In like a lion

My inbox has gone a bit quiet this week, which of course led to the typical freelancer worrying that work was drying up (the plants definitely are, in this weather). Rather than fret and check said inbox every 30 minutes, or surf even more, I tracked down some dusty online accounts and forgotten passwords, tidied up some blog accounts, reviewed my résumé, and turned to the time-honored and thoroughly terrifying practice of cold emailing.*

Do people even cold call anymore? I don't know, but contacting a complete stranger out of the blue, by whatever means, is never easy. More so when you're contact phobic** like me. It's not as if you're disrobing in public; you're just telling the (hopefully) nice stranger that you're [insert freelance occupation here] and that you were wondering if they were looking to add another person to their team.

However scared you feel, just do it (let that email sit overnight though, just to be certain), and the practice is always worthwhile. The wait for replies is actually worse, but you'll get through it and possibly gain a new contact! Ina worst case scenario: treat yourself to a nice bottle of red (or white, as I do; or chocolate. Whatever you like).

*I'm not sure about what it takes to have honed it into an art.
**I work long hours alone, so spoken English is almost a second language for me now D: 

Pasta sauce three ways

Guys, did you know that it's true when they say that there are literally as many ways to make (a tomato-based) pasta sauce as there are people who make it?

For instance, my mother-in-law uses ketchup in hers, hahaha (yuck), my sister-in-law always has to temper the sharpness in hers because she uses a lot of tomatoes, and I take the easy way out to by leaving the tomatoes to cook down on their own and duke it out with the (sweeter) onions.

Gratifyingly, Enfant Terrible didn't even wait for me to finish asking the question before answering: "Of course I'd like your pasta sauce the best! Do you remember that time when you made it for lunch and I had seconds??"

He's glib, that one.

Morning mania

Guys, listening to the call in radio show this morning made me remember why I stopped listening to radio shows. The girl presenter was teasing the boy presenter about his film choices, which were romantic dreck such as Twilight and Titanic.

Titles beginning with T and questionable taste aside, girl presenter's view was that such films are unmacho, therefore macho guys worth their machismo shouldn't watch them, much less enjoy them. There's so much gender stereotyping behind that view, I almost knocked the radio off the shelf, though I didn't because it's not mine.

Even better, they aired a listener's call. This woman opined that guys with unmacho film tastes such as the boy presenter are husband material, as opposed to the bad boys, whom you don't get married to because they're, well, bad boys. The listener said she was married to one such (boring) husband material type and she's only begun to appreciate it after SEVEN YEARS of marriage and after having a kid with him.

So right now, it sounds like the good guys are to be left alone until a girl decides she's had enough partying and wants to settle down? There's absolutely no guarantee that any of these people will stay the same, you know what I mean?

Honeymoon over

Guys, it finally happened to me: I met one of those people so devoid of conversational topics and firmly entrenched in their conservative mindset that the first thing they ask a newly married person is why haven't they had kids yet. Because fuck you, that's my business, that's why.

I mean, ask me how married life has been, what it's been like using "we" instead of "I", or how many carats my ring has, even (I don't remember where my ring is, I hate jewelry, tqvm).

Of course, I'm not the only person from my generation to not have kids within 7 months of getting married (if you do, rest assured I can do the math for that, hur hur hur, but I won't judge you), so I sympathize with my friends who are in the same situation.

For those who can't imagine WHY baby-making isn't a priority for us, please consider the following:

• We might not want kids yet. 
• We're might not able to afford kids yet. 
• We might want to live together alone for a while, enjoying and luxuriating in each other's company. 
• We might want to travel together lightly, and get into trouble without worrying whether there will be someone left to raise the lil 'un. 

I just realized: once you have kids, it's you with them forever. You can only be alone with your spouse for that short time before that. So fuck you, biological-clock-is-ticking lecturers, it's for my husband and I to decide how we spend our life together. Or shall I ask YOU when your next kid is coming, or why you aren't trying for a boy after all girls you've had?

Unfortunately, I still have to see my uncle's father-in-law at family gatherings, so I just smiled and said we wanted to get as much practice as we could.

Sweet discovery

Guys, as you know, honey can be used as a quick face mask. It's supposed to be anti-acne, its humectant profile pulls in moisture, and it's good for treating small wounds (at least as far as wounded rodents in those preliminary studies have demonstrated). Some say that raw unprocessed honey is the best, better still if it's organic (eh?), but as long as it's actual honey and not syrup + honey, you're okay.

You smear it on with your fingers, avoiding the eyes, and leave it on for 10-20 minutes before rinsing it off in the shower, right? At least, that's what I've been doing.

The fiddliest thing has been getting it into a smaller container I can just stick my fingers in, as I didn't want to contaminate the stock container that contains the honey meant for eating. Unlike Pooh the Bear, the jar of honey is not for me alone.

I finally realized that I can just swipe as much honey as I need for my face from the spoon I use when I'm making my coffee in the morning. After all, my hands are clean, the honey in the jar stays clean, my black coffee is sweetened, and no one else is up early enough to comment on how oddly dewy my face is. Win-win!

Two sides

"Always look out for others."

"If you can't take care of yourself, how will you do the same for other people?"

Things learnt from mountain biking

1. If you're going to crash, aim for a small tree or bush. Big trees will hurt you worse, or kill you.
2. If you and a small tree are being inexorably drawn together by the charisma of your careening bike, put your head down and let your helmet take the brunt of it (learnt from experience).
3. When riding through a sandy, twisty trail lined with thorny bushes and/or whippy plants, lean forward and keep pedalling to prevent the bike from swerving.
4. In the kilometer 30 under the unmerciful blaze of the afternoon sun and with lunch another 15 km away, use your damn gears and keep pedalling.
5. Visualize that cool drink and keep going.
6. A warning shout to the stray dog(s) napping in the middle of the road is always good.
7. When keeping clear of a larger, faster vehicle, it's better to just ride through the muddy puddle than steer along the extreme edge of the track. Dirt washes off (a very good mantra for everything); broken bones don't.
8. Use rear brakes more than front brakes to avoid flying over the handlebars.

Aw-koon (thank you), Cambodia!

Editing: USA vs. the rest of the world

The most common would-be freelancer question is "Where/How do I find a job?"

Typically, they would be pointed to freelancer marketplaces such as Elance, Freelancer.com, and the like, where you bid for gigs, or jobs. Complaints of undercutting by South Asian nationals abound, perpetuating the stereotype of the region as an international sweatshop both on- and offline.

However, I'm not here to grouse about that, or even gigs with paltry budgets (just say no and tighten your belt). Rather, I want to comment on how the beta versions of some freelancer sites limit registration to people living in the United States or Canada.

I'm not saying they're wrong in doing so. Certainly, it's their prerogative, and it might offer potential clients a semblance of security. I do think that in doing so, they limit their talent pool, and there is no guarantee that freelancers from these regions are necessarily better.

There's also nothing stopping a person with a legitimate US/Canadian address from successfully establishing an account with the site and subsequently farming the work out on other freelancing sites (!!) to people living outside North America.

Likewise, I don't think they have safeguards against a person who obtains a fake US/Canadian address and registers anyway. After all, there are mail forwarding services that cater to shoppers when an online shop in the US/wherever doesn't ship internationally, so why not freelancer sites?

TMI: PMS and fitness

As most women would probably know, your level of physical activity, and by extension, fitness, directly affect the severity of your PMS.

That is, unless, you're one of those lucky bitches who doesn't experience it, in which case: you lucky bitch.

As a baseline, I get bloated, stupid, forgetful, CLUMSY, irritable. Further reading reveals that PMS also heralds flatulence and constipation (AND diarrhea wtfwtf). The point is, most female bodies go haywire during PMS, and then they bleed and manage not to die from blood loss, so... I don't know. Hurray, nature?

Based on my observations, about a month of proper running and yoga has minimized all that. As in, I was kind of bloated but didn't feel like a whale, the irritability/moodiness lasted about 2 days, and everything else was pretty much packed into the day before my period started, so you can imagine the wreckage that ensued when I went to the club that morning.

Overall, a definite improvement. Also, I have no fast foods cravings anymore, but wouldn't turn down a good serving of pasta and cheese.

Daydreaming

For me, the first 1-2 kilometers of running are a battle to warm up and settle down. Every sensible bone I have (and my lungs) demands that I stop the insanity and go back to bed, because that's what you do at 630-ish AM, especially on weekends.

I keep running of course, because it'd be embarrassing to turn back so soon and because Enfant Terrible and our brother in law have pulled ahead and I don't want to run too far behind in the dark.

I really should get one of those LED safety clip-on blinking lights.

Before I realize it, I'm not thinking about how stupidly hard it is to run anymore, but other things, like the blinky light. And oh, here's a wee dead mouse. There's a person wearing a blinky light coming from the opposite direction. Usually, it's a white guy, and we exchange smiles and nods.

It's not that I run in a cocoon. I feel the road under my shoes, and I pretend that I'm in the Cormac McCarthy story, the one where Aragorn takes a long, depressing road trip. A creature in the tree cries out; alarmed, or a warning to others?

On another route, I make it a (sad) game of avoiding the inevitable dog turds, occasional shards of glass, and suspicious clumps. I trod on a flyblown rat once.

Elsewhere, we run past a copse of rubber trees and the smell of something rotting wafts out.

Over time, I'm sure we'll remember which parts of the hedge are used as pissoirs by the guards at the golf course (srsly, where else can they go?).

Everything ends eventually, naturally. The sun comes up, we take the return route back, and our attention is drawn inwards, just putting one foot in front of the other without stopping.

Also, there will be roti canai.