Love thy Neighbours

The headline - "Mark Zuckerberg Sounds Like the Neighbor From Hell" immediately reminds me of my neighbours. A story that I must shared.

Mark Zuckerberg as a neighbour

Thank you. Photo: Andrew Ross, Andrew Ross, SF Chronicle.

As for Mark Zuckerberg's neighbours, I can understand and sympathies with them. Home is our sanctuary, our nest. Once we are in our home, it's supposed to exude this feeling of peace and quietness. Close your eyes and reminisce how it felt the peace and quiet. Doesn't matter that our teenage kids want to blast his rock music to the highest as long it's within the confines of his room and it doesn't disturb the neighbours.

The constant drilling, the constant banging is a noise that many can't take especially when it's over a period of hours, after hours and days after days. Not to mention the dust that they renovation are creating around the neighbourhood. To have your windows, doors, grills, all wax with layer of dust within the next hour after you had wiped it off.

However, I am writing this 'Love thy Neighbours' is because of another story that I like to share with all of you.

Along my street, I had these two neighbours that are in loggerheads for past few years already. Before I go into the full story, a non-Malaysian has to understand the concept of a linked-house, as some countries don't call it linked-house. It means the houses are linked side by side without any space in between. Hence a row of 10 houses would be linked to each other without any empty side space in-between each houses. The only leisure empty space outside of the house is the front car porch and the back yard where one can plant trees, shrubs and flowers.

These quarrels must have escalated to 'enemy' stage as one of the neighbour has installed ply wood wall on his side of the house at the front car porch area so that he don't need to ever see his neighbour. I think most of you can imagine how ugly this looks to the street in this neighbourhood.

Upon investigating, I was told that the neighbour "A" that installed this ply wood wall apparently has this obsession that neighbour "B" is always following him in whatever he does. When he paints his house purple, she paints hers too. When he changed his car, she changes hers too. And it even comes to the point that when he drives out from the 'sharing' parking space, she would drive back all the way from wherever she is, just to take over that parking lot by parking her spare car there!

So how does one deal with a neighbour like this? Who can be a judge to say is it really that neighbour "B" wants to be the Joneses or is neighbour "A" imagining all these?

I am yet to see what will happen next. I just need to write this after reading a man like "Mark Zurkerberg" also behaves like that!

How about sharing your neighbour's story?

Do your mind wonders when you are having sex?

This article 'In praise of slow sex' brings to mind a story that my friend once told me. She was having sex with her man when she suddenly notices a cobweb at the corner of the ceiling as his man was humping away in ecstasy at her. And she forgot, and said, "there's a cobweb". You can guess what happens next. Although I had to add that my friend is a 'clean freak'. Does that make it excusable?

So do your mind wonders when you are having sex? Like absentmindedly think of what you have to do next, the amount of clothes you need to iron, the project paper you have to finish, the dishes you need to wash, or the interesting conversation you just had with your friend. Or would you have answer the phone when it rings while you are having sex? Well if your mind does wonders and you do pick up the phone when you are having sex, there are two conclusions drawn by the author:

(1) The man probably needs to brush up on his sexual technique.
(2) Or our behavior reveals something alarming about the way we live nowadays.

I would think it's the latter. These days, we are chasing time to do so many things. In addition to commitments to our work, our family, we also want to be in all the latest trends that are happening all around us. So we try to juggle as many activities as possible, we go to gym, to facial, to massage, to yoga, to do charity, we read the latest book, watch the latest movie, be seen in the latest socialite cafes and we signed up in all the social media sites. Not only that, we buy the latest blackberry or the iphone, we tweet daily so as to keep ourselves updated every second, every minute of the day. To the point that "we even have to put our mobile phone next to our bed when we are getting ready for sex," said one of my friends.

So do you have any incidents to share when you are having sex or stories to tell? Or do you already realized this and are now taking time to enjoy sex, to be more mindful of the present. Share your views.

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/carl-honore/in-praise-of-slow-sex_b_322026.html