(friendly hint: click on the pic to get larger size; and visit the originators to drop them a note of thanks and encouragement for these amazing artwork.)
For more stylized and re-imagined Disney Princesses, click tab Disney Princesses on top of this page.
Ready?
***
REALISTIC Disney Princesses by Jirkavinse
These are the artist’s illustration of Disney Princesses if they were real life persons.
Filed under Pop Goes the Fiction!
I don’t have a car.
I don’t have a house.
In fact, I own very few things that can be called “possessions”. I love books, but I have no problems giving them away or selling them when I need to pack up my life and go. The ones that I keep would be gifts, stored with a sister til it’s time for me to take roots somewhere again.
The only thing that has been faithfully following me around is the 20++ year old Ovation guitar. It is not mine to begin with; it’s a little something that I “borrowed” from my brother. I just never bothered to return it. He has since given up on seeing this guitar and bought himself a replacement in the form of a Martin that I’ve only been allowed to touch once – under his watchful presence. Smart.
I don’t have anything else on me that is older than a year or two. I give a lot of things away. I lose a lot of things too. Some things I broke or set fire to. Every girl needs to do that sometimes.
I am not a slacker.
(Would you believe me when I say that I have been most described as “very accomplished”?)
I am not irresponsible.
(I’m just lazy. Which is a different thing.)
I am not a minimalist.
(Well, I am, but not in the shopping-sense.)
I am not against material possessions. In fact, I want a lot of things, just like the next materialistic person. Maybe some day a 9-room loft high-up in the sky. With a fast, little silver car in the basement parking lot.
I just don’t own anything.
My whole life can fit into a 7kg-maximum overhead bin suitcase; and even then I over-pack. This purple and pink hardcase Lojel luggage, it’s been following me around for 7 years.
I guess you can count that as a possession.
So yes, I don’t have a car.
I don’t have a house.
Instead, I have a borrowed guitar.
And a suitcase to call home.
(This too is a true story.)
Filed under Conversations/Arguments, Happy
Yes it did. After about 20mins of running, the conveyor belt stopped moving. Like the good people from The IT Crowd would ask, “Have you turned it off and on again?” – yes I did thankyouverymuch, several times in fact yet the conveyor belt remained unmoved. I really have bad chemistry with this particular treadmill and I am taking it as a sign that yes, I really should take the running outdoors.
That said, Week 8 has been most satisfying. Pacing was good, speed was good, endurance was good, I was sweating a lot but I wasn’t tired and had a good time. I consciously chant I love running, I love running, I love running as I go along, and yes sometimes I substitute “running” with “benedict” – why not? That said, I still have lots to do, miles to run. I worry about my state of health constantly. I know that I can do better than this.
The Berry posted some really cool photos about running and exercise. You can see the full post here. Here’s a few more that I found on the Net to give us the extra push to get out and get moving.
Source: Miles With Sytle
Source: FitFabCities
Source: What I Found While Walking Around
Source: I’m Chatty Natty
Source: Golden Squirrel
No better time to start than the present!
Filed under Running
This is gonna be a quick one and this is gonna be the one and only time that I’d write about religion in this blog or anywhere else.
Apparently some people are outraged with this post of mine: Clothes Make a Girl. Some wrote to me about it, some even un-friended me on Facebook or ranted in their blogs/twitter about it.
That’s okay. I have been un-friended for lesser reasons. We don’t have to see eye to eye on anything and everyone’s entitled to their opinion.
I don’t have to clarify my intention but I want to.
Don’t mistake my call for tolerance as a defiance against one’s religion. The whole point of the post was to take religion out of the equation because frankly, her practice of religion is her business and no one else’s. So is mine, so is yours.
For us to brand her immoral and not a good person because she doesn’t wear a tudung (headscarf) or doesn’t dress the way we deem appropriate is being intolerant. My issue is with our lightning-quick judgement of people. It is not challenging the tenets of one’s religion. It is my challenging our habit of moral policing other people who don’t think, act, dress, live the way we do.
I want to say on record that I understand where the outrage came from and why. It is okay that you feel I am out of line for speaking up for this girl. It is also okay for you to tell me that I don’t have adequate knowledge of the religion to speak about wearing or not wearing tudung. I know I don’t, which was why this post and the one that initiated it were never about religion or aurat to begin with. I stand by what I wrote: oftentimes we use just our eyes to measure other people – whether they are good or bad, worthy or unworthy – it’s all based on what we see. I am not sorry for pointing that out.
Like I said, everyone should be free and feel safe voicing their opinion.
(Coincidentally, the un-friend button is also free and safe to be used by everyone. There. That’s the extent of my passive-aggressiveness for today I promise.)
What I ask is for us to respect each other’s point of view. Most importantly, please respect everyone’s right to keep their religion and the practice of it as something private and sacred to them and them alone. Yes, as a society, as brothers and sisters, we should look out for each other, exchange knowledge, lend a hand, offer advice.
But please leave the superiority complex at the door. Getting outraged or excessively critical at those who have opposing opinions or what you deem a misinterpretation of religion, yours or theirs, is alienating them further from your cause, no matter how pure your intention might be. Tolerance, just like understanding, works both ways.
Speak and be heard. While we don’t have to agree, we also don’t have to be a bully and all rude and lordly about it either.
And yes, feel free to disagree.
(Sorry, I lied about this being a quick one. That’s the only apology you’re getting for today.)
Filed under Conversations/Arguments, Go Grr...
I have told this story before, in a different form, about how many years ago a group of strangers that I met on the Internet saved me from myself.
It wasn’t an especially unique story. Back when the Internet was young and new, I frequented a chat room called Alamak.
It was 1997. I didn’t know anyone in there, and the only reason I was there at all was because a friend told me about it.
I was living with a few girls in a double-storey house in SS2. Every morning we would walk to the bus stop in front of the (now defunct) Cheow Yang Restaurant to go to college. At that time I was already painfully aware that I was not cut out to be an accountant in a sharply-tailored Ralph Lauren business suit toting a patent leather briefcase and a monogrammed Montblanc.
It was hard to start a new life when everyone you know is from your past. I knew they sympathised with my struggle but they didn’t understand it. I knew that too. Maybe it wasn’t the best of ideas to turn to the Internet for support, but I needed to be among people who didn’t know me – people with whom I could reinvent myself, people that I could lie to.
It was a hot afternoon when I decided to log into a chatroom called The Globe. I was wondering what nickname to use when I happened to glance at the TV where a singing competition was taking place. I have forgotten the name of the competition and the name or face of the girl who sang it, but she sang “Part of Your World” from The Little Mermaid.
So I typed Ariel and pressed Enter. For some reason, the bot changed the nickname to Ariel6.
And that was the nickname that I used when I eventually logged into Alamak. It didn’t take me long to make friends. The girls liked me because they thought I was a boy. The boys were suspicious of this fast-talking, charming newcomer. I was competition. Once they found out I was a girl, the relief came hard and fast and everyone quickly became friendly in order to overcompensate for their earlier combative mode.
It was a freeing experience.
This group of people – strangers – they embraced me and accepted me as one of their own. Soon I found that I was looked after, cared for – someone was always calling to ask me how I was, someone was always at the front gate to take me out to supper, someone was always making sure that I was included.
By the same time the next year I was a different person. I cut out a new life for me. It wasn’t the best of beginnings and I wasn’t exactly prepared for it. I withdrew from Alamak, not because these people have become disposable, but because by then I didn’t need the anonymity of a chat room to feel accepted. These friends I made, they were no longer just nicknames. I knew them. I’ve been to their weddings. We’ve celebrated birthdays. Shared many late night teh tarik and nasi lemak sessions in Kg Baru.
By the time I had gained enough footing to be able to say I’ve got planes to catch and bills to pay, I was no longer able to see these friends.
I told you this wasn’t an especially unique story.
I am still in touch with friends I made from those Alamak days. Many of them are on Facebook. We may not be as close as we used to – it’s hard to recapture the recklessness and carefree-ness of our youthful days. To say that I miss those days would not be truthful. I was not in a happy place then; I was descending into the bottom of one of Murakami’s wells. I came out of it fairly alright; but it’s not something that I want to go through again or re-live in my memories.
But I never forget those friends. Or the kindness and friendship they shown me.
One of them passed away tonight. Immediately I remembered what he used to call me – Arial6 instead of Ariel6. He used to tease me that my nickname sounded like the tv antennae; sometimes he’d call me adik (little sister). When we found each other again on Facebook in 2010, he sent me a private message to ask how I was, how life was treating me. He was the same as the person I knew in 1997 – cheerful, friendly, never overly familiar, always respectful.
We had a lot of shared memories, a mutual friend reminisced.
Me too, I thought, me too.
Good night abg zuliss. Thank you for the friendship and those nights at NLA.
Rest well under the grace of God. Al-fatihah.
Filed under Special Mentions
Photo source: The Berry
Recently I was asked if I was ready to settle down. There are two problems with this question. It suggests that:
I understood the reason for the sudden influx of these questions in my inbox. It was my fault. I have been putting cryptic status updates like “I miss my love”, “time, it doesn’t move” on facebook – I was begging for this kind of curiosity so I should not complain. Right?
I am not complaining.
I am sorry if that is the impression I gave.
Let me try to describe my situation by using the movie “500 Days of Summer” as an example. Actually, scratch that. It doesn’t have to be this particular movie really, just pick any movie. It all tells the same story: the pain of loving, losing and longing for someone. Sometimes you get the girl, sometimes you don’t. But somewhere along the way there is always that nostalgic feeling for the one that got away; the one; the first love; the what ifs? that every now and then pops into your head when you hear a certain song or stand in a certain place.
But no one tells the story from the point of view of the one who got away.
Maybe that’s because the story would not resonate as sympathetically – after all who wants to listen to someone complaining about being loved? Put a lid on it, yeah? No one wants to hear about your suffering when you are the one inflicting it.
You know where this is heading. So I am not going to go there.
The lady doth protest too much, methinks.
No no. I am not protesting.
All I am saying is that I love easily.
People I see on TV. Pink things I try in the stores. Photos I look at on the Internet. Songs I hear. Books I read. Shoes other people are wearing. Babies.
And I express these loves. Just because he is a fictional stranger seven thousand miles away doesn’t mean my love for him is less real, less valuable, less passionate.
It’s just that these loves, these professing of affection and adoration, these declarations and cryptic messages – they’re just that. There is no agenda, no secret wishes.
I have been in the presence of great loves. I recognize it. I know how it looks like. How it feels.
But I am not waiting for the one. I am not looking. Neither am I being stubborn just to proof that I am not in the settling-down way.
I’m just…I guess the word I am looking for is languorous, about it all.
He’ll find me. Love me. Marry me.
Or not.
It’s fine. It’s all fine.
(says John)
And that’s why my story is the kind that won’t can’t be told.
Filed under Conversations/Arguments, Wonder
I was asked recently what’s my size. I divulged that I aspire to dress in size 2, and that I am currently an 8. The trouble with this is I am confusing myself with US vs UK sizes.
If you are like me and get boggled when you are trying to buy clothes, here’s a simple size conversion chart. You can change the chart and see the corresponding sizes by using the online tool here.
At my peak last year this is what I was wearing:
This is the size I am wearing these days:
I am not obsessed about sizes. But size matters a lot to me. Let me explain.
I hate stepping onto the scale. It is a futile and de-motivational exercise. I always get so angry when I look at the numbers. When I lose weight, I am angry because I am not losing enough weight. When I gain weight, I am angry because the scale is faulty. It’s a lose-lose situation for me no matter what number pops up.
So I use my clothes as my health measurement.
I am at a good BMI and waist circumference when I am a UK size 4 (US 2). At UK size 8 (US 6), I am a bit too heavy and my BMI is dangerously high. In fact I am overweight – there, I said the dreaded O word.
Of course weight (and by association, BMI) is not an absolute measurement of one’s health. I know that. Still, it is a good indicator to help maintain a healthy weight range. You can use the online BMI calculator at Nutrition Society of Malaysia, that has been designed for Asian age, weight, gender, here.
I know some will say, bullsh!t Ijah, size 8 is not fat, you’re just one of those size-obsessed people.
I didn’t say size 8 is fat. I am just saying that size 8 is a tad too much weight for me to carry around being that I am only 152cm tall with a petite frame (discount my exceptional chest, please). I am being realistic here, not being vain. I need to shift the weight and get fitter not because I am unhappy with the way I look, but because I want to continue to eating all those delicious cupcakes and blueberry cheese muffins and work party karaoke all night without my heart collapsing at the strain. It doesn’t mean I love my body any less when it is a size 8 or that I am pop-culture obsessed or that I am desperately trying to reclaim my teenage body or that my self-worth is tied to my weight.
It simply means I need get back to size 4 in order to be able to continue living life the way I like.
Brain is the new sexy, but I need to be alive and alert in order to dazzle people with my brain, no?
Yes.
Filed under Conversations/Arguments, Running
Let’s start this post with the list of runs that are going to take place in February & March:
My update this time will not follow the style of the previous posts, mainly because there is no change where my diet, water consumption and gear are concerned.
Exercise-wise, the Treo treadmill at home is having tantrums and I am not sure what seems to be the problem so I have decided to split my runs into 2 days at the gym and 2 days running outdoors.
One thing I must admit is that running outdoors is hard and I get tired easily. But I know if I keep at it, I will get fitter and better. My outdoor route is as follows:
It starts from the main gate, then I run towards the KGSAAS archway, passing by Green Hill and KGSAAS greens. Once I come to the archway, I’d cross the road towards Laman Seri, then I turn right and run towards the Extreme Park, passing by the 24-hr KFC, Pizza Hut and Burger King, or as I’d like to call them, temptations. I continue straight to the Al-Rafi restaurant and stop at the stop sign right in front of it, then turn around and reverse the process til I get back to Sri Alam Condo’s main gate. The entire run is about 4km in total and takes a little over 30mins.
After 7 weeks of intermitten running, this is how I look like now:
IA's progress: Week 1 to Week 7
There is not much to show for when you lose only a measly 2kg but I am hopeful. I read about people losing 15kg in 2 months and I thought man, how do they do that? Envy fills my entire being! But I know I am on the right track, and that extreme dieting or using supplements and drugs to facilitate weight loss is just me adding more strain into my already long-abused body, so I am going to stick to my regular diet and keep up the running thing.
I read somewhere that for positive affirmation to work, you need to avoid using negatives. For example, if I say: I am not fat, the subconscious does not recognize the word “not” so it reads the affirmation as “I am fat” instead. So, no more saying “I hate running”, “I am fat”, “I am tired”, “Outdoor is hard” etc.
My affirmations now will be as follows:
If affirmations work in other areas of my life, it’ll work in running too. I believe.
Time to suit up and get out of the door!
Filed under Running
“Unclose your mind. You are not a prisoner. You are a bird in flight, searching the skies for dreams.” ― Haruki Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
I have several reasons for wanting to share this story. I will tell you those reasons at the end of this post. But before I get to the main story, I need to tell you the backstory first, which goes like this:
Two weeks ago I made up my mind that I want to meet someone, let’s call him Mr. Abu. I don’t know Mr. Abu, we don’t have common friends, he lives seven thousand miles away, we don’t walk in the same circles. For all intent and purposes, we may never meet at all.
But my mind has a disinclination to worry about the impracticality or the improbability of it all. The way I see it, if it’s all in my head I might as well go for it. So, if I were to meet Mr. Abu accidentally, without orchestration, what would be the most logical situation for it to happen? What would I say, what would I wear, how would the conversation start? In short: when my grandchildren ask me to tell the story of how we met, what would be the story that I tell?
So this is how I worked it out in my head.
I was standing behind Mr. Abu at a Starbucks and he didn’t have enough cash in the right currency on him to pay for his coffee. I was impatient about getting mine, so I paid for him and told him, don’t worry about it, someday when I am in your beautiful country and we happen to meet, you can buy me coffee in return.
The only logical place for this to happen is of course in an airport. In my head, the Starbucks would be the one in Changi Airport Singapore – simply because I pass by it every time I am walking to or from the arrival/departure gate. Anyway, I raised my coffee cup to him in a silent toast, smiled and we went our separate ways.
Fourteen hours later I was at Heathrow Airport waiting for my luggage to come around when someone tapped me on the shoulder and said “Coffee girl!” And the rest, they say, is history.
This backstory is important because of what happened next.
In order for me to meet Mr. Abu as lined out in the backstory, I need to be flying to London via Changi. There are two possible ways for this to happen: either I am going for a holiday in London or I am going there for work.
In my current work situation, travelling overseas is not required (side note: a lot of the work I did in the past required me to travel extensively). So if I were to travel to London for work, I’d have to have a job that entails travelling to Europe as part of my duties.
I play and replay this “meeting story” in my head. Most of the time I do it when I am trying to sleep and need my mind to “switch off” from the realities of my daily life. I do it because it is fun and nonsensical. While doing this usually I will fall asleep without realizing it.
A few days after I started doing this, I sat in front of the TV to watch an episode of Amazing Race. In this particular episode, the competing teams were in Denmark and they had to find their way to Legoland. For some reason, this particular scene was stuck in my head.
About two days after the Amazing Race episode, I was contacted by three separate parties about three separate jobs. I remember remarking on facebook: why do I have so many missed calls today? When I returned the calls I found that opportunities exist for me to be considered for the following positions:
All three opportunities would make it very probable for me to be in Starbucks at Changi Airport at one point or another. The only question that I need to answer now is this: which one would I be interested to explore? I know the smart thing to do is to explore all three. But, moving one step ahead, presuming that I am exactly what each company wants and that I have the luxury to choose, which one would I pick?
I spoke to an old friend a few nights later about how coincidental things seem to be. Earlier that night my sister made a casual remark about us going to London for a holiday some time in April. Suddenly the possibility of going to London, either for a holiday or for work, doesn’t seem so distant and improbable anymore. Both became very real possibilities; which way the scale would tip now depends on how I well make use of these possibilities.
It was past 3am when my friend drove me home. I had too much teh tarik to drink that night so I knew instant sleep would be impossible. So I decided to surf the Net. The first news that I saw was about one Ms Christina Aguilera taking her son Max for a birthday treat. Where to?
Legoland in Carlsbad, San Diego County, California.
When I saw that I laughed. A line from the movie Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy came to my mind:
It’s not impossible, just highly improbable.
Now we’ve come to the point where I will tell you the reasons why I am sharing this story.
Firstly, it’s because for the most part of my life, I have been told that I am lucky. I can’t and don’t want to dispute that. I know I’ve been lucky. Opportunities, possibilities, coincidences – distant or ridiculous as they might be – all these seem to knock on my door at just the right time for me to take advantage of them.
But I don’t believe that I have been accorded a bigger portion of luck than the next person. I think we all have the same share; that we all have the same access to tap into the “luck well” and take as much as we need. What I do know for certain is that if I connect the dots, I can manufacture these possibilities. I may not know how or when they will manifest themselves, but I know that by making certain choices or doing certain things, I close the gap between dream and reality. Luck is very nice, but I need to get up and get moving for this luck to be of any use to me at all.
Secondly, it’s because there is a popular school of thought propagating that if you have a dream, don’t tell it to anyone. Just keep it to yourself. The line of reasoning goes like this: if you tell your dream or personal plans/goals to other people, the positive feedback or encouragement that you receive from them will make you feel gratified and trick your mind to think as if the goals are already achieved. This in turn will (a) give you a false sense of satisfaction; and (b) demotivate you from working as hard as you need to achieve these goals. Sort of counting your chickens before they hatch.
Is that true? Apparently there’s a lot of research to support this. You can see a video that explains it here.
Do you agree with this school of thought? Wait. Don’t tell me. If it works for you, good for you man.
Me? This school of thought bothers me. A lot. I think different dreams need different ways to be actualized. Some dreams need zipping up, and some needs to be vocalized. For me personally, voicing it out helps me to widen my playing field. It’s like playing Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. Somewhere out there is someone who could help connect my dots. It may be someone I already know, it may be a stranger. The point is, I need to find this someone, this Kevin Bacon. And to do that, I need to tell – be it by telling the universe, or friends, or strangers who accidentally come to this blog looking for something else and run across this post instead. Sitting here being mum about it hoping that somehow Kevin Bacon will find his way to me is asking too much of a favour from Lady Luck.
I am not being naive. I know the value of keeping your dreams to yourself. And I understand that this school of thought is not advocating being mum, all it is suggesting is that you don’t share the end game with anyone so that you will be self-motivated to continuously work hard to achieve it. I am just not sure this is the most important rule I need to adhere to. In fact I don’t think it is a rule at all. To quote Feynman “The fact that you are not sure means that it is possible that there is another way someday.”
Which brings me to my final reason, it’s because this story illustrates and reminds me, in real time, that it is good to dream. That it is good to disregard the improbability of it all and let my mind run riot. That it is good to have something just a little wildly out of reach so that I’d always have something to work on, something to look forward to. And that if I pay attention to what is happening around me, if I pay real close attention, the only thing that is stopping me from doing anything and everything is my own hesitancy.
Too often I catch myself thinking “Oh, that’s never going to happen to me,” or “How the hell am I going to do that?” or “I’ll never be given that chance,” or “Forget it, it’s just not my fate,”. I haven’t even tried visualizing it in my head, much less doing something about it and I’m already giving up? Why do I do this to myself? I claim to be an optimist yet I talk down to myself and allow this defeatist attitude to influence me that I wonder if I can call myself an optimist at all.
So I decided to write this down, to commit this story to a permanent form, to remind myself that I am, to use an overused cliche, my own worst enemy.
I need to overcome.
I must.
This is a progressive story. I don’t know how it will progress from here because there are things that are yet to pass.
Maybe I’ll go to Legoland, maybe I won’t.
Maybe I’ll have coffee at Starbucks in Changi airport, maybe I won’t.
Maybe I’ll meet Mr. Abu, maybe I won’t.
What’s certain is that any of these maybe’s can become definitely’s – it’s all up to me really.
And that is, my friend, what dreams are for.
(Dreams can’t come true? I’m glad Kaka didn’t believe that.)
Kaka’s 11th dream came true. He added the Champions League title to his trophy case for the first time when Milan defeated Liverpool on 23 May 2007, after publicly sharing this dream with millions of people.
Filed under Conversations/Arguments, Wonder
How is 2012 treating you so far? As far as my running is concerned, the new year didn’t bring with it a steel-strength will to continue running. I only managed 2 runs this week, both were outdoors so they were considerably short being that the landscape around the place I stay in is hilly and pretty tough for a novice like me.
There are a few runs happening in February. One is the Pacesetter Mizuno Relay 4x3km on Feb 19 and the other one would be the Rotary Club Klang Jogathon on Feb 26. Please go to MYraceonline.com for details. I must add that the Pacesetter one is open ONLY for Pacesetter Athletic Club members (that’s kinda clique-ish, don’t you think?).
It is Week 6 and I have lost 2kg since. It yo-yoed a bit at the start (lost 2kg then gained 1 back, then lost 1kg then gained 1 back) but now I think I have lost the 2kg for good. That sounds good, but remember I have 13 more to go. By normal standards this weight loss is not up to par, if I had been more regular with the running and all I should have lost 3kg i.e. 500g/week. But, I’ll take what I can get. Other updates for this week:
GEAR
FOOD
EXERCISE
If you’d like to join me for my weekly outdoor run, send me an email at ijahamran@yahoo.com so that I can hit you up on facebook and let you know the schedule.
I end this post with this important question: have you seen Sherlock, the BBC One series? If your answer is no, then you should! Just google it and see for yourself. In meantime, here’s a clip from Season 1:
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