TimothyTiah.com

I just spent the night watching a movie with my Dad. My Dad loves watching two types of movies. The first kind is Action.. it doesn’t matter if there is no plot, it doesn’t matter if the acting is horrible, it doesn’t even matter if it was unrealistic. Throw in some guns, some bombs, some hand-to-hand combat and you got a winner for my Dad.

The other kind of movie that my Dad loves watching is Chinese movies set in the old days. You know about the emperors and all. So tonight I sat down with him and watched the second half of The Curse of the Golden Flower. You guys remember that movie right? With Gong Li, Chow Yun Fatt and Jay Chou.

One thing I found amusing about that movie though was how almost all the actresses had like the most powerful push-up bras in the world to show huge cleavage. I mean most Chinese movies I’ve seen of the older days didn’t really bang on cleavage but this one… woahh…

Nevertheless I can say this, Gong Li is one hell of a great actress!

Anyway if you’ve seen the movie, you’d know the story is fairly complicated. I missed the first half of the movie so correct me if I’m wrong but here’s what I understand from it. Okay so you have the Emperor who has this first wife in which he has a daughter with. And then he decides to marry another woman to consolidate his power on the throne and in order to make sure nobody finds out about the first wife, he locks the wife up but the wife escapes. Then many years later, the second wife which became the empress started having an affair with…. his son (I think). Some incest shit going on there Can’t remember which son but it was one of them.

Then the daughter that the emperor had with the first wife met with one of his sons with the second wife and fell in love. They shagged and all not knowing that they were actually… *gasp* BROTHER AND SISTER! When they eventually found out, there was big drama. This daughter ran outside the palace and got stabbed to death. Her mother then ran after her and also got stabbed to death.

All this happened while the second son of the Emperor played by Jay Chou was trying to have a coup to overthrow the emperor.

So much more happened and I don’t know how accurate I am after this but… one thing that really came to me was…

HOLY SHIT IT SURE AIN’T EASY BEING a Chinese Emperor in those days.

I mean, you gotta worry about your empress sleeping with your son… or your son trying to overthrow you… and all this shit… how do you even find time to run a Kingdom?

I really don’t see why Simba was so excited about being King.

So who wants to be an Emperor?

I did it. Iz true… after all the egging on I had from my friends that Macs aren’t good for playing PC games (and after Robb, SY and many other friends bought new PCs just for Starcraft 2), I finally went to Low Yat on Friday to buy myself a desktop for gaming.

Come to think of it, growing up I’ve always wanted a good gaming desktop, like a really really powerful one but I never had the chance or the excuse to buy one. Ever since I got into college I always used a laptop because it was easy for me to bring around since I traveled a lot between Penang, KL and London. Laptops aren’t great for playing games. Then I started using Macs and I got to play less and less PC games.

I didn’t exactly fulfill my childhood dream of having a super computer with two graphics cards and like… super maxed out RAM or anything though. The man at Low Yat told me a super computer like that can cost RM6,000. Wayyy too much for me so I went for a lower spec computer that can’t play ULTRA high graphic settings on Starcraft 2 but still better than my MacBook Pro that can only go for medium settings.

After I bought it, I started to think of how I was going to break the news to Kitteh. In recent days I had asked her what she thought and she always said “NOooo!!”. So over lunch with some of the Nuffies the other day we were thinking of how I would break the news to her and we came up with some ideas.

Imagine a scene, Kitteh walks into my study after she comes back from work and sees the computer.

She then shouts “YOU BOUGHT A NEW COMPUTER?!?!” and gives me a stare waiting for my explanation.

What do I say?

My imaginative Nuffies came up with these suggestions

“A new computer? Nawww…. that’s always been there baby. Really… how come you never noticed it?”

or

“My brother wanted to buy a new computer so he gave me his old one… but not after he ermm “reconned” it to look different”

or

“Good news baby! Today I went to Lowyat to buy Windows 7 and they gave me a free desktop! Got promotion!”

or

*look surprised*

“WHAT IS THAT STRANGE NEW POWERFUL GAMING COMPUTER DOING ON MY DESK?!?!”

or… just play dumb.

“What computer? Where? I don’t see any computer?”.

I hadn’t decided which line to use even by the time I picked Kitteh up from work for dinner. So we went to Bangsar Village and that’s when we happened to bump into Linda who just finished dinner. You guys remember Linda right? This is Linda.

The perpetrator of what was about to happen.

Linda started talking to Kitteh and said

“I was sooo hungry before dinner! You la (pointing at me)… deserted us during lunch today and went to buy your new computer!”

Kitteh’s eyes widened to the size of dinner plates and I heard the most frightening 5 words of my life.

“YOU BOUGHT A NEW COMPUTER?!?!?!?!”

There was a moment of silence then that actually only lasted for like 2 seconds but really actually felt like it lasted for 30 minutes… it’s like everything slowed down in that 2 seconds and my life flashed before my eyes. I saw a fast forward of my childhood growing up, then going to secondary school at Saint Xaviers Institution, then in college, university and eventually coming out to start work.

When I didn’t respond, Kitteh gave me a little push and repeated
“YOU BOUGHT A NEW COMPUTER?!?!?!”

The rest of that was a massacre. There I was trying to justify to Kitteh why I needed a new computer because it’s just so much better for games than a laptop but Kitteh lectured me on “wasting money” and she won the argument.

So that everybody, was how it all came about. Kitteh and I strike a good balance. On one hand, I’ve slowly become the kind of person that just wants to live life and do whatever that I think will make me happy… but Kitteh slows me down a bit and helps knocks some practical sense into me. The result is well.. we rub off on one another. Not just in this way but in many other ways.

Ending note for the guys though: Mannnn I can’t believe I never had a proper desktop to play my games much earlier. It’s soo much smoother to play and a lot easier on the eyes too especially for Starcraft 2!

PS: This blog entry was brought to you by my new desktop… hehehe… see? see? Can not only game but also BLOG!

I read this article on TIME some time ago and I thought it was one of the most important insights in life that I’ve ever had. Basically the gist of it is that there was a huge survey done among 136,000 people from different ethnic and economic backgrounds in 132 different countries all over the world on whether money makes them happy and this is what they found.

“Yes, money makes you happy — we see the effect of income on life satisfaction is very strong and virtually ubiquitous and universal around the world… But it makes you more satisfied than it makes you feel good. Positive feelings are less affected by money and more affected by the things people are doing day to day.”

The second part of that paragraph was what really made sense to me. When you think about it, it’s really true. Money does make you happy but it takes more of a satisfaction joy rather than really really make you feel happy! The things that make you really happy? What you do each day and the people around you.

That’s why you see people leaving really high paying jobs for lower paying ones because once they reach a certain threshold of having “enough money”, they find that it’s more important to do things that they like rather than things that pay well. So why are so many of us chasing money all the time? Is it because all sorts of different things in society “manufactures” that desire to need lots of money? Or do we not know yet, that having a lot of money doesn’t really make you as happy as you think.

I think of the things that really make me happy. It’s not really how much money I earn… I’ve always been this happy. What has made me even more happy today is the friends I have at work and on weekends.

The family I have and the girlfriend.

What makes you happy? Is it money? Or is it something else?