The Glass Castle

As far as I can remember, I never liked reading memoirs. How can it be any more interesting than a textbook? The only memoir I’ve ever read before The Glass Castle was about our former finance minister (are your eyes falling out of its sockets from reading this?) That’s if it can even be regarded as a memoir. If I didn’t remember wrongly, it was more like his life told from the perspective of a third person. For all I know, I only read it after submitting to the requests of my history teacher.

But I was glad I read The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls. The author wrote about her past without an ounce of self-pity. What initially attracted me to this book was that her parents were homeless.

Her dad (other than the drinking and gambling) reminded me of mine, who would sometimes teach me random things kids my age never knew. The journey of reading that book was filled with laughter and tears. Best of all, she could describe it all using simple English unlike some writers who gives you a headache by using bombastic words and sentences of a hundred words long.

I think it’s too soon to make any conclusions, but what the heck, I think memoirs are cool coz they’re about progress and not about the ending like most fictional novels and you don’t really look forward to the final chapter or to finish reading it. What’s more, these are actual happenings, and thus making it even more interesting.

Reading the last page, and then looking back at its title, The Glass Castle, sent a pang of sadness through my soul.

Tutup sepenuhnya

Wanna know what that means? It means ‘Fully closed’. This was the words I got when I reached the doorstep of the library a while ago. I had purposely set the alarm at 10 am (though I only woke up at 10:30) so I could make it in time to borrow another novel before they close for prayers at noon.

But surprise, surprise! From 18th to 30th September, the library will be opened from 8:30 am to 4:30 pm from Sunday to Thursday and will be FULLY closed on Fridays and Saturdays. And it’ll be fully closed again during the Raya celebration and two days after that. If you’re wondering why it’s open on Sundays and not Fridays, that’s because the week starts on a Sunday here and Friday is their big day. I’m trying my best not to be sarcastic.

So now, HALF closed makes complete sense to me. If they can say things like FULLY closed, half closed should be a regular word for them.

Now I have to make sure I carefully hang on the what quarter of The Glass Castle I have left for the weekend. I don’t know if it’s just my luck with the library. I think I’ll just take it as a morning stroll.

I promised I would tell about the toilet here. From what Malaysians know, Kelantan is a place where different sexes must line up in separate lines, and there are no cinemas, or karaoke, or whatever. Well, they’re partly true. I still haven’t come across any ruling which segregates different sexes. But what I did come across was a unisex toilet!

There’s one in our hostel café. It’s a lone unit with a label ‘Tandas’ on it which means ‘toilet’. When we saw men and women going in and out, we were intrigued. I knew I had to at least go in that Ally McBeal toilet once.

When me and my friend were done, one guy walked in and was shocked to see 2 girls there. He made a 180 degrees turn, paused and made another 180 degrees turn back and into one of the cubicles. When he got out of the toilet he started to investigate its door for labels other than ‘Tandas’. Man, that was funny.

There’s also one unisex toilet on all the floors of the sad two-storey library. However, I suspect it to be staff toilets because they’re squeaky clean. Or maybe it’s because the library is a ghost town. The staff toilets in the departments in the hospital are a disappointment. This shows what kind of staff they hire.

And last night I discovered that this place transforms into a scary world at night. Me and two of my girl friends walked out of the campus for supper and on the way back around midnight, there were motorcycles passing by that would call us out, and one even slowed down beside us. That was freaking scary. After that fella, another car drove up next to us. My friend saw him roll down the window and smiled a mischievous smile. Other cars honked when they passed us. I’ll never go out for supper here with just girls ever again.

There’s nothing positive here to brag about except the intriguing toilet.

Wiieee!~

I don’t know why the Wi-Fi Alliance would coin the phrase ‘Wireless Fidelity’ irresponsibly because it doesn’t make any sense to me. Maybe you can say it is a wireless connection that remains faithful to you whenever, wherever you go, never letting you down. If that’s the case then I can very well say this medicine campus here has Wii.

Stop! Don’t get too excited! They surely don’t have the Nintendo Wii.



Wii here stands for ‘Wireless Infidelity’ just like how it sometimes is loyal and totally delivers everything (with the approval of the oh-so-loved Fortinet), but most of the time cheats on you and shows you nothing but a blank web browser.

But even after my ‘long’ rant (really, a rant can never be too long or too short… wait…? Forget it), the main purpose of this post has nothing to do with wireless’ infidelity. It’s again, about the good old library.

I was just shoo-ed out of the 2nd floor of the library because it apparently closes at night. *enter lots of exclamation marks here*

Not only is this campus’ library small and has nothing but medical and some fictional books (which is located on the god-damned 2nd floor), half of it closes at night? I’m sorry, did you hear that right, coz I didn’t. I simply grabbed a novel because I didn’t want to leave there empty handed and lucky me, so far, the story is good.

A case of OLCD?

Geographically, I could get into trouble for putting the following photos on the web. We were assigned to go to a clinic this week. What makes this place worth mentioning is that everything in the office is labeled. Everything!

Take the standing fan and the chair for example.

Sorry for the bad quality. It only reflects the standard of my cheap phone. Geez, the MP3 installed in it just kamikaze-d itself the other day.

Here’s another one which almost made me explode into laughter – a labeled wall clock.

And finally, I don’t think anything can beat this. This is like the jaw-dropper of all things you can ever label.

Even the fluorescent light tube is labeled -_-“

A case of OCLD – obsessive-compulsive-labeling disorder?

P.S.: This post fits perfectly for its 'label'.