Month: July 2008

No go zone

I don’t live in a posh part of London, like Knightsbridge or West Hampstead. In fact, it would be accurate to say that I live in one of the poorest boroughs in London. Still, it ain’t that bad! I feel completely safe, walking home from the Tube station at night time.

However, Domino’s Pizza is less enlightened and has declared our street a ‘no go zone’.

It means that whenever we order pizza, the delivery person calls us when he arrives and we have to meet him on the main street, which is 10 metres from our front door. This is the closest that Domino’s employees can get without fear of mortal harm. I don’t know where they get their information from.

Richard, whose love of tandoori hot pizza requires pizza delivery boys to risk life and limb.

See? It even says ‘NO GO ZONE’ on the box!

Sweater organiser

It’s the little things that excite me. The latest thing to bring me great joy has been the purchase of a sweater organiser from the Futon Company.

I was originally going to buy a shoe organiser to stop me from tripping over the twenty pairs of shoes that I’ve managed to accumulate in England (few, compared to what I have in Melbourne). When I realised for an extra £2 I could buy the twice-as-big sweater organiser, I did so. I figured I could store both bigger and more shoes in a sweater organiser.

Once I hung the organiser up in my wardrobe, a change of heart led me to put clothes into the organiser. This freed up wardrobe floor space for a pile of shoes. I am very happy! Only Frequently Worn Shoes are out in the bedroom now.

Look how organised it is! And it’s still like that, weeks later. That’s how you know that an organiser works!

No matter how little I put on the shelves, the organiser still arches at the top. It pains me. It looks like it’s being stretched.

Damian joins blogworld

I welcome Damian, my housemate, to the blogworld — Worldwide Rants. Damian is ruthless and entirely accurate in his opinions. He likes Jaws and bobbleheads. From his blog, we can expect to read workplace woe, praise where he witnesses (rare) competence, and bobbleheads of the week.

Textbook Joan

You might remember a while back when I was suffering neck pain.

On my second visit to a spinal specialist, he waved my MRI scans at me.

‘I knew it!’ he grinned. ‘Textbook case! Adjacent segment degeneration!’

‘I’m a textbook case?’

The surgeon explained that a third of patients who had the same neck surgery that I had when I was 12 years old developed this disease. On the scan, he pointed out the dark spots which showed that extra pressure on one of my discs was wearing the disc away faster than it could regenerate.

‘It’s exactly what I thought at our first appointment’, he said with satisfaction. ‘What I need to do is refer you to physiotherapy to strengthen your neck.’

So for the next two months, I visited Sha, a friendly physio from New Zealand. It was really great, actually. I learned from her exercises that not only reduced the soreness around my neck and shoulders, but also got rid of my headaches.

At my final session, I described to Sha a problem I was having with one of the exercises I was meant to do.

‘In the dumbell upright row, my arm is fine… but I’m having trouble with my right knee. It feels weak and I’m afraid to lock it, which makes it hard to lift the weights. I’ve had problems with this knee for a long time.’

Sha moved my knee caps around and felt them click. ‘They’re very loose,’ she commented.

She made me stand and examined my legs. Soon she started giggling.

‘What?’

‘You’re a textbook case!’ she said. ‘Exactly like in a textbook. See how your knees don’t line up with your feet? You’ve got flat feet. It means that sometimes your knee cap doesn’t track properly…’

‘Textbook,’ I repeated. I had heard this before.

So now I have an extra set of exercises for my second unoriginal problem. The good thing about suffering all these creaks and aches is that now I have real and pressing reasons to go to the gym. The alternative is disablement by torticollis and creaky knees.

Toe running

I did something really quite stupid. I read in one of the free London newspapers that the reason why Kenyans are amazing marathon runners is because, like the ancient humans we evolved from, they runon their toes. That is, instead of first contact being the heel (‘heel strike’), Kenyans push off the balls of their feet.

Well, there is no greater authority than the London Lite! So last Saturday, I went to the gym, got on a treadmill, and ran for 10 minutes on my toes.

It seemed to work! I really did run faster with no extra effort.

Unfortunately, I seem to have done something awful to my ankle. I’ve been limping for a week.

Today felt better so I tried doing a bit of jogging — and had to hobble home from the gym again.

I guess I’ll avoid the treadmill for a bit longer!

Bathroom geography

I’m terrible at geography and do my best to hide it. If someone said, ‘I know it’s crazy, but Mogadishu is next on my destination list,’ I’d nod and say, ‘Totally!’, with only the vaguest idea of where Mogadishu is.

But no more! There is change in my life and that change is a new shower curtain.


‘Do you like the new shower curtain?’ asked Damian the next morning.

‘It’s wonderful!’ I enthused. ‘I finally know where Malawi is! And who knew Madagascar was so big!’

‘The only thing I’m not sure about is that I never see America. It’s all the way bunched up in the corner,’ Damian mused. ‘Maybe every once in a while, we can flip the curtain around so that we can see the other side…’

‘An, never mind America,’ I dismissed. ‘Look how boring it is! Just a couple of big countries, that’s all. Now, AFRICA, that’s the interesting bit! I never knew there were so many countries in Africa!’

Damian agreed, ‘Yes, I suppose you’re right.’

America, whose geography is quite dull (without the various States marked in, anyway).

Africa, a far more interesting (and politically troubled) part of the curtain.

My housemates, Damian and Richard, behind curtain number 1.

Undemocratic

From Made in China in The Age.

Yu says [Chinese] policymakers are beginning work on a new five-year plan beginning from 2011 that will intensify the country’s current energy, pollution and climate-change efforts. But he says China is sticking to the levers of administrative edict rather than considering a domestic carbon-trading scheme.

“In my view, if there’s a huge polluting factory next door, then the best option is to shut it down, rather than allow it to buy credits so it can keep polluting and then pass the higher costs on to consumers,” says Yu.

Brilliant. None of this mucking about with this ‘market solutions’, ‘flexible mechanisms’ or ‘public consultation’ stuff, just the all-powerful arm of big government.

Becoming a Full Time Glasses Wearer

When I was 10 or 11 years old, I got my first pair of glasses. Since then, I have been a Casual Glasses Wearer (CGW), only donning specs when at lectures, the movies or while driving.

In truth, though, I should probably wear glasses more often than that. While my left eye is quite good, my right eye is quite bad. In fact, right now, I’m typing with my left eye shut and I can’t even read the laptop screen in front of me.

It’s a good thing I can touch type.

When I’m not wearing glasses, I feel like I’m looking at the world with only my left eye. You really only need one eye to see well but it does feel a bit uncomfortable, like wearing a gauze eye patch over my right eye.

I don’t think of myself as a Full Time Glasses Wearer (FTGW). I’ve never been one. In my mental image of myself, I don’t wear glasses. However, to be a FTGW is not too far a departure from my self-image. I’m very square, not terribly sporty… Perhaps I’m not Asian enough, if you know what I mean.

However, I’ve now come to my senses. I’ve realised that there is nothing actually stopping me from wearing my glasses and feeling comfortable all the time. This is why last week, I decided to become a FTGW.

I wore my glasses for one day, then the next day I was back to my old CGW self. Actually, all that happened was I forgot to wear my glasses. I’ve only remembered my resolution now, a week later. I guess you could say that I’ve fallen off the nerdwagon.

Tomorrow is a new day! If I can climb five storeys every day, I can surely carry the weight of spectacles on the bridge of my nose and the shelves of my ears-tops.

It’s actually been quite difficult to find a photo of me wearing glasses. Here are my frameless pair. I have an uglier pair that I wear more often. You can see a polar bear wearing them here.

These are prescription sunglasses, which are absolutely necessary for driving when the Australian sun is out. They are also very expensive. I’ve lost a pair already.

Taking more than your fair share

There are many things I can talk about under this blog post title of ‘Taking more than your fair share’. Ecological footprint is the obvious example for me.

However, I’ve had commuting and the Tube on my mind for the past few posts and I saw something that really irritated me. I sat opposite a man slouched on the other Tube seat. At the next stop, a lady got on and gingerly positioned herself on the nominally vacant spot next to slouched man. Any decent person would pull in their limbs to occupy only their fair share of the seat. But this man, who otherwise looked respectable in a business suit, didn’t budge and stared into space while listening to whatever was on his MP3 player.

If he was a large man, I would understand. But he was average sized! I couldn’t understand it at all! He was so rude!