The boiler seems to be on the blink again and as it is Bank Holiday here, no one can be persuaded to come and have a look at it. So the duvet seems to offer the warmest place as I oscillate from FB to Blog stopping to read news online somewhere in between; anything at all to stall my long overdue article from completion.
I must admit that I have been lured back to FB, a place I swore I'd never put a foot in again. A friend suggested that I reactivate my account to retrieve some photographs from her and once I pressed the button, there was no turning back. There I discovered the place where friends congregate: friends who had been slowly disappearing from my comment box and from my beloved rantauan.com: a virtual village which was once ringing with laughter over pantun wars, is now quiet. Initially, I had problems putting names to faces as in FB most except Mekyam, use their real names.
I found old classmates and I even found my mother!!! My nephews and nieces, siblings and relatives are there as well. Our family members used to meet up in www.myfamily.com but some bright spark decided that FB is a more convenient place to meet. She even ghosted my mother's account!
And guess who else I met there? Our wedding photographer!! Zubir, or Tok Bet as he is affectionately known, is an old family friend who is related to my brother-in-law and by marriage, related to Puteri Kama. FB is indeed a small world. Being in touch with him brought back memories of that fateful day - 9th December 1979. Tok Bet is almost a brother to us, bunking in with my brother most nights when we were living in Yan. After our simple bersanding, he ushered us to the bedroom for the standard 'sitting on the bed' pose. The room wasn't big enough for him to move around, and as he walked backwards to get a good picture, he tripped backwards into the bathroom!!
The virtual world, through all these social networking sites, is forever interested to know what we are doing, what we are thinking. I wonder why. So, in a haste, and still procrastinating over the article I am supposed to write, I wrote: ZO's dilema: should I write for blog or cari makan? This prompted quite a few suggestions.
Now, I had considered myself quite a veteran in this cyberworld, but it never ceased to amaze me how the online written word could be misconstrued and misinterpreted. What I had in my head and transfered onto the page, was not what was received. My dilema was whether I should write an entry for the blog or to write a piece for the newspaper. Nevertheless, its quite an interesting study of how a written word is read and perceived. I had failed to convey what was in my head at that point in time.
And as you can see, the blog wins hands down and I will now write to cari makan.
Over and out.
Kak Teh's also wrote from under the duvet here:
Notes from under the duvet
