Piers pointed out to me today something funny that he saw on his Facebook feed.

There were my status updates where I was stressing about my essay, groaning about not having much time left to finish it. And then, on the same page, it also showed that I had been watching Prison Break on Netflix.

Now, this is a complete lie because, while I was toiling away at my essay, Piers was the one who was watching Prison Break on my Netflix account. Because my Netflix is linked to my Facebook, it auto-updated.

Stupid Facebook.

But it’s all good. I enjoy linking all my apps to Facebook so that everyone knows whenever I watch a movie, listen to a song, play a game or toast some bread.

Today, we live in the happy delusion that people actually care about every breath we take and every fart we make. If it keeps us happy and raises our self-esteem, why not, huh?

Indeed, why not.

But just remember not to believe everything you see in Facebook because someone could pretend to have watched an intellectual film just to appear intellectual, or another person could use someone else’s Netflix account to watch Prison Break while said someone else is supposed to be working hard on an essay.

But, still, all is good. I have scanned through Netflix quickly and not found any overly embarrassing films or TV programmes in there so Piers is welcome to knock himself out watching all the shows he possibly can because Netflix is like a TV buffet.

Anyway, the worst of my chicken pox is over now. I don’t even want to talk about it because it is the worst singular experience I’ve had in my life.

I am now trying my darnedest to catch up with my school work because I had to miss an entire week of classes, during which I was sick and miserable at home, at times fantasizing about rushing outside in the middle of the night to provoke random drunk students so that they would be inspired to stab me dead.

In the meantime, I have been honing my drawing skills on the new social game, Draw Something, which you can play on Apple and Android devices, and which you should because it’s fun. Download it and add me via Facebook or e-mail so we can play together and I can traumatise you with my crappy drawings.

Can’t stay to chat now. I have just finished writing a 5,000-word essay but I have one more to write, the contents of which were taught when I was absent from school.

Hoorah.

Have a good March and be as mad as a March hare!

Piers tried to pay me a compliment the other day.

“Your skin is so smooth,” he said.

I was about to modestly protest when he added, “Like a pumpkin.”

“What?” I said.

“No, wait,” he said thoughtfully, “Pumpkins aren’t very smooth, are they?”

“No, they’re not.”

“Okay,” he tried again, “Your skin is as smooth as a peach.”

Obviously, it wasn’t going very well.

I said, “Huh?”

He said, “Peaches have got these little hairs…”

I made a face. “Are you calling me hairy??”

“No, no, of course not,” he said defensively, “Peaches are not hairy.”

“They’re fuzzy,” I told him.

“That’s kinda smooth isn’t it?”

“How is that smooth? It’s fuzzy!”

He thought about it for a while, then said, “Okay, okay, not peach. What should it be then?”

“Tofu,” I said.

“Eew!”

“What?”

“Tofu is slimy!” he declared.

“It’s not.”

“Yes, it is!”

“It’s a common analogy to say a girl’s skin is soft as tofu!” I said.

(Actually, I’m not sure about that at all. It was just the first thing that popped into my mind. Silken tofu is very soft and smooth, isn’t it?)

“That’s disgusting!” he proclaimed again, “Tofu is slimy and wet.”

“It’s not slimy!”

(Which is true. Tofu may be wet but it’s not slimy at all.)

But he had one last argument.

“If tofu weren’t slimy and wet, Takumi wouldn’t have to worry about spilling it.”

I’m sorry if you haven’t watched Initial D (the Japanese anime) and therefore don’t get the Takumi reference, but don’t worry about it because it’s a stupid reference to begin with.

The point is that, after all that, I didn’t feel at all complimented because the conversation ended on “slimy”.

We didn’t go any further than that; I generally try to change the subject when Piers gets too silly.

Luckily for him, he’s useful in many other ways (such as fixing broken things around the house) so we can happily overlook his flaws (such as likening me to a pumpkin).

For his information (since Valentine’s Day is coming soon), I don’t need roses or compliments. I’ll happily settle for an iPad 3 (and not the gimpy 16GB Wifi one)!

:D

You know how, in relationships, you reach a point where you run out of things to talk about?

Piers and I got to that stage a few months back. We gradually replaced our bonding sessions with TV. Lots of TV.

I was starting to get addicted, too, because England has no end of interesting, crazy TV shows.

Not very productive.

Fortunately, things are beginning to change now that I’m back at school. Piers will ask about my day and I will have many stories to tell him. We can last hours this way.

That wasn’t possible just two weeks ago.

Our daily updates went like this:

Piers: How was your day?

Shey: Um, same as yesterday. How was your day?

Piers: Same as yesterday.

Shey: What’s for dinner?

His job is a bit boring. He sits in front of three monitors and stares at pixels all day long. If the pixels are not worth staring at, he stares at his iPad.

For me, two weeks before, I played Facebook and iPad games full-time. Sometimes, I blogged.

But now, we can have more engaging conversations, like this one that just happened:

Piers: How was school today?

Shey: We learnt how to transfer water and beans from container to container.

Piers: Gosh.

Shey: And how to open and close padlocks.

Piers: Wow. Sounds interesting.

Shey: Yes.

Piers: You must be becoming very useful.

Shey: I think so.

Piers: I can get you to do all sorts of stuff around the house now.

Shey: Do you have beans that need transferring? I can do that.

Piers: No, but now I know you can, I might get some.

Shey: I can do mung beans, butter beans, soya beans and aduki beans.

Piers: Amazing. You’re so smart! Proud of you.

Shey: Thanks!

We went on to talk about nuts. I tried to convince him to buy me honey roasted cashew nuts to practise on, but he wouldn’t hear of it, insisting that I haven’t been trained to work with nuts.

I have, though. I’ve been living with one for almost a year now.

Yes, we’ve been dating for nearly a year, so it’s understandable for us to run out of things to talk about.

But not anymore!

I think tomorrow we learn how to use scissors. Yes, Piers and I are going to have another exciting conversation!

I got told off this morning.

All because Edgeworld, a game I’m playing on Facebook, sneakily told all my friends that I’m playing it.

A lot of Facebook games do that, in fact. You can’t even log in to Facebook these days without everyone immediately knowing that you’re at the moment skiving off instead of working/studying/blogging.

So, this was what happened.

I totally didn’t know an update was posted when I logged into the game, and then suddenly I got a notification that someone had commented on my activity.

To further illustrate my point about Facebook games being sneaky tattertales, there was this one morning when I woke up and went about my daily routine, which was:

1. Turn on computer.
2. Turn on MSN and say hi to Piers.
3. Open all my current Facebook games to use up stored energry/collect daily credits etc. Then, if I have time, play for a bit.

((I know it looks like a very sad routine but looks are deceiving so let’s leave the judging for another time because today’s topic is not to discuss my Internet/gaming addiction (although the word I prefer is passion)).

So in the midst of doing my routine this one morning, an MSN message suddenly flashed on my screen:

“You logged in to Edgeworld before saying hi to me!”

Now, before you get the wrong idea about Piers, he was just teasing me and not being stalkerish. It’s impossible to develop an impulse to stalk a girlfriend who wants to stay home all day and play games. I would say I’m quite safe from having a stalkerish boyfriend.

To clarify the situation, I did in fact turn on MSN before I opened my games, but it’s just that Chrome loaded my games a lot faster than MSN signed in, so it would have appeared to stalkers, should I actually have any, that I prioritised games over going on MSN.

This incident brought home the point that Facebook is quite dangerous so we should never add our bosses, teachers, parents, elders and people we don’t like on it.

Who knows what other kinds of things, in the future, Facebook will tell about us without us knowing.

Of course, we can (and should) try to be more careful. And if we strive to be honest and reliable and diplomatic in all things, we don’t have to worry about Facebook telling on us.

Like, if you wanted to turn down a date from someone you don’t really fancy, just say no and don’t come up with stupid excuses like “I broke all my fingers so I can’t come out” and then the next thing is he sees you playing Edgeworld on Facebook.

I’m sure I’m not saying anything new here. Everyone already knows the dangers of Facebook. But then people still keep getting caught in embarrassing situations. We really can’t be too careful.

In the meantime, I’m not too worried. I can live with the odd person telling me I game too much. Not that it’s even news, duh.

And Justyn should be quite happy now so I should be able to log in to Edgeworld without further repercussions.

It is very hard to please everyone but that doesn’t mean we can’t try our best.

So, be happy and make people happy! Just don’t burp or pick your nose when Facebook is watching.

I have a problem: The English can’t pronounce my name.

You see, my official name (Shen Qiaoyun) is written in hanyu pinyin, which is the English phonetic representation of Mandarin.

So the English would read it as Kiao Yoon because Q is supposed to be a hard K sound in English. Some of them even get stressed because Q is not supposed to come without a U.

“What on earth is this word?!” they’d be thinking to themselves. “It breaks all the rules of the English language!”

They’d make an attempt: “Kuh… Keeee… Kao… Keeeeowwww? Kiao Yoooon? The doctor will see you now.”

I don’t want to be called Kiao Yoon forever.

So what am I going to do?

The most logical solution is to legally change my name.

But that is a massive pain in the behind. I have already done that. I changed my name once in November 2005 for feng shui reasons and had to go through the tedious process of updating records everywhere.

In fact, I only updated my driving license recently, which is exactly six years late.

I’ve also had to use a passport bearing my old name for more than five years because ICA refused to give me a new one. They just made an annotation in one of the pages in my passport showing that I have changed my name.

But no immigration officer in the world has ever thought to flip to that page on his/her own accord. I always have to spend a long time at the counter waiting for the officer to check my photo page against my arrival card, then look at me suspiciously, then allow me to turn the pages in my passport to show him the annotation.

Once, a Hong Kong immigration officer even scolded me after I showed him the page. He said I should have written my old name in my arrival card since that was what was showing on the photo page.

So, now that I finally have a new passport with the right name, I never ever want to go through that process again.

In England, Piers usually introduces me as Shey for the sake of convenience because, even if the English hear Qiaoyun being said, they find it hard to say it themselves.

Piers has been practisig the pronunciation for nine months and he still says Chiao Yoon, which is close enough but not quite right.

I’m not sure what to do about it. I don’t regret changing my name because it’s been good for me, overall. It has helped to somewhat change my personality, which has in turn altered the course of my life for the better. But I wish I’d had gotten a name that didn’t start with a stupid Q.

My feng shui master had actually given me a list of names to choose from and Qiaoyun was the nicest sounding one. Many of the ones on the list sounded male or ugly, for example, Yongkang. Wtf, right?

I was talking to Piers about this recently. I told him I didn’t want to be called Kiao Yoon because kiao means dead in Hokkien and he wtflol-ed.

Life is never easy, is it?

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

Addendum:

Just remembered a good example I should have given.

When I was in England, I was online shopping a lot. I received packages from postmen and courier service men probably 30 or 40 times in all my time there.

Each time I opened the door, they would read off the package: “Kiao Yoon?”

Because there are many different courier services in England, I was always getting different people, so I didn’t even try to educate them as to the pronunciation of my name.

I suppose I could use the name Sheylara for my online shopping from now on, but there will still be situations where I can’t use it (bank, insurance, clinic, etc) where people will have to try and read my name off a form. These are the ones I want to avoid!