Does This Dress Make Me Look Pregnant?

I bought this dress in a thrift shop for RM15 (around $3.50). A dress like this in retail could easily cost me around three to four times that price.

The dress, had twice, brought me memories that I will never forget. Twice while wearing this dress, people had mistakenly thought I was pregnant. I’m not offended though, quite far from it actually. I found their opinion hilarious.

The first time I heard of it was when I went to the doctors for cough + flu + fever combo in 2019. Whenever I fell ill, my skin felt like it’s on fire. Everything hurts, even a slight breeze. Every time my skin brushed against any articles of clothes I’m wearing, it felt like I’m being sliced with a sharp knife. So a broad dress came across as heavenly at times like this. It’s comfortable and didn’t brush against me as much.

The doctor took my temperature, and asked the usual questions; symptoms, drug allergies. He took off his stethoscope and said, ‘This dress you’re wearing, you’re not pregnant are you?’

I’m not being ignorant; I can hear what the doctor wasn’t saying. He just wanted to make sure I’m not with child so that he can give me the proper medicine to treat me. But he did mention the dress being the reason he asked. Both of us laughed loudly in his office when I told him no.

The second time I heard of it was on Saturday in 2020 when I went to the string of food market near the town library. It was exceptionally hot, and I felt especially plump that day, so I pulled this dress from my closet to wear. There was this lady, whose stall was selling pastries: bread, buns, full-sized egg tarts, mini egg tarts, pineapple tarts, you name it. I was craving for pineapple tarts so I went there to buy a carton. The lady switched the carton I handed her to what she said to be a “better looking tarts” because the one I picked had cracks in them.

“We women should give good food to our babies if we’re pregnant” she said, implying that I’m pregnant. “The poor baby in your tummy wants to eat pineapple tarts. Let’s give the baby the good-looking tarts, okay”.

I laughed so hard when I heard her say it. I did not correct her, as I did not want to embarrass her and make things awkward. I went along with her assumption, and was given a discount for the pineapple tarts and she even thrown an egg tart for free.

I collapsed in the car in a fit of laughter when I tell my father about it. I know this has everything to do with the dress. I’m on the chubby side, but people never outwardly ask or assume I’m pregnant. But it has happened only twice, and both times were because I wore this dress.                

Never wrong a writer. They get their revenge in print.

I don't like to be asked what's on my mind and when I do, I am told that I was being over-emotional.

I don't like that when I told people how much I hated you for what you did to me, I am told to move on.

I don't like it whenever I tried to let go of you by talking about you or writing about you, my throat gets tight and I feel like crying.

I don't like it that I am accused of not moving on, when I fucking do want to move on.

I hate you so much for making me change my mind about you.

I hate you so much for convincing me that your words are true.

I wonder if you have any sort of remorse

I hate you so fucking much.

I am on the way of punishing you.

I will give birth to a character intended as a representation of you.

And I will give you a slow and painful death.

Reincarnate you again in a different name, only to have you murdered in some sort of way.

Just like Sisyphus who was punished by being forced to roll an enormous boulder uphill, only for it to roll down when it's near the top.

That is how I will punish you.

A non-glamorous immortalisation of you.

Every time people read about death in my books.

There's no other person they would think of, except you.

For every book, with a death of your character, I will send you a signed copy.

And perhaps a dictionary.

(Because you can't read English)

Do you guys think Bonnie noticed Woody was missing?

I did not watch Toy Story 4 in the cinema, due to personal reasons. I waited until they played it on Fox Movies for free.

I read some movie reviews; and a lot of them were disapproving of the way Bonnie ignored Woody, and all agreed that Woody should have stayed with Andy.

After watching the movie myself, I agreed!

I am quite offended by this fictional six-year-old girl.

If Woody is in college with Andy, he wouldn't be mutilated by another toy in some random antique store for his voice-box.

But then again... If Woody is in college with Andy, he wouldn't have been reunited with his long time love, Bo Peep...

The end of the movie fast-forwarded to two years later (kindergarten is for how many years in America?), Forky is still in Bonnie's bedroom. Which brings the question, does Bonnie noticed Woody was missing?

Twelve random facts about me

Why twelve? I don't know. Probably because there's twelve months in a year? Here we go.

1.

I cannot stand the taste of pineapple.

Not under any circumstances, not even when I dipped them in salt.

2.

My house is a mess.

No matter how many times I tidied up, it's still looks messy.

3.

I can't handle scary movies.

Although the only ones I've ever watched all the way through were Chucky, IT and IT2. They're not bad. But then it's probably because I watched them during daylight.

There's a funny story behind how I came to watch Chucky. Maybe I'll write that in another post.

4.

I used to pull out grasshopper's legs when I was little.

In elementary school, my friends and I would catch grasshoppers, and then we pulled out its legs so it can't jump and escape. We wanted to make them our pets. The grasshopper(s) didn't last a day before it died.

5.

I daydreamed - a lot!

You can't even imagine what it's like. Apparently it's a mental condition called Maladaptive Daydreaming. Although mine's probably called Immersive Daydreaming. Either way, it's a mental condition, like I said.

6.

I don't curse.

Well, at least, I don't curse in front of people I'm not close with.

And I don't curse in my native language. Those were vulgar as vulgar can be. So I only curse in English.

7.

I have one constant friend throughout the years.

His name is Dante, and he's an imaginary pen-pal I wrote to when I write my diary. Hmm... I haven't write to him in a while. There's so much to catch him up on.

8.

I got my driver's license in 2019.

It's a very long story involving procrastination, money problems; and lying and thieving driver's instructors, who happens to be a friend of mine, by the way! I wanted to support his business and that was how he repaid me?!

9.

I keep things that I don't need, or have no need for it again.

This is probably why my house is messy? Hmm... Better fix that.

10.

I am hopeless in Mathematics.

I swear I scores As in Maths from kindergarten age to 9 years old. This was a case of teacher who don't know how to teach when I was ten. And in this case, he only teach a certain group of students because it was convenient in terms of body posture. When we asked him to show us how to do the work, he wasn't as detailed.

11.

I take a long time to eat.

There's this one time at the shopping mall food court, my mother got tired of waiting for me to finish eating, she went to another shop to kill some time.

12.

I write fanfictions.

It's M/M trope(?). It's embarrassing if people in my circle knows about it. But this is okay. I'm sort of in incognito.

For that one reader who visits my blog when they can’t sleep

 Hello. Welcome.

 

Your comment about me not updating my blog in a long time has been heard.

 

Well, if I haven’t been updating my blog before, it was because I was unbelievably lazy. But this year, I have the fortune of having a full time job.

 

But I will try and regularly update my blog from now on; since I found out I have a loyal fan. You won't believe how happy this makes me.

 

You also mentioned not being able to focus on reading my blog because I wrote long articles.

 

I will try to keep them short.

 

Stay tuned.

On My Bookshelf: The Hundred-Foot Journey, by Richard C. Morais

[ WARNING: SPOILER ALERT ]

My dear readers, if you are an avid reader like me, and like to read in your free time (especially if that free time also includes meal times), then I don’t think this book is for you.

I would suggest you to read until the end before you decide to negatively react to this post over just one sentence.

This book tells the story of the humble beginnings of the Haji family; starting from the Haji’s grandparents. The grandfather is a humble but rather successful businessman. But it’s the grandmother who is the entrepreneur of the family, who thinks outside the box and was able to transform a home based small business of lunchboxes to a full blown restaurant business that also became a source of income to many people around who worked for them. You have got to admire that. It gave you a sort of inspiration to be successful as well.

(Clapped hands) Now… I am going to tell you about why this book is not suitable to read at meal times. I’m not sure how accurate the cultural reference is of the Indian community, but the book mentioned the word “toilet” several times, “raw sewage”, “sweaty armpits the size of dinner plate”, sloppy description of eating style and all others, all before the fourth chapter. Even if you’re not eating at the time you’re reading the book, but if you happen to have a weak stomach, you will feel queasy nonetheless.

Unfortunately (or is it fortunately?) I will not include quotes of the said mention, for fear my dear readers might be having a meal when reading this.

If you are a person easily to feel squeamish, I suggest you start the read of this book by sucking on something to take the edge off; maybe some tangy candy, or minty ones; really, whatever helps. But it doesn’t last the whole book, thank goodness. Only the first few chapters.

The book however, I guess what shocked me a little was when fifteen year old Hassan who just arrived in London following his mother’s death, met with his London-born cousin of the same age for the first time and was astounded by her choice of fashion that he cannot keep his eye away from her. I know, everyone is allowed to be a little astonished by something they very rarely see in their life. But what I meant by I was shocked was when the vehicle they ride on, that was driven by his late mother’s brother, rounded a roundabout so fast that the said cousin’s knee were pressed against his thigh and he can feel his pants pitching a tent just from that!

And as we leaned around the corner, I felt my cousin’s hot knee push back against my thigh, and instantly a cricket bat was poking up through my pants.

I really don’t understand what brought that on. Even though the book was written from a first person point of view, I don’t know what went through his mind when his body reacts like that. How could you get aroused from a person’s choice of fashion and from a simple physical touch like that?

Hassan later wondered if his troubled relationships with women had everything to do with losing his mother in a murder. As soon as it felt as though the relationship is about to get serious, he will do something to screw it up. With that said, this book contained some bam-bam in the ham storyline. Although it not really that focused: just one sentence per woman. But with enough of an overactive imagination, a person can jerkin with the gerkin anyway (Not that I tried).

Madam Gertrude Mallory is a two Michelin star restaurant chef and owner, called Le Saule Pleureur, that also double as an inn. She is so successful that people travel from Paris just to eat at her restaurant. Madam Mallory is quite a character! She is the sort of employer that I would get a lifetime of trauma from. She lost her tempers easily and does not care who around them listened. When the Haji family decided to open a restaurant right across the street from her and make Saint-Antonin-Noble-Val as their home, she went ballistic. She did everything to sabotage their business; such as blackmailing people of the town market she patrons not to sell goods to the Haji family.

Plus I have a sneaking suspicion that her loyal manager Monsieur Henri Leblanc is a little bit smitten with her, and she him. Just a lit~tle bit smitten. Lit~tle.

But don’t let first impressions fool you. Madam Mallory showed herself as a surprisingly emphatic person, albeit dismissively emphatic. One bite of the food Hassan cooked, she immediately sensed talent. Which brings me to the part where Madam Mallory sabotage attempts, and it went back and forth between the two restaurant owners, and finally stopped when their fight caused an accident burn to Hassan.

Madam Mallory determined to make things good again, even staged a hunger strike in front of the Maison Mumbai. She refused to move from where she was sitting and eat until Abbas Haji, Hassan’s father, agree to let his son work at her restaurant where she knew he can be great. Abbas agreed eventually.

And so Hassan’s journey into the French culinary began. Madam Mallory’s attention to Hassan had planted a bitter seed on her existing staff, particularly Jean-Pierre.

For if there was one human condition that Madame Mallory understood, it was jealousy, the intense pain of realising there are those in the world who simple are greater than we are, surpassing us in some profound way, in all our accomplishments.

She did not mean to make her staff envious of Hassan. She was gentle to Jean-Pierre’s outburst and it made him shameful of his acts.

But he is like a visitor from another planet, and in some ways he is to be pitied, for the distance he has yet to travel, and the hardships he has yet to endure.

This quote changed the way I look at life. This quote changed the way how I look at other people, especially when they make mistakes.

Hassan did not stay at Le Saule Pleureur long, and since his leaving, he had been in and out of working in many restaurants, even helping some of them earn one more Michelin Star.

“When you leave here, […] you are likely to forget most of the things I have taught you. That can’t be helped. If you retain anything, however, I wish it to be this bit of advice my father gave me when I was a little girl, after a famous and extremely difficult writer had just left our family hotel. ‘Gertrude,’ he said, ‘never forget a snob is a person utterly lacking in good taste.’ I myself forget this excellent piece of advice, but I trust you will not be so foolish.”

“I am not very good with words, but I would like to tell you that somewhere in life I lost my way, and I believe you were sent to me, perhaps by my beloved father, so that I could be restored to the world. And I thank you for this. You have made me understand that good taste is no the birthright of snobs, but a gift from God sometimes found in the most unlikely of places and in the unlikeliest of people.”

He soon settled down with his own restaurant, that he co-owned with his sister, with the help of Madam Mallory’s regular patron, and inheritance from his father. As any business owner will tell you, not every day is filled with sunshine. Things got steadily hard for Hassan financially, and it certainly did not help with his emotion that his father, Madam Mallory and his best friend all died within less than six months.

This was the vision that visited, in that restless space between sleeping and waking, and it greatly soothed me. For this vision of the chickens heading to slaughter reminded me that there are many points in life when we cannot see what awaits us around the corner and it is precisely at such times, when our path forward is unclear, that we must bravely keep our nerve, resolutely putting one foot before the other as we march blindly into the dark.

And it was just before I fell asleep that I remembered one of Uncle Mayur’s favourite expressions, often repeated as we walked, hand in hand. through the slums of Mumbai when I was a little boy. “Hassan, it is Allah who gives and takes away,” he liked to tell me, and with a cheerful wobble of his head. “Always remember this: His will is only revealed at the right time.”

I am always reminding myself why I got into the game in the first place. […] It’s so easy to become intoxicated by all this flimflam. […] That is what he had to teach us - all of us - in the end. Never lose sight.

But when Hassan’s restaurant luckily earned a surprise third Michelin star, things were alright again and the book ended and so is this blog entry. I know. I’m shocked too.

This blog post is part of On My Bookshelf series of Around the Year in 52 Books reading challenge.

On My Bookshelf: The Out of Office Girl, by Nicola Doherty

[WARNING: SPOILER ALERT]

If you want to read about publishing, this is the book. If you want to read about writing (or rather, the process of ghost-writing an autobiography), this is the book. If you want to read about somewhere based in Italy and/or London, this is the book.

Most importantly, if you want to find a book by an author whose name contains A, T, and Y for your book reading challenge, this is the book (at least one of the books).

Alice Roberts worked at a publishing house in London, and one of the projects her department was assigned to was writing an autobiography for an American actor, Luther Carson. The actor was by no means ageing nor dying. But his short marriage and hiatus from acting brought interest to his life. When the ghost-writer who stayed with Luther in Italy came to no significant progress on the book, Alice was given an assignment by her reluctant boss to help convince Luther to help write the book.

Alice went out with a guy for two months, who then ghosted her and terminated the “relationship” after a long silent treatment. It made her question if there was even a “relationship” to begin with. So the trip to Italy was the break from London life she didn’t realise she needed. She was starting to day-dream about getting into a relationship with her actor crush, and imagining her ex-(sort-of) boyfriend getting jealous and wishing he hadn’t dump her.

The reality she was met was far from her imagination. Luther Carson, while expressing his intent to wanting to write the book, kept putting it off. He kept going out on his friend’s yacht at daytime, going out to dinner and clubs at night time. When asked about writing the book, he was going with the “party first, work later” approach. No wonder the ghost-writer had trouble writing the manuscript. Alice was hounded with deadlines by her boss, who already thought she was not a competent person for the job since the beginning. After another procrastinating on Luther Carson’s part, Alice lost her patience and gave him an ultimatum about what is at stake.

Luther came to his senses and agreed to actually start working on the book. But this time, Alice was facing another challenge: The ghost-writer, Brian, heard news from his wife that she was diagnosed with cancer. He was distraught of having to be so far from her; torn between the responsibilities that was asked to do his job, and the love for his wife. Alice made an executive decision to send him home, and send him Luther’s interview transcripts for him to work with. Her boss was not happy when she found out what Alice did, and even more upset to find that a supposed clause in the autobiography contract, that Alice was in charge of, was left out by accident; but nevertheless let Alice continued with her work with the book.

Luther Carson was a transformed man, and in a span of a few days, Alice had acquired more materials for the book than they did two weeks ago. His agent, Sam Newland, was convinced that writing the autobiography will be the worst decision Luther has ever made and the stories written will be held against him throughout his entire career.

Alice and Sam had a talk and came to an agreement regarding to Luther. Putting that aside as a resolved problem, they had a few cosy moments where Sam even felt comfortable enough to tell Alice a few work gossips about famous actors and actresses. The cosy moments progressed into flimp-flopping, and, oh-my, Nicola Doherty wrote it in such a way that made you want to hitchhike to the sky.

I love it! I love Alice and Sam together! I ship!

Much better than if she ended up with Luther Carson…

But Alice got the idea that Sam was just playing with her and that it was Marisa, their Italian friend, who he was really attracted to. Her hesitation put a strain on their friendship and any potential that it will ever progress to something more. To make matters worse, Sam found the paper containing an intimate detail of Luther’s hiatus and thought Alice was tricking him into putting it in the book. Alice returned to London without ever having the chance to explain herself.

Luck wasn’t on Alice’s side at work. While she admittedly did a quick progress on the book to the point of it being finished, she was dismissed from her job. She was accused of unprofessional conduct when a gossip site wrote about “a publishing house editor” was spotted coming out of a night club with Luther, accused of firing the ghost-writer without consulting with her boss, and for carelessly leaving out an important clause in Luther Carson’s autobiography contract.

I was engrossed in the book so much when I found out that I had about three more chapters left! What will happen to Alice and Sam?! I hope they ended up together!

Okay. I just returned from reading the last few chapters and I have great news!

While going to an art exhibition with her colleague, Poppy, Alice bumped into a founder of a newly established publishing agency, who gave her her card and asked Alice to contact her if she wants to consider working with her. 

As a thank you for coming with her for emotional support, Poppy pulled out Sam Newland’s business card from her bag that she took from Alice’s boss’s desk. Alice refused to take it, telling her that contacting Sam will be pointless, to which Poppy replied with this gem of a quote.

When a nice guy shows an interest in you, you run a mile. It’s as if you think you don’t deserve it. Whereas a creep like Simon has your full attention.

It does make you think all of our the-one-that-got-aways...

A few days later, Alice was contacted by the managing director of her old workplace, asking her to come back to working with them again with a promotion. No, begging her would be a more suitable word. It turned out that Sam found out that Alice was fired from her job and demanded that they reinstated Alice into the company. So the managing director begged her to come back, and if she decided not to, they promised they will put out a great word out for her if she wanted to work for any other publishing company.

Alice found out from Poppy that Luther and Sam were in London, for a premier, and she rushed to the hotel they were staying in. She felt like it was the only chance to meet face to face with Sam and talk properly. Sam found her at the reception and they both went up to his room. They had a proper talk, and what a satisfying feeling it was to read that they genuinely had feelings for each other and the kiss at the end to prove it! I was squealing with joy in my seat the whole time! In fact I am still giddy with happiness.

Want more good news? The book doesn’t just end with thirty-seven chapters. It had epilogues too!

This blog post of part of On My Bookshelf series of Around the Year in 52 Books reading challenge.