Let me begin by telling you about Chumi.

Chumi and Brendan have been friends for the last twenty-five years. We meet up sometimes when he is home. He works in KL and has been there for the past ten years. He is a sweet soul but more often than not, he is kind of depressed, i don’t know over what,, probably career & love life. But for the last few years, it was kinda better cos his work has shown results and he has had a fiancé for quite some time now, although it is also kinda grim cos their wedding has been postponed a couple of times and there was an underlying question if it is gonna happen at all but he has not brought up the matter and we didn’t prod. The last time Chumi came over to our place was not so long ago, in October. He was telling me about his woe at work like how his bosses asked him to substitute inferior beverages and sell it like the premium thing, and other stuff that conflicted his principles. I was just encouraging him to venture on his own cos i can tell that he is quite an expert in his field (food & beverage) and that many of his clients liked him. All he needed was some courage to try, since finance is something he can work on. hence i was pretty surprised that he later let on that he decided to have his own business and that some big clients have already told him they would be supporting him. I guess by housing us at his place and spending time with us was his way of thanking us? I don’t know. You know, i am quite straight forward. If i have to thank a person, i sit that person down and look him in the eye to say how i appreciate it or how it had helped me. So anyway, back to our trip. We stayed at Chumi’s investment house, which was not empty but not lived-in either. If was off Shah Alam, in Selengor which is 20 mins drive from KL city. He said he bought the house as an investment but i wondered why then, doesn’t he rent it? He said he didn’t want to rent to strangers cos “you’ll never know”. Kind of irony i thought. Anyway, I am glad for that sleepy town because i really needed to detoxify. The first 2 sleeps there were just nightmare. I mean, i had dreams about work, about loosing communications and about angry people. Oh, that is just so stressful and awful but i guess it was just detoxifying and it had to come out of my system. You know, the mind is such a fragile thing, having peace-of-mind is really bliss. So anyway, i am glad to say that the rest of my sleeps were alright.

When we first got to the house, it was dusty and had cob webs. It was new and furnished, just not lived in. It reminds me of my childhood home at Cairnhill where it was on the ground and had lots of sunlight and i love drinking my morning coffee facing the kitchen door where i could see some greenery. I inspire to live in a landed home so that i can be close to the ground, which for me is an important thing. Not to mention, i love seeing a big sky not eaten by buildings and scrapers. I don’t know why, but big sky is therapeutic for me. We cleaned the place as we “lived” there for four days or so. It is just natural to be cleaning since we needed to use the place. I will always remember the night we had some white wine and sang acoustic the whole night till 5 in the morning. Brendan is really fabulous, I call him a jukebox. He could sing at a drop of a hat, it was so romantic and fun for all of us. The next night, we had the karaoke thingy called “magic mic”, it is a gadget that has 2000 songs pre-stored you just need to key in the numbers to select a song. Though the images were cheesy calendar looking still pictures, there were still quite a number of good songs we loved and again, we sang till 5am or so. I even did a Marcaraena dance. It was just one fabulous, laughing good time.

I could only say we went to one party, which was the “speed zone” campaign by Ferrari for their world tour 2007. As it was held at Zouk, it was nothing short of Zouk or should i say, it was just as what you would expect, Zouk. I say, Zouk did a good job remodelling the success they have at home and just repeated the formula there. Anyway, it was an average party but we made more fun for ourselves. I was laughing my head off with my antics, you know me, i am a little crazy sometimes. And it is good fun that i had a friend to clown with me. There were a line of royal-looking mirrors that lined the walls to velvet when we moved from the main room to velvet. Along the way, i had to announce “mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of them all?” and we would lock our arms to run to the mirror and scream our lungs out, mixture of screaming and laughing at the same time. I don’t know how is that fun now but it sure was when it happened.

Our countdown was at KL Tower, which is one of Malaysia’s monuments. We “partied” at the viewing gallery which was like on the 150th or 200th floor, i can’t remember, but it is 421 mtrs above ground, overseeing the city and had half a dozen fireworks going on at the stroke of midnight, welcoming the new year. I said “partied” because the place was not a discotheque though there was a live band that mixed many tracks at their chorus, though i must say they were quite good. But the rest of the people there was mostly Muslims and didn’t / couldn’t drink alcohol, hence it was more like a C.C party. Community Centre party. I was so amused with the water bottle they gave away. It was shaped like the tower but no one else was as amused as me. I asked Chumi to get me a dozen of those and val thought i was out of my mind lugging it back home. At the gallery, they even had a platform like what you would see at a Muslim wedding where the couple sits on and people taking pictures. I dragged Brendan along to do the cheesy thing to take a picture with me for the fun of it. I have decided to be more cheesy than ever and let go of any up-tightness i may have because i feel that living includes being able to laugh at things and at myself sometimes. So anyway, we did have too much drink and were all tipsy. On our way down from the tower, we met the DJ in the lift and we all sang happy birthday to val from the 150th floor to ground. Then, i caught one group of people who had dinner and countdown at the restaurant above. They were so cheesy i couldn’t help taking a dig at them. You see, the women all dressed the same, in their LBD little black dress, who would know who-is-who? i keep joking that they were “a flock of socialites”, socialite-wanna-be that is. Before you think that our neighbours are not as stylish, i have to bite my tongue when i got to the other pub downstairs. The women there could give us a run for our money, they were modern and wow, were curvy at the right places. Sexy sirens. They allure sexiness like one seductive cat. The next morning, i told Brendan that if i were a man in KL, i probably would stay off the scene because i don’t think i could resist those sexy women or be faithful to one. So i guess there are both fashionable babes and those screaming mass-production ones there. Whatever the case, val was unhappy we had to go back and cut the party short. On the way back, she bit me on the arm. I don’t think she knew what she was doing and anyway, it happened. Of course i was mad at that moment, i am human made of flesh but i was grateful for that episode after that. Cos i learnt about my fury, about making amends, about love and understanding. All in an episode, how fascinating. for a split nano-second, i thought i could almost understand how God cursed Man but took it all back. I recapped my learning and joked that i was poppye the sailor man, making Brendan laughed his heads off and he had the humour to take a snap of me cooling the swell with a freezing can of tiger beer . Anyway, i do hope that val will move on and don’t think so much about it, like i said, i am glad it happened.

I also learnt about “trip / grip”. Trip- meaning an altered state of mind where some many people needed. You know, the feeling of all things loose, freedom and just loosing control. For a lay man, this can be achieved with just a drop too many and this is just normal clean fun. But as human, we tend to push our limits, try our limits, and sometimes, we don’t know when to stop. That’s when the grip part comes in. Grip is to have a hold. Have a hold of yourself when you are testing the limits. That is fine art. It takes a lot to know yourself and to know that sometimes, some things are not within your control, plus sometimes, some things get out-of-control. So you carry on exploring until you get both trip and grip at the same time. But you must always know what and when is it enough.