Questions answered.

Here are the answers to the questions asked by my readers in the last post (Some of the questions were corrected where necessary). The comment section for the post is now closed.

From ButirStar: What will you do when you are happily taking a shower while shampooing, suddenly you smell fogging smoke???
Hola Kak Long. Haha. I will leave the bathroom and take another bath after the fogging team left. No use proceeding with the shower since your hair is going to smell terrible anyway.

From Mimi: Salam..Kak Nani, how to improve my English? Especially grammar. Do share your experience. You're my idol. TQ.
Salam, Mimi. I'm flattered - well I'd never thought I could be an idol. Not yet at least. Thanks. I don’t know how to answer this without scaring people away, most people who asked the very same question you did would slightly cringe at my answer. I hope you won't, haha. OK, my parents are book people. They go to bookstores when they could spare some time. They brought their kids along, too. So I was exposed to books, to the habit of reading since I was two years old. When I was three, I was already reading in English.

My experiences include an amount of 95% of reading story books, and 5% of English lessons at school. In that 5% you'll find insanely dedicated teachers, hundreds of grammar exercises a year since 1992 to 2002, shameless attempts at speaking in English with teachers and friends and lots, I mean LOTS of encounters with error-making and the ability to laugh at myself as I made them.

The 95% is your effort. Your teacher couldn't be with you 24/7, so you're gonna have to work on your own 95% of the time. Start small. Your language skills will grow before you even realize it.

From Saffa:
1) How do you see yourself 5 years from now?
I could be the Head of the Language Department. InsyaAllah.

Financially; oh I have always been financially strong, alhamdulillah. Hehe. 5 years from now I should be able to buy a house, cash. InsyaAllah.

Family; I could already be married with one kid. Or a pair of twins.

2) Have you ever thought of publishing your own book?
Yeah, I have. All the time since I was 14.

3) Do you correct people's grammar mistakes when you read their blogs?
In my head, yes. I'll do it in their comment boxes if they ask me to.

From Ayaq Masak: WHY MUST ALL QUESTIONS BE IN ENGLISH?
Because I'd love to respond to them in English. I need to respond to them in English. I don't wish for my already-minute linguistic skills to deteriorate. They might if I stopped using them for a while.


From Chameleon: Someone really hates you, get the chance to stab you and you die. With God's willing, you're still alive!! What would you do/say to that particular person when you meet them?
First you said I died. Then I was suddenly alive. I can't really understand your question, Chameleon. But say if someone really stabbed me and I survived the attack, I'd ask the person what his/her problem was – after he/she is put behind bars.

From Sanzo: Any interesting questions from your own students? Example; 'Teacher, can I become a God?' If so, how do you answer them?
I don't do extra miles in my explanation unless I was talking about something that I really, really like. So for questions like, 'Teacher, can I become a God?', I'd simply give them the truth: No, you can't.

From Faisal Admar: I wanna see your face! LOL
That's not a question! Hehe. Well, I'm mysterious. For now, I choose to stay that way.

From Jiyuu: I feel you, sista. And here I thought blockage only happened to the lame writers. (Not implying you're lame in any way. I meant it happens to the best of us.)


Situation: You're stranded in a thick forest with a river running through it with the person you love and you have only a single apple to eat. You have no idea how long you are going to be stuck there and there is nothing else edible or else lack the required skills to scavenge anything. Question: What would you do when the both of you get hungry?
We'd eat the apple for energy and he'll catch fish at the river and make fire and prepare dinner and make beds out of anything that could give me comfort, well practically everything. I'll climb the tallest tree I could find to make a call out for help and we'll wait for Jiyuu's private jet to come pick us up. We'll be out in less than 24 hours. No problem at all. Hehe.

From Farah Hanani: What is your weirdest dream?
Most of my dreams are weird. I like them weird. I even have favourites (yeah I'm strange like that). So far, the weirdest would be the one in which I was on a holiday at my one of my aunts', with my mother. On the day of the arrival, she took my mother to shop. So, I was left alone in the double-storey house. Now here's the weird part; she told me to make myself at home and be careful if I were to go up to the third floor – but there couldn't be a third floor in a double-storey house, kan? That's what I said. And she told me this, in the dream, 'Tangga ke tingkat tiga tu kadang-kadang ada, kadang-kadang tak jumpa. So be careful. You might never come down once you go up.' She looked sad although she was smiling when she said that. That was when I realized that there was no single trace of her kids and her husband around the house. It was as if she had always been living there all by herself.

Is that weird enough for you?

From Avid Gunner: As a writer, do you struggle with Mary Sue?
Hehe. As far as I am concerned, I do not struggle in my writing of the character Nina. I find her to be a person I could easily relate to, but not someone I wish to be. She's someone I wish to know; to be friends with. I try to make her a believable character, with flaws and strengths of her own, nothing inhuman. So far things are going great, I haven't yet felt as if I'm struggling to not lead Nina into becoming a Mary Sue.

Done!

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Feels great. I guess the blockage's gone now. I might be able to come up with something independent after this. Thanks to everyone who helped! See you soon!