me and my tapir

Over a dinner of my mom's weird version of tom yam, I told my mom (after we bitched for about half an hour about the stupidities that maketh the stupid man, (Mohamad) Khir Toyo, (not forgetting the Datuk Seri and oh, Dr title)) that I wanted to adopt a tapir at the zoo.

I don't know how the conversation ended up with my mom's fascination about this incident at the Melaka zoo when my mom mistook an elephant's schlong for its trunk and wondered why it was spouting all this water until she realised that the trunk was attached to somewhere quite dubious... (And you wonder where I got my open, vulgar humour from.)

But anyway, yeah. My mom was all supportive and said, OK, why don't you go sponsor the tapirs RM100 a month or something because I told her that all donors will have their names listed on this page on the Zoo Negara website. By the way, none of the donors are channeling their money towards the tapirs which is so cruel of them. Who cares about the orangutans? Tapirs are so much more cuter. And if you put a picture of one underneath your pillow, they'll eat up all your bad dreams. So says the Japanese folklore.

Then I told my mom that maybe I'd get to give a name to a tapir. And that I have the perfect name for it. I'm gonna call it Tan Sri Ismail Merican, in honour of the Health director-general that I LOVE so much.

Actually, he is a major asshole. He is rude when he answers my calls for comments and he is a senile old man who would forget something he had told me two days earlier.

I thought it'd be cool to call my tapir Tan Sri. After all, you have dogs called Duke and that sounds all noble and shit. A Tan Sri is a Malaysian equivalent of a Duke, innit? So when I get to visit my adopted tapir, I'd go, "Oi, Tan Sri!" and then I'd take pictures of it pooping and put it up on Facebook with the label: "Here is Tan Sri Ismail Merican. He pooped a big one today." That's going to be so cute.

But my mom thought that that was a cruel thing to do. Not to the real Tan Sri, but to the tapir.

"You're going to name it after an ugly man," she said matter-of-factly.

True.

Maybe I'll just call it Tapir.

So tomorrow, I'm going to call the zoo and find out how I can make donations, get my name on that list of donors' page, and if I can give a name to one of the tapirs they have.

I love tapirs.