homesick
(apr 27, 2001)

I haven't updated this website for about 5 months. In internet time that's about as long as it took for the world to move from Triassic Age to the Industrial Revolution. Boy, this site should be an invaluable archaelogical finding already (but I wouldn't mind being found by Harrison Ford and his fedora).

So a lot of things happened during this vast gap when I totally ignored non-decaffeinated. I went back to Malaysia, had a lot of fun, got an internship, summer got to its horrible end, packed my things, said goodbye, hauled my ass back to Melbourne, and it's uni again, only as a much cooler status of being a jaded know-it-all second-year rather than a wimpy wide-eyed first-year.

Believe me, I have a lot to tell you here.

Just not quite sure where to start, though.

Hmmm.

One thing for sure being away from homeland reminds me how Malaysian I am here, however uncool it is to admit it when I was back home. I guess you feel like that when there are only two people from your country in your campus and you're one of them. And you don't even know this other person because you're just so socially ignorant.

I can go on without rice for weeks and I only wear baju kurung during Hari Raya. I'd like to argue that that doesn't make me less a Malaysian, but that's probably too selfish. Maybe I'd just like to say that it doesn't make me an Australian. When I fill in forms I still write 'Malaysian' when asked of my citizenship. And it feels like more than a mere legal obligation (of course I was tempted to put 'brooding Italian' but I don't have the accent to go with, so.).

I'm not a patriotic person. At least probably not in a blatant, bra-burning way. If I have to take Bahasa Melayu SPM again I'm probably going to fail the paper. I cringe at public service ads. I get mad when the PM makes an address to the nation on all TV channels. I try to stay clear of any political bias. I try to dissociate myself as far as possible from what's going on in Malaysia.

But I know, deep in my arterial valve, I simply won't fit anywhere else.