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| Sunday, April 16, 2006 |
| ... and then some |
My speakers have disappeared. To where, I do not know. My hours spent in front of my PC are now silently spooky. Jaco and Pat no longer accompany my midnight ramblings. Add the recent cold weather into the mix, you've got the beginnings of a horror movie here. Picture this
A cold wind is blowing, an average-good-looking-guy hunched over his computer, a mug of hot drink in his hands, covered by a blanket. He types feverishly as he tries to keep up with his work. The wind gets stronger. Suddenly his shutters fly open, accompanied by a sudden shriek that is the wind, branches scrape against his window. He looks up, thinks it's just the weather, and goes back to his work. Suddenly a dark shadow looms above him...
*Cue theme from psycho*
Well my uncle from Brisbane came down. whoopedee. I remember staying in his house when we visited them, and his wife tormenting me with squeals of "so cuuuuuteeeeee!!!!" and lots of cheek-pinching and hair ruffling. Just thinking about it brings shivers down my spine. *shudder* I was 8, k? I was cute then. But still. The anguish... The torture... *curls into fetal position, rocks back and forth, sucks thumb*
No child should have to go through that experience. The stereotypical scary aunt IS REAL.
IT'S NOT A MYTH, PEOPLE.
Good thing she wasn't the big-bosomed, bad-breathed, bad-haired type. I would have been permanently mentally scared if she were...
So yes, they're back, and their two daughters who used to bug the cows out of me are all grown up. They're ok now, less squeaky, less irritating, though I can't remember which one was the one I dropped when she was little. Probably the less bright one... So anyways, there was this big dinner where the whole of the Leong side of the family came back together, and oh my dear it was pure torture.
Stretched-on-the-racks kind of torture.
Cold-water-dripping-on-forehead kind of torture.
It's not that the food was bad. Nor the wine (which was ok ok only). It's not that my aunt morphed into a big-bosomed, bad-breathed, bad-haired type and tried to suffocate me between her assets. She was, in fact, as slim as I could recall. It wasn't that the place was dodgy, the lighting bad, or the company boring. It was the plain fact that my half-tipsy uncles and aunt THOUGHT THAT THEY COULD SING.
Let me get one thing straight. I consider myself marginally musical. I don't have perfect pitch, it's taken me 6 years of piano training and 10 years of guitar to be able to only begin to guess what chord it is I'm hearing. I still have trouble differentiating a myxolidian from a phrygian, a diminished from a sustained, but you get my drift. And that small drop of musical ability in my blood comes in no way whatsoever from my mother's side. My mom's sense of pitch is about as good as a drunken wild donkey high on speed in heat running away from hunters. And that's insulting the donkey and the speed. Her brothers and sister fare very very very slightly better.
My aunt (not the one who traumatized me) was belting out Whitney Houston and Unchanged Melody and stuff like that at the absolute top of her lungs, probably hitting a note by accident every now and then, screeching, nails-on-blackboard, waking up the dead kind of stuff. And that's when she's sober. She wasn't on this occasion, nor were my uncles who still had the sense to know that they weren't great singers and thankfully, thankfully, thankfully, thankfully, kept the decibels low. But they were still amazingly off pitch. I never knew anyone could be so tone deaf. Take the worse from Malaysian Idol auditions and imagine something worse. They were worse than whatever it is you're imagining now. It's painful, I know, don't tax yourself that much eh. Just for you to get a sense of where I'm coming from.
It got to the point where my grandmother, good ol' poh-poh, was sticking her fingers in her ears.
To make matters worse, my tone deaf and tone dumb aunt started dancing in the middle of the room. And my mom joined her. In the most absurd manner possible. Pirouettes and circus clown style poses. Then they both pulled my cousins out to join them. I was a quivering jellied mass of shame... They only had a glass of wine each... The only saving grace was that it was a private room, so no one (save the waiters) saw anything. Thank freaking goodness. Thank absolutely freaking goodness.
The entire spectacle was caught on camera though. I would post the video if not for the fact that their blood runs in my veins... and a cold finger of fear touches me when I think about watching it again. One day when I have kids I'll show it to them and teach them about the dangers of alcohol.
Speaking of alcohol... |
posted by theycallmecruel @ 9:31 PM  |
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wheeeeeeeeeee
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