I’ve had this recurring theme in my dreams for years. I’m driving and when I hit the brakes, the car won’t come to a complete stop. I’m jamming the brake pad with all my might and the car just won’t stop rolling forward.

In my dream this morning, two things had changed: The car was on reverse instead of going forward. Also, an accident finally happened. (Previously, I always wake up before any mishap happens.)

I was trying to reverse park Makkuro in an open air car park. The Goonfather was on the passenger seat.

When I was done getting the car into position, I stepped on the brake but Makkuro wouldn’t stop. He kept rolling backwards (as if there’s a lot of space in the lot to roll backwards).

I said, “Why is Makkuro rolling backwards? I’m stepping on the brake as hard as I can!”

The Goonfather said something about the brakes not working because the ground was sloped downwards.

The car rolled for, like, half a minute, enough time for us to have a conversation.

Suddenly, I felt us rolling down a very steep slope and Makkuro rolled right off the ground. I had time to think “uh oh” before we launched into air, backwards.

We actually did a slow somersaut as we descended. I still had time to think, “We’re going crash and die.”

But, miraculously, we didn’t crash and die. Makkuro landed the right way up in a ditch and we were unhurt, although Makkuro lost his entire roof.

The first thing I said was, “I’m sorry I caused Makkuro to get hurt.”

The next thing I said was, “I need to take photo!”

As I rummaged in my bag to get my Blackberry, the Goonfather jumped out of the car and started walking away.

Without someone to help, I had an impossible task taking a photo of myself in the scene of the accident. But I still had to try because I needed to have some good pictures for blogging.

Then I started to panic because I couldn’t get my picture and I had the sense that I needed to get out of the car quickly because that’s what people normally do when they get into an accident.

That’s when I woke up. And realised that it was late (12pm) and I’d missed breakfast.

(I had been fantasizing about McDonald’s breakfast last night as I went to bed hungry, so I was a bit disappointed to wake up so late.)

But I’m glad Makkuro is fine. Isn’t that the best thing about nightmares? You wake up and everything that’s bad has disappeared and you’re relieved that it never actually happened.

=======================================================

Sponsored

Asian Poker Showdown

You’re at the final hurdle. You’ve fought challenge after challenge. You’re so near you can taste the finishing line. But, wait… You must now face the best poker professionals in Asia. Will you beat them all and emerge as the Asian Poker Showdown Champion?

Visit www.AsianPokerShowdown.com to watch all the videos!

I’ve always resented the inventions that supposedly make women “prettier”. How much pain, time and money have they cost women throughout the ages?

I’ve always wished people could be happy to leave well enough alone, and that makeup, cosmetic surgery and beauty treatments never existed. I resent having to put in so much effort to look good.

And yet, because all these inventions and implements are in place and have become the norm, I must conform to standards or be overlooked.

To give you a visual image of what I mean, let’s talk about bound feet in ancient China. It was considered beautiful for women to have ridiculously small feet. Females had to endure the pain of having their feet broken and mangled through their lives.

Imagine yourself living in that era. As a girl, you would want to have tiny, mangled feet so you can look as “beautiful” as other girls, to be an object of envy and admiration rather than to be discriminated against or overlooked.

But wouldn’t you wish that the practice never existed in the first place so your feet can grow normally without you feeling the pressure to conform?

But, the way it was, you could have happy feet and be ugly or tortured feet and be admired. Either way, it sucks.

Unfortunately, we still have what I consider barbaric practices today to mould people into societal standards of beauty. Plastic surgery, tattooing, waxing. They are all barbaric because they cause pain.

Sure, everyone has a choice whether to do it or not. But when everyone is doing it and you don’t, you lose out. You’ll find it harder to get jobs and find partners or just fit in. Your self-esteem will plunge and life will be more miserable.

And when your naked photos accidentally get leaked a la Cecilia Cheung, you get criticised by the whole world for not having put yourself under the torture of waxing your privates.

There are all these people who self-righteously claim that inner beauty triumphs over everything and that painful beauty procedures are dumb. I’m sure even they cringed at those photos.

These people go around criticising celebrities who go for plastic surgery and yet expect women to magically have hairless privates and flawless physical beauty.

There’s no such thing as natural beauty.

Cosmetic surgery existed long before anaesthesia was invented. (I suppose we can count ourselves lucky that those days are past.)

Besides the ancient Chinese binding their feet, the Maori carved up their faces with sharpened bones and applied dye on the wounds to create elaborate patterns. Burmese tribal women collapsed their collar bones to create long necks.

I think the long neck thing is still happening today. The tattooing too, with less painful methods.

In the past, painful beauty practices reflected the status of those who were able to do them. Being able to mutilate yourself was an enviable luxury. It’s still the same way today, seeing as how plastic surgery costs the skies.

WHAT IS WRONG WITH THE WORLD? Who the devil invented these practices in the first place? I wish people would just leave things alone and stop coming up with bizarre ideas for making humans look “better”.

Aren’t we good enough as we are?

Unfortunately, we all have to conform to all these crazy standards in order to ease into society better.

Everyone conforms to some standard or other to varying degrees. Some are easier to follow (like makeup and hair cuts) while others are tougher (like big boobs).

But everyone must conform to at least something, which is the whole problem. It’s not easy being the person who gets stared at and pointed at just because you refuse to get a Brazillian wax.

You must suffer, either now or later.

I will state for the record that I opt for beauty. I just wish the option didn’t exist. That’s all.

I’ve never really liked ice desserts or ice-blended drinks because ice hurts my tongue (and sometimes teeth).

I would eat mango shaved ice because I love mango but will leave most of the ice alone. Haha.

But Nanny Wen recently introduced to me this thing called snow ice, which gave me a new liking for ice desserts.

Pictured above is Milo snow ice. It doesn’t look very appetising in my photo but it’s very tasty. It’s Milo-flavoured ice with Milo powder, so how can it not be tasty!

The special thing about snow ice is that the ice has a very satiny smooth texture, which makes it not feel like ice as we know it.

It’s shaved into very thin slices and it doesn’t seem to melt until you put it in your mouth. If you poke your spoon at it, the feeling is like poking at a bed of felt cloth, very soft and huggable (although I wouldn’t actually recommend hugging your snow ice).

It’s very amazing.

The first time I tried snow ice, I marvelled at it all the way like a suaku.

“It’s so soft!” I would exclaim.

“Wow! It doesn’t melt!” I would say.

“So fun to play with!!” I would squeal.

I swear the ice doesn’t melt. You know how ice desserts are always a pool of water by the time you’re halfway or three-quarters of the way through, depending on whether you’re indoors or outdoors?

This snow ice remains ice right till the end.

Or maybe it’s because I was sharing with Nanny Wen so we finished faster. LOL. You go try and tell me lah.

I’m sure there are several places you can find this in Singapore, but I only know two: City Square Mall (in the food court) and Hougang Mall (Dessert Story #02-18).

They have flavours like mango, durian, green tea, chocolate and, erm, I can’t remember anymore.

It’s actually fun to eat, never mind tasty. And it’s not very expensive. Under $4 I think.

Uh oh. I want to eat snow ice now. =(

It’s always fun to have a group project, everyone working towards one goal together, whether in real life or virtually.

In EverQuest II, our group project is to buy a guild hall, a place where guildies can hang out and do many things conveniently.

It’s a massive project requiring a lot of money and a lot of time and, after a month of hard work, we finally earn the eligibility to buy the cheapest guild hall in the game.

The hard work never ends, though. The guild hall can be continuously upgraded and there’s weekly maintenance to be paid and amenities to buy.

Fortunately, in games, hard work is actually fun.

The first eager beavers to arrive at the guild hall at the momentous moment of purchase:

As we first entered the hall, everyone stood around gawking before going wild and running around the rooms, each person trying to claim rooms for themselves.

The Goonfather (Silvermist in the game) put a giant “ashtray” in one of the basement rooms and said, “This is the smoking room.”

That’s not really an ashtray, though. It’s just a very ugly fountain.

As we were coming up from the basement to gawk at the main halls more, we saw Kerrendor perched on the wall opposite the stair landing:

So we decided that Kerrendor was a better thing to gawk at.

More and more people came to gawk at him while he just stood there, unmoving. We waited to see if he would fall off the wall.

Then, seeing that he was not going to fall off, the others decided to go join him:

So, I don’t know what the Goonfather (Silvermist) said to Kerrendor while they were perched on the wall. Suddenly, they both started fighting and then tragedy struck.

The Goonfather’s tragedy, in particular. He was dead in, like, five seconds.

In the picture above, Kerrendor appears to be in a prostate position apparently out of guilt at this unexpected murder.

But I think he was just pretending. We all know his innate bloodlust very well. Later in the night, he tried to murder the guild hall hirelings for fun.

Hirelings which cost us a lot.

So much chaos happened that night I had a hard time keeping track of everything. And people kept messing up the guild hall.

Like, someone started putting magical piles of snow all over the place, making it snow inside:

The same someone also tried to disguise himself as a guild hall hireling in order to confuse people:

I shan’t tell you who Silverfox is. You can guess…

The hirelings weren’t very happy about him trying to steal their jobs.

To maintain some order, I ordered a group photo shoot so that everyone had to stay still in one position for an indefinite period of time.

Fortunately, people tend to be quite cooperative and mellow when you order a group shot. Well, most of the time, anyway.

It does takes some dedicated yelling to accomplish, at times.

Like, certain individuals would refuse to stay still and get in position until after you’ve yelled at them at least three times.

Example:

But I generally only allow everyone to disperse after we’ve gotten at least one good shot, so certain naughty individuals know that they must eventually comply or we’d be stuck there the whole night.

This isn’t everyone in the guild. It’s hard to get everyone online at the same time!

Which is just as well, I suppose. It would probably have taken me two hours to get a nice shot if everyone had been there!

Writing a magazine column (as opposed to writing blogs) is rather tough, mainly because you have a very specific word count to adhere to.

Also, because you can’t distract readers with photos after every two sentences, you actually have to write something of note in order to keep their attention.

And a few other things which I won’t elaborate on cos I’m not holding classes on writing columns.

The point is, I’m having a tough time coughing out one short column a month but, at the same time, it’s also a breath of fresh air being able to write a piece without having to worry about pictures.

Here’s my column for the May issue of Stuff, which is out in stores now!

(Well, at least, I think my column should be in there. I haven’t actually gotten a copy yet.)

=======================================================

The following was first published in Stuff Magazine, May 2010.

By Sheylara

I am going to suggest something revolutionary. I am going to suggest that, if you have kids, you allow them to play games. In fact, make them play games. Start them as young as possible.

It’s easy enough to keep the lads interested since they’re born with the ability to grow gaming controllers between their hands, with or without parental help. But girls might need some nurturing, so keep your home stocked with the latest releases to cultivate their love for gaming.

It’s very important for girls, especially, to love gaming. I’ll tell you why (or I risk my editor throwing this column back in my face).

You want your daughters to grow up as gamers because gamers are smart, fast-thinking and creative. Many important life skills are learnt in games, such as leadership, problem solving and cooking.

But the biggest reason to breed girl gamers is to encourage marital harmony.

Think about it. If women understood the absolute need to play just one more mission to unlock that new kickass skill before coming to bed, there would be fewer quarrels and more happiness.

If women understood the utmost importance of playing Final Fantasy XIII on launch day instead of celebrating one of those ridiculous “monthiversary” things, many household accidents (such as porcelain plates mysteriously flying towards walls) could be avoided.

Sure, there’s gaming addiction to contend with. I’m not denying anything. But I have turned out fine and I enjoy harmonious relationships with men, except when we get competitive over whose computer is more powerful.

So, breed a gamer today. Your daughters and sons-in-law will thank you for it. Not to mention the Singapore government.

=======================================================

Sponsored

Asian Poker Showdown

Haha… this is crazy. The eight poker contestants get thrown off the world’s highest bungee jump in Macau! Watch them grit their teeth and do it…

View more episodes at www.AsianPokerShowdown.com!