Lightfoot

A kampung house is commonly built out of wood. Sturdy, dark, old planks of wood painted white or blue to make it not look like wood.

Modern couples nowadays crave for hard-wood floors in their homes, a seemingly-affordable luxury perpetuated by Ikea catalogs and Trading Spaces, shiny oaks or pines gleaming in the living room. According to them, covering up these hard-wood floors would be a sin.

But in a kampung house, the already natural wood floor is typically covered up with that interior decorator's blight: the linoleum. Linoleum in all sorts of colors, sometimes all mixed up together in one frightening, endless pattern of geometric and floral overdose. Green was my grandmother's favorite color, and green was her linoleum, wall to wall, in the living room.

But that's not what I wanted to talk about.

Have you ever noticed how walking on a wooden floor in a kampung house instantly turns you into a stegosaurus? I would walk from the sitting room to the kitchen and all the plates and cups in the geroboks (that's a cupboard/cabinet for us people who don't speak Terengganu) would rattle and shake like Godzilla was passing by.

There's no such thing as quietly tip-toeing your way around. Some parts of the floor would remain silent, but other parts, particularly where the planks would be loose, would creak and croak an announcement of the impending giant that is about to arrive.

And yet. The inhabitants of the house can walk around as silent as a mouse. I observed this when I stayed in Kemaman for a couple of days. There was this one particular spot just outside the doorway to the kitchen. A few loose planks supported a glass-front cabinet filled with beloved dining sets and silver trays. Whenever I have to go to the kitchen, I would literally tip-toe there, like a ballerina. But it was more like that hippo ballerina in Disney's Fantasia because those tell-tale planks would groan under my weight and sneer at my lack of grace.

The owners of the house? These two makciks who make killer ketupat palas, who look like they weigh a whole lot more than me, seem to be walking on air. You won't hear anything but the quiet shuffle of their bare feet. On blue linoleum, of course.

They can silently sneak up on you at breakfast and ask you to have some more tea and please don't bother about the dishes, they'll take care of it. Maybe it was just a nicer way of telling me not to go to the kitchen anymore because their old gerobok and its contents simply cannot take any more punishments.

In other news:
There's always been questions about SpongeBob's sexuality, but seriously, do you think your four-year old cares if he's gay or not? So what if the man/sponge/sea creature likes to vacuum and cook, is best-friends with a pink Patrick, and happy all the time? If a male likes to do all those things, he's immediately gay?? Sometimes people worry about the silliest things. Dude, it's a cartoon. And since when is "diversity" code for "pro-homosexual"? Idjits.