Presenting the latest collection
of short stories, I guess it's the best way to compile topics that haven't much
to do with one another -- like fish, climbing, and time. The thoughts get
deeper further down hahaha, happy reading!
Ikan Bilis Ignoramus
During the weekend in Kluang we stopped by an ikan bilis wholesaler so my mum could restock. As I wandered around looking at all the different kinds [this suaku hadn't seen dried anchovies in so many different forms before], the seller was explaining how whole ikan bilis cost RM(x) per kg while cleaned ones cost RM(1.5x) for the same, with x denoting an amount I've forgotten. She then went on to say that the higher price was to compensate those who spent time and effort beheading the fish. Therefore, the uncleaned fish were "cheaper".
I clearly rmb feeling something fishy about that whole reasoning... but it failed to register at that point, thanks to the heat and sleep deprivation. Lol the wholesaler even mentioned that cleaned ikan bilis weigh a third less than whole ones after removing the head, bones, and squishy black stuff inside. Yep, thanks to my lagging brain I'd already beheaded and gutted hundreds of the small fish, before it hit me that we could've gotten someone else to do it for practically free. But then again I don't normally get much chance to unravel the inner workings of ikan bilis. Had a few suans shot my way while at it though. Hahaha I'd actually thought I was going pretty fast... until I looked up and saw that my pile of heads barely reached half of my mum's and grandma's. I may not speak my dialects well, but I understand them fairly ok, especially when my mum announced in hakka that for every fish I cleaned she'd have cleaned three. My grandma sniggered too, but at least she praised my immaculate fish -- quality counts!
Also interesting was how I got to put my finger armour to the test. During a long break from climbing the excess skin sheds from underuse, and with it goes the notable ability to handle hot stuff. This meant that I definitely felt the heat of the freshly scalded bitter gourds while helping to stuff them (for hakka yong tau foo). But my fingers held up well against the ikan bilis. At the very beginning of the cleaning session, my mum got up to get gloves to protect her hands coz apparently the fish bones were sharp and pricking her. As I was experiencing none of this assault, I carried on gloveless... until I felt the needle bones of one of my final few fish pierce through. So they were sharp after all, but my skin was thicker HAHA. Looks like the armour has many uses other than allowing me to stay longer on the wall and help people open their stingrays at bbqs xD
Climber Finder
I seem to have some kind of fortune when it comes to finding people to climb with. When I started in Y1 I joined the club alone, but I made friends there and we progressed together through those shaky newbie days. On exchange, I met my first climbing friend halfway up a stairwell in London, and she led me to people I climbed with regularly till now. When I jio-ed in REP, people came, and people stayed. Even out of nowhere in the most random of situations -- helping facilitate an unaffiliated camp for money in the summer -- a climbing friend awaited. When I started work I always knew that I'd one day jio my colleagues to climb (and have done so, it's great fun!). Usually, there'll be people interested to try it for the first time or else they might have done it once in OBS and want to give it another go. But lo and behold, there's a colleague who'd started climbing before I was even aware of such a sport called rock climbing. Stun.
This might seem a little like bragging, but that's really not my intention. I just feel from all my experience that this is a sport where friendships come easily. Climbing is unlike many other sports which are predominantly team-oriented. Of course we all come from schools/clubs/countries which we may represent in competitions, but nothing stops a climber from climbing with another climber wherever they come from. It's a sport that bonds rather than divides. And now that our sport is growing, it may be easier to bump into random climbers in random places. But given that I've only been in this sport for 4+ years, my situation seems a little 夸张.
Haha, it's as though certain specific lucky stars are constantly shining down upon me, while others adamantly face away. If only this strange luck of mine could be transferred to other aspects like say... keeping injury-free. [It's no joke given that the breaks I've had to take total up to roughly a year #sibeisian, but that's another story] As it is currently, I spread my ~6 climbs per month amongst different people, but I look forward to every session. Mostly it's because of the awesome people I get to spend these good times with :)
Time
Since Y4S2 I've been fascinated with the perception of time. How not to be, when the whole of 2016 went like: blink one time, end of the week, yawn another time, end of the month. Like tumbling through some sort of final year wormhole, until Y5 vanished and 16th Jan arrived.
For all of us who started work on 16th Jan, we've crossed 3 months in the workforce! Huh wait... Only 3 months? Feels too short a time to have contained everything that's happened so far, but it is. A few friends have reported similar sentiments. But strangely reaffirming is the fact that I've had colleagues remark the same thing I've been feeling -- that it's as though I've been around for half a year or so at least.
It's like time is always on the move from day to day, not quite in a rush but definitely enough to create a conveyor belt kind of feeling. But zoom out and it's only been a fairly short ~3 months, quite the opposite of how 2016 went. Why ah? It's not like time flew > Mach 1 in 2016 coz final year was too much fun, and it's not like I'm suffering now. Loading-wise, Y5 was hiong enough to sort of rival my current work pace. So that overused adage clearly ain't everything. Thinking about it, if fun (or lack thereof) isn't the culprit, then it could be 2 other things.
Things (whether at work or outside) normally overlap/run in parallel but the time spent doing them is perceived in series. Coz even if there's many things to do it's still not technically possible to be doing 2 different things at the same moment in time, at least at the newbie level I dunno how it's like higher up. [Drinking tea while reading doesn't count, y'all know what I mean haha] The constant switching between tasks gives the illusion of things being done one after another, but this is just the micro aspect of larger things that don't actually come after one another. The time and effort we perceive to be spending in series actually feed into different parallels that all stack within the same time periods. Hence, my friends, this is my theory of why we're only at 3 months even for some of you fantastically overworked people.
Also important is that I think I'll be working here for some unknown length of time. It's not like a summer internship racing the clock down where with every passing week we get so much closer to the end. Ah it's definitely not like a looming graduation, which for me came like one of those ghosts that suddenly crawl at high speed towards you on your screen. Endings are like islands in the sea of time; without them we don't really know where we're headed and how long it'll take to get there. And so we keep cruising/swimming/drifting, whichever floats your boat. Well who knows where the end is now, but I highly doubt I'll get to it very soon.
In the meantime let time flow slowly if it wants to, so I can enjoy my youth longer haha!
