Vox Nihili

Goodbye!

I knew I was gonna get mocked. The sight of a chink with an African drum must have provoked and opened up the intrigued. Some random dude obnoxiously banged his hand on my djembe (sorta expected something like that would happen). A gentleman asked if he could have a go at it (I passed it to him and he started playing). The woman next to me shared that they play somewhat similar instruments at weddings in her country (she was from the Philippines and we had an “I have elbows” moment). Two girls took pictures (no comment). Plenty of stares. You think London would be immune to oddity. Think again.

Why?

I turned a year older, but still none the wiser.

A couple of years ago, I may have looked more like a donut. But since then, a spotty prune I have become.

Very often I can’t enunciate properly, making what I to want to convey unfathomable. Even more so when I’m tired, or when I’m cold.

Just today alone…

- “Where is the cansion pash cosh?” (pension cash cost)

- “I didn’t know you speak a-rabbit” (arabic)

- “reconsious..reconsil…re-con-ci-li-a-tion”

And the unavoidable…

- “Do you want some crips…criiisp..argh! chips.”

I just saw Fitna. And I’m affected.

3 parts of my body were bleeding simultaneously this morning – cracked lips, nosebleed and my aunty’s monthly visit. It’s biologically quite amazing women are capable of bleeding so much like that. It’s also obvious that it’s mostly my face that is falling apart.

How do you create incentives such that people who are a few minutes late are not worse off from people who are say, an hour late?

I was 10 minutes late into work today and blindly walked into our weekly Tuesday morning assembly. With everyone in the department gathered round, I could not avoid the undesirable attention as I made my grand entrance. Because being 10 minutes past is relatively small on the punctuality measuring scale, I completely forgot about the morning meeting for I hadn’t put in much thought into avoiding being caught. Whilst if I knew I was going to be very late, I would have taken extra means to avoid being scorn upon. And by that, I would have thought about using another entrance, gracefully blend myself into the meeting (or completely miss it if necessary) and avoid being noticed. Furthermore, if on a regular day I was 10 minutes late, it’s most likely I was nothing else but late. No escape. Now given I arrive a time significantly later than intended, but made clever improvisations to the situation, I might have people assumed I had a more important prior engagement. An acceptable excuse. So why should someone who is slightly unpunctual receive more humiliation than someone who abuses punctuality more? How can this be avoided?

A man and a very small lady were walking side by side before they came to a puddle of water. He took one step over the puddle whilst she had to shuffle her skirt up before leaping over. Kekeke.