The thing about concerns..

Dear readers,

Very recently many things have changed. I don't work for a tyre company anymore, I work in the agriculture business. Huge change. Tough decision. In early 2011 I did what I never thought I would do..I quit my job.

That shall always remain monumental to me. Shifting from the comfort of knowing what to expect to " ohhh God did I make the right choice?". Concerns normally surface, mostly they are based on financial reasons. You know, the how do you pay for this now, the bills and and and. Then it occurred to me how easily we are bounded by this chain of materialistic dependency.

For example, ok so you still are servicing a high loan for that fancy car you bought, but you can sell it and buy a smaller car just to get by. You don't need Astro cause its just repeating the shows anyway and plus you can just go to the nearest internet cafe and spend not more than 5 bucks to spend more than enough time to watch your shows on Youtube. You might, have trouble when it comes with the house rent or monthly installments, but nothing that a discussion with a bank of default forwarded payments can't handle.

In short, there are temporary solutions. Yes, you have to get up on your ass and find a job after that and yes that might not be easy. But you can start a business. Go to a bank and ask for a loan to start an enterprise. Maybe. The options are endless. The point is there are options and they come with risks. But what is the point is also that your comfortable 9-5 job you so take for granted of having now will always be at risk. And nothing is written in stone that you will live life as is forever.

And thus here I am. Yes I got a new job. I don't know what its all about but time and effort and hopefully hard work will help remedy that. So, we move on.

Thus the thing about concerns is...its nice to ponder on it, waffle on it, sleep on it, make gracious love on it if you want but then just take an action on it. And look not back but the future. On that point comes as well our concerns..2012. Will the end of the world come? Would Israel wage war on Iran? Would we go through another huge depression? Is the dollar stable? Would I get married? Is my health ok? I say lets build on factors we can influence and just do it. And here is a list:

1) If the world ends 2012 - Decide to live or die? To live, study what are potential forms of the earth's destruction and figure out best survival measures. If it means going to Tibet, to higher ground or build a ship then do it. Or if well, accept death then just maintain status qou.

2) Would there be a world nuclear war? - Maybe, if so build a survival bunker.

3) Would there be a financial depression? - If so, start saving and learn to cook. Cause selling food is always good business regardless.

4) Is the USD gonna stay up/down - Maybe not then start buying tangible things that can be used for barter trade later like gold.

5) Would I get married? - Maybe not but doesn't mean you can't build a life that does matters to someone, join charity. If its getting laid/sex is of your concerns than, depends on your religious views, there are available options...hehe won't suggest here..go figure.

6) Is my health ok? - Maybe not, than take small steps to improve, change your diet, stop smoking and drinking too much alcohol and and.

These are just examples and are ment to highlight the fact that life is about choices we make and not PhDs or Nobel prizes. Thus live life people. Live it to the fullest. Concern yourself not of what can't be done, and lets embrace what can be done...

The thing about time...it does heal

Hey ya'll. Hows it going.

Been along time since I started to write again. Haha but I have sooooo many stories to tell I tell ya. Banyak giler k. But donno where to start. Ok lets do this. I will be outstation tis whole January. Will be in Wutha-Faroda. So will try get a solid story through guys.

Till then, I wish to officially announce.....I AM BACKKKKKKKK

Time to move on...

Dear Friends, Bloggers, The world,

Its getting harder and harder to update now. I know its lame to say, I'm busy, a lot of stuff lah to do and what not..but, thats it I guess. Some can just feel content in knowing that they have updated their blog with something. Nope. Not me. An update should be monumental. Thats just me I guess.

Ok, updates..I'm going through this dilemma. Ok, at this point people who know me will say, why talk about work Amad..again! Well hang on, hold your horses, whats wrong with being passionate with what you do? Ok, so I was offerred to take control of engineering. I was from engineering for 6 years ago, then was sent to production and now they want me to replace the current manager. Problem is..he is a friend.

Me and Francis. Good title for a movie ya. Francis and me go way back. He was my mentor and my boss when I started. Here's the thing, there is still sentiment in the plant that Malays know less and technically unsound on the technology/engineering stuff compared to the Chinese. Sad to say, its kinda true. But I decided to prove the masses wrong. I took every single abused lashed at me as an encouragement to do better. Those who know me then knew that my life was all work. This resilience started to take notice and Francis started to open to me by saying," ..one of these days I'll probably drop dead due to something.., its about time I teach someone what I know." Thats exactly what he did.

Francis was the first son of a char kuey teou peddler. He was taken in as an apprentice in 1977 and ascended to his current post as Plant Engineering Manager. He was involved in 90% of the commissioning of machines and technology training in this plant. He has also single handedly save the company 2.3 million with his developement of our own mixer controls and assisted Sumitomo industries in Japan for the developement of the now much acclaim RJS 7 PCR making machine, a best selling making machine from this manufacturer. You bet ya when he wanted to hand down his knowledge it was an honour. And I incurred the silent wrath and jealousy amongst colleagues as he never, I repeat never revealed his knowledge to anyone till I came.

The trainning was tough. Just like the kung fu movies, you need to crawl to get the knowledge. Biasalah chinamen style. After all the abuse, and even making me cry twice..I never gave up and sought to acquire as much knowledge as I could from Francis. Times past, I was known by my colleagues as Yang Mar - Dragonblood Malay. A name that harboured 2 meanings; one that i was not a typical malay and two that I was also like a vampire who sucked knowledge from the sifus. I was fine with it becouse the efforts were starting to show.

To put it simple, I wouldn't be where I am now if it wasn't for Francis. And the best thing was, we became really good friends. We hang out a lot after work. Talking about life, the hard times, Malay-chinese relationship, family values and all. I started to build a friendship that I thought could never be built. Then we seperated. Francis was assigned to take up half a project and I was promoted to take up the other half. So, from subordinate, now colleagues. The friendship never ended.

In particular, there was a time I was having a problem during commissioning. It lasted for nearly 40 hrs straight. It was then the chinese new year holiday. By chance he heard the problem from my technician who spoke to him by phone asking for advice. Francis called said if I needed help. I said no I'll handle things. That time we spoke was at 2.30am. However. Francis, without any professional obligation to be there, came at 3am. We went through the problem togather and had the machine up by 10am the next morning. I asked him why he came to help and he replied," I knew you must be in trouble and I came to help". It was his holiday. He had a family who needed him to drive them down to Penang the next morning. He just said, " Nah get my wife to drive maaaahh. At least now you can sleep kan?"

So, later I became a business unit manager and he took helm as Plant Engineering Manager. Thats when the problem came. Technical people are good at what they do but somehow, in the eyes of top management his management skills were perceived as insufficient. I do not know what people saw in my form of management but by the grace of Ar-Rahman I was blessed with results. So management put two-and-two togather and figured to try an engineering-based production business unit manager will be a good angle to try and shape the engineering since he has married the 2 core manufacturing functional teams into one.

But that wasn't the final reason. Unbeknowest to me, in Francis's personal file he cited my name as his immediate successor. And in his last employee dialog he mentioned again when ask of his succession, he said," I do not know of your plans for Amad..but I hope that you consider him as my replacement should something ever happens to me". Tis he answered the HR Director.

And the person to break the news to me was Francis himself. It was hard to take it in as I feared that maybe he was being lett-off. I rushed to meet the HR Director to get a final confirmation and he told me that I need to decide how to use Francis, and that if he stays.. he reports to me.

Francis..my friend. You have always been there for me and always had my back. And now I look blank on my org chart trying to make his function work..still staring.....but I think I found an angle.

So, as said, thus that is my monumental event so far. I will, I think, will not have time to update about my blog anymore. I'll still keep it on, just to flip through to read my ol post for nostalgia. Maybe update if the time permits and something does come up worth blogging about..maybe just to announce if i'm getting married hahaha. But the new job is tough.

I wanted to write about something else actually but thought why should we write about stuff emotionally and regret the consequences. What is said can never be taken back. And scars will heal but deep ones leave a mark. I guess the reason I thought, of all my other monumental updates, like falling in love-being dumped again, new found freindships with uni friends and the status of my social activities like salsa, the one most important was the realisation of a friendship lifecycle.

And like Francis..we do meet other people. Other important people that come into our lives. To stay on and keep a single friendship alive is a behemoth task, and many painfull roads down the way. And sometimes the ones that were once close to you..moved on. You know this when they cant have a decent conversation with you but keep asking about, 'ade girlfren ke tak?' After that..awkward silence..Sometimes the other half that pines for the friendship should realise the futile hope when the another moves on. And like Francis, and like Feizal and like Rambo and like..all the other important ones, old or new in our lives, a friend is one that above all puts others needs before their own. And the world still holds a portion of these people in population. I guess at this point we just say goodbye to the the old and cherish the ones that are relevent to us.

In conclusion, thank you my fellow bloggers for your supports, and honest comments. Thank you for even just reading the first 3 lines couse I know i can be overdramatic when writing. Thank you for being patient for the ones that actually took time to read through till the end, only realising that I lost the plot half-way at paragraph 3. And thank you for those whom have included me in their blogs to follow, I appologise if I had directly or indirectly hurt anyone along this course of blogging from my views or opinions or comments. To all, I wish you all the best. Goodbye...... Thank you.

Thank you...

Soundtracks....

I was checking out some blogs the other day and came across this young blogger, Hanis, who wrote about the song of her life. After reading through, it made me reflect towards the songs in my life. She ask her fellow bloggers to tell her what particular song were important to them. Thats when I realise that for myself, it was'nt just a song... but songs. And with that here are some collection of songs that for their reasons have left an impact in my 29 years of existance:

THE EARLY YEARS
Nursery rhymes. My favorite..Incy wincy spider. Reason being my late mother would like to geletek me with her fingers whislt singing this. It was so much fun..and back then mengeletek budak kecik as they call it was an incessant habit amongst the elders. Like lahh the elders had other better things to do. However, the point that I had this cute small dimple when I smiled did not help my relentless efforts to plead the elders to stop mengeletek either. Ahh aa but then..thats the best part of having a younger sibling..thou shall be mangsa seterusnye. Kesian Suraya...in my defence; Its Tradition!

FIRST MUSIC INFLUENCE
Back in primary I started to actually take interest in music at the age of 11 years. Back then Muzik Muzik was hip and trust me, before Astro created a storm with Akademi Fantasia, even before American/Malaysian Idol was dominating the media viewers..Juara Lagu was the Bomb. Who could not forget the clash of 1990 when Search's Isabella went head-to-head with Wings's Taman Rasyidah Utama. It was a close fight, with each band trying to outdo each other vocally, musically, style and ball-squeezing-butt-clenching leather pants and hair-curlers. It was amusing to see the more uncomfartable the pants looked, the more stable and higher the pitching of their voices. Alas it was Search's Issabella that triumphed and for the next couple of years nothing but.."Dia...Isabella, Lambang cinta yang nyata".

How influential was this song? Let me just say, sampai nenek-nenek dan makcik-makcik from 60 years till 80 years were even humming the song. Not to mention it was even a proud moment for parents at that time to showcase how their new child, at a timid age of probably 2/3 years, would sing the chorus to that song. It was a song so recognisable, so instantaneously acknowledge and had the longest airplay in M'sian history (then!). And for me..it was the first song I was able to play on the 1st string of a guitar.

YEAR OF THE RAPI do not know what possesed me at that point. But I gues thanks to radio shows like American Top 40 (on radio 4 then) it was the age of rap. Two very important things happened in the 90's , rap and Will Smith. The opening to fresh prince of bel air theme was more or less the catalyst to the generation at that time. The tv show was a much watched and popular show shown on TV3. It was considered un-hip to have not watch or missed a fresh prince episode. It was at this age that I had my first crush on a girl. And she liked rap music. Specifically vanilla ice. It was a competition amongst my classmates to see who could sing Ice Ice baby without making a mistake. And I remember that this period was also giving birth to the age of the baggy pants. God...what was I thinking!!!

IN MY OPINION ROCK SAVE ME

In my early teenage years, I started to take up guitar playing seriously. This led to me buying a lot of guitar magazines to grab hold of tablature transcripts to popular songs I wanted to learn. It was hard to find the songs you wanted to play on magazines. It usually depends on whats famous that time, and thats only when it would get published. It was one fatefull evening, I got a guitar mag for my birthday by my late mom. It did not have any songs I wanted, but, she knew I like reading them and bought it regardless. I never took any attention to the album review section but decided to perused and read through to see what was interesting at that time. What cought my eye was the review of the Soundgarden album, SuperUnkown. I miss-intepreted the concept of 'melancholy and beatleisque' to mean the band was a happy-happy melodic ensamble. Bought the album and to my shock, was blasted with the infusing angst and banshee wails of Chris Cornell. Here I was standing in front of my radio speakers being impaled by the wall of guitar distortion, welcoming grunge rock in its most finest.

It was hard to swollow at first, but after awhile it all kinda sinked in...and I was then totally converted. Maka bermulalah zaman rock grunge and alternative music saya. Though later on, my list of listening evolved to Pearl Jam, The Stooges, Velvet Undeground, Stone Temple Pilots, Foo Fighters..and and and, it cannot be denied my admiration for them them stemmed from that first scream and thumping riff of The SoundGardens.

As my skills in guitar playing progress, so did the hunger to be technically proficient. In simple terms, that means nak jadi a bad-ass guitar player. I had enough of power chords and riffing highly distorted guitar. Also going up and down on the guitar neck playing scales as fast as humanly possible is a skill but not a musical expression. I wanted challenges and wanted to explore guitar playing at its finest. That got me into jazz. Acid, funky jazz to be specific. And the song that did it all was Virtual Insanity by Jamiroquai. A friend set up a challange for me to figure out the piano opening using the guitar. It took me close to a month to figure it out but once I did it was so cool to play. You see Jamiroquai did not showcase the guitar extensively. No. But it was the successfull attempt to transcribe the song in guitar and improvise accordingly opened up my eyes to music interpretation, styling and soul. I guess it was the song that told me anything is possible with the guitar. And I never looked back.

As we get older, we accumulate experiences. The good and the bad. But mostly the bad sometimes overwhelm the good even if it is as minicule as an atom. The harder the challanges, the higher we go in life, the harder we fall. Being a Muslim its hard not to fall into the trappings of the comfort pill. But with every indulgence, regret is close by. However in spiritual grace comfort is more meaningfull. And for that the greatest loss that Malaysia have is the parting of one of the greatest lyricist of our time...Loloq.

But in M Nasir, he lives eternally in these songs. Nowdays, its these Nusantara and M Nasir's earlier works that lullaby me to rest from the humdrums of the hectic and ruthless world.

So thats it. The songs of my life. It can all be well described by Loloq when he said:

"Sedang tuhan, tahu sesiapa..untuk neraka untuk syurga. Aku kan terpaksa, memilih syurga, demi pengertian ku pada hukum alam. Dan sesunggunya, aku cinta, padamu tuhan walaupun sesat jalan."