Peace and stuff

Going over the last few posts, it’s like I’m always complaining about some business or the other. So this time I’m going to complain about something else.

As far back as I can remember, there’s always been some cause to get all worked up over for young people. Like the feminist thing. It’s like all the women I know were always attending meetings or getting harassed. Busy with feminist-ey things all the time. Maybe that’s why men are higher paid in the workplace. idk.

Now we have some kind of racial/religious pot brewing and everyone’s up in arms about it. A mob even recently attacked a fashion bug outlet claiming that a woman was assaulted in there. Nobody deserves to have their business vandalised over things like that. I mean, if they’d at least claimed that they wanted to demolish it because of the horrible clothes they sell, I’d have been cool with it. I mean really. Stop supplying people with more shiny dress shirts and ridiculous beach shorts. No wonder everyone’s all worked up.

So there’s this facebook page of hippies people passionate about voicing opposition to all the violence and stupidity. I decided to post this here for a multitude of reasons. To convince myself that I’m not so full of myself that I think I’m too jaded and world-weary to be optimistic about people doing activist things, and so that I can weasel out of being obliged to share everything on facebook. Mostly though, it’s probably because my internet is so slow today that I can’t watch any tv shows online.

Dear Dialog,

You’re not that bad to your customers. Most of the time. Even when some of them are too lazy to write blog posts in the form of letters.

Now that I’m rid of that tedious literary device,

Over a month ago, I got a phone call from someone who claimed to be from Dialog, and asked me for some personal details like my NIC, claiming that I’d been selected as a “priority customer” and that I needed to “confirm my identity”. I’ve received too many emails from Nigerian princes to be completely trusting of such things, so I asked what being a priority customer entails, and why they would need to confirm my identity since it’s my phone line in the first place. The rep asked me if I could speak in sinhalese instead. Hey, I’m not the one who started the conversation in english. And then blabbed some vague spiel about “special offers” for phone accessories and things.

At this point I’m wondering why someone would want to scam my details off me. After a few more minutes of the rep sputtering and stumbling through what seemed like a failed script, I hung up.

I contacted dialog’s regular customer support and asked them if they knew of the number I’d been called from and if I’d actually been put on some loyalty card list. I was told yes, that was a legit call and I’m an asshole for making some apparently 14 year old socially inept girl working a miserable desk job all teary-eyed. Well they didn’t actually say the latter bit but I’m sure someone was thinking it.

Afterwards, I decided to write a scathing blogpost about Dialog and how their customer service agents come off as identity thieves. But then I got lazy and I stomped on the metaphorical fingers of my blog holding onto the cliff edge of activity over the abyss of lifelessness.

Then a few days ago I get a message saying I’ve been upgraded to a special credit category or something, as per the written confirmation. What confirmation? Did you skywrite it on the bright skies over Kadawatha for me to gaze upon leisurely as I brushed my teeth one fine morning? I’m yet to receive any letter saying I can now get into more debt than usual with my telco, as of five days from the date of the message.

IDK, Dialog, what’s up with the shady service?

Moles

Salad by SliceOfChic

You might be wondering why there is a picture of a salad up there. Then again you might also be wondering why your life is such an empty husk, never to see fulfillment, forever to be lost in between the pleats of the skirt of life. Just like that blasted vanilla milkshake from the Deli France in Odel. Thing tasted like sawdust in water.

Last night I had a very strange dream. Yes, I know what that sounds like, and no, this has not turned into one of those blogs.

Just hear me out. It was fun. It involved a bunch of talking vegetables, me, and an evil mole. They say the faces you see in dreams are ones you’ve seen when you were awake, consciously or otherwise. I was relieved to find that all my companions in the dream had no faces, in that dreamy censorship kind of way, meaning I probably hadn’t seen any anthropomorphic vegetables anywhere.

Anyway,

I was standing outside a house. I was small. Apparently I was about vegetable-sized too. I turn around and there was a carrot, a… leek(?) and a cabbage behind me, all looking very agitated(don’t ask me how I knew this without seeing faces).

It turned out that we were a band of vegetables running away from a mole who was hunting us down to return us to his human master, who was apparently a cook. We were thrown into a wild adventure through the rain gutters and roofing tiles, jumping off ceiling fan blades and ducking into cabinets with the mole hot on our heels. The technicalities of a mole being able to even see where it was going, let alone being physically able to dangle off the edge of the roof didn’t occur to the escaped ingredients.

Eventually, we were joined by a pineapple, who had escaped some time later. He also brought about our demise, when just as we were running towards a little boat docked in a stream nearby, which was to take us to freedom, safety and the joy of slowly rotting away in a few days, the mole ambushed us, ordered his henchman the cat to burn the boat, and threw a net over the lot of us.

Turned out the pineapple had snitched on us to save himself. What followed was a slow montage of cooking scenes full of salads. Sauces never looked so terrifying. There was even a corny-teen-movie like sequence at the end, with credits and “the cabbage went on to be eaten by the Duke of Wellington” etc.

Breakfast was uncomfortable.

Why won’t you contribute?

As you all might know, there’s this 16 days something something campaign to raise awareness on gender based violence(GBV). Here’s the link for the campaign “hub” in Sri Lanka -> http://srilanka16days.wordpress.com/about/.

Click on it. Learn. That link is all about violence against women. What we don’t really hear about is violence against men. I didn’t think it was much of an issue till about last year either. Violence against men takes many forms, such as plain old domestic violence, molestation by employers(usually of under-aged boys) and refusing to make sandwiches.

BeyondBorders is doing a great job over at http://beyondborders.wordpress.com/tag/16-days/ by compiling a collection of images and brief descriptions for people to use freely to produce material for promoting campaigns like the 16 Days of GBV. Or GBV awareness, rather. You should contribute. There’s only about four days left and any contributions in the form of photographs or even just your take on GBV would be immensely appreciated.

With all you people wandering around with shiny new SLR’s, I’m surprised we haven’t been overrun by contributions, actually. It’s sickening. You get a chance to do something for the betterment of mankind and all you do is take pictures of your cat? Disgusting. I fart in your general direction. At the very least, submit one picture to keep the guilt-inducing voice of your conscience away, like I did. Looking for a good deed to do before Christmas brings you a lump of coal? Well, here’s your golden opportunity. I’m Gerald Pereira, and I demand that you contribute.

 

TL;DR?

Good/Bad guy reversed. His voice seemed the most appropriate.

 

 

Photography Exhibition by CEPA.

Click to enlarge smaller, useless image.

Take part or you’re off the list for the next Rapture.

A Time Capsule of Sorts

I’m going to take someone’s advice and just write.

I haven’t been putting much effort into this little journal of sorts lately, and I have a feeling my 60, 70 or (hopefully) 80 year old self would really appreciate hearing about my exploits back when I was young, spry, not an internationally renowned figure and slightly more dashing. To you, sir, I write this post.

Hello. How are you doing? I’m great, as you might remember(I hope you don’t have Alzheimer’s). Since there’s not much you can gain from me telling you things which happen in the past, I’m just going to ramble at you for a bit. Maybe if you have time machines in your time, you’ll come back and tell me things. What say about five seconds from now?

.

.

.

.

.

Nothing? Fine. Be that way. Or maybe you just have Alzheimer’s and can’t figure out how to work the thing. Maybe you’re an outlaw getting by on just your wits, good looks and walking stick, so don’t have access to a time-machine right now. Dammit. All I wanted to know was whether I should learn to cook, or if women will be obsolete in the future when people finally invent instant food pills(Just add water!). A few other things too, but you get the gist.

I hope you’re still more or less the same. Sans the undesirable bits, of course. I quite like myself the way I am. Most importantly, have you figured out a way to grow facial hair without looking like a hobo or some kind of degenerate who just broke out of a prison with a bad barber? Perhaps even more importantly, by just a bit, I hope you still feed your inner child and haven’t confined him to a slow, painful death. I hope you’re still fun. Look. Are you smiling?

Since you already know everything I know, and everything I’ll ever find out, there’s really not much more to say. May this post find you in good health and embroiled in few lawsuits. Have a nice day!

P.S – I pray that wordpress won’t close down between now and then. Or maybe they’ll move it to something else.

P.P.S – Will I ever figure out poetry?

Revival?

A lot of people posted again. Is this some kind of return to the hey-days of blogging where we all linked to each others’ posts and met up awkwardly over a few beers?

The last bit, at least, will hopefully come to pass again. Valentine’s day is coming up again, and we want to do the same thing we did, what was it, two years ago? Come to Lani’s in the evening. It should be fun.

Assaulted

Okay, you know that I’m the kind of badass that makes Chuck Norris look like a japanese school girl skipping home after a tiring day at school drawing pikachu over and over again. But then there are things in this world that can make even me screw up my face in terror. Last week I came face to face with such a terror.

It was vicious. It was menacing. It was a finely tuned killing machine intent on my destruction. I came out of the encounter just barely alive enough to sing “I’ve got soul but I’m not a soldierrrrhhh” while stumbling away. Last week I met the spawn of the devil. The kind of thing that spends its free time outside primary schools, luring little kids in with toys and candy, then teaching them to listen to Justin Beiber. It was a terrible beast.

It was a mop.

Well a mop handle. And it had this plastic ring-thing on top that made it extra sharp.

See, this is what happened:

I race into the bathroom to shave. I’m in a hurry. I drop the shaving cream. I knock over the mop leaning against the wall trying to pick up the shaving cream.

I pick up the mop, throw it against the wall.

Slow motion.

I bend down to pick up the shaving cream again.

*cue dramatic violin music*

As I’m on my merry way down, I see the mop rebounding off the wall, and heading back towards me, out of the corner of my eye.

Have you ever tried stopping in the middle of an almost automated action like that? It’s impossible. Like getting a woman to be logical. It should be called the Logic chromosome, not the Y chromosome.

But back to our story.

To my slow-motion dismay I notice that my face is traveling on the perfect vector to intercept the mop handle.

*dramatic violin music reaches crescendo*

And it does. The mop handle, pivoting on its base, has rotated just so that its pointy top is right under my face, and my vertically traveling face impales itself on the handle. Right below the left eye. Ouch.

*cue clatter of pots, pans, galaxies and entire universes banging against each other*

Thankfully it just gave me a bruise under my eye for a day, which affected me only in that people on the bus kept staring at my face. Even hobos turned to look at me. I had forgotten to shave that day too, meaning I probably looked like a homeless rapist or something.

And now it’s just slight evidence of a cut under my eye. Most of it has gone the way of the dodo, or most twitter users’ sanity.

Face, Meet Hair. Hair, Face.

Some of you might already know that I’m growing a beard. Now, I’ve never had to do anything to my facial hair other than cleave it off with the ferocity of a cat clawing its way up a well. And since my beard of choice turned out to be a goatee and mustache combo, I hadn’t the foggiest how to get it. Do you draw an outline on your face beforehand? Maybe you actually have to measure the length on both sides, so as to be symmetrical.

Possibilities. So I turned to our mutual friend, the internet. A quick search and an “I’m feeling lucky”(far less gratifying than it sounds) and I got to http://beards.org. Once there, I was quickly terrified by all the hair. The mullets petrified me. So I ran like a little girl back to google. A few Yahoo! Answers later, I was in front of the mirror with a butter knife in hand.

What? The posters said so. The internet is never wrong.

I Wasn’t Inspired

But I liked it.

I’m not sure why it’s called an Inspirational Swan Lake though. To my layman mind, it was to swan lake what a camel is to an elephant. Both have the same basic structure, like how both involve much dance and great music, but you reach a point where you just don’t know what to make of the trunk. Okay so maybe the story isn’t what’s important. But then why call it that? I couldn’t make heads or tails of the plot, and neither could people around me. The gender reversal was easy to take, but then all these other characters popped in and I was wondering if I was in the right play.

Now, if the whole premise of the thing was to focus on the whole “performance” aspect of things, the performance being the choreography, it was pretty good. It was entertaining. They did a great job of… doing stuff… in time to the amazing music. The entire performance was great, except for the fact that my mind kept roaming all over the events that unfolded trying to find what the heck was going on. I put it down to me being too uncultured. But then again if it were really that great it should make at least something apparent to the observer.

As for being inspired, I don’t know what the big deal was. A bunch of people prancing about on stage does not inspire me much, even if a few of them were deaf or blind or Mac users, it just didn’t make my brain explode into a great big hailstorm of sexism and ways to photoshop people’s faces into humorous images.

Watching just the performance is great, though pretty much like watching Transformers 2 or something. Wait, I know I can connect the two somehow. Ah!

In one it’s a bunch of people practicing long hours to carry out some slick dance moves etc. etc. In the other, it’s a bunch of people putting many years of practice to use to create some pretty slick eye candy.

This may be a bit of a stretch, but when you come down to it, neither made much of an impact, except for one having music that I’m going to go find. But that’s not something you can attribute to the performers.

And finally, in the souvenir, the actors had stage names. Why?