated how these lines breed. That is also playing with lives. The fact is, i don't see what is so sacred about human lives. Not that i will go out there and slaughter 100 babies and feel no remorse, but i just don't see what the hell is it that makes certain parties so riled up that they go poking their noses into other people's business. And i have yet to see a passage where god remarked that to play with biology is to play god, and to play god is forbidden. To me, life is life, a miraculous occurance, but a routine occurance just the same. To really understand ourselves, we need to poke, prod, examine, and find out more about what we are.
Science. Science is a weird thing. Science is all about knowledge, yet the more of science you uncover, the more you know that you don't know. To borrow an analogy, it is like clearing a pieces of unknown forest to discover a lot of other connected unexplored patches. The more you explore the more unknowns there are. Yet the fun is in finding them. Thats what attracted me to science. There are always the promises of new things. Unknown areas to uncover. Fun things to learn. The cutting edge. It seems funny how physists of old rain scorn on other sciences. When you think of it, nature doesn't care that we have divided science into different groups. We happily sundered the realm of the living into Biology, forces and motion and electricity into physics, and atomic interaction into chemistry. But bear in mind that there is no such distinction in the natural world. Nature doesn't give a damn about how this is biology and that it shouldn't include some physics. I think if we look everywhere and into every discipline of science, and if you look deep enough, these tags and categories become meaningless. The movement of the arm displays remarkable physics, digestion employs numerous different chemical reactions, enzymes rely on hydrogen bondings, which is made possible by atomic configurations, and electromagnetic forces hold the protein into shape. And so on. Thats what, for me, makes science so interesting. Peel away a layer of something you thought is familiar, and there is the promise of mystery. And the answer sometimes contains a bit of eveything, some familiar some not. It just has a way of making you reevaluate your opinions. You can look at your own two hands in totally different ways, yet it will still be familiar, because you had them your whole life. One just never realised what secrets it contained, and what makes it tick. I get a rush of satisfaction whenever i learn how something familiar to me works, and now i can remark to myself:"Oh, so THATS whats going on in there. Interesting. Good job."
CurrentMood: Feeling weird
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