3 reasons why I love Easter, why I don't like computer games and other unrelated topics

First off, the reasons why I love Easter:

1. Uni holiday
2. Double pay (if you work on Easter Friday and Monday)
3. Sleep (this is a derivative reason due to the fact that it's uni holiday but "2 reasons why I love Easter" doesn't sound as good as "3 reasons why I love Easter")

Apart from all those reasons, there's nothing to make Easter more special than my birthday which was the National Sorry Day if you have to know. Why does it have to be special just because it's an important day to one of the main religions of the world?

I spent Friday at work contemplating whether Jesus should be called a zombie or a vampire. After some thinking I arrived at zombie, to be a vampire you have to do all sort of mutual blood drinking between the vampire and the one that would be turned into a vampire and other metaphysical bullshit according to Buffy the vampire slayer. But then didn't he offer his blood and his flesh, metaphorically speaking, to his disciples in the last supper? Does that count as reverse vampirism? Whatever, who cares? We don't even know if Jesus did come back. And by "know" I mean some scientific proof other than the well documented "scientific" facts from the world-renounced, "reason-friendly", thousand-year-old, beloved tome that is the Bible.

I've always wondered, but not intrigued and frankly too lazy to find out, about the deal with Easter bunnies and Easter eggs. What the heck does that have to do with a man dying on a cross and then coming back to life three days later? Well, now I know after reading this rather informative post. Think of it as recommended reading of the day.

The Floorober bought a Nintendo DS lite last week even after all my efforts in dissuading her from such foolish, time-wasting, antisocial and juvenile past-time. Oh we do play Halo occasionally, I have not problems with video games except for one which I will be discussing later. It's just that with Xbox we can't play it all day since we'd be in front of the TV all day and that is a pain, literally. The Nintendo DS removed the literal pain out of equation which means she will be playing all the time. Not good when you have parents who don't have the patience to nag and who would subsequently developed rather high-pitch yells once nagging fails. Also that's not good when you have to share the room with the nag-ee. Triply not good when you're already irritated because your lecture notes contradict themselves within the same slide and you're trying to decide which statement is true after emailing the lecturer to no avail while your parents try to use the high-pitch nagging technique on their unfazed, rather thick-skinned and patience-challenging other child. It always ends with me joining force with the parents. Triple the high-pitch yelling does do it for the nag-ee, but I always end up being more irritated.

Anyhow, the Floorober got the Nintendo DS lite and is waiting for some mod chip to play illegal copies of games to arrive. In the mean time I use the old Gameboy advance cartridges to try the DS out. After a few minutes of playing Mario Gallery (or whatever the hell the name of that game is) I remembered why I never liked those games or playing games a lot. They make me anxious. Every time I lost a life I felt like my heart stopped for a millisecond. Curiously enough, I feel that way before exams and before I find out my exam results. "Surprisingly" enough, I don't like exams. This is probably why I like puzzles more than the games that only require hand-eye coordination.

The Alarmist is back for the holiday, she said something rather funny today which I'm pretty sure was funny at the time but I can't remember now so I reckon it wasn't that funny. So, no Alarmist quotes.

The Drama Queen (DQ for short, that's my grandmother if you haven't read or have read but subsequently have forgotten this) had another drama session recently when she went on a hunger strike after my dad telling her not to water a chili plant to the point of drowning it and then cover it with cardboard so that not any sunlight can get to the plant. If there is an equivalent organisation to RSCPA but for plants they would have stormed our house and gently uproot the poor chili plant to put up for adoption in some other household. Or if that chili plant can magically grow legs and move, it would have uprooted itself to get away from the DQ's "tender" care many moons ago. Anyway, after her one-day hunger strike, the DQ resumed eating food but refused any nutritious food. When asked why, she said she did so so that she can die sooner. If you know my grandmother, she's a hard-core Catholic devout, what she is talking about is very close to suicide, and suicide in Catholics' book is the highway to hell. My mum pointed that out to her, she's been eating proper food again but who knows when she's gonna pull that one out again?

Since the Alarmist's back for the one-week holiday, the DQ has taken up waking up the Alarmist at various time of the day to tell the Alarmist that she should go eat. Strange thing is I think the DQ needs to eat more than the Alarmist.

What I'm really excited about at the moment is buying a new laptop. I'm finally too sick of my slow-ass old laptop. I was gonna buy a Vista laptop but then all I've heard about Vista is bad news so this might be a good time to jump out of a might-be sinking ship (that I haven't gotten onto yet so I shouldn't be worried about but being me, I was worried anyway) that is Vista. It was either OS X or Ubuntu or buying a Vista laptop and wipe it clean then install XP on it. The Linux and the Windows options sound like a lot of work that I won't want to do so OS X is the way to go. As a lot of reviews have been saying about OS X, if you like iTunes you'll love OS X. Here's my problem: I freaking hate iTunes. I hate its ass ever since I got my first iPod in 2004. We'll see how it'll turn out. If I end up hating OS X there's always running XP on Boot camp on the new Macbook.

More hilariousness from my family

My grandmother has what experts (I mean me) would call "martyr complex". She thinks that no one, and may I stress no one, has suffered as she has. My aunt, who we don't really talk to now due to a "disastrous" wedding reception last year, has a more severe case of this complex but that's another story. Remember the last time I talked about my grand mother? We were in a sort of cold war then with one side: my grandmother and her cheating theory and the other side: the rest of the family members living in this house who were very well-adjusted to living with an individual who suffers from "martyr complex".

Let me tell you how to handle someone with a "martyr complex", you ignore what triggered their martyr complex outburst and hope that they'll get over themselves soon. It might sound callous but that's the only thing that works with my grandmother (not with my auntie though, that'll be like throwing gasoline into a bushfire). Consoling her just makes her cry more and longer, showing her real cases of people who actually suffered more than she had only makes her angry (something about us belittling her suffering). Ignoring it all together is only a quickfix but it works.

So we were in the middle of our very own cold war under our (and the bank's) very own roof and we were using the tried and true approach to dealing with grandma by ignoring that she's angry with us and carry on as usual. And she was retaliating by refusing to eat properly and holding about 100 sleeping pills hostage against us. So we had a cold war and a hostage situation. After a week of the standoff, my grandmother declared that the war was over. No, she didn't just forgot, she stopped the "war" because she was scared that we would put her in a nursing home. It wasn't actually a threat per se. My Mom just had enough of being worried about grandma and told her that if she didn't let us take care of her we would have to put her in a nursing home for complete strangers to take care of her. It worked like a Zyrtec(c).

So the war ended but that doesn't mean my grandma would stop talking, mainly to me, about my dad sneaking out of the house to visits his mistresses. Her new obsession now is telling other people to eat. One day she woke the Alarmist up at 7 am (extremely early for the Alarmist who is still on holiday from uni) to tell her that she should go eat breakfast immediately and then she can carry on sleeping. The Alarmist, obviously, wasn't impressed.

Another of my grandmother's new thing is calling me by the Alarmist's name, calling the Alarmist by my other sister's name and referring to my dad behind his back as what can be translated to English as "old bastard" or "old man". Vietnamese is strange that way, one word can mean bastard, man and boy at the same time and you can differentiate what the speaker meant by the tone of their voice. The way my grandma said it, she meant "old bastard".

All the name swapping that's going on in my grandma's head makes for a hilarious situation. One day my other sister called home to speak to the Alarmist. My Grandma picked up the phone and said that the Alarmist is not home. The funny thing was, the Alarmist was right there next to grandma, with her headphones on utterly oblivious to the fact that grandma was answering the phone. Grandma was quite right because as far as she was concerned the alarmist's name referred to me and I was out. Funny hey?

One good thing that comes out of this whole grandma situation is that my parents have already sworn off living with any of us kids when they're old. They said that they wouldn't want to live with us even if we invite them to. Oh, and we didn't invite my grandma to live with us, she demanded that she live with us. Old asian people, you can't understand them.

my grandmother and her latest drama

My grandmother lives with my family. She has almost always lived with us since for as long as I can remember and that is not necessarily a good thing. It's actually on the borderline of being really bad right now. There is a reason or several reasons why she doesn't live with the families of my five uncles and aunts. The number one reason being they can't stand her for a long period of time. The other reason being my family is so easily bullied into letting her get away with anything.

You might say "Meh, what can an old, cute looking lady in her nineties do? I'm sure it's not that hard to put up with her". Wrong. My grandmother is the first drama queen I knew of. Everything has to be her way or no way. The latest shenanigan she's gotten into is rather amusing from my perspective. It started with her being her usual unreasonable self and ended with us giving up and letting her do whatever she wants.

My grandmother had a stroke a few months ago which left her at a loss for words. OK, she can't completely use her speech faculty anymore but on a good day when I wake up with lots of patience I can make out half of what she says. One of those "good" day happened to be the day before I had my microbiology exam and was cramming at my desk when she came in with her tale of deceit and unfaithfulness. So basically she told me (more like she talked for a while then I guessed for a while out loud and she would nod or shake her head) that my dad is cheating on my mum with 3 women who come to our house on a regular basis and that they call my dad constantly and he them. It took a long time for what I put down in one sentence to come out of her. Of course I didn't believe her. It just so happened that there are a nurse, a physiotherapist and a speech therapist, all of whom happened to be female, who come to our house at least once a week to help my grandmother rehabilitate into our house after her stroke. There, 3 unknown women all accounted for. Mysteries phone calls were from the hospital telling my dad my grandmother's warfarin levels. Of course I couldn't believe her.

She told my mum the same tale which my mum didn't believe of course. Since nobody believes her my grandmother had nothing else to do but throwing a huge tantrum which involved not talking to anyone, refusing to acknowledge that anyone besides her lived in the same house and staging a hunger strike. Rather infantile behaviours if you ask me but hey it's the cycle of life, you get hellishly childish when you get over 90. My mum gave in before day 1 of the hunger strike even finished. She had to apologise to my grandmother for not believing her and that satisfied my grandmother. Note my mum didn't say that my grandmother was right but it seemed that having someone apologising is enough for her.

That is not the end of that. Since then every time my dad gets a call or calls anyone she would tell me that my dad is talking to his "mistress" and smile a smile that says "you didn't heed my warnings and now that bastard is cheating right under your nose". She's been rather hostile, to put it lightly, towards my dad for a few months now. My dad is the nicest person on Earth, he puts up with her for almost 30 years and she's not even his mother. If it was up to me I would have given up on being nice already.

I don't want aspirin - a conversation with Granny.

Do you ever just wonder why it doesn't happen to you that you should do something quite obvious? Well, that happened to me, today. I suddenly realised that I've never really talked about my grandma before

Ok, to be completely honest, what actually happened was the fact that I haven't blogged for more than 7 days (and that's against my resolutions for this year if you're wondering why that's such a big deal, one of these days I'm gonna say "frak resolutions, I'm out of here" but it's not today) and I have absolutely nothing to write about.

Since I'm being completely honest, I do have a few somethings to write about but they're really really boring. For example, today I found out that if I'm a mythical god, I'd be Anubis. And who the hell is Anubis? Well, he's a very important guy.

Anubis was the Egyptian God of funerary rituals and the protector of the dead as well as the judge of souls and ruler of the underworld. Since it was his duty to weigh souls (along with the Goddess Maat) as a means of discovering the content of honesty, Anubis was also the God of truth.

Wow, I must say this is the first time these quizzes get me right. Can you imagine me as the ruler of the underworld? If you want to find out what mythical god you'd be if you're one, head over here. Before you ask, I don't usually frequent those love quizzes websites. I got the link from a Battlestar Galactica board.

Or I can talk about this insane letter I received today telling me that my name is at the top of the waiting list for Oral Surgery at The Royal Dental Hospital of Melbourne. What's insane about it is the fact that I have had the operation already. only 3 months ago, 2 weeks before my second semester exams. No wonder the waiting list at the Dental Hospital is so freaking long. They do their surgeries on the patients twice.

See what I mean? They're completely and utterly (is it a bit redundant to use 'completely' and 'utterly' in one sentence? oh well, what the hell?) boring. So there I was sitting with my screen blank and absolutely nothing to write about, not even a funny youtube video to save the day. And suddenly I remembered this conversation I had with my Grandma. Here's how it went:

GRAN
(opened the door to my room, sneaked up on me while I was listening to very loud Stabbing Westward music on my kick-ass, 30%-off-boxing-day-sale headphones)
Na*, can you find me some paracetamol?

ME
(recovering from an almost heart attack and barely holding back swearing "Jesus F---ing Christ!")
Sure Gran, one sec.

ME
(after having dug through the medicine cabinet and found anything but Paracetamol)
Gran, I can't find any Paracetamol but I have some Aspirin pH8.

GRAN
I don't do Aspirin, it's gonna burn my stomach.

ME
I'm sure this won't burn your stomach, it's pH8.

GRAN
(probably thinking what a useless space-wasting ass I was)
Yes it will. I'll just wait until your mum comes home.

ME
(happily retreat back to my room and even louder Stabbing Westward music)
ok.

That's the conversation. Not a verbatim version of the conversation though coz the actual conversation was in Vietnamese and my grandma doesn't talk teenage-style. See, [sarcasm] we were great conversationalists, communication really brings harmony to the family [/sarcasm].

Ok, I'm turning off sarcastic mode. The truth is I can't stand my grandma sometimes, make it most of the time, and that conversation is one of the example why. I could have launched into a lengthy explanation of why normal aspirin will cause discomfort if you take it on an empty stomach since it's an acid and aspirin pH8 won't because it's basic. However, that would mean explaining to my grandma, who is in her mid-nineties, about the pH system and that would mean I have to reason with her. If you know my grandma like I do, she's an unreasonable kind of lady most of the time.

Even if I did explain everything to her she wouldn't have believed me. However she won't have any problem believing what somebody from her church group tells her. I swear she'd drink the aspirin pH8 without asking any question if someone from a church group tells her that it's safe. Something similar happened to us before. Some lady told my Grandma that there's this plant that would help lower your blood pressure if you chew them raw or something. After a few kilograms of the stuff my "skeptical" Grandma's blood pressure sky rocketed. I guess the desired effect of the stuff is to increase your blood pressure astronomically then lower it down by a teeny tiny bit.

That does say something about trust though. My grandma has problems trusting me, a member of her family, while she has no qualms about trusting a stranger. How does that work, Gran? Oh well, she asked for help, I tried, she didn't accept it, so be it.

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* what my family members use to call me.