Finding My Words

My pen feels like an old friend, one that I haven't met in years. I pick it up and put it to paper, the grip so familiar, the words choked and tumbling from the nib, spilling out, clumsy on the page. My desk is once again my window to distant worlds, to people and events I have never seen before. A girl is crying on the other end today, she is in her brother's room - what is she thinking? Her thoughts are no match for my window, I put them down to paper.

Sentient sounds from below, some snippets of a pop song my sisters must be listening to, and the window disappears, abruptly. I am back at my messy desk, the light from the table lamp pooling onto my page, and the girl crying is a distant dream. I look around: there's a mountain of newspaper cuttings on the floor, a judogi reeking of sweat from last night's training, and my books have made their godforsaken pilgrimage onto my bed, hidden beneath the pile of clothes I've yet to fold.

I have started writing again. My window is grimy, the images sometimes distorted after long neglect. A very unproductive post-SPM phase is now over.

Tomorrow I will have some glass cleaner. And that world will be clearer. Why is that girl crying? I will soon find out.

On Blogging

When I was 15 I remember reading a Star Education feature called World Wide Writing, published 30th May 2004. That was a long time ago, and I was a very different person: I hadn't yet joined Judo, I thought the PMR was the worst thing to have happened to me, and I thought Avril Lavigne sang art of a very high order.

This article featured what Star Education thought was the best of Malaysian student blogs. Here I pause in writing this post - I ran upstairs, opened my inspiration folder, and started entering the links of the blogs from that article. Most of them no longer exist: Daisy Boo (baabaablackcitysheep.blogspot.com), C'est la vie (gonzalos.blogspot.com) and William Fong (williamfong.theuseless.com) are all 404 page not available. The only blogger from that article whom I still read is Edrei Zahari, and with 1000++ posts in his archive he's still going strong.

A few months later, on November 17th, I started this blog.

It was a nicer time to begin blogging. Blogging wasn't mainstream yet, so nobody was there to tell us what to do and what not to do. None of that "OMG the whole world can read what you're writing about my school" garbage had started, and only Dooce had been fired for blogging about work. Heck, it was a grand time for all of us. It was like the 70s all over again (make love not war, at least not blog ones), corporations wondered what the heck blogging was for (now we get corporate blogs ... so go figure) and we made up the rules as we went along.

Today we have spite wars and people blog for the strangest of reasons. They actually do it for money, can you believe it?! Ohmigosh - money!!! Others blog for readers. Back then we neither had money nor readers, and if you told people you had a blog you'd have probably gotten a stare for all your efforts.

"Block hia? Ohhh ... that one I know I know. I use got Vitamin D wan, can prevent skin cancer! You lerr??"

So here I am, scratching my head and wondering why I'm still doing this most arcane of Internet activities. It's been a great journey, sure, and I'm certain the million or so teenagers out there ranting and venting their feelings would say the same (oh, you mean it's 2 million now?! It was a million the last time I checked ... like, oh, 5 minutes ago ...).

Why Do We Blog?

Which, come to think of it, is one very important question. I've given my reason quite a few times before: I blog because I want to keep a record of my growth. When I'm old I would want to sit down and go through my archives, and laugh at my thoughts; laugh at my antics. It's a picture that keeps me going: in my mind's eye I have kids, and my wife will be chucking a frying pan in my direction over a sexist remark I made back when I was - what? - 16?

Ahh, good times lie ahead.

I am convinced that people blog for many reasons, and some reasons are more fulfilling than others. If you want to blog for popularity ... fuggedaboutit. You may very well get popular, but that's by far a long shot, especially if you've got the writing skills of a rock. More often than not you'll get disillusioned and stop blogging, and then - this is bad - let your writing pollute the already polluted blogosphere. And if you get popular - cool. But I've seen too many cases where bloggers have their blog define their self-worth, and their egos inflate over something as unsubstantial as reader numbers.

Others blog for money. Now, I've got no problem with that, but I can't stand blogs who blatantly splatter ads all over their layouts without giving you quality of any sort. I'm happy if you give me writing that'll move me, and I'm happy if you give celebrity gossip or well picked fashion photos or just brilliantly composed photographs. But God please save your readers if you're blogging for Pay Per Post, or if you've just put up a Beowulf review with 6 pictures and less than 100 words.

Please God in heaven help me.

The thing about blogging is this: it's a very unfulfilling, boring hobby if you don't do it for the right reasons. Do it for the people you'll meet, rather than the fame you'll get ... do it for the feedback and the support you'll receive, rather than the money. Some do it for therapy - they spill their guts out on the digital page - and that's perfectly fine. Only often it's so unreadable only people who really care about them read it ... and even then sometimes not. But so what? You're writing for therapeutic reasons, and nobody has to read it to make that kind of writing effective!

Different people have different ways of blogging. I've friends who let their pictures do their talking for them, and I've friends who rant a lot, eventually letting 1000 words or so make their point. And I read them because they're my friends. Nothing to it.

But it's reaching beyond our circle that's tricky. It often calls for us to really improve the way we write. It means being honest, being clear, and - occasionally - being funny. And this is the good stuff - it means we're churning out real quality ... and that can only mean a better blogosphere.

There is a phrase in Stephen King's On Writing that applies to blogging as much as it does to writing:

Life isn't a support system for art. It's the other way around.

If I ever (God forbid) let my blog take over my life, it would do me well to remind myself: it's just a blog. On the Internet. That's probably read by less that 0.1% of the world's population. Blog well, blog good, and for all our sakes do it for the right reasons.

Our eyeballs will thank you for it.

Also related: Mark Bernstein's seminal 10 Tips on Writing the Living Web.

Update: I removed a sentence from the 14th paragraph, reading: 'In doing so, however, you're lowering the quality of writing out there. There's nothing much we can do about that.' It doesn't make sense, and even if true, doesn't contribute anything to the point I'm trying to make.

Intelligent Dinner Conversation

tay said:
could u ever be interested in a nice phone?

Dienasty said:
well
if i throw it and drop it and it still works
yes

tay said:
mine does....
i droped in in the toilet
it was in my pocket
i took my pants off
for some reason
i flung my pants
just to straighten it
den it flew out
directly to the floor
so it's fling + gravity
and the best thing
the camera had a black spot on it b4
i was going to send it to fix

Dienasty said:
and now
it has brown spots

tay said:
den after it floored
the spot disappeard

Dienasty said:
O.M.G.

tay said:
fixed it

Dienasty said:
i. touched. your. phone.

tay said:
not toilet bowl
i mean
in the bathroom
on the floor
not toilet bowl!

Spirit Or Stupidity

My last conscious thought was "Thank God it's not Osaekomi."

And then there was a bright rush of colour and an absence of sound, and I was free and it was peaceful and I was not on a mat. I was flying: that was it ... that was the only explanation. There was a bright light; heck, there were lots of bright lights, and then the images started, flashing sepia and beautiful. Most were too quick for me to snatch and hold, to remember, but there were a few: one was a ferris wheel, swinging in reverse; and then a city at night, from above; and feet ... moving feet, to and fro. To and fro. Sensei's face broke in. To and fro. What is he doing here? To and fro, interrupting my peacefulness? To and fro.

I was brought up to my feet, my vision of the dojo swimming. The green was too green, Max was too round, the voices rushing back into my head.

"What happened?" I croaked. My throat felt raw. It hurt. I realized the match wasn't over, that in all probability I would need to fight again. My shoulders tensed ...

"He choked you. You blacked out."

... and relaxed. I had lost. Lost, and gotten a hell of an experience in the process.

Stumble, stumble, back onto the floor, the solid, solid ground, and then Tay was next to me, one of those rare times I've seen him worried, his voice gentle: "Are you okay? Your face blue."

I waved him away, ("Okay, okay.") the pain in my back excruciating.

Opinion on what happened was split two ways: people like Tang and Tim (who choked me) thought my spirit was amazing, that I didn't want to give up in the middle of a choke. Others like Frankie and Vivienne thought I was stupid - "Kenapa tidak tap out?"

And you know what? I don't know which one I was. Maybe I was strong, never wanting to give up, wanting to win. But the truth was that it felt more like I was stupid. Pick up and move on.

The pictures in my head, though, were quite something. A ferris wheel in reverse? Something is miswired up there, I swear.

Why We Fall In Love With Sports (And I Didn't)

I have always thought of myself as an anti-sport person.

I found myself more in love with books and computers than the great outdoors ... a geek lah, in simpler terms.

I did not (and probably still don't) understand the joys of running after a feathery nub with a ridiculous looking netted stick, or of bouncing an orange ball through a forest of tall people, with the eventual aim of shooting it into a hoop. But hundreds all over the world do love these weird concepts, don't they? And to hear Sam and Jasper talking of badminton would be to think it was a religion, rather than a sport.

I did give badminton a try. I was in primary 3 and I played at the youth and sports hall near Jalan Kereta Api. It didn't go well. I missed the shuttlecock 90 percent of the time, and soon I got sick of running after stray shots. There just wasn't any fire to get better at it - I was told to practice serving against a wall ... and pretty soon all my shuttles ended up on the roof.

I stayed away from badminton for a long, long time.

Running to me is a sport more understandable than most. Who hasn't played cops and robbers in primary school? I loved the thrill of ducking left and right, spinning to dodge oncoming hands, and the shortness of breath you get after outdistancing and outwitting a potential captor. Yalah, athletics might not be like that, but I know the pleasure involved at beating time - be it personal or recorded. And having a friend like Paul helped a lot in understanding some of the nuances: the pain, the mental state, the windbreaking strategy.

Running wasn't a sport for me, though. After discovering my speed the bullies in primary 1 took me to their pet chase victim. I quickly learned to read at recess.

So I grew up sans sport for many years. I took up swimming, but only to prevent myself from a wet and unhappy death, and then I tried basketball in PJ, where Kenny remarked that the ball played me better than I played it. Which is, of course, a sad and sorry truth.

I think the main problem with me and sports is that there is this period of unbearable rote before you become any good at it, and I just couldn't bring myself to get past that stage. What? Hit a shuttlecock against a wall for 4 months?! You crazy ar?! Don wanna go liaw! Add to that the hundreds of kids who are so much better than you are, and despite being younger are all the more ready to laugh at you. You ask them for help and they look at you as if you have five legs.

Looking back at all of this I wonder, sometimes, at what made me love Judo. It isn't very different from other sports: you still get players that are egotistical, and there is this period of unbearable rote before your technique works. But instead of turning me off these elements in this sport pushed me on further. Like fire. Or weed. Or rum, whichever vice you prefer.

But I suppose Judo's appeal to me lay in its practical applications. You got to defend yourself, while learning throws and locks. And there is this important tactical side of it, which is lovely to me as a geek: combos, counters, styles (Mongolian vs Japanese), specialties. It requires you to think, and to think a lot. It was very much like a Tekken video game. Or Soul Caliber. Or Mortal Kombat. And that everything was open to your imagination: you could create whole new ways of doing techniques, if you wished.

Yes, I know much of this does not make sense, but I have gotten past that period of unbearable rote and am now finding myself at a stage of competence, where it is easier to love a sport you are good in (funny that applies for the reverse scenario: that it is easier to be good in a sport you love ...) Very often I feel like a sheep in wolves' clothing. Me? Okay at a sport? Impossible!

And then I remind myself of all those things I have yet to master, and the minor details of me going up against real wolves fall to the wayside.

We sheep have our moments, once in a while. I intend to enjoy them.

You've Got To Love Andrew Ho

From my phone inbox:

I hate you ced, you could hav established better friendship if we are to go for the same math tuition for like more than a year. Now u chose to leave, when i see your name and think back, i wont hav much memory of u, n u r just another name.

Roughly half a minute later:

See its one year we could have spent together, the whole 2008, but you just blew it off like how someone would do with a fuel powered leaves blower in canada during fall.

Two days on:

I am having a great time without you in math tuition, don you ever come back to distract me. I bought a new dog.

Wonderful sense of humour. He didn't mean any of it, of course, but it was a good chuckle all the same.

I can't wait for him to come back to the blogosphere.

The PLPB Open (Psst: I Got The Shirt!)

I lost my first match.

It happened so quickly: one moment I was upright and taking an inside grip, the next I was on the ground and staring up at the ceiling and hearing Sensei call out ippon!

Shit. Shit shit shit shit shit.

Forgive me this swearing.

Shit.


Let's take a look at it before continuing any further:



The throw Gan pulled off on me was an Osotogari. My throw. I can handle losing, I can handle doing my best against a left hander (left handers always have the advantage in Judo), and coming out second. What I cannot handle is being thrown by a throw I know inside out.

Alright lah, not inside out. But a judoka takes pride in his specialty, and we don't usually like been thrown with the one throw we feel is ours. Logical, correct or not? You've practiced that one technique over and over again for two years, and slowly you'll get to know everything about it: the possible combos, counters, how to pull it off, and how to stop it.

I was beyond pissed.

I sat down next to Malcolm, simmering in this pot of self hate. And he turned to me and said something that changed me; changed my view of the entire competition.

"I think you think too much. In the match. Stop thinking."

Click. A row of windows aligning themselves in my head. I look out from one end and there is light somewhere beyond, and I examine these windows one by one.

The first is Malcolm's words, but they are already echoing in my head, and I understand them.

The next is Jasper telling me not to respect my opponent. That the laughter and friendship kicks in only after a match, and to hell with them while you're in the middle of a competition.

Gary talking: "In Judo competition anything can happen, no matter how good you are. This is just the way it is. Split second and bam."

And the last window, where I decide for myself that I want something from this competition. And that whoever gets in between me and that prize will have to pay the sorry consequences.

Then these thoughts clear themselves away from my head, and I spend the rest of the competition not thinking at all.

My sister calls this picture sen. I was not responding to conversation.

I lost my first match, and so I am entered into something called Repercharge. If the person you lost to reaches the semis you'd be entered into something called the Loser's Pool (hate the name) with the ultimate aim of third place. Any loss along the way means elimination.

It was obvious that I could not afford to lose any of the matches I was going to play.

My first repercharge match was against Vyneriddo. I threw him in a minute or so with a perfect Osotogari, though I had to make two tries at it. I was pumped up, my movements were fluid, and I was keeping my mind empty.

But my heart fell when I saw who I was up against next. It was Enoch, the same guy who had defeated me with a koka in the State Selections. My Osotogari had a curious history of failing around him - he was taller, and he was heavier, and damn his legs were long.

Here's what happened:



An explanation: that was an Osotogari, which was overdone and made him fall on the back of his neck. I scored only a yuko for it, and then he attempted an armlock. A few seconds after this video ends I threw him again, this time with an Osoto-makikomi. I then dragged out the match, messing with his shoulders (and quickly losing whatever stamina I had) for 4 whole minutes.

I won with two yuko. Enoch didn't manage to score.

And the worst was over. It was with a cruel sense of irony that I fought Tay for third place, since he was doing wonderfully outside the Losers' Pool. Tay insists he was lucky to go that far, but I disagree. No amount of luck could've helped him if he hadn't been training for the past few months.

Here's our match, all 22 seconds of it, ending with an Osotogari:



And that was that. I got 3rd, Tay got 4th (woohoo for St Thomas'!). Tim got 1st, Aby got 2nd, Jerom got the other 3rd position, under me in Repercharge rankings, and Gan got 5th.

Oh, and one last thing:

The dojo is in that happy state of chaos after a competition, and I head for Sensei, catching him before another official asks for his help.

"Sensei!" I say, grinning.

"Yes?"

I take a deep breath. "Now, about that shirt ..."

I Want. That. Shirt.

I have my eye on the orange Osotogari shirt for the entire duration of the Piala Pengarah. It is my throw, and my longing for it is entirely understandable.

Steffi, another Osotogari specialist, is very happy to get hers ("Eep! Osotogari ahh? I want!"). Horng Eng sticks her tongue out at me throughout the entire competition, flaunting it.

You see, all officials get the Osotogari shirt free. But I am a competitor, I couldn't get it free, and I wanted it so badly.

"Sensei, can I have that shirt?" Pointing at the officials table, all decked in orange.

He has that familiar twinkle in his eye as he replies.

"Now, what I'm going to do is to print some extras, and keep them."

I groan inwardly. This is exactly what I don't want to hear.

He continues: "Ahh. Now you train hard, and in the next few competitions if you do well I'll give you one. Got many chances for you to prove yourself wad. The PLPB Open, The President's Cup ... where the Perak judoka will be invited again ..."

And this time the groan escapes my lips, curling in the air. Trust Sensei to come up with something to push me harder, a carrot slowly revolving above me. Upwards.

That shirt belongs to me. I want it.

And the PLPB Open is tomorrow.

Photolog: Last Day Of School

You Know Lah

The setting is in PA tuition. I am sitting between Jylene and Tay, and she leans over and asks him:

"Tay! Are you straight? Or bi?"

Without missing a beat Tay replies: "Tri."

"What? What's the other -"

"Kenny!" Tay was smiling, a finger in the air.

"Oh? I thought you were going to say 'horse'."

"No, that's you!"

"You!"

"No, you!"

"You lah!"

I took a deep breath.

"What?"

"I feel my brain cells dying."

Constipation Pushups

We are together in a circle, at the end of a training session. 20+ judokas, all sweating and tired and to some degree ready to crash. "Pushups!" Sensei shouted, "We go in a circle, with Anderson counting 10, and then Shahirah, and then Cedric, and Chong, and so on. 100 pushups!"

Shahirah did some quick maths. "Setiap orang 10 ... kami berhenti dengan Sensei la!"

I looked around and counted 10 people. Yes. The 90th to the 100th was Sensei's. Anderson started counting.

Judo pushups aren't like the normal ones you get in BB, or the very laughable ones the girls in GB do. They develop the glutes and broaden the shoulders, and they are the reason all judokas have well defined upper bodies.

But whatever. So there we were, doing pushups, when Gan starts making this odd urhh urhh urhh sounds. They got louder and louder, and by the time we reached the 50s it was sounding very much like an old man with constipation.

"Oi!" Sensei shouted. "We see you people in Waterfront ... acting so macho with your girlfriend ... and then you come here and what do you get?"

"Siapa?" Shahirah asked. I jerked my head in Gan's direction - we usually saw him and his girlfriend in Judo competitions. She supporting him, of course.

Shahirah collapsed in laughter.

By the 60s I found it difficult to lift my arms above my head. By the 80s they didn't feel like arms. Wooden blocks, probably. Gan's cries grew louder and louder with every push.

Finally Sensei! The last 10! Oh my kingdom for the end of this torture! I swear I could hear the angels singing!

"1! 2! 3! 4! 5! Eh?" Sensei paused. "What number already? Forgot! Nevermind ... 1! 2! 3! 4! 5! ...!"

And Gan's constipation cries now had a defeated edge to them.

The PLPB Novice

First competitions can be scary things. Scarier even, than first trips to the dentist. Think back. Your very first dentist trip was when you didn't know what to expect. Perhaps it was the smell that warned you, or the description of a dentist (a tooth doctor ... doctors do painful things, don't they?). It is the 2nd trip that you start to cringe and cry and hold on to your seat, to lengthen the simple act of getting out of your car and walking, knowing soon you will be seated with nothing to save you from the metallic taste of pain.

But no.

Competitions are different.

Competitions test your mettle, they whittle you down to your core. Who are you, really? How will you handle the stress, the fear, the different kind of pain of disappointment? How will you interact with your fellow competitors, the friends who are not your friends? They wish you the best and then attack you.

The mental struggle is delightful. And frightening.

I saw all of this at the morning of the PLPB novice. Nobody said it out loud, of course, but the tension was there. It is electric, hidden behind friendly faces and illustrated in the tiny changes to the competitors. Soft people are softer. Loud people are louder. They all joke, become quiet, joke again.

The red and white belts help differentiate competitors in the heat of a match.

Beautiful morning, really. Tay picked Gary up, then came over to pick me. The sky was a brilliant blue. We stopped by the dojo to wait for the rest - we were going to PLPB via carpool and most of us had not the foggiest where that was.

Charlton looking sexy.

I followed Malcolm. That turned out to be a big mistake.

Malcolm the transporter. Not.

We squeezed into his car, playing with handphones, and I felt an odd, uncomfortable sensation as Malcolm zipped out of the parking lot. It wasn't that he was not competent - he kept close to the Isuzu Bighorn leading the way, and nipped in and out of lanes with the confidence of a chimpanzee crashing through the rainforest.

Then we hit the highway, and Tay overtook us, and Malcolm hit 90. We passed the new bridge, paid the toll, and he let out a raucous peal of laughter as he overtook Tay again. The laughter was free. Crazy. And was usually followed with a firm foot on the accelerator.

Hunting Tay down.

Oh. My. God. We did not travel at speeds slower than 70 after that.

WAKAKAKA!

Wobbly knees after we reached the campus.

Red tatami. Nice, yes?

Tay, Gary and the rest of the competitors changed into gis. I taped the referee's seats, and then was resigned to the role of photographer. With a big, fat DSLR. Oohlala.

Gary and Tay warming up.

No, seriously.

Honest!

Urgh.

Oh, and this is Tim. He's only been playing for only 4 months, and he can already throw me. I suspect that it has something to do with the fact that he is a left hander (and I can't fight left very well), but he trains. A lot. We expect him to win the whole competition off the bat.

Tim. Uchimata.

Tay's first match was cacated. He didn't dare to attack, and I knew the things going through his head, though that fear was a matter that he will have to overcome by himself. His footsweeps were static (which means they have no chance of working), and he didn't dare to reach out in any big throw apart from Taiotoshi (which is the hardest to pull off, really). But I think he did pretty well, considering. I'd performed far worse than him in my first competition.

I probably looked like this (the flying guy) back then.

Gary Tay had previous competition experience (Sarawak wushu), and this helped. The first match saw him like this:

Gary was the one flying. A beautiful, beautiful Osotogari.

But he won his second with an Osotogari counter. The Thomians cheered for him, and Tim in particular helped by yelling out advice from the sidelines.

Tim was the one that surprised all of us. He defeated Tay in the first match with a clean kosotogari, won the second by a pin, and then lost the third to a white belter. I hit the shutter the precise second Tim fell - too late. I got a picture of him on the ground. It was deashibarai! A footsweep so fast most of us only saw the results of the throw, and not the throw itself.

Deashibarai is a timing throw. You sweep one of your uke's feet from the outside, as he is coming foward, and then he falls down upon himself. It is very, very hard to do that against an opponent of equal ability. And a white belter! God!

Tim won in the end, of course. But by a very narrow margin. Gary got 2nd place in the lightweights. And the girls? Heh. There were only 3 of them, so everyone walked back with a prize. Ern Chee at 1st, Siat Ying at 2nd, June at 3rd. They banged their heads while fighting. The dojo erupted into hearty laughter. Sensei closed, I took pictures, everyone was glad it was over. The guys changed out of their gis, talking and pushing each other around. We told Malcolm he blew the ending whistle like a sissy. He told us he was falling asleep. And we all ganged up on Tim and shook our heads and made tutting noises.

Too soon the trip back: into the car with Malcolm, and the horror again.