Karen Cheng is as you would know, an uber mom / hot-chick / graphic-designer extraordinaire, and a blogger who’s got onto Australian TV. And in her photos of herself, she has developed this pose, much like “BlueSteel” or “Magnum”, called simply “The Karen Cheng”.

And here’s me with a poor imitation of it – at the front door, after a night out and slightly tipsy.

Join in the fun, why don’t ya?!

Got back from Melbourne late last night and I had a great trip there, both work wise and exploring some of the seriously hip and chic bars in the city with girlstar7. Pictures and write-up will be done soon.

In the meantime, I would like to say something about why I love this country and it comes from an aspect not often talk about: taxi drivers. During this trip, I took six taxi rides and during these six rides I’ve had drivers of six different nationalities: Lebanese, Indian, Aussie, Pakistani, Sudanese, and Armenian.

With the Aussie who is Melburnian, because he visits Perth often, during my ride from the hotel into the city to meet up with girlstar7 he’d point out some of the suburbs and buildings which reminded him of Perth.

And with the ethnic drivers, we immediately shared a bond from being immigrants. While I gathered that everyone else seems to have a problem with the Sudanese for being too aggressive on the road (it was true with the driver that I had), there was one thing that everyone of them shared.

Muslim, Christian, white, black, or brown, everyone of them used the phrase, “No worries mate”. Despite all the differences, and no matter which part of the world they had come from, everyone ended up being assimilated in one way or another. And amongst other things that indicates that you are from Australia, one of the most obvious giveaways is saying “No worries”.

And I think that’s great. I love it.

Work today was hellish. Two colleagues called in sick, and another got sent home in the middle of the day so that he can come back later to close up the office which one of the off-sick colleagues was meant to do. I was alone for 4 hours answering calls after calls after calls. Meanwhile, the support emails just kept piling up and the voice mail count increased at a scary pace.

I was stressed out, and impatient customers were pissed. It was not a good day at all and I’m sure management is gonna have some words about it.

I was so wound up when I left that when I got home, I quickly downed two bottles of beers in quick succession. I needed to mellow out the tension and it felt good. I also needed a laugh and what do you know … I stumbled across this on my colleague’s blog. (Thanks Sam via Phil!)

It’s funny because it’s true. But yeah, impure thoughts and all that. I feel dirty.

Almost two years ago, I had lost Wendy as a friend when I disagreed with her then-boyfriend’s insecurities and wrote about them here. What I didn’t reveal then was that before that he had also mocked my sexuality by calling me gay in front of her – it went on for the whole of that one night, annoying the hell out of me. It was illogical since I was the one who introduced them, but it made sense when I viewed it under the bigger context of him being insecure.

So yeah I didn’t like him and I wasn’t afraid to show it. But that distressed Wendy greatly, and we stopped talking or seeing each other for a long time.

Recently, about two months ago they’d broken up. Before that even happened though, as inevitable as I had always thought it to be, we had started to talk again. It was more or less forced upon us because Wendy had become Simon’s housemate. Being civil to her wasn’t that difficult because although I had been disappointed with her, I never hated her; he was the one whom I’d despised more.

No words of apology were spoken. I think we were both stubborn in our views in that we both thought what we did at the time was the right thing to do. Despite that, we gradually rediscovered why we became friends in the first place.

And it’s a nice feeling revisiting a friendship which I had written off. I’m not saying that it’s back to how it was – when you have a deep wound, even if it heals over there’d still be a scar, but what we have now is definitely nicer than before.

Yes it’s a very nice feeling indeed.

protego @ stock.xchng

It’s a common perception that the working hours in Asia are longer. While it’s true for some industries, it isn’t for most of them. For example, it may appear that people leave work late but the truth is that they also arrive later.

And sometimes a lot of time is filled during the day either being idle or being unproductively distracted. Attending meetings where you don’t contribute or learn anything, and having lengthy cigarette or coffee breaks are not uncommon. Even worse (or better if you are a slacker) is when it’s a big corporation and being lost in a sea of people means that no one will notice you being gone for more than 20 minutes at a time.

So I never understood this appearance of working hard but hardly working. I’d rather show up on time, do my work and leave on time. A cousin who had work here and had gone back to Malaysia to become a self-employed boss had to educate his employees thus: I don’t care if you leave early as long as you’ve finished your tasks for the day, and I don’t want to see you in here late just because you’ve wasted your day doing non-work related stuff.

Meanwhile over here in Oz, in some of my past jobs I’ve struggled to stay occupied and would look at the clock constantly like an anxious school kid waiting to get out of school. With my current job though, it’s the opposite. It gets quite busy and sometimes it’s hard to leave on time because I don’t want to leave things that I can do today till tomorrow, and thus compound my workload the next day.

Though for the sake of work-place harmony, I think I should try to leave on the dot more often. Because while I don’t want to be look like a slacker, I also don’t want to appear to one-up my colleagues by leaving later.

And I’m sure all of the above sounds just like Dilbert or an episode of Seinfeld: you want to look like you are working hard, but not too hard because no one likes a brown-nosing workaholic who makes everyone else look bad. Heh.

Me: Hey mom, you know that matrimonial charm you gave me?
Mom: Yeah?
Me: I lost it.
Mom: It’s ok. I’ve got spares. *goes to her room, comes back and hands me another one* Here you go.
Me: … !

Mom is kinda awesome like that. Or you know, she really REALLY wants a daugher-in-law.

Although I’ve enjoyed Adam Sandler’s movies, they never made me genuinely excited. Not until I read about his latest movie “You Don’t Mess With The Zohan” – just the title alone is funny enough. And it’s also the first time that I think anyone has ever used a movie to satirise the subject of the animosity between Israel and the Arab world.

From the excellent write-up in the New York Times about how the movie came to be:

About eight years ago Mr. Sandler conceived of the Zohan character, an Israeli assassin who has been trained to hate and kill Arabs; exhausted by the ceaseless bloodshed, he fakes his own death and flees to New York to become a hairdresser. There he finds Jews and Arabs living together in grudging if not quite harmonious tolerance.

Film – Adam Sandler Tackles Israeli-Arab Tensions in ‘You Don’t Mess With the Zohan’ – NYTimes.com

Intrigued, I searched for the trailer and bloody hell it’s funny and it’s got a message to boot. Some people on both sides of the argument will probably get offended by this but I don’t think it’s more offensive than the realities on the ground. I think that it’s good that this will make people laugh and also stop and think a little.