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Saturday, 30 April 2011

The Weeping Wife

The hymns were playing in the car as John set to wash it . He wanted to listen to them as he washed the car. It would give him a good feeling.

His wife was looking on as she washed the laundry. She had noticed that while he remembered to wash his old car every weekend, he had not done anything to hers which was left parked outside the house under a tree.

All that he was interested was to sell it off as soon as possible, irregardless to whom or what better bargain he could get. Perhaps, he was lazy to take care of it.

Later, he felt guilty about not helping with the housework. He wanted to vacuum the house. He looked for the vacuum cleaner but could not find it. He started to complain about his wife keeping it away. Why complain about a tidy wife, you might wonder. It was just that he preferred things to be put where he could see them, which meant that he could not care less having the whole house cluttered. His wife had tripped over the long hose of the vacuum cleaner and nearly fell the other day. It had made walking in the small kitchen hard. There was not a storeroom to put all his gadgets and tools, so he used part of the kitchen to put his things.

After all the complains, he got tired and went to sleep. The house remained un-vacuumed. Who wanted him to do the job anyway, better to get it done myself, thought the wife. After all these years, she had learnt to be self-reliant. There was not much to be communicated between them now. Each had their own thoughts and the wife had given up hope of ever coming to any agreement with him. She had learnt to plan and take care of her own affairs. It had been made clear to her quite some time ago that that was what he intended to do, but she always seemed to forget about it. He had always wanted to drop his responsibility but could not because of his parents. He was afraid of his parents.

The wife, on the other hand, was getting herself mentally prepared for his abandonment. She had to stay on until the children were old enough. It was not a matter of forgiving him or not. It was letting her husband free because he had revealed he was tired of the relationship.  He was tired of keeping up to her standards, of which she regarded the lowest among all good people. He wanted to go back to his old lifestyle. However, it was going to be unfair to the wife. What would others have thought, she questioned herself. Others would have thought she could not forgive him for his vain self, his failures, and his bad habits. Yes, she found him hypocritical but she could forgive him for that too. Now, it is him who wants out. However, he is not telling that to his friends. How am I going to tolerate this anymore, she wondered.

Monday, 11 April 2011

The Very Mercenary Dentist

Dental care nowadays is extremely expensive if you go to the private clinic.  Most of us prefer private dental care because of the shorter queue and flexibility of time.  Government dental clinics have fixed days for extractions and for filling or scaling. Some of us find it hard to accomodate for those times, so instead we prefer to spend money on our most treasured asset-a fine set of natural teeth.  However, that is not always guaranteed by the amount of money we are willing to put in. Dentists are such an arrogant lot!

A tooth extraction normally costs about fifty ringgit , scaling costs eighty ringgit whereas filling costs fifty to eighty depending on the size of the cavity.  However, I have a feeling this kind of money is not satisfying some dentists.  Some prefer to earn from the 'higher end' kind of jobs namely crowning, bridges and the like, which at the minimum, costs about eight hundred ringgit for one crowning.


One thing about the dentists is we have to trust our teeth to them.  We won't be sure how many holes we have in our set of teeth or how bad they are except to trust them.  Besides, we are not too sure the work they have done is good enough for us to pay that much.  There is no guarantee although we may have paid hundreds to the thousands of ringgit. Though some dentist will advise to have an X-ray done to show how the cavities are before doing, many will just proceed without having it done at all, because the X-rays are going to mean extra costs to be paid.


At the end of the day, there is no proof of how your teeth are before the job is done. Once, I was having my teeth done and the dentist was in a hurry to go somewhere.  He kept on asking the nurse beside him if he had missed out any procedures.  Poor me , because I was thinking that the 'fate' of my teeth was going to be in his hands! I did not want a shoddy job done to my teeth and I wanted my natural teeth to last longer!  Most of all, I cannot afford  to 'throw away my money' for the crowning and root treatments and whatnots if I can avoid them!

Houses that Look Like Offices

During these couple of years, the design of new houses and recently renovated ones have taken on a new look.  Most of them have taken on a more contemporary design where there are more rectangular and square shapes. Somehow, it reminded me of how offices should look , more than how homes should look. Excuse me whoever out there who think otherwise!

I would prefer houses that have designs that blend with the neighbourhood.  To me, it is an odd picture to see a completely different contemporary designed house jutting out from the classic looking ones. Recently I noticed a greyish newly renovated house with a glass facade amidst a row of brownish , woody looking houses.  The house by itself looks beautiful but it looks odd among the other similar or almost similar looking ones.


Though I don't think the new designs are ugly, I do not understand why some people bother to tear down their already nice looking houses to adopt the 'new' look. Moreover, the building materials nowadays are more expensive and somewhat of more inferior quality.


I thought people should be more conservative in their usage of the Earth's resources and I don't see how this is going to be if they keep on 'chasing after' trends of all sorts.


Even if they are so wealthy, I think there are better ways of spending their 'excesses'.  Just in a matter of a decade or two, these designs will soon be a thing of the past and what is 'beautiful and modern' will be 'ugly and outdated'.  Humans can be very fickle.  The availability of money to be extravagant is the main cause of this fickle-mindedness.

What's Wrong With the Young Married Couples Nowadays!

I have recently heard of many stories about young people getting married with no intention of having children in their lives. It's just the woman and the man , and the dog named Boo.


There is an apparent fear of bringing up children properly in this ever fast changing world where good moral values have becoming 'archaic'.  It seemed that these people are preferring to achieve their ambitions and dreams instead of spending their time in making a family.  They fancy travelling to all the places they want while they are young.


Meanwhile, they shirk their responsibilities as children to their parents.  They tell their parents to carry on working lest they get Alzhiemer easily if they don't.  They do not give money to their parents because they are still earning. If and when their parents are too old and sickly, they put them in the homes and they just pay
for the expenses.  They do not have time to visit them often because they are too busy making money to upkeep their lifestyles. Anyway, they will say, what is wrong with their parents staying in the homes, because when they themselves are old, they are also going to do that as they will have no children to take care of them. At least, their parents still have someone close to come and visit them, whereas they are not going to have anybody at all!


How sad that these young and married couples decide to spend their lives this way! What a sad choice!