Jakarta, again.

I’m flying off tomorrow on an unplanned but necessary trip to Jakarta. Sigh, that’s the 2nd time this year, excluding Bali. I’ll be back Thursday I think. My notebook’s fixed so I shouldn’t have any problem getting online.

What do you do when you’re pissed off?

Had this post for weeks so I thought putting it up on a gloomy Monday would be perfect.

What would you do when you’re totally pissed with someone? That thought hit my mind as I was watching some guy chase his gf with a knife in a slasher movie some time ago. So would you…

1. Be adult about it and find out what’s bugging him/her. (which of course never works when emotions are running high.)

2. Give the silent treatment until he/she caves in. (a.k.a sulking.)

3. Lose your temper and demand an apology.

4. Swallow your emotions and try to forget about it.

5. Keep it inside and hit out later.

Come on, be honest now.

Personally I would stop everything, let it out and settle it right then and there, which puts me somewhere in between #1 and 3. I’ve never seen any point in holding it in.

I will assume that my friend is aware that he/she had pissed me off and is interested to make amends, which can be about as rare as a flying pig if he or she has the emotional maturity of a 5-year old. Which is why one should never forget the lollipop test on a first date.

I guess even old slasher movies have value – a message about anger management.

Are thongs gay?

I just couldn’t resist this post but something happened yesterday afternoon that made me laugh my head off.

I went to the gym with my two friends KC and WL (names disguised to protect the innocent). Shirley my gf came with us and we all had a great workout.

After an hour we decided to call it a day and adjourn to 1U to bum around. I came out of the shower first and put on my clothes inside the shower cubicle. KC came out second but he headed to the changing room to dress up. WL came out last.

Anyway as I was drying my hair, KC put all his stuff on the bench to put on this pair of bright red thongs. Nothing extraordinary to me but apparently someone in the changing room thought it was. One guy just couldn’t take his eyes off KC and his thong and from the worried look on his face, KC noticed it too.

We were roaring with laughter as we walked to the parking lot and I earned a big painful punch on my arm from KC for daring him to go back and take down the guy’s number. KC has a girlfriend and is definitely straight (at least I think so).

WL says thongs are gay. So undergarments actually have a sexual orientation. Right. But I can see what he meant. I used to think that thongs are practical because there’s less material to hinder your leg movement so its just another version of the athletic supporter. But yeah I suppose you can see “more” if you are into that kind of stuff.

What about you, do you think thongs are gay and if yes, why?

While we’re on this topic, here’s an intelligent question for you. How many times can a guy wear a pair of briefs without washing it?

Think carefully and scroll down for the answer.

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6 times.

The underwear is basically a piece of triangular cloth so what you do is you rotate it clockwise each day so you’re always protected by a fresh side of the cloth. On the third day, you turn it inside out and repeat the process. So that’s 6 days in total.

Now another question. How many days can a woman wear a bra without washing it?

The Simpsons rocks

Old school toons rulez!!!

I couldn’t stop laughing in the cinema yesterday, sorry Shirley. Its a hilarious movie, exceeding my expectations in just about every way. You have to be familiar with life in the US midwest and American partisan politics to catch all the jokes but even if you’re not, its still worth every cent.

The movie itself is a social commentary about traditional American values – family, church, the environment, the government, and business. There are deeper layers to appreciate like the love between a son and his father, a husband and his wife, a man and his pig. All in all it gives it a meaning that’s hard to find in other toon movies.

The patently funny moments I find hard to forget are Bart skateboarding thru town naked, Moe losing his bar, the Inuit boob lady, and of course my favorite, SPIDER PIG. Who says imbeciles don’t have a life.

A warning though. If you queued up for tickets expecting to see state-of-the-art eye candy, you’ll regret it. This is no Pixar or Disney production and purposely too I understand. You won’t find the crisp-clean smooth flowing images that you see in Shrek, The Incredibles or Ratatouille. That’s because the entire show is hand drawn, produced the old fashioned way.

But the movie more than makes up for it by encouraging the audience to engage in life’s challenges (like relationships) rather than escape from it, and presenting in a way that makes it real, complete with imperfections and silly people. Better that than having an indestructable mouse or ogre teach you the finer values in life don’t you think?

I absolutely love the movie and I think everybody should watch it.

4.9 out of 5.

(I would have given it a 5/5 if I knew what happened to SPIDER PIG).

Movies I want to see

The Simpsons have a movie.

Not fair. I want movies for these other favorite toons of mine too.

Hooray for my hero Spongebob!

Wait a minute that’s not Spongebob?!

New post @ 1600 Wall Street

I’ve just posted something about how a company gets AIDS in my other blog.

I’ve been experimenting with the header image. Still undecided about it. Any suggestions? (Angel, got a better photo of your toe?)

Thinking is for wimps

Everyone says, “Don’t think too much lah, just do it” and you know what? I think its a great line. Thinking is not cool and I happen to believe too many people are letting their grey matter get in the way of fun.

This guy (the car owner not the cop) certainly didn’t let thinking get in the way of fun. Booze up dudes, who cares. I mean what’s a small car wreck and a lost limb once in a while eh.

Thinkers are bad because they are party poopers. Well, mostly. They throw cold water over harmless mischief and enjoy taking the fun out of everything. That’s why they’re not on your party invite list.

Its the same in business. Just the other week someone told me, “Bryan you’ve got a great idea. Why not just do it. Don’t think so much.” While I understood what he was tying to say, a part of me says you’re not the one having to incur a million-dollar loss if the thing goes under so what do you care, dickwad. Oops I’m thinking too much there aren’t I. My bad.

So when it comes to matters of finance, health, marriage and family, should you stop thinking and just do it? What does it mean? Just follow your instincts? (Found out that apparently the urge to validate dodgy numbers on a business forecast is not a valid instinct and therefore if you do it, you’re a party pooper.)

So I conclude that “don’t think, just do” is a call to unplug your critical brain function and let your heart, stomach, groin or whatever take control of the wheel. Sounds reptilian. Sounds cool. And if you succeed, you become a role model for achieving something without the aid of a brain which then makes them brainy people look like sheep. Wouldn’t that be something. Man I could build a whole lifestyle and economy on that. No wait, I think I’m already in it.

Being hunted

Knowing I’m not the only one to have been approached by members of the same sex makes it easier to talk about it. Firstly I’m not casting myself as a victim at all. I’m just someone who’s had the privilege to observe a part of humanity people seldom see. I even wrote a sociology paper on it in college. It was quite useful to have a couple of gay friends who helped me put things in perspective.

Ok, I’ve blogged about being approached in Guangzhou and Singapore. Those weren’t the only times. My first encounter was in a San Francisco donut shop many years ago where I was having lunch. This large guy with a cowboy hat saw me eating alone, came by and mustered up a conversation. Ok so I was naive, what do you expect from a dumb 16 year old. Long story short, he asked me if I’d be interested to join him for a weekend at his ranch in Sacramento. I didn’t see anything weird in it but I said no anyway because I was supposed to be on my way back to Chicago by then.

It was only upon reaching home that day and relating the incident to my aunt that I received my first lesson on this ‘parallel universe’. Oh by the way, for those of you who have never been to San Francisco, you DON’T find gay couples holding hands and kissing around every corner. Its an Asian myth.

So anyway that close encounter helped me become aware that this thing is real. It happened a couple more times over the next year. Strangely one of them became a friend. By some stroke of embarrassing luck he ran into me at the high school cafeteria. Turned out he’s a senior at school. Anyway he saw that I had a girlfriend so after some awkward moments we got a conversation going. We became friends after that. I even helped him build a paper glider for a school project later that year.

In college I had a couple of classmates who were openly gay and I asked them why I’ve become a target. Well… friend A said I had a nice face. Friend B said I had nice buns and have bumps in the right places or something like that. Whatever. They were decent enough to teach me how to recognize signs of being hunted and how to say no without making a scene.

So this is what I’ve learnt.

- Having gay friends doesn’t make you gay, just like having straight friends doesn’t make them straight.
- They have sex on their minds. All guys do.
- If you feel threatened by an advance, its probably because you have fears. No fear, no threat.
- They are people with feelings too.
- To reject an advance, just smile and ignore. They’ll get the message.
- If they’re persistent its ok to say I’m sorry I’m not gay.
- Metrosexuality can and will attract advances.

Yup, that’s it.

Guangzhou rendezvous

I’ve given up looking for my camera’s SD card so I’ll just post a few video stills from my camcorder. I’ll be going to Cn again in October, this time to Beijing and if I can convince my parents, Harbin.

One thing about going places with your mom is how they can be so overprotective of you. She didn’t think it was a good idea for me to walk around the city alone with a camera. Its not like I’ve never done it before, geez. It’s like we’re either in the hotel, in the car, in some office, at a restaurant, then back to the hotel. For my dad it was a working trip. He had to remind me it was a working trip for me too.

So here’s a few crappy stills randomly salvaged from the 1st few minutes of my camcorder recording.

Told you it was crappy. I haven’t even seen the rest of the footage.

Anyway about the ‘interesting’ encounter that I mentioned in my last post. We went to this big new shopping mall and some guy tried to pick me up in the washroom. I was doing my thing at the urinal when I felt this guy next to me getting a little curious. And I think it was more than just normal curiosity cause he seemed fixated to a certain part of my body. Anyway he waited outside and flashed me a smile as I came out. Mom came to the rescue thank god. The end.

So that went down in my list of WTFs. It would be the 2nd time this year after one guy tried to get me interested in his pecker at a gym changing room in Singapore. Yeah I asked the same question, why me.

Anyway the trip home wasn’t great. The in flight service sucked as usual. With my notebook kay o’d and with the cheesy video games on board, I decided to put better use of my time sleeping which I did.

And that’s my trip.

Scary plane rides

What do you do when you’re in the transit lounge of some airport and you see breaking news about a horrific plane crash somewhere? This happened to me 3 times.

As we disembarked at Changi (Sg) last Tuesday, we received breaking news about a plane crash in Brazil. Apparently 200 people died. It was an Airbus 320, similar to the one we had taken to Sg.

En route to Guangzhou

Earlier this year, I had just stepped off a plane at Jakarta airport when I saw the news on tv that an Adam Air plane had disappeared and presumed crashed. And right there on the tarmac were a couple of Adam Airs. In 2005 en route to Boston for Christmas, as I was waiting for a connecting flight at Denver airport when news broke out that a plane had gone down in Miami.

Statistically air accidents happen in clusters so you’ll understand why I had rather mixed feelings about being on an airplane on a day planes are crashing.

Baiyunport, Guangzhou

Because of how people and places are scattered in my life I can’t escape flying, never mind that Boeing tells me it’s 22 times safer flying in a commercial jet than traveling by car. I’ve had scary moments and these have been the hardest to forget :-

Chicago to Phoenix. Took off in a storm to fly through tornado alley. Pilot struggled with turbulence, changing the cruising altitude a few times. I was familiar enough with the route to know that these moves were abnormal.

New Jersey to Los Angeles. I swear we almost hit the wing of another plane when we took off.

Sg to KL. Record-breaking number of mid-air turns in a 50 minute flight. We thought the pilot was burning up fuel to prepare for a crashlanding.

KL to Bali. Cross winds. I think we landed sideways instead of a straight line. Big jolt and screech as we hit the ground.

Sg to Amsterdam. Very hard landing. A few overhead bins jolted opened and stuff fell.

Taipei to Hong Kong (Old Kai Tak). Navigating the plane between tall apartments during typhoon season to land.

San Francisco to Denver. A commuter turboprop. Hit air pocket over the mountains and I spilt my orange juice all over my pants.

San Francisco to Denver (another flight). Dead of winter. The plane skidded slightly on the icy tarmac on landing. Small screams and gasps in the cabin.

But my biggest scare by far has got to be this.

Des Moines to Rockford Illinois. A single-engine private plane piloted by a friend. At cruising altitude a big gust of wind dragged us down a few hundred feet in seconds. I think my heart got lodged in my throat that day.

What about you, what was your worst plane ride?