baby, don't forget my number

We sit down for our nasi lemak breakfast. Gary and me.

G: Have I told you about Ah Hong?
M: Nope
G: There is this woman who keeps calling me on my handphone asking for Ah Hong. I keep telling her sala! (wrong number). But she keeps calling my number asking for Ah Hong, Ah Hong
M: ...
G: After a while, I get so fed up I tell her Ah Hong xi liao!
M: Hee hee. What did she say?
G: She scolded me lah
M: Does she still call?
G: No
M: That worked really well
G: But that’s not the worst. Wait till, I go on the OFFENSIVE. I have her number. One day, I’m going to call her number and ask for

Ah Hong? Ah Hong?

hoo ha over a skirt

I have pale and tubby legs but lets just say that they attracted the stares and hoots of all my co-workers today.

When I first started work in the dark ages of 1998, my employer had a no trousers rule for women so I wore skirts on a daily basis. Short ones, long ones…I wore them up the bus and everywhere. I wanted to wear pants but it wasn’t allowed. It was only when I started working at my present work place in 2001 that pants were accepted. Liberated from the skirt, I started to wear pants most of the time.Over time, as the legs did not see the sunshine, they became even more pale.

Through the two pregnancies in 2002 and 2004 and as my belly swelled, I went on to elasticised waists. I thanked my lucky stars for the pants which provided cover for the lower half of my body which was grotesquely expanding, sprouting veins and retaining water.

My legs disappeared forever from public view. At the heart of it, I had a disembodied relationship from my legs and I hated them.

====

But I wore a skirt today. The legs which had never seen the sunlight. A public strip show. The moisturiser was lathered on and the stray hairs extracted.

It isn’t even a very short skirt. It goes past the knee and you get only a small glimpse of the calves. But based on the external reaction, I felt like a middle-eastern woman who wears full body coverings but had titillated the world with a view of her ankles.

There were warm looks of encouragement all around. I walked to the toilet and noticed a male co-worker behind me. I turned behind and he gave me a smile. Not a lecherous smile. He look amused.

A crowd gathered around staring in the general direction of the hem of the skirt and at the nakedness which was the pale-pale legs.

”wow!”
“it makes you look slimmer.”
“so sweet!”
"you should wear skirts more often"

This made me even more self conscious. Should I have worn a longer skirt. To my toes?