I know this might be construed as racist but, just as the Chinese are generally seen as being industrious, Malays can throw extremely good parties. And even though all the staff were Malay (and thus Muslim), and there were unfortunately no pork products available (ham…sigh), the entire family was made to feel extremely welcome. There was even a Santa Claus (one of the staff) handing out little presents to all the kids who attended. I doubt anyone could have done it better.

As you can imagine, after that wonderful night, we were waiting with bated breath for this year, hoping that the neighbourhood restaurant would do the same thing. What we forgot was this.

Since last year, there has been a significant influx of expats into the area. British expats, mostly. And a group of them must have approached the management of the neighbourhood restaurant because, this year, we don’t have the dinner like we had last year. Oh no, this year, we have two parties. A kids’ party and, one and a half hours later, an adults’ party.

This seems to be a peculiarly British and Australian thing, this division of…well, everything at a social event. (The Americans, from the Californian parties we attended, seem generally, thankfully, free of this kind of WTFery.) If there are Australians at a barbie, they’ll automatically divide into the men’s group and the women’s group, with a no-go area in between. (And, if you’re male and more interested in women, and thus cross the invisible line to go talk to said women, you’ll be regarded as a “poofter”, which is incredibly ironic as “poofter” is a derogatory term for a gay. If you’re a woman and more interested in talking to the men, well of course you’re a “slut”.)

If you socialise with a bunch of Poms, they’ll inevitably throw an event where the kids have to disappear for hours on end while the adults have some fun. What’s interesting about this is that the Poms won’t organise an alternative to occupy the kids that aren’t supposed to be there, they’re just not supposed to be there, and it appears to be perfectly okay if their (and your) children are walking the streets or panhandling or something, as long as no carousing adult catches sight of one.

Why I’m particularly bemused this year is that, of all the holidays of all the seasons of all of the year, you’d really expect CHRISTMAS to be a family event, wouldn’t you? I can understand a no-children rule at, say, a Valentine’s Day dinner or New Year’s Eve bash (and we’ve not attended more than a decades’ worth of said parties due to our little petals) but CHRISTMAS???? Good freakin’ grief!

So there you go, another promising event shot to hell, and it’s all thanks to the British. Even when their colonising armies went home, their mentality obviously didn’t.

I’m not talking about investment banks, those Ponzi-scheming, blood-sucking, Crown-of-Thorns starfish devouring institutes of everything in their paths. Ahem. I’m talking about your normal, run-of-the-mill banks that, now that I think of it, are little better.
Think about it. You’re giving the bank YOUR hard earned money. And the bank will be using YOUR money to make money that they supposedly survive on. Remember when banks were like that? But now….

You want the flexibility of a daily working account? Well, you ain’t going to get a cent in interest from any money there. And if you underestimate your expenses one day and overdraw your account, the charges rack up at an alarming rate.

You want something with some interest? After all, you should get something back from essentially giving your money to an alien concern that may or may not guarantee your cash deposit, right? Sure, you can have some interest, but the bank won’t make it easy for you. You can’t have a cheque book or ATM card associated with YOUR money. You have to pay for any over-the-counter transactions associated with YOUR money. You have to maintain a minimum balance of YOUR money.

As the conditions of the accounts available were explained to me, you can probably guess that I was getting more and more unhappy. You can bet that if I had a more client-friendly place like a credit union available, I wouldn’t have given the bank a second glance, but I didn’t have a choice.

I hate the way banks pour on the charges for each thing you want to do with your own money. I hate the way banks give exchange rates that are worse than you can get from a High Street money-changing booth. I hate the way banks expect to make many percentage points of profit between the paltry rate you wrangle out of them and the rate at which they loan out your money. And I hate the fee they charge every month to keep your money in their virtual building. It’s obviously not good enough to make money the regular banking way. Oh no, they have to rub salt into the paper cut by then taking away your money whether you’re using it (transaction charges) or not (account-keeping charges).

Anyway, that’s my weekly rant. The account was set up, the service exactly as I was expecting (I was dressed casually), but I do not count myself as a happy customer. If anyone is thinking of setting up alternative banking options, please let the world know. It’ll be more popular than inventing a new mousetrap.

I’m sick.

Except, that’s not what the moral is at all, is it? The real moral of the story is: “tell the truth and you’ll become rich”. After all, the reward for being honest is not a sense of self-satisfaction, a glow knowing that you have done the right thing. No, not at all. The reward is something very expensive; a material possession.

It got me thinking. Is this really what I want to tell my children? Be honest because you could GET MONEY if you do? I much prefer: be honest because it’s the right thing to do and you’ll be able to look yourself in the mirror without flinching.

I understand that, when these fairy tales were first created, they were for illiterate peasants who couldn’t think beyond the next day’s meal. But I had thought that our moral sense may have progressed, if not in lock-step then certainly staggeringly a little further beyond a bag/axe/crown/fish of gold being the answer to all our problems. Why are these old tales so persistent?

And here’s the second problem I have with fairy tales such as the one we studied. It’s all about being happy with your lot. Don’t try to rise above your poor beginnings. Just be happy to tootle along and sometime, in the future, if you’re lucky, a deity may throw you some scraps and you’ll be just like all the aristocrats you envy without going to any effort at all. To my mind, there’s a hidden thread of instructive fatalism in there. Don’t argue, don’t fight, don’t learn. Just keep doing what you’re doing and, one day, who knows? You’ll win the lottery! Or win the prince! (Cinderella) Or you may not, but them’s the breaks, know what I mean? * wink wink * nudge nudge *.

I feel the same way about the Sermon on the Mount. I personally think that was added in later to keep the proles happy while various Christian-based empires lorded it over them. From all I’ve read, Christ (if he existed) was a real rabble-rouser and completely the opposite to the one who preached the joys of being utterly passive.

He came home shaking his head. “I just had the weirdest experience,” he told me, “and I don’t quite know how to categorise it in my brain. I’ll tell you about it and see if it resonates with you.”

And here’s what he told me:

There’s a guy who occasionally catches the same bus as I do. (Let’s call him Faisal. The ethnicity is irrelevant, I’m just trying to be all 1Malaysia and multi-cultural here. –kaz) Faisal is a really friendly guy. He always greets me when he sees me, is perennially cheerful and seems bent on offering me advice on everything to do with living in Malaysia.

This morning, he said that I just had to travel up to KL and spend some time there visiting various clubs. I told him that I wasn’t really into visiting any nightclubs and, besides, we have animals at home. Two of our dogs are still puppies (they’ll always be puppies to J, but that’s another discussion –kaz) and I’m not willing to kennel them on a whim just so I can go haring off to KL.

“Don’t be stupid,” he told me, “they’re only dogs. Just leave them at home and go.”

I stared at him. “They’re part of our family,” I said. “I can’t just leave them.”

“I’ll look after them,” he said.

“Do you own any dogs?” I asked. He said no. “Then how can I leave them with you?” I asked, adding, “They need food, walks, attention.”

“Tcha,” Faisal replied. “Just leave them with me. They’ll be fine.”

And there was nothing, J told me, that he could say to convince Faisal that (a) he wasn’t interested in visiting KL in the near future, and (b) pets need to be taken care of.

“I don’t understand. It was like he absolutely refused to listen to anything I had to say, no matter how many different ways I tried to explain it. Have you ever come across this kind of behaviour before?”

I made an equivalent non-verbal gesture to chewing up a wad of tobacco and spitting it out and said the following to him (feel free to follow along at home):

Let me encapsulate the last two plus decades of being a woman and a business owner for you.

I meet a guy called Fred. And Fred is bouncy and perky and says to me, “What do you do for a living?” And I say something like: “I’m an IT consultant.”

“Who have you worked for?”

I shrug. “I’ve worked for a variety of companies.”

“Have you worked for NASA?” he asks.

“No,” I shake my head.

“Why not?” he asks.

“Because I’m not a US citizen,” I reply, starting to get just a teeny bit tetchy because, really, is it any of his goddamned business? But I’m trying to be polite here, “and you have to be a US citizen to be employed by NASA.”

At this point, Fred laughs. “Oh that’s just bullshit. My friend, Pete, comes from Burkina Faso and he’s employed at NASA as a Senior Moon Crater Investigation Dude. He makes seven gazillion dollars a year doing that shit and they employed him six seconds after he cleared US Customs & Immigration in New York.”

Me, still trying to be nice and bringing my eyebrows back down to head level again: “Are you sure? Because I’ve spoken to NASA guys at job fairs and I even got into a conversation with them at Ames. They say they love my experience but, as I’m not a US citizen, they can’t employ me.”

“You just don’t know what you’re doing,” Fred replies, as chipper as ever. “That’s probably why you’ve been working for all these second-rate companies all these years. Let me get Pete to talk to you and he can show you what you’re doing wrong. You might even start to make some money. Wouldn’t that be nice? What say I come over tomorrow night with Pete and you can buy us pizza? And beer. I really like Duff Gold. What’s your address again?”

I tell him two words.

At this point in the narrative, I tell J, one of two accusations usually gets levelled at me. I’m either a frigid lesbian or a man-hating ballbuster.

It’s gratifying, but also sad, to see the dawning realisation on my husband’s face.

“I’m so sorry,” he tells me. “I would never have brought up the incident at all if I’d known you’d faced something like that even once.” Then he gets indignant. “Why didn’t you ever tell me about behaviour like this?”

I thought about that for a long second. “Seriously? Because it happens so often, it’s just part of life. It’s nothing special.”

I cannot tell you how much I love men. I love kidding around with them, swapping dirty jokes with them and generally shooting the breeze with them. (Curiously, considering my ideological stance, I get on best with ex-Army officers. Must be my background as an Army brat kicking in.) To me, men have an air of fun that women lack. I think that has to do with evolutionary biology, but that’s my opinion.

However, there’s one segment of the male population that I Cannot Stand and they are the Freds and Faisals of the world. That segment spans all races, colours and creeds and, unfortunately, they’re everywhere.

After this incident with Faisal, I think J is starting to realise exactly what kind of uphill battle our Little Dinosaur faces when she goes out into the big bad world. Through no fault of her own, she is going to get put down just because she’s a woman, and that’s not even counting the fact that she’ll be a migrant in whatever country we end up in, as well as having brown skin and an exotic-sounding name. And if she shows the least bit of ambition or is proud of her competence, well….

For the rest of the world that doesn’t have a chip on its shoulder, however, IWD is wonderful. I recall, with fondness, the celebrations in Australia. The seminars. The long lunches. The sparkling wine. The rest of the day off. Great times.

Because darling J is an old-time socialist boy, he nabbed The Wast to go do some shopping together and Little Dinosaur and I were presented with bouquets of chocolates, a lovely dinner, followed by cake and sparkling wine. (I also got a pair of speakers for our homeschool and shall describe the set-up in more detail in another post.) Hope you had fun as well.

Part of our IWD "loot"!

I mentioned on my GoodReads blog on Friday that Broad Universe released a recent podcast on romance in speculative fiction. Rae Lori was moderating. Cate Rowan, Heather Massey and myself were on the panel. To read all the details please go here.

And lastly, I’m very happy to announce that a novella of mine, called “Europa, Europa” has been accepted into Total-E-Bound‘s forthcoming “Seeing Stars” anthology, to be released this May. More details as they come to hand.

When J and I were discussing how the homeschooling was getting along (a weekly review), it started with the gripes. I wonder if I’m teaching them an expansive enough curriculum. I wonder if I’m hitting the correct concepts in the correct order. I worry about the dismal lack of quality in some workbooks I’ve bought. I wonder how to work more innovation into our schoolwork.

J is worried about the sheer amount of time it takes to homeschool kids. The critical importance of an even temperament in the face of “how the hell did you manage to do that?!” moments. Whether he’s pacing things correctly in the ECA (Extra-Curricular Activity) he supervises with them. (Electronics, in case you were wondering.) What else he can think of to keep things interesting.

Then we started moving into the positives. The ability to offer our kids a more holistic view of education, where chemistry mixes with cooking and physics mixes with discussions of the weather. And, one of the most important intangibles of all, our own attitudes.

I told you before that The Wast is learning piano and Little Dinosaur chose the violin. What I didn’t add was that the start of this year meant that both J and I took up instruments as well. I’m learning the piano, which is a switch from my previous instrument of flute. And J, who has never learnt a musical instrument in his life and worried terribly that he doesn’t have a musical bone in his body, is learning the tenor saxophone.

The effect of us parents actively learning is, we feel, a good one for our kids. They see that we practise every day, and there’s never a single squirm or upturned lip when I tell them it’s time for their own practice sessions. They know full well that we’ll start ours the minute they finish theirs and that we’ll practise for longer.

When we make mistakes in our music, we stop, re-read and try again. They’re learning to do the same and will repeat troublesome passages several times until they get it right. Nobody told them to do that, or stood over their shoulder to make sure they take instrument in hand. They’ve done it all by themselves.

J and I originally decided to take up music as a way of keeping our minds active. (I swear, I can feel the neural paths being formed in my brain. The image it conjures up is an explorer deep in the jungle, hacking a path through the greenery with a machete. About as slowly too.) But we’re finding an unexpected pay-off in the kids’ education. With homeschooling, you can’t lie. What you are and what you show is what the kids will pick up. So far, the good seems to be outweighing the bad. So far.

Alas, in the end all that happened was that I just moved my laptop from room to room. In fact, J moved it for me and I didn’t even notice for a day and it was moved from the kitchen, which is where I am a lot of the time! LOL

I treat writing as a professional job. I write during the week but, unless there’s an emergency looming, I take the weekend off to concentrate on family. And thus my subconscious must have taken this philosophy to heart because I Couldn’t, For The Life Of Me, Get One Word of writing done during the long weekend.

I slept. Almost an entire day, which is unheard of. I read. I cooked. I drank. Copiously. But I did not write.

And so here I am on Monday morning. We’re starting a new school year at homeschool. The Wast will be beginning a Primary-7 syllabus and Little Dinosaur will be tackling Primary-5. I’m revving up with new workbooks and some new technology to use (but more about that anon). My writing laptop beckons to me and I know that I’ll have to knuckle under. It’s a working day. Time to work.

But, in the minutes in between, the precious minutes I spend with you, stalwart reader, I’m just savouring the laziness. And that’s why there is no blog post today. Just fyi.

The Chinese zodiac is year, rather than month, based and, furthermore runs in a 12-year cycle, with a sub-cycle based on the five elements. According to legend, Buddha invited all the animals in the world to a feast when he was about to leave Earth, but only twelve showed up. In order, they were: rat, ox, tiger, rabbit, dragon, snake, horse, sheep, monkey, rooster, dog, pig. To honour them, Buddha named each of the years in the lunar cycle after them in the order in which they turned up at the meal. That’s not all, however. Each animal also runs through its own cycle based on the five elements of metal, water, wood, fire and earth. This new Chinese year, for example, is the Year of the Metal Rabbit.

If you filter in the element as well as the animal, you will see that your particular Chinese zodiac occurrence only comes along once every 60 years.

And why would an atheist talk about Chinese astrology? Why not? It’s fun, even if I don’t believe in it. Actually, especially if I don’t believe in it. The family are off to a lovely dinner today, which includes Yee Sang, originally a Teochew-style dish but now adopted by Chinese communities across Singapore and Malaysia.

Personally, I think Yee Sang took off around here precisely because it’s messy and, by execution, causes great hilarity. What you do is this:

1. Put a selection of ingredients onto a platter. The ingredients can include, but are not limited to, finely julienned carrots, capsicum, daikon radish, cucumber, pear, finely shredded kaffir lime leaves, lettuce, peanuts, orange and/or pomelo segments, lotus seeds, jellyfish, sea cucumber, pickled ginger, sesame seeds, fried rice vermicelli noodles, and so on. Really, your imagination is the only stumbling block at this point, but the keyword is grated (or finely shredded).
2. Put a selection of sauces onto the ingredients on the platter. These sauces include plum sauce, lime juice, maybe apricot jam as well as kumquat paste, sesame oil and five-spice powder. The idea is to have a slightly sweet, piquant dressing but go easy on that five-spice powder.
3. At this point, the next step may vary. My preference is to now have all the diners stand up and, with their chopsticks, try to toss everything as high into the air as possible, while singing out auspicious phrases.
4. When everything is mixed and half of it is decorating the diners, chairs and table, everyone sits down, gets a portion of the salad, tops it with prawn crackers and slices of raw salmon (or mackerel) and digs in. (Most people toss the salad after the fish has been added but I never like missing out on my ration of salmon or mackerel if I can at all help it!) When finished, the rest of the meal proceeds as normal.

I’ll let you know what was in the Yee Sang we’re going to have, so watch out for an update and Happy Chinese New Year to all! Have a great long weekend and catch you Monday.

• There is a church in Georgia state.
• The minister wants to wear a gun in church.
• The church and, presumably, his parishioners, have no objections.
• BUT, the law generally forbids possession of weapons at churches or church functions.
• A case is filed.

The court hears the case but decides that the priest cannot carry a gun because:

Prohibiting the carrying of firearms in a place of worship bears a substantial relationship to that important goal by protecting attendees from the fear or threat of intimidation or armed attack.

John Tyner goes on to say:

A private entity wants to allow guns on their own property, but the government says, “no”. The people’s right to keep and bear arms can be infringed because of the possibility of “private bias or coercion”; that is, the government can take action because a crime might be committed, in the absence of any evidence of said crime.

And I completely agree with him. HOWEVER….

This does not stop the rational (i.e. non-US) readers of this piece to ask: why the hell would someone want to wear a gun in a church anyway? Now, I may be an old-fashioned atheist, but I thought that a church was a place of worship and sanctuary, a place of peace and reflection. The comments at Volokh suggest that the carrying of weapons may be valid when certain religions find they are the victims of violence from other religions but, if that’s the case, surely you have a bigger problem that needs addressing, one that involves law-makers and policies outside church grounds before infringing upon it?

The idea that one group may commit violence on another group on the basis of religion is not new. Only last year, a gang of three youths was charged with arson and attempted arson of some Christian churches in the Klang Valley area of Malaysia and there are numerous flare-ups of the same in Indonesia. Please note that the response in both countries has NOT been for the priests and ministers to carry guns to mass. Good gods, every interested party has understood that this was a problem of wider compassion, education and understanding, not shooting the first nut-case that wanders into a nave with a Zippo™ lighter in his/her hand. Apparently not so in Georgia, which prefers to shoot first and ask questions later. (And I mean, Georgia??? There’s a hot-bed of inter-religious hatred, with the potential for terrorism and counter-strikes necessitating bearing lethal weapons in a house of worship, in Georgia*??? The country south of Russia, I could almost understand; the state in the southern United States less so. Maybe the guys there are wearing underwear a couple of sizes too small.)

To my mind, there’s really only one bona fide excuse to carry weapons into a church and that’s when the inevitable Zombie Apocalypse occurs. It’s a tried and true piece of fact that, whenever great horrors beset humankind, the place everyone runs to is the local (stone-built) church. I’ve seen enough cinema to know this to be true. But, again, may I humbly suggest that should you be caught in the middle of a Zombie Apocalypse, whether or not you violate the First Amendment by reloading your sawn-off shotgun in the vestry is, by then, academic?

* Yes, I have visited Atlanta, Georgia, on several occasions, and thoroughly enjoyed each trip. Thanks for asking.