I absolutely abhore people who give utterly crappy excuses, especially the one about having no time.

Oh, I didn’t let you know/do something cos I had no time for it.

This conveniently throws the ball to my court, where I will be the unreasonable/not understanding one if I don’t empathize with someone who was terribly busy and couldn’t spare even a second.

Except that this excuse is rubbish. There is nothing difficult about taking 10 seconds to send an SMS, or 30 seconds for a call. It is the basic of basic courtesy/responsibility. Not doing it shows both how 1) Self-centered you are that it does not occur to you that someone else’s time is just as precious as yours, and/or 2) How low the person is on your priority list.

The only exception is if you were held up by work, then no choice la. I also know that some things can’t be helped when it comes to work.

Other than that you’d better have a damn valid reason like you were knocked by lorry or something.

If you forget, say that you forgot. If you remembered but didn’t do it for some reason, admit it and apologize. Don’t frickin tell me no time!!! It is just an excuse, to compensate for your lack of balls.

Pui.

When I was 4, I shifted house for the first time. It was 8 blocks away. I stayed there for all of my growing up years.

7 months ago, I bade farewell to my home of 19 years… and shifted 1 block away. Sounds pretty dumb, but there were circumstances. If you know, you know. If you don’t… well, make your best guess.

The shift didn’t really affect me, since it was only a block away, and the surroundings were exactly the same. I could still see the same faces, take my dog for his walk on the same path, take the same buses when I’m going out etc.

Today, I’m moving again. This time, it’s not a block or 8 away anymore. This time, I actually feel like I’m saying goodbye to something.

You know how if you’re about to die, your life suddenly flashes past you? I don’t think it just happens at the end of our lives; a break up, the day of O level results, the death of a pet… at the end of every significant juncture in our lives, we always remember everything.

Goodbye, the place I once called home.

I think it’s so easy to just shove reality under the carpet and eat meat guiltlessly. Everyone’s doing it anyway.

I try to avoid articles that write about the barbaric things that our food goes through before it comes to our plate, because honestly, I don’t want to know. Especially when I’m planning to have chicken rice for dinner later.

But sometimes I think it’s better not to be so deluded. Eating meat is a choice, but I think it should at least be an informed choice.

The New Yorker has a good article on this, titled

FLESH OF YOUR FLESH

Below is an excerpt:

Most of these creatures have been raised under conditions that are, as Americans know—or, at least, by this point have no excuse not to know—barbaric. Broiler chickens, also known, depending on size, as fryers or roasters, typically spend their lives in windowless sheds, packed in with upward of thirty thousand other birds and generations of accumulated waste. The ammonia fumes thrown off by their rotting excrement lead to breast blisters, leg sores, and respiratory disease. Bred to produce the maximum amount of meat in the minimum amount of time, fryers often become so top-heavy that they can’t support their own weight. At slaughtering time, they are shackled by their feet, hung from a conveyor belt, and dipped into an electrified bath known as “the stunner.”

Link to full article here.

Some people, aka the Mum, like to tell me that I’m very anal because I have to do some things a fixed way or I would feel super uncomfortable.

• Like how I need to arrange my wardrobe according to 1) Sleeve length, 2) Colour and 3) Shade/Print. I will know immediately if someone has rearranged my clothes, and which ones are out of place. I like how it’s super easy to see the overall scheme of my wardrobe and where I need to add/subtract pieces.

• I also abhor it when people rest their feet on my chair. It irritates me to no end as to why they can’t let me have my 60cm of personal space.

• I can’t stand my own typo errors on Twitter and I will delete a tweet and retweet it even if just a period was missing, or the first letter wasn’t capitalized.

The list (really) goes on. It’s ironic how irritated I am by all these given how messy my room is (because somehow I think that the first and most basic step of being OCD is being obsessively neat and clean; i’m so not).

Right now I’m tediously going through every post on this blog and rearranging the categories because it just doesn’t feel organized to me. Halfway through I felt pretty stupid, but I know that the uncomfortable feeling of the posts not being in place won’t just go away.

Urgh.

Some time ago, on one of my twice daily walks with Maomao & Kitty, I saw a new addition to the neighbourhood – an alaskan malamute.

Oddly, he was tied to the balcony door, ala this:

At that point in time, I gave the owner some benefit of doubt and assumed that they had a good reason for wanting to keep the dog in the balcony for a while – guests who were afraid of dogs, perhaps?

However, every day I walked past, the dog was still bound, whether it was 7am, 9am, 3pm or 11pm. Also, I have not ever seen him out on a walk. Okay, the walk part remains inconclusive I suppose, since I can’t prove it.

The photo above was also the last time he showed any sign of liveliness and came down to greet me and Maomao. Now he just lies on the floor, chin on ground, looking miserable.

2 days ago, I saw something that absolutely appalled me. The owner put on large granny underwear for the dog, presumably to prevent its poop/pee from staining the floor.

The underwear was stained. Today, I walked past again. The underwear was stained.

The question is – what do I do? Assuming I talk to the owners about it, there can be 2 outcomes. They heed my advice, or they don’t. And if they don’t, do I:

1. Ignore it and let the dog remain with his “family”, however abusive they may be?
2. Report it to the authorities, who will without a doubt remove the dog, because it isn’t even a HDB-approved dog in the first place. Fate of the dog hangs in the balance. He may be put down by the SPCA.

I hate dilemmas like these. People just shouldn’t own pets if they aren’t prepared to take care of them.

Update: Called the SPCA and they went to check on the dog already. The claim here is that the owner of the dog is having some family troubles, and temporarily brought her dog here to stay with her while she sorts things out. Leash is coz the family staying here doesn’t want the dog wandering around their house. They say leash is very long. Underwear coz the dog was in heat.

I dunno.