Mysterious nothing box

Besides very obvious physical differences, one of the amazing differences between man and women is their brain. Not the morphology ofcz, but how the brain works. Don’t duh me, I can prove it.

Let’s think of a man’s brain as a warehouse filled with many boxes. Each and every box is dedicated for a particular subject. There is one box for car, one box for job, one box for children, one box for you and one box for your mother- its somewhere in the basement. The boxes are bound by one rule: boxes never touch each other. When the man wants to discuss a topic, he just take one box, open it, and discuss what’s in that box and then close it, put it back very carefully not to touch any other boxes. That’s men.

In contrast, a woman’s brain is like a ball of wires. Zillions of microscopic centers and each and every one is connected like a complicated mesh. Job is connected to house, house connected to car, car connected to kids, kids connected to mother in law, and mother in law connected to father in-law and so on. It’s like the internet super highway. It’s driven by the energy called “emotion”. That is why women tend to remember everything..bcz they care about everything. Which men don’t!

Now, men, have a box in their brain that women are not aware of. This particular box has nothing in it. In fact we call it “the nothing box”. Of all the boxes in our brain, the nothing box is our favorite box. That is why a man can do something completely brain-dead for hours. Like fishing or sitting in front of TV and flipping channels. Until you hear a scream from the kitchen “stop thaaaat! You can’t possibly be watching anything”. Im not! Go away!

Recent researches done on human brain have actually proved that man has the unique ability to think about nothing…. “teeeeeet”. It’s just a straight line. But women’s brain is always active.. “tzzzzzzzz”. Something is always going on, be it early morning or middle of the night. That’s why women don’t understand this nothing box- and it drives them crazy!

There are women who asks, can I go to this nothing box with him? “no u can’t, then there is something”. Besides, you’d go in there and say “u know this place could really use some wall pictures, a nice coffee table there and some flowers here”… Noooo! Nothing. We don’t want nothing in our "nothing box". Get out!

“Mangkuk” is a bowl, but also an artful Malay word

“Korang ni semua mangkuk mangkuk lah” Said a surgeon while addressing a bunch of medical students. Literally it would translate to something like “you all are bowls”. He wasn’t taking about types of ceramics or plastic polymorphs from which bowls are made. It was more of a metaphorical expression.

What did he mean?

“Do you know what a mangkuk is?” asked the big guy. One scared little girl at the back mumbled “it’s less severe than bodoh”.

“Bodoh” is another widely used Malay term to describe some ones incapacity to handle a situation well, or rather when someone fails to please another person, and then he is a “bodoh”. Yeah! again, much different from its literal meaning in English, ie “idiot”.

That wasn’t his definition!

“That is not my definition; to me mangkuk is you all” he said with a grin on his face.Did he mean mangkuk is best defined by medical students?

“You all are from International Islamic University, you all are not idiots. You are intelligent, how many “A”s are we talking about? 10A, 12As, some can’t even count the number of “A”s they have” He explained further.

“You know it. We expect you to know it, you have been taught it all, but u can’t use it, you can’t apply it; that makes you all mangkuk- mangkuk besar!” – Of cause mangkuk besar would then mean we are bigger bowls than other small bowls.

Oo! Wait, I think I’ve got it! Mangkuk is just a person who holds loads of knowledge. But cant make use of the knowledge. Like manguk sayur, it just stores the sayur. Doesn’t eat it. Ha!!

Different people with different definitions!

Don’t just over generalize it. For another person, mangkuk might be a different entity. So, it’s little difficult to say what they actually mean by it unless you get a first hand explanation from the person himself. Nevertheless, we hear it pretty often.

At the beginning when you hear it, you may think it’s all the same, but believe me, it’s actually different. For orthopaedic surgeons "mangkuk" is a medical student, while “mangkuk besar” is a House Office (HO) and at this rate, Medical Officer (MO) would become “mangkuk besar sangat”.- a very big bowl indeed!

Since “mangkuk” is such a widely twisted terminology, I believe here it somehow signifies the closeness of the MS, HO and MO to the specialist. Or rather it might just be an expression of the degree of the knowledge the three group of people have- or rather supposed to have. That may explain the ascending scale of besar-ness of the mangkuk.

Take home message; Even though mankuk sayur and mangkuk ayam is understood well in general population, other professions has its own definition of mangkuk. Therefore, practice caution while using and digesting it.