Tariq Kamal's blog.

Wah. Am not dead. Huzzah.

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.

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:

They did an X-Ray on my chest area, as well as the blood test. The results were:

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.

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

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


Previous archived entries

Who is this guy?

Tariq Kamal was born on November 1981, on a day in which he wishes was a day of infamy, but unfortunately it wasn't, much to his frustration. He's a Malaysian, and is at the same time proud and ashamed of that fact. He's a comics and computer geek, who sometimes can't be arsed to catch up with his stuff. He's also occasionally misanthropic, and looks at Tarot Card 20 with a mixture of hope and frustration. He's also very impulsive — hence this weblog, which he will probably neglect like his last one.

He majors in computer science, and has shoulder length hair that Hani adores and everyone else finds disturbingly and rather disgustingly retro. And you would too, unless you like the kind of long, wavy black hair that romance novel heroes have. If you do, mind, Tariq doesn't have the pecs of the six-packs. For crying out loud, he's a CS major.

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