im doing this COS duty as we speak and its a total boredom. i am tired but my body isnt allowing me to sleep and its annoying cause i gotta wake up at 5am later. plus i am starving and there is no food here. ok, there is some chocolate cakes but they dont taste that good. cerewet pulak. haha.

lately i've been doing some soul searching. keeping to myself abit more than i usually am and being very careful in life. like i've been riding my bike slower than ever, smoking so much lesser and been a little bit more holy as of late. those are very random reasons but overall i just feel i need to find some kind of purpose in life.

as some of my close friends may know, my grandfather passed away 2 weeks ago and naturally it has quite affected me to a certain extent. i am not as close to him as u think i am, partially because he lives across the border in johore and he comes back to my place about once a month usually over a weekend.

years leading up to his death, he became weaker and weaker physically but you can see from his actions he was fighting it all out and his spirits were high. my house doesnt have a lift (elevator) and he would struggle up the stairs for 3 stories on his own 80+ year old feet sometimes resisting my help. overtime, the doctor diagnosed him with high blood pressure and probable heart disease.

each month he came, as the only grandson being there, i had to help out abit, whether i like it or not. obviously as a teenager for the past few years, sometimes i will find it a chore. like sometimes i wanna go out with my friends but my mum got to work so i gotta postpone my outing to stay with him at home and take care of his needs. at other times, i would be nicer of course, maybe making him coffee, or breakfast or whatever he needed. sometimes he would ask me for cigerettes and (behind my mum's back), gave him some. cause eventhough he's being very dependent, my grandpa is a cracker of a joke or 2. so sometimes, i like to hear him talk random stuff and comments he make about tv shows were really nonsensical but hilarious to hear.

once when i was in upper primary school, i stayed with my grandpa in his village about 100km away from the border for a few weeks. i don't know what made my mum send me there but i think i was her idea of me getting familiar with my roots. my grandpa was quite condusive during my stay. everyday he would buy or make me food, make me comfortable in an anfamiliar environment and basically brought me around the village and made friends. i remember a visit to his palm oil plantation (like those you guys study in geography) and i'm telling you its hard work getting those pieces of palm and earn a living out of it. but he had passion. he actually had pension from his service in the police force which is really enough to live on in a village but he chose to opt into the village life.

an estimated 90% of my relatives on my mum's side live in malaysia. out of my grandpa's double digit amount of siblings, he's the only one who was based in singapore which resulted in all his 6 children and grandchildren to be here and i am one of them. the other 10+ of his siblings all live in the state of johor or some place else in malaysia and somehow i am inching to find out about them, cause from the day i can remember, i only know like 3 or 4 of them and a part of me wants to get in contact with them and establish some kind of "relative-hood" so i know who's who and i think its very healthy for family cohesion.

i think its something that my grandpa would love to see too, being able to know that the generations which succeed him knows his family, his siblings and people in the circle. he was a great man who cared for his children and people who crossed his path. all of us, his family are deeply saddened by the loss and hope that you can spare a prayer for him. may god bless him. Al-Fatihah.