neither here, nor there

what ethnic group do u think i belong to? I think i've considered myself a malay for the longest time, but yes anyone can tell i'm not malay. which is good in some ways, especially when someone's bitching about u in malay. haha, like what happened a few mins ago. I'm in the central lib using the comp here, n some bugger had to spill coffee n leave his mess n the coffee cup at the very desktop i booked. yes so the cleaner lady (a malay) came over n kinda said "meluat" outloud (for my dear manjen n yindian frens: it means disgusting) obviously directing it to me. sheesh. no i dun blame her, but yes u stupid buggers (yes, I'm referring to u Mr Coffee Spiller)spare a thought for the cleaners lah, n poor INNOCENT people like me who get the brunt of the blame on ur account.

so yes, i've realised this a long time ago, how i never really fit in. yesterday whilst ordering food at the arab food stall in the biz canteen, out of true ignorance, i asked the stall lady(who's damn nice by the way) what Falafel is,( its the arab version of vaadai, an arab tidbit) n she looked at me with a totally bewildered look, n eyed me accusingly as she said " Aren't you supposed to be Arab? You should know what." Yes, I get that alot.

Need more proof? Once, a man came up to me, muttering as fast as the F1 racing cars at Grand Prix in TURKISH, expecting me to answer as fast as him. But of cos, looking at my stupendous, totally confused expression, he must have figured that i don't speak the language, or probably just assumed that I'm one retarded Turkish.

Oh, and this is the misperception i like best. when someone thinks I'm from Spain or somewhere Europe-ish. No, post colonial mindset aside, admit it,the spanish girls are hot. so if i do get such comments which I obviously regard as compliments,i try to push it and enforce their belief for a little bit, until of cos they insist I say something in Spanish other than "Ola"or " Raul" which then just foils my plans, n puts me in a situation where quick thinking is of absolute importance, to save my indian ass.

So yes, for the record, I'm Indian.Born n bred in Singapore, but Indian, and I speak a whole list of languages- English,Malay,Tamil,Hindi sparingly,German,n a little Mandarin (yes, and my vocab ranges from words like "pentan" to "siao" which are sufficient to detect all that mandarin bitching)

so yes, u might want to think twice when bitching about me, unless u do it far far away, or do it in French or some unknown language like Turkish. :x