Great Truths About Death & Money

1. I have all the money I need … if I die by 4 o’clock today. (Henry Youngman)

2. You can’t have everything. Where would you put it? (Steven Wright)

3. Money was invented so we’d know how much we owe. (Anon.)

4. I intend to live forever. So far, so good. (Steven Wright)

5. I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying. (Woody Allen)

6. Money is better than poverty, if only for financial reasons. (Woody Allen)

7. What’s the use of happiness? It can’t buy you money! (Henry Youngman)

8. To love is to suffer. To avoid suffering, one must not love. But then, one suffers from not loving. Therefore, to love is to suffer; to not love is to suffer. To be happy is to love. To be happy then, is to suffer, but suffering makes one unhappy. Therefore, to be happy, one must love or love to suffer or suffer from too much happiness. (Woody Allen)

Give Me Skinny or Give Me Death

I am a lousy conformist, that’s what I am. Despite my self-righteous diatribes about standing up for my principles and being the unwavering Rock of Gibraltar when it comes to staying put in the face of popular opinion, I confess that I’m secretly feeble-minded.

Exhibit A: I can rant for hours about how skinniness does not equate beauty but at the same time, I fret whenever I feel the waistband of my jeans cut into a lump of flesh that seemed to have developed overnight. A slight bulge is enough to send me into a wild tailspin. My mind is instantly deluged with desperate schemes to lose the excess flab – from eating a raisin a day to working the treadmill for two hours a day until I lose the weight or drop dead (whichever decides to come first).

I’m ashamed. I’m ashamed because I feel happy when people come up to me and say, “Oh my god. You’ve lost weight!” I nonchalantly reply, “No lah, it’s just that I look thinner in the dark with these strobe lights.”

I’m ashamed to admit that it thrills me to hear, “Aiya, where got fat? You’re so blardey skinny!” Of course, no one can accuse me of being a stick insect but this thrills me none the less.

Or the common, “Fine. You show me exactly where your flab is. Show me!”, after which I proceed to pinch about a bucket of lard from the folds of my stomach. They then go, “Aiya, that’s what you call flab? I’ll show you what real flab is!”

I don’t think you want to know how the rest of the story goes (not unless you’re bulimic and wretching is something you enjoy). Besides, this is irrevelant to my point.

My point is, I’m weak. I cave into the opinion of the masses. I may proclaim that beauty lies within, that physical beauty fades but true beauty lasts forever and all that jazz, but I have left out the fine print: beauty lies within... for other people; physical beauty fades but true beauty lasts forever... for other people. Not for me.

Give me long, slim legs and silky long hair and flawless skin and a knockout figure. Give me a brilliant white smile, sparkling eyes and a 24-inch waist. Give me a swanlike neck, delicate ankles and a behind that can stop traffic.

Of course, charisma, intelligence and confidence are important. I’m not denying that. I want those things too. I work hard at those things. But losing a few points of my IQ will never be as enormous a catastrophe as, say, newly discovered orange peel on my butt.

So because I’m weak, I shall continue going to the gym in hopes that I will one day be the proud owner of a body that resembles Halle Berry’s. Because I’m not strong enough to tell the world to “Put a sock in it! A little pudge never hurt anyone!!”, I’ll continue to stand sideways in front of the mirror and spin into a panic at every little bit of protruding flesh. Because I’m weak, I will resist the mad urge to devour that last piece of chocolate mud pie. Because I don’t have the guts to go through life with excess weight and not give a rat’s arse what people think.

7 Reasons Why Workaholism Is Good For You

Being a workaholic has its advantages.

Always appearing to be busy, you are therefore seen as contributing greatly to something (even if it's contributing in some way to the aesthetic value of dog food packaging). You have the luxury of burying your soul, the very essence of your being, under loads and loads of ... that's right: work.

Reason #1: You have an instant, ready-made excuse for anything unpleasant that might crop up. "Congratulations on winning the first prize at the International Parakeet Talent Convention. I wish I could make it to the ceremony but I've got a mountain of paperwork to wade through, man." Now, this lame excuse would only work if you were known to be a workaholic. It would never work if your friend knew that you sped home at five sharp every evening to watch reruns of Mork and Mindy.

The same applies to concocting an alibi for a heinous crime like say, murder, for example. "I was in the office writing a contact report at precisely the same time Mrs Pang was being sliced into giant-sized cubes and turned into carrot soup." Again, this would only be plausible if you were known to be an obsessive, compulsive workaholic.

Reason #2: Workaholism gives you an identity. It allows you to identify with workaholics all over the world - it's not all that different from alcoholics, druggies, sexaholics and a whole other bunch of holics. When you have such an identity, it carves you your very own space in this mixed-up world. In a world where war, famine and misery are rife, you can push everything aside, stand up tall and proud and declare, "I work, goddammit!!!"

Reason #3: You will never be lost ... mostly because you're always in the office.

Reason #4: You will never wonder what your purpose in life is ... because it is to write insanely long emails and draft out boring quotations.

Reason #5: You will always know who the most important people in your life are ... aiya, they're the ones who dole out your paycheck la.

Reason #6: There will always be consistency. Whenever life spins out of control or goes out of its way to bite you in the ass, you can languish in the knowledge that no matter what happens, work will always suck. You can count on it to always suck. It will rarely get better or worse (hey, when you're scraping the bottom of the barrel, you know it's pretty much a done deal).

Reason #7: Workaholism doesn't discriminate! Anyone can be a workaholic. Unlike snooty country clubs, it doesn't matter how much money you make, how expensive your set of golf clubs is or how many BMWs you own. It doesn't matter what race, age or gender you are. Workaholism does not discriminate. All you need to earn your way in is the ability to stare at the computer for 12 straight hours without blinking and have an all-consuming (and therefore, unnatural) fervent passion for pie charts.

There. I have made my case for workaholism. Now all that's left for me to do is to actually become a workaholic. So far, I fear that success has eluded me - especially since I just spent the last fifteen minutes blubbering about the virtues of workaholism instead of doing any real ... you know ... work.