Wah. Am not dead. Huzzah.
Saturday, April 12, 2003 at 10:20 a.m.
No, I'm not dead. No, it's not SARS. The fever's cleared.
However, I am a little pissed off at boomspeed for cutting off Hani's account. My style-sheets were there. Bah.
So all you get now is a blog entry. And not a long one, at that.
Entry link: #in-Singapore
Hurrah. Biohazard man.
Friday, April 4, 2003 at 07:39 p.m.
My father sent me to the hospital this morning, mainly because my symptoms have not lessened.
It was okay, I guess. Malaysian hospitals are probably a lot better than the snake-oil salesmen that plague our country's private medical establishments. Ironic, since the both of us went to the same doctor as children — a Dr. Virik. But that's a different story.
Highlights of the whole thing:
- Taking a blood sample from my arm. That was kind of funny, since apparently have the arms of a woman — it's almost impossible to find a vein on my left arm. What the nurse did instead was pierce a needle to the vein on my right hand — you heard me right. It's still a little bruised, and looking at the needle just going into my skin over there freaked me out. Plus it hurts a little more.
- Listening to some other girl get her blood sample taken. She was probably 12, or something like that, and had similar symptoms to what I had — coughing and fever for several days. She was screaming and squealing like mad, the poor thing. Her mother and the nurse had to hold her down.
- Wearing a fucking surgical mask. It's annoying, and when I exhale, my glasses cloud up. I'll be glad when this is over.
They did an X-Ray on my chest area, as well as the blood test. The results were:
- No, I didn't have pneumonia, which is one of the symptoms (but not the ONLY one) of SARS. That's good.
- No, my fever wasn't caused by bacteria — which explained the general uselessness of the antibiotics I took. This is bad — SARS is a viral disease.
So the jury's still out. It may be the flu, or it could be SARS. In a way, being uncertain about it isn't too good.
The doctor ‘strongly urged’ my dad to put me under quarantine under a government hospital — my dad said no, I'm better off being at home, where at least I wouldn't be exposed to any SARS-positives in a government hospital.
Spent the drive back listening to my dad lecture about how being unfit got me into this trouble. That man can be an utter twat sometimes.
Entry link: #SARS-hospital
Fever and coughing.
Thursday, April 3, 2003 at 09:03 a.m.
This is my third day of illness.
It's been fever, and a little bit of coughing, so far. I'm tired, mainly because it's been three days straight that I've had these symptoms.
Yes, I am worried about whether this is SARS. If the fever continues until tomorrow, I'm taking a blood test.
My immune system hasn't been at its best lately.
Entry link: #fever-cough
The Treatment
Tuesday, April 1, 2003 at 01:23 a.m.
Let me just start my blog by saying that Fabian probably has it worse off than me.
Let's see — why do I say that? Hmm.
I spend a lot of time around females. More so than guys.
I'm not too sure why. I suspect it's mainly because I feel comfortable with 'em. I always know what I'd want from a woman, and they know I know, and it definitely defines our relationships with each other. With guys — uhh, I guess.
Maybe I need to join a Trek fan-club or something.
(thinks for a while)
On second thoughts, maybe not.
Anyway. The main disadvantage about being surrounded by women is that, as a heterosexual male, you are the Enemy. Your situation would be less parlous if you were homosexual, or of the same gender — as a homosexual male, you pose little to no threat, and as a fellow sister (either straight or otherwise), you have the right neurochemistry to understand what estrogen does to the female mind.
Yeah, that thing Freud basically threw his hand up in the air on, saying, “I'll be fucked if I ever know what women think.”
As the Enemy, women look at you and think, “This guy could rape me.” Oh, I'm sure plenty of women think otherwise, and insist that she knows a few men she absolutely trusts herself with.
A thought experiment, then. Within the next three days, ladies, look at all the straight men you know, even your fathers and brothers, and consider this one question:
“I would trust this man to not molest me if he was with me in a bath-tub, naked like the day he was born, scrubbing my back.”
There won't be a big list of straight men you'd want in that bath-tub.
Right, so I'm basically the Enemy. That means that most women, when surrounding themselves around me, would want to make sure that I, as the Enemy, am Harmless.
And they do that by teasing. Endlessly.
Nina can confuse the monkeys out of me. TJ and Hani will grab my butt. The other YCCians will talk about me, as if I was a prize bull, either to be milked or taken to the slaughterhouse. The only thing I've ever tried doing to stop that is to say something outrageous, like “I think that black guy in ‘the Core’ was really hot. Like pervy-uncle hot.”
This, although effective, is very, very unsubtle. So I don't like using it, and I end up being hen-pecked, because I don't want to end up ostracizing myself unnecessarily.
Of course, when you get sick and tired of the Treatment, I end up saying something immensely shocking (and, in retrospect, bone-headed), and they shut up, look at me like I'm some wild, frothing savage from New Guinea, and immediately change the subject. Of course, you get a reputation as a perv, then, which doesn't help, as the Treatment is increased for old Kamesennin-style pervs.
Of course, like I said, it's worse for permanent straight male YCCians, of which Fabian is one. The only one, of course, for now.
Either he's a masochist, or he's hiding something. He takes it like a tupping trooper. Bloody hell.
I'm glad I'm not a YCCian. I can see why the word ‘harpy’ is usually used on a vexing, troublesome woman. The original harpies also screwed around with a guy — an old man, with the gift of prophecy. They'd swoop in, steal his food, probably screw with his mind or something and fuck off.
I wonder if the writer of that tale was trying to put up some kind of hidden meaning.
But then, we're guys. Subtlety is so lost to us, we poor, sad things.
Entry link: #the-Treatment