I feel very accomplished now. Pretty good for a non-native speaker. At least according to them. But still, when I saw some of the words I thought "My god, how are these actual words?" *horrorface*

You can try the test out here. 

It's pretty fun. 

In other news, I have my SPA interview booked for the 27th of February and I have yet to study for beans. Yay me! Also, yay holiday mindset.

In all honesty, I was pretty scared to take the test

akunona

Tough love, maybe

So, I was thinking, (pretty revolutionary, judging by the past few weeks I've been wasting doing nothing) about love, yeah? In the previous post and all that? So, in conjunction with my ability to over think and go off in tangents all at the same time, I was thinking about sick kids. Really, all the sick kids that I have had the chance to meet during clinicals. And also all the times, I myself have been sick during my studies. And how all my friends have been sick. And really, just about sickness in general.

What I was thinking was that, really, my mom did a pretty good job raising me.

You see, while we were living in Indonesia, back when there were only four of us in one house, my original housemates and I, every time any of us would fall sick, the others would go out of their way in taking care of them. Like say, Qilah was sick. Wan and Fiqi would make her bubur, bring her cool towels and maybe rub her head with this vile concoction made from Asam Jawa that would supposedly help with the headache and keep the fever down. Except for me. All I would do was maybe stick my head in the room and ask her how she's doing, I have some more paracetamol (if I had any) and if she wanted it, I was upstairs.

Some people would call me a callous and heartless bitch, but really, that's how I show I cared. If I didn't I probably wouldn't even bother to knock.

Now, what I mean to say is, I have never understood the need for over pampering while sick. I don't get why you need to make special food, have cool towels, and make vial concoctions from Asam Jawa. Thankfully, they never did any of that to me. And I'm generally fine with that. Sometimes they wouldn't even know that I was sick, and suddenly one day, I'd come down to the living room with no voice. And that's fine.

I once asked Aqilah about it. Was she bothered by the fact that I had never done any of those things that the others would do for her. Because I have never understood the need for all of it. And she said that she understood. My home life and theirs are vastly different. Mostly she just figured because my dad was a doctor, we never really had to care if we were sick or anything, but she wasn't exactly far of the mark.

As I remember anyway, when I was a kid, whenever I was sick with fever, my mum would tell me to get the green syrup from the fridge and drink it (somehow, paracatemol came in green syrup, don't ask me why). Sometimes, if we were really clogged up and couldn't breath, she'd make this special thing with Vicks and hot water, make us put our faces over it, and cover our heads with a towel so that we would breath in the fumes. She never really pampered us over much.

I don't know. That's just how I remember it. I always just went on with it whatever I was supposed to do, and eat my medicine so I'd get better.

You see all the television mums sitting at their kid's bedsides and taking temperatures every half hour and wiping down sweat or whatever, it is they do. And in my family, it was always, go take that medicine, and go to sleep.

It wasn't that she didn't care, no. It's just that she didn't pamper. If we were sick, sometimes we'd still go to school. Just because.

So when I listened to all my friend's stories on how, when they were sick, they would cry and cry and want to eat porridge or soup or have their mum lie down with them or something, I couldn't really understand why. And when that carried on into the now, when they were sick and would have all their housemates be worried, and go out of their ways to bring her stuff, I still don't get it. At all.

As you may have figured out, I never understood why some people would not go to work over a stomachache. Because I still would have. And I have. Of course if I was sick, I'd take other precautions like wear face masks all the time. If I had a headache, or a stomachache, or really anything, I'd still pretty much go to work. One time, I had a tummy virus and ran a fever that was 39oC and still went to work and stayed my on call shift. The rational at that time was, having to take over a friend's shift if they had covered mine would have been so bothersome.

So, yeah. I'm kinda glad I am the way I am. Though the bad side of it is that I tend to expect the same from other people. I'm pretty glad my mum raised me to be this person who I am now.

Once, when I was a kid and had a fever, I was sleeping in my room and my brothers had barged in and were making a lot of noise and I had woken up, but I hadn't opened my eyes yet and was generally cursing them to hell as sister's are wont to do. Then, my mum came in and made them all go out because I was sick. She then put her hand to my brow, to feel for a temperature and followed my brothers out. And I went back to sleep. When I woke up, she made me go get the medicine from the fridge for myself.

And that's how sick kids get treated in my home.

Thanks mum.

akunona

Of life, love, marriage and epic run on sentences which make less sense than I intended them to

So today, I am sitting here, on the floor of the living room in my childhood home, with my laptop on my knees, listening to Beethoven’s Allegreto Symphony no.7 in A major, OP.92 which I only know of because I searched the King’s Speech OST (it’s the music playing when his Majesty gives that speech through the radio at the end of the movie, wait, that might be spoiler-ish? Ah well.) Contemplating love.

Didn’t see that curveball coming didja?

Not really.

So last year, I made a post on Valentine’s day  (which you can read here, if you so ever wish) and I think that I came across as being rather cynical. I can’t help it, I am cynical. My default setting is sarcasm. Which sometimes people don’t get and they think I’m just being mean, though maybe they’re not that far of the mark. But would it really surprise you, if I said, really, truthfully, I do have a romantic side.

Gasp and call the Night Watch. Or something (incidentally, I do have all the Night Watch books, I just have never read them. Maybe One Day).

It’s not really news if I said I have not, ever, been in a relationship. I do moan and groan and complain about it a lot and in several past posts. It’s nothing new. But what if I said, that forever, I have wished for a love story so sweet, it will give me eternal cavities.

In all clichéd stories of life and love, my parents have known each other since form 1 in secondary school. And I have wanted something as awesome as that. Though, as you can probably deduce, that boat has sailed, been scuttled, and sunk into the depths of the Forever Alone ocean of unrequited love tears. But dramatics and run on sentences aside, yes, I do want to be loved. I do want an epic love story.

Surprise. I am, apparently, a little girl at heart.

But then, I think, what is love? Why do people equate it with a heart, which, really doesn’t even really look like a heart? Where do feelings come from? Why do people always say, follow your heart, when last I knew the heart, which is made out of special heart muscles, with special nerves, and special structures like fibers, chords, and flaps, that all, somehow, work together in synchronicity to make sure that we get the required amount of blood flowing through our vascular system so that we don’t get tired while at rest (stage 4 cardiac failure according to NYHA), does not, in any way, have any cognitive abilities. Making it unable to make an informed decision. Unable, to even make a decision. And yet.

I have a thing for run on sentences. It’s the common bane of all my English teachers. They obviously have not succeeded in culling my penchant for writing long, wordy nonsense. I have only deteriorated after my last English teacher in Matriculation.

But back to love. So? What is love. The scientist would say a mish-mash of various hormones induced by specific conditions to make your pupils dilate, your heart palpitate and a general feeling of warmness, maybe. Also, what happens when you get into a fight or flight situation, except different hormones. I dunno. I’m digressing.

I don’t know why, but somehow, I have worked into cultivating a very hard exterior in which, I am perceived as being, not romantic. I don’t read romance novels, I think watching romantic movies is boring, and while my friends are all, this is so sweet, that man is so romantic, I tell them that I have barfed a little in my mouth while observing their exploits.

Once a bunch of friends and I went book shopping. And among the books that ended up being purchased by my friends was a book, written in a vaguely religious manner, by a religiously educated person, on love. And marriage. And what we should do in this beautiful, wonderful, sparkly institution known as marriage. And I do not understand why she bought this particular book.  So, in the ever ongoing quest to obtain more knowledge, I asked her, why.

She said that when you come to a certain age, you’ll start thinking about these things. About growing up. I replied, but I’m the same age as you. We’re even born in the same month. Maybe you’re just a late bloomer, she said. Have you got a boyfriend Nona? She asked me. I said, no, unfortunately not. A look of comprehension dawned on her face and she said, that’s why. You don’t have a boyfriend Nona, so you don’t know how it feels. You haven’t felt the feeling of being in love and being loved. You wouldn’t understand. I think the conversation then went into tangents of how after I have fallen in love, I would probably change. I don’t know what I’ll be, but apparently, one of them would be a person who voluntarily reads self-help/motivation books on love and marriage and the lovely, beautiful and sparkly institution that is marriage.

And I abhor that answer so much so, because it makes me less human than her. And it is just really me, but it also implies that after having fallen in love, I may turn into a sycophantic human being who breaths and lives love and sentiment. Love pushes through my veins, kinda shindig.  And I hate that.

I may have never had a relationship but that does not mean that I have never been in love. And yet, I still don’t see the draw of reading the self-help, sappy long winded books of love, happiness and marriage genre.

The easy and oft used argument is of course, to each his own. And the more complex argument might include debates on child development, Sigmund Freud vs Erik Ericsson’s modules, nature vs nurture and maybe a long winded and completely illogical argument on why raspberry ripple will always top vanilla on the most awesome flavor for ice-cream in existence. But whichever way you say it, I think that in the end, love is so much more, marriage is so much more, and reading it from a cookie cutter, sugar glazed book is just so dumb.

It’s not like I don’t want to fall in love. Not that I don’t want to get married. Not that I don’t want to have a family of my own. It’s just that I think reading from those books, gives you very high ideals on how everything should be perfect. When in reality, it’s really not that clear cut. Sure you have ideals and motivations and some of them planted in you when you read so and so book or something but in the end, life is never what the books say. I mean, even all the things that have been written in medical texts have been researched and really the most general and common presentation of some such situation or disease, will almost never present the same. And that’s like, damn.

So, in essence, I think that reading those books is dumb and I’m just gonna wing it.

In the end, what made me contemplate love and all the convoluted reasons behind it, and marriage, and so many things that I cannot for the life of me articulate into a comprehensible sentence, is that today, is my parent’s wedding anniversary. And we know how that went off to.

I told my mother this morning, Happy-however-happy-you-want-it-to-be Anniversary. She asked me how to be happy. I told her to have a cookie.

Have fun contemplating life, love and the (apparently, to some books and people) lovely, beautiful and sparkly institution that is marriage.

akunona