Half a Void

I had another one of those odd dreams yesterday. Not last night, because these days I sometimes wake up in the middle of the night and then fall back to sleep before the handphone wakes me up--I still haven't put batteries in the alarm clock, and besides the handphone's alarm tone is customisable. At the moment it's a recording of me saying "Wake up. Wake up." in a slightly electronically-distorted tone, but when I figure out how to connect that phone to my computer, it will sing either "There is Life Outside Your Apartment", "I Feel Fantastic", or "The Mom Song"--you know, the one where Anita Renfroe yells "GET UP NOW GET UP NOW GET UP OUT OF BED".

Admittedly those are rather loud noises, but then I needn't worry about waking the roommate anymore because he's gone away; the post-it he left behind said that one of his friends' roommate had gone away on exchange and he was going there, which means he's been waiting to move again since the beginning of the semester. It does put a bit of perspective on why he's not been terribly friendly or why he still hasn't told the bank about his change of address, which I always thought was odd given the impossibly ordered sort of life he seems to lead. Still, he's probably happier where he is now. So that's at least one person out of my life for the rest of it; if I never saw him before this year I'll likely not see him again for the rest of the course, and after that it's even less likely.

Still, I don't like waking up to an empty space. I'm used to having people around, since whenever I go to visit family I end up sharing rooms. The family's size is such that rooms have to be shared or else somebody has to go on the floor or couch or kitchen stovetop or something, which means that by now I'm used to waking up to the noises of people either yelling "WAKE UP!" or snoring or simply being awake with all the little noises that entails. Waking up to complete silence, apart from the fan's whirring, is... new to me, and not entirely comfortable. I suppose that of course there's more freedom to do whatever I want in the room, but I was always doing that already anyway.

...I wonder how the Pig is. It's slightly worrying when the last messages he sent me were decidedly emo; I've enough faith in whatever common sense he has that he hasn't gone suicidal, but it's still worrying. And he hasn't appeared on MSN or Skype in awhile (I use the webcam as a mic these days because my mic-equipped headset is uncomfortable and doesn't work anyway), which is also cause for worry; and the last conversation I had with him was not the most optimistic either. It's very, very worrying, but what can I do about it but pray? Granted, that's probably the best thing I could do in such a situation, but would it be asking too much for an immediate and obvious answer?

Overall my emotions have been fluctuating rather violently over the past... how many days? the past weekend, at least; at the very least, since Friday. Friday there was a surprise quiz (not quite surprise, merely forgotten-by-me) for the elective, which I didn't find terribly difficult except for one calculation question that I couldn't get the numbers to add up for. I hate multiple-choice calculation questions because if the lecturer has made a mistake, the question becomes a huge time sink while you try to figure out how exactly the numbers need to be arranged and dealt with to produce the correct answer. That wasn't difficult, although it was a surprise; but on Friday I was a bit on edge because Saturday promised to be busy. In addition I was dealing with a very demanding person all day that day, and it ended badly--I wanted to go seek them out and pound their face into the MRT tracks and then stomp on them and leap to safety a moment before the train arrived to properly turn them into mush. Friday, therefore, was a day of quite great irritation.

It was also somewhat stressful, because on Friday night I received a phone call to tell me that I shouldn't skip lectures: one of the professors had announced a project, and most of the people I know in class had been there and promptly formed groups, and had not included me in those. I therefore had to start thinking of people who might have also skipped class that day and might make good groupmates.

Saturday I woke early; the Doulos was in town (both literally and metaphorically) and I wanted to visit. For those who don't know, the Doulos is a ship, owned by Operation Mobilisation (OM)--you can Google the organisation. What it has on board is a huge crew of missionaries who go from country to country aboard the ship, and each place they go to they do something different, or so I gather from what I know and have heard. Most often they sell books, which also helps raise money for their work. The books, obviously, were my main reason for going--I've been visiting the Doulos whenever it was in town since very young. It's quite famous amongst Christians, I think; at any rate I have memories of me being very small and wandering around what seemed like neverending shelves of books and wanting to buy a lot more than what I could have. I usually had to settle for just one book, or two, or none.

Last Saturday I therefore went, and spent--let me see--almost two hours aboard, during which I managed to select six books for a grand total of SGD24, which is MUCH cheaper than any bookstore I've ever seen in this country (or, for that matter, Malaysia). I'm currently reading one and have lent another to a friend, and I hope he's reading it. It was a nice, if slightly underwhelming, experience, if for nothing more than the fact that I'm now taller than the bookshelves and they no longer tower over me the way they do in my memories. I was certainly giddy over having got books, though!

And then I got back to the room, and the Pig was online, and we chatted--that was the depressing conversation I mentioned before; the details are of course confidential, but I cheered him up as best I could (it seemed to work, if only temporarily). It was a Skype call, and lasted nearly 90 minutes.

The night was spent quite pleasantly with a few people, none of which have ever been mentioned here; but the one I knew best of them was Almond, and the others were his friends (if I am right, they were from the Christian fellowship). I was there mainly because Almond had been worrying very greatly earlier (he is a freshman, and is connected to me in a circuitous route--he is the brother of a senior friend of Herr Robson, and both Herr Robson and the senior friend attend the same church as I, which is where we first met) about gaining enough participation points to secure a place in the hostel next academic year, and then had proceeded naturally to start worrying about my participation points as well. It turned out that one of those friends knows somebody in the choir and the choir is recruiting, and will provide enough points for a place in the hostel next academic year too.

Yes, I know. I am very strangely connected.

After some time during which we discussed the possibilities and problems (foremost being that next semester I'll be almost entirely away from school and hence unable to attend the twice-a-week practices), I have decided to go for an audition this Thursday; but I have first to contact the friend-of-Almond-who-knows-people-in-choir to arrange for that.

That was Saturday. On Sunday there was church, and then the Bible study group after it, both of which were pleasant--the folks are friendly and the food is good and plentiful. But after that, both Almond and I returned to my room (he had borrowed a DVD from the church library and wanted to watch it) and that was when I found the roommate had become the ex-roommate, but had left a nice explanatory post-it under my mouse. The DVD was enjoyable, but when Almond had left I began to start feeling like the room was a bit empty.

Yesterday I went through the whole day wondering if it was fair of me to join the choir so late in the semester and with the promise of only being really active with them for half a semester (or even less!) and trying to find groupmates for the project; I did, in the end, manage to find a group to join and decide to audition for the choir and see how it goes, but all the same I was feeling rather lonely by the end of the school day, not least because Easy Kill insisted on constantly discussing the project and, of course, I had nothing to do with it so I just sat there being left-out.

But Monday night was nice. As I've mentioned before (I think) I'm one of the small-group leaders in Campus Crusade, and last night was one of the meetings for the small-group leaders; and it was very refreshing. I think one of the things was that it got my mind off of my problems, where it'd been for the whole weekend and that Monday; and quite frankly, it's good to be with friends where you can be ridiculous as you like and nobody minds (or at least, they don't mind too much). It was refreshing.

Which leads me to wonder where that dream I had this morning came from--it must have been morning because I woke up at the end of the dream and it was 8am. The dream's events are as follows:

I and a girl (I remember thinking she was my sister in the dream, but I don't know which sister) were undead, but not zombies or vampires or any such thing. I was simply the way I am now except I didn't need to eat or drink or breathe. We were living in a small, comfortable house with Sweeney Todd and Helena Bonham Carter (not Mrs Lovett, but how I knew I don't know), and every night (my dream had montages of several nights going by) we would have pie. Suddenly I found out that Sweeney Todd did not like undead people, so I and the girl had to eat the pie so that we would appear to not be undead. After that we went to sleep. The next day when I woke up, I had facial hair (facial hair seems to be a recurrence in my dreams), and lots of it: I looked something like an Ewok, except the hair was all black except around the nose and mouth, where there was a perfect elliptical carpet of white hair. I remember being panicked and leaving the house, and wondering how long it would take to tweeze out all that hair. Somehow I then knew that having hair on the face and in that particular pattern would identify me as undead, and I fell into a pond where another man then dived in. He recognised that I was undead because I was underwater and perfectly fine while he was expelling bubbles from his mouth.

Then I woke.

Wasps and Squished Lizards

THE WHAT? How did it get to be September the 22nd without me noticing? How did time fly so quickly--exams begin in less than two months--egads, how time does fly! And I've so few posts up too--not that much really happens, but I have got to do this more frequently. Maybe if I left this tab permanently open, like my Facebook tabs (Home, MouseHunt, newly-added Mythmongers, and occasionally Country Story) and Twitter, you'd get a lot more updates from me here. As it is I am regrettably infrequent.

My life hasn't been terribly exciting, in any case; things happen, deadlines get met, I get stressed, I sleep and eat and go about my life. This week is the first week of school where both my Monday and Tuesday nights are free, though I'm still sore from yesterday's frisbee game and the trail-walking I and some Crusaders did later in the afternoon/evening. Sore in the arms, oddly enough, which I take to mean that my lower body at least is somewhat healthy.

...I've been talking with the Pig a lot on MSN, ever since the trip to Patience where we hung out a heckuva lot. I still miss those days, partly because they were holidays, and partly 'cause he's a great guy. Who thinks the same of me, which is very ego-stroking--not that my ego needs a terrible lot of stroking before it goes whack out of control, but it's a jolly nice sort of feeling. I think I'm rather needy for affection that way, and by gads he's a veritable motherlode of the stuff. Heh heh heh heh heh.

Though it just makes me wonder how people see me. The problem with that sort of question, of course, is that you can only ask it of people who already have known you for a long time and are perfectly comfortable being honest and hurtful to you; complete strangers are going to either say something nice or something noncommittal, and if they say something negative one is all too likely to simply brand them a troll and discount whatever they do say. And heck, how does one answer that sort of question anyway? I wouldn't know how to describe three-quarters of the people I associate with--ask me to describe people and I'll tell you facts about them instead of opinions--descriptions in their own way, I suppose, in the same way as "cold and sweet" describes a flavour of ice-cream. And as for how I see myself--!

I suppose this is mostly brought on by the roomie--I don't usually care so much when the person I get randomly allocated to live with for a year pretty much ignores my existence: my A-levels and the previous three roomies or so are testament to that. It's just that this particular roomie is in a very similar course of study to mine, and is Malaysian; as a result we have heaps of mutual friends while remaining complete strangers. It's probably also somewhat odd-feeling when said mutual friends turn up and he does a complete switch from work-obsessed to genial--in fact he's very much like my father that way, which may explain some of all this madness. Still, the fact remains that I haven't exchanged much more than maybe 20 sentences with him in the past month, and our most reliable communication is the grunt of assent he makes when I look at him with my finger on the light-switch every night when I want to go to sleep.

Still, at least life is moderately comfortable, if very quiet, in the room--the loudest noise probably is the clicking of my mouse (it's very clicky) or the tapping on my keyboard--I type very fast and very loud. Or at least, very fast for someone who's never actually taken any secretarial speed-typing courses. I presume such things exist.

I think I've found a streak of cruelty in me--well, not too wide a streak, but it's there. It's very odd and discomfiting when people call me out on being rather more hurtful than I absolutely need to be to get my point across (or when I don't even have a point to get across), since I don't usually think of myself as cruel or hard-hearted--maybe a bit mad-science-y, but not mean. I shall attempt to do something about this, but I don't know what: think happy thoughts, I suppose, or help someone across the road or something...

I was supposed to start studying an hour ago. I spent the last half hour on this post, and I've still not even started describing the things that've occurred over the past few weeks; still, do I really need to remember trivia? especially trivia that concerns myself? One never knows when some information may come in handy, of course. I might someday be replaced by a doppelganger and my most intimate contacts will want to know some strange trivia about me to identify the "real" me; but this log is online and anybody who wants to replace me will almost certainly have read it! ...I think I shall study now. And then shower, and sleep. My money says the roomie only reappears just as I am about to switch the lights off.

Jelly Babies and Balloon Wars

"School starts again tomorrow"--that was what, 19 days ago? I've been lax, haven't I? but I've also been busy, busy, there's so much to be done and so much more to plan for--these are times when there isn't time to do much but keep on doing, doing, doing until one falls over into bed and cannot even reminisce over the day that has just past before tiredness claims one's consciousness.

Admittedly I'm exaggerating, just a little bit, but then--

This, I warn you, will be a long post. 19 days is three weeks--or very nearly so--and with the hectic nature of these past weeks, I have many, many events to record. In fact I probably have few events to record, but I'll be going into them with my customary amount of detail, which will simply fluff them up all the more.

Thus--we begin with the first day of school, on which I had only two hours of classes because the labs and tutorials don't start until the second week of school, at least; this semester, in fact, labs only started on the third week. Very little happened that day and the next few, apart from myself and Goalkeeper constantly keeping track of each other's locations: with me being a squatter in his place at the time, we had to always know where the other person was so that whoever needed to get back to the room could do so (there was, after all, only one room key between the two of us). That first week passed quickly, and I remember there was Crusade-related activity as well--we were still surveying the freshmen and giving out foolscaps--I haven't the exact figures, but we gave away upwards of 800 items.

The first and second week were mostly characterised, in fact, by Crusade's aim to reach out to the freshmen--the first week was surveys and the second week (at least the first three weekdays) by the extra-curricular booth stuff...

Here I digress for an explanatory note. The University has many students, who have a variety of interests. These students, somehow, tend to band together, and when you have a large enough band then you call it a Club. The University officially recognises Clubs of a certain size and above, and joining these Clubs then allows you a certain amount of points that help you stay in Halls as well as looking good on your resume, depending on which Club you are in. The University, during one of the early weeks of the school year (in this year it was the second week), holds a Extra-Curricular Activity Fair (informally, the ECA Fair) for a number of days (three days this year) during which the Clubs may apply for and, if permission is gained, set up a booth to advertise their presence to the student body and hopefully gain members.

Now, the Crusade is a University-recognised Club, and so we had a booth. We also had a mascot (costume donated by one of the Crusaders), which I unfortunately never got the chance to see walking around. I'm not sure what response it got either--my classes on Monday and Tuesday are such that I wasn't able to be at the booth very much, and on Wednesday Goalkeeper took the key and rendered me unable to leave the room until the roomie returned--otherwise I'd have had to leave the place unlocked and very unsafe; thus I was terribly inactive as far as booth-manning was concerned.

On Thursday there were classes from 8.30 onwards, and by the second Thursday most of the class realised that one of our lecturers is the kind of person who knows a great deal about something, but just can't quite communicate it--in our case he knows statistics very well, but is absolutely unable to tell us why the equation takes such a form, or what the various bits mean. There's a petition already being passed around where people plead for a change of a lecturer to one who can talk in terms we can understand, though frankly I'm pessimistic about the chances of it succeeding. The faculty hasn't quite as many lecturers as it could have.

...I'm probably mixing up chronologies quite badly here. The weeks were just THAT interchangeable--well, not exactly. I simply haven't very much of a grasp on time. At any rate I do know that sometime during the the early weekdays of the second week I applied for, and received, an extra elective which I was very happy about until I looked at the lecture notes. Which, to my horror, were entirely in Comic Sans of various font sizes, and consisted of abrupt sentences ending in far too many punctuation marks--you know--things like "IS THIS SO????!!!!!" and "WHAT IS ENERGY???????????"--things that don't inspire any great confidence in the lecturer. I like my lecture notes to not leap off the page with aggressive-sounding roars. (Yesterday I attended the lecture, and found that the lecturer is able to talk for 3 hours with only a ten-minute break in between because the students get tired, and still not manage to finish the set of lecture notes because of all the side anecdotes.) I also, during--I think it was on the morning of last Thursday or Wednesday--applied to become a legal squatter in Goalkeeper's room, but it was rendered unnecessary by the email that I received last Friday afternoon that said that I'd been allocated a room.

And so I moved into my new room on Monday night, with Goalkeeper's help, after spending Monday morning paying for the new room and Monday afternoon obtaining the keys to it and finding out where the nearest road was (it turns out the nearest road is right beside) so that the taxi would know where to go to make me expend the least effort in shifting things. Thus I have been living in my new room, with the new roommate, since Monday night; I quite like this new room, as it's one of the older Halls and thus has more floor space. The newer Halls have less. The roommate's another quiet, neat-and-tidy type--why do I tend to end up with neat, quiet, health-conscious, studious people? they make me feel so guilty all the time--and so far we haven't exchanged much more information than that we're both male and that he doesn't mind me switching off the light on his side of the room when I want to sleep. So far he also regularly sleeps later than I, and wakes later--I keep getting woken up by passing traffic, though so far I've managed to regularly get 8 hours' sleep (on Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays at any rate).

And today is Saturday; it's 7.30pm at the time of typing. I've spent most of the day going between various Facebook games and my statistics notes (I'm almost at the point of giving up trying to understand 'em and just plugging in formulae for use whenever needed), which makes today unusually productive. I should probably go for dinner soon, too.

A couple days before was Thursday, which was fun--it was Student Union Day, which means classes got cancelled between 10.30am and 2.30pm; Crusade took that time to organise a bit of board games time and also provide an opportunity for the Crusaders to sit around watching each other become competitive. I played Munchkin, which is actually quite fun; it does, however, require a bit of knowledge to play, and I didn't have any--so I lost quite badly. All the same it was fun. And after the event was officially ended, several of us didn't have any classes to go to, so we stayed back to help clean up the rooms we'd rented for that (there are function rooms all over the University for Club events) and began bashing on each other with balloons. It's a mercy the room doors weren't transparent, because I suspect if the people outside could look in, we'd never be allowed to rent those rooms again. And then we continued playing card games--myself and a few others, of which one was Herr Robson--Munchkin was followed by Monopoly Deal (which is like UNO, except Monopoly-themed) and then the actual Monopoly (which I lost due to not having houses, though I did own half the board's worth of properties). We took a break for dinner, then returned to Munchkin; we only finished playing everything around 10.45pm, which means I'd effectively spent nearly 12 hours on dice and card and inane laughter. It was, however, very much fun.

...I shall go to dinner.

Mixety Mix

School starts again tomorrow--it feels sometimes as if my whole life has been a long series of repetitions of schools restarting. This blog certainly has had a lot of schools restarting in it--considering I've been in school for quite awhile, that's understandable. And with two semesters a year, you'd think I'd get used to having school restart and end by now; but I haven't. It's still change, however expected, and will still take some readjusting to.

I spent pretty much most of the weekend with family: most of Saturday and nearly all of Sunday. But I'm getting ahead of myself--there's at least 2 days undocumented between the last post and Saturday, so I shall get to them.

Let me see. The last post was Wednesday, the day on which Herr Robson moved out of the hostel where he'd been squatting and into the room which he is currently renting, outside the campus; it costs him about SGD260 a month, and is a rather cramped little space--not at all to my liking, but I suppose one has to settle for what one can get in these times. Accommodation, basic need though it be, has never been value for money. Wednesday was a quite relaxed day, I should say, unless I've totally forgotten what actually happened that day.

On Thursday, as I recall, I had to wake early (naturally, Goalkeeper woke earlier) because there were things to do. Campus Crusade does this every year--we spread publicity about ourselves to the freshmen at large through distribution of foolscaps (everybody loves a free foolscap) together with surveys and things, and of course to distribute them you need to pack 'em in little plastic wrappers first (for ease of transport) and then you need people to go around distributing the things, and people to carry around pens for people to do the surveys with. I was part of the workforce this year. We spent the morning forming assembly lines, as we called them, to pack the foolscaps and a small brochure into plastic wrappers and then to seal them (the sealing part was the bottleneck); and then in the afternoon, around lunch or so, we headed out to distribute them in teams (there were two, both heading to different places at different times). My team managed to distribute about 450 or so, which was quite a lot. The extra packed plastic bags (to be used later) got bundled up in brown paper wrappings and put in Goalkeeper's room, and there's a whole stack of 'em behind me at this moment.

Which reminds me: Goalkeeper and I moved again (that's a lot of moving in the past three months!), and now are in a newly-renovated room. We spent Friday afternoon to evening doing it, since he was busy in the morning and I was asleep, only having woken up around 9 or 10 or something like that--actually much earlier than usual, given that my natural waking time is something like 11am to 12pm. It was very sweaty work and tiring; thank heavens we'd got access to a trolley owned by Crusade (remember those stacks of foolscaps in brown paper? They didn't exactly get there by hand-carrying) and so we moved most of the heaviest stuff that way, after sweeping and mopping the room to Goalkeeper's comfort zone: he's a little more careful about hygiene than I am, but the room (when we first looked at it) was too dusty even for me.

On Saturday I met the parents in the morning for the second wedding of an old family friend (he's known my parents since before I was born), which took me about 1.5 hours of travelling to get to; then there was a three-hour meeting with the Crusade committee which I am a part of this year; and then I went to the wedding dinner, because a guest had suddenly become unable to make it and so there was a spare place if I wanted it (and I did). The wedding dinner was lovely, but a little slow--they served one course every half an hour and I was still achingly hungry at 10.30pm (the dinner had started at around 8pm). I left around 11pm (just after the second-last course had been eaten), but arrived at the room at close to 1am due to the difficulty of getting a taxi at that time.

On Sunday I went to church with the parents, and then spent the entire day with them (the Gobbler joined us after his church service too); we went around, did a lot of walking, became extremely tired, and eventually we had dinner and split up--I returned to the room at around 11pm yesterday, completely tired out.

And tomorrow is the first day of classes (for tomorrow they'll be 3.30pm to 5.30pm), and after that is a Crusade meeting. How time goes!

Don't Be Ridiculous

It is fourteen days since my last post, so I'll start this one off by wishing the Empress a happy 21st--I hope it turns out better for her than it did for me, and I expect it probably will too: I've already completely forgotten how my 21st birthday went.

(I just spent a few minutes reading how it went. Apparently nothing at all occurred.)

...well, then, let's see. 14 days, two weeks; what's happened in that two weeks? A great deal, I must say. This post is going to be a rather long one, so I might as well type it today since the rest of this week promises to be rather less than refreshing.

I returned to Spore last July the 20th, and there was a camp on July the--let me see--the--oh dear, my memory's definitely failing me these days, but I'm relatively sure it was the 22nd to the 24th of July; it was for the University's branch of Campus Crusade, since I'm one of the Bible study group leaders (it's how I tend to explain my role, since saying "SM" tends to lead to long speeches and explanations, and I really don't very much like long expository speeches) and required training. Besides, it was a chance to meet everybody else up after three months and it's good to be able to say we haven't lost any familiarity with each other as yet.

The camp wasn't exactly tiring, though it did tend to end late, what with all the suppers--the food there was, I suppose, quite good; but I'd only just got back from Malaysia and my taste buds were still adjusting at the time, so it was only on the first night of supper that I got out of the "we do food better in Malaysia" line of thought that always hovers over me just after getting back. It was good to meet the new people, too.

After the camp it was a few more days, during which the Hall office kept sending me emails suggesting I should move out--at first gently, and then they grew more insistent; and then they decided they had better threaten to change the keys. I think I moved into the current room some time before the 29th--let me see--I returned from the first camp on the 24th; which means I moved rooms on the 26th or so; maybe the 27th. I had help, of course: I got a taxi to help with the transport and a friend (with whom I am now squatting--let us call him Goalkeeper, because he does that well) to help with carrying things around and, naturally, to provide a place for the things to be carried to.

My family turned up in Spore on the first night of the first camp, if I recall correctly, and stayed a few days; but I only actually met them for a day or two of their stay here, in between camps--I think I met them on Sunday and Monday, which means I was already moved by the 27th at least. It wasn't the best of meetings; for one thing, retirement hasn't mellowed my father at all and he's still the same grumpy, rushing, incredibly stressed-out person he's been for the past half century or so. We exchanged maybe five lines of dialogue through the entire two days, mostly about my lack of plans for self-improvement during the remainder of the holidays (two lines) and how slowly I was moving along through public transport (three lines). As for the rest--ah well. The Empress is the only one I can really comfortably talk to, I think; the parents, for obvious reasons, are extremely uncomfortable people to talk to--and should they ever read this they are likely to throw their hands up and growl something about me being remarkably uncommunicative as well. Gobbler's getting to be more and more like dad, though I'm trying to head him off before he gets there, and the two youngest--*throws hands up in air*--the kid sister is a quiet thing and the kid brother is a lump of stone that only good manners prevent me from curb stomping.

As it was, I lived with them for two days, didn't really enjoy myself terribly--why is it that they have no concept of relaxation or entertainment, and seem to imagine that one can spew out enlightening tidbits of information at the drop of a hat? The Gobbler met me and the first thing he said was "Hi, what did you learn at camp?" upon which I started sifting through three days' and two nights' worth of information and tried to figure out what sort of thing I had learned that he might want to know about, and said "Lots of things" to stall a bit. And then we met the parents and he said I'd forgotten everything already. Really.

At any rate they left for So Hour on Monday, during which a great deal of stupidity occurred and the last thing my father said to me before they left was "always late!" on the phone as I was trying to get to the bus depot with the Empress to see them off. At that point the Empress took the phone away from me (possibly seeing my expression) and she took care of the rest of the "conversation" if you can call it that. My parents have a habit of going on and on for lengths of time about what they see as fatal flaws in people, regardless of its propriety or the discomfort of the people they are talking to (or about).

Well, the family left for So Hour, and I resumed normal, non-aggravating life, which meant the second camp--for freshmen, but I went as a senior--also by Campus Crusade. (Yes, I'm relatively involved in it. Don't look so surprised. I don't sit in front of this laptop all the time, you know.) It was pretty fun, too, and decidedly tiring on the second night since everybody decided that sleep was overrated and broke out cards and various other things to play games with. I have it on good authority that the guitars had barely three hours of rest between them and certainly I got barely three hours myself, having stayed up until 3.30am watching half-asleep, full-grown boys (egads, the way some of them go into hysterics!) roll around floors giggling whenever somebody lost a game, or got a penalty for losing too many times (they call it a "forfeit"), and so on. Very enjoyable the camp was.

...and that was about five days ago; the rest of the time has been mostly spent between Goalkeeper and Herr Robson, who (until just now) was living in a nearby block. We've been having a lot of meals together, and admittedly it's good to get out and have some human contact once in awhile. Goalkeeper's a nice guy, but we're different enough that it's always a little bit awkward, I think... or perhaps I just don't know him well enough yet, and certainly it's bad manners to complain about one's host when the host has been faultlessly polite.

I played pool yesterday... it's similar to billiards (which I played with the siblings before, in Fifth Hun), but I had to re-learn how to play all over again and I've gotten very attached to that little marvelous stick with the large X on one end of it. Very useful that thing is, and much more stable than my left hand! And then I tried playing soccer and found myself the heaviest person of the 8 that were playing; and of course, I was slow and lumbering and utterly without any sort of decent reaction speed. (And since I was wearing slippers I couldn't kick very well either.) It was also entirely tiring and very... constraining? It's odd how people enjoy being unable to use various body parts in a game--it's like a Self Imposed Challenge, but you have to have at least some level of skill to undertake those things, and I haven't got any.

I really want to start swimming regularly again, I think. Maybe I'll also take up jogging or running or badminton, if I can find somebody of my fitness level who'll not mind it; that'll be difficult, obviously. I'm far more unfit than the average person.

Winged Bills

I returned to Spore yesterday; it was another 7-hour journey, during which I dozed fitfully and ate and drank very, very little--I try to avoid heavy eating just before and during travelling: the whole process is bad enough without the risk of travel sickness.

Let us see--the last post was July the 9th--that's about two days before I left Patience for KL... well, then, let us take up the story there. What happened? Let me try to recall--ah, yes, it was Thursday. Well, little of note occurred: I got into an argument with the kid brother that resulted in us not talking to each other (in fact we still haven't talked to each other) that mostly centered around him never listening to what I say unless it increases his level of comfort, and thus landing himself in a large pile of discomfort (and I-told-you-so's) and when I refused to listen to his demands for comfort (read: my laptop), he went into a fuss and stopped talking to me entirely. Not much of a loss, admittedly; his conversation tends to revolve around himself and his own opinions, with very little room for others'--it's not unlike my dad's that way.

The last time I saw the Pig (this trip at least) was the night before his trip to Betel Island; shortly after he came back, his classes started again--but I've already mentioned that. In any case we never managed to go for food again after that trip; it's a pity, because I've no idea when or if we'll ever meet up again in real life--online is a whole other matter (which reminds me: I should restart regularly using Skype sometime).

I left Patience on the morning of the 11th, along with a friend from church and two uncles; we were joining a camp in Payday (name, again, changed for anonymity) organised by OM; it lasted from the 11th to the 16th, and was immensely interesting. Huge changes on perspective that I'm trying to maintain, and a great deal of quite interesting people met (though I'm slightly embarrassed to say I haven't Facebooked them all, or added them all to MSN just yet--or even emailed for that matter). It was a very nice camp, apart from that we had to leave early due to transport issues (basically the uncle who was driving didn't want to get back to his condo late); and somehow I got the impression that the uncles were there more to evaluate than to make friends and learn--I mean, seriously. 83 campers there, and the two of them were pretty much stuck to each other no matter what the occasion. Far be it from me to jump to conclusions, but I've the hunch they didn't get very much out of it apart from maybe some amusement.

We left the camp on the night of the 15th; I had started asking around on the 14th for accomodation in KL, but only actually got it on the morning of the 16th with Jogger (who is back for summer holidays); in the meantime I had to endure a lot of parental You-Should-Have-Done-It-Sooners and one from the Coconut, who appears unable to decline my requests without tacking on a You-Are-And-Were-Wrong. Claus said that he thinks she hates me. I think he's right.

At any rate I stayed in the condo that Jogger's parents (and Jogger, when he's around) inhabit, from the morning of the 16th to the afternoon of the 20th, and during that time I spent a great deal of time with Claus and Blue (Claus's girlfriend), most of it being carted around to places of food, though other things did occur too. It was very nice, and also quite incredibly draining on the wallet--let me do a bit of tracking...

16th (Thursday):
-Movie: Harry Potter 6 (RM 10)
-Pasar Malam: Foul tofu (RM 2); Tofufa (RM 1.10); Yoyo ice (RM 2)
Total: RM 5.10

17th (Friday):
-Lunch from a bakery: Bread (RM 3.20)
-Dinner at Kaki Korner: Chicken Maryland (free)
-Supper at Shajahan: Roti tisu (RM 1.80); Milo ping (RM 2)
Total: RM 12.10

18th (Saturday):
-Lunch from a mamak: Rice with egg (RM 2.20)
-Low One: LAN cable (RM 6); mouse (RM 10)
-Dinner at SS2 Murni: Chicken Napoleon (RM 10); small Honeydew Blended Special (RM 4)
Total: RM 44.30

19th (Sunday):
-Breakfast: Charkuayteow (RM 1)
-Lunch: Prawn noodles (RM 7.50); Milo ping (RM 2)
-Dinner at Shajahan: Murtabak daging (RM 5); Milo panas (RM 1.60)
-7-11: Orange juice (RM 1.60)
-TBR: Nasi lemak telor (RM 2); Teh tarik biasa (free--I forgot to pay Claus for this one)
-BRJ: Indomie biasa (RM 3.50)
Total: RM 67.80

...I'm pretty sure I forgot a few meals in there; I'll have to talk to Claus again to make sure I didn't inadvertently leave anything out--after all we spent an average of 7 hours together a day (usually with Blue along), and one is liable to forget small details in there. Also, this pales in comparison to the amount I ate when in Patience with the Pig as well as the amount I usually eat in So Hour (I always say I have one meal a day there--it begins when I wake and ends just before the grandfolks go to bed)...

...I'll probably need a weight-loss regimen set up soon.

Runners and Walkers

I'm quite badly tired out. I think it may be due to me not having woken naturally since the family arrived--I've been wakened every morning before ten by an overly cheerful voice, occasionally accompanied by a whap to the stomach (and, admittedly, my abdomen is sizable) or pats on the arm or back--my sleeping position is on my belly, limbs splayed out (right hand beside head, left arm around pillow, right leg curled up, left leg straight out), and apparently this is a position that greatly invites people to wake it by physical contact. While I generally hold no objections to physical contact (except from people I have some animosity towards, or am unfamiliar with, or simply don't usually touch), the circumstances make it somewhat less than appreciated. And add to that the fact that the kid brother and I have still been helping to move heavy objects around--although the weight is decreasing, the work is still tiring--and that we commonly stay up 'til 1am watching The Nanny--it's no surprise I'm heavy-lidded most of the time. I hardly talk at all these days, though the sinus and cough probably contribute to that. They're getting better, however: surprisingly a bit of Vitamin C and cod liver oil capsules did the trick for me--no garlic in the ear, thankyouverymuchpleasedon'tletthedoorstrikeyouonthewayout.

I've had a couple of rather... strange dreams lately--beginning last week, I think... I don't remember the exact day, and I forgot to write it down at once when I woke; but I still have a rough idea of the dreams.

Dream 1: I was in a dimly-lit place, wearing my usual attire, and for some reason it was hazy, though my breathing was unaffected. There were many other humanoid shapes around, though the bad lighting meant that I could not discern a single face or any distinguishing marks. They were all silent and roughly the same size as well. I was holding a hoe and the other figures were all holding various household implements--mops, brushes, etc; and suddenly I knew that we were in some sort of game or contest; though I couldn't figure out the rules or the prize, it seemed that we were in some sort of fight to the death. The shadowy figures began moving slowly about, and I whacked at a couple of the figures' legs with my hoe; they were soon defeated and, seeing no other figures near me, I sat down. Suddenly there was a bit of pain at the back of my neck, at the base of my head, and when I touched it I found I was bleeding, and I moved out of the way of the next incoming attack--somebody was attacking me with a bladed item, so I got up--it was not a deep wound, as I found myself moving with no difficulty, and tried to take their feet off too; but my strikes were curiously weak, and the shaft of the hoe kept on bouncing off its (I hesitate to say "his") arms. Then I woke.

Dream 2 occurred some days after Dream 1, and my memory of it is comparatively hazy: I only remember that the whole family was made up of army people--sergeants, corporals and the like--and for some reason there was an argument and somebody was threatening to resign their post, leading to a huge family feud about it, because it was peacetime anyway.

The Pig hasn't been replying my messages since he got back from the Peninsula--well, once or twice, but that was just after he got off the plane--I managed to predict, with some accuracy, the time when he would turn his phone on after leaving the plane (assuming, of course, that the plane had arrived on time and that he would obey the order to switch off electronic devices with communicative functions), and that was the last of our communication; I think he's out of credit, and I'd phone over to find out except that I have a sneaking suspicion that both his phones are being tied up talking to his girlfriend, or that she's around and he's not free to talk anyway. It's a bit of a pity since I'd've liked to see him again before leaving... I might be back in December, but that's so highly unlikely that I might as well admit I'm unlikely to reappear for the next year or two, and by then we'll both have graduated and he'll be off somewhere and I'll be off somewhere else. At any rate I've been spending the time with nobody but family and family's contacts--people from church, old acquaintances, relatives--I've gone nowhere without family around and truth be told, I'm starting to hanker after a day or two of uninterrupted time for myself to just sit back and do nothing useful.

After all that's what the parents tend to look at when time is being spent: the usefulness of it--whether whatever is being done will make one a more useful member of society, or a better (read: higher-scoring) student, or a more skilful worker, or a healthier person (from any aspect you care to think of)--and I tend to consider activities in terms of Required or Interesting, and while the parents are around and the Internet's on restricted access, I've been doing a lot more Required things than Interesting ones, which is not to say that the entire holiday time with the family around has been a dreary affair--merely that they tend to consider "What Needs Doing" first and then forget "What Might Be Enjoyed Doing". It's probably something to do with their growing-up process, which sounds like it was full of hardships the way they tell it--you know, the tales of "I woke every day at 4.30am to walk half a mile in the dark to strip trees for bark which I had to stomp and process into wood pulp which I then soaked before walking to school three miles away without breakfast, and then after that I had to walk back to the farm and plant things/harvest things until night when I would do my homework by the flickering light of fireflies that we caught by hand in the fields and then I'd lay out the wood pulp to dry so I could make rough paper out of it for the next day's homework". Which of course probably is entirely true, but has coloured their thinking to a certain extent and now I can't sit around the house playing the Wii or watching TV or reading fiction without being told to grow up and do useful things like prepare for next semester's exams.

I suppose one can't go through life without a healthy amount of doing Required things; I just don't like the way the world seems structured so that Required things and Interesting things are necessarily segregated; duties, yes, wonderful things, world wouldn't turn without 'em, but goodness gracious do they have to take up the whole day and can't we loll about for an hour or two spouting nonsense?

The walks by the beach are still ongoing; just that now they're a whole-family affair, and I usually walk in the bit of sea where the waves gently lap around my midcalf while the rest of the bunch go jogging around and the mother walks along in the far rear, sedately staying un-sweaty and un-wet. I always end up walking alone, because they like running and I don't; so I walk in the waves, watching the crabs scurry for cover and the jellyfish and so on--you already have a comprehensive description of what the beach tends to be like during my walks on it. I found a dead turtle washed up on the sand a few days ago; it seemed fresh, since I didn't smell any decomposition, though it had stopped bleeding from any wounds it might have had. It was on its belly, and I didn't want to turn it over, so the only wounds I could see were a rather deep-looking stab on the top of its shell, slightly to the lower left of the apex (if you were standing at the tail and looking towards the head) and a slash into its left rear flipper, which had pretty much entirely taken the flipper off (it was floating freely in the waves, unlike the other three flipppers) and appeared to have gotten into the insides, because there were tendril-like bits of meat also floating in the water. The turtle was quite a large one, too, though the parents (I told them about it and the whole family came to see it--they'd been jogging and hadn't noticed it) said it wasn't quite full-grown yet. The poor thing was piteous, so we took photographs of it.

Of Holidays

The electricity got cut off again the night before last: the third time in a week and on the same day as the previous post, too; it was terribly annoying, especially since it was night and everything was dark as well as humid. But the afternoon was okayish, because a short time after the previous post, the family was bundled into the car and we went off mall-strolling until we found a KFC with WiFi, upon which we settled in for the next three hours, during which we caught up on as much as possible of life beyond these shores--the nature of the family's lifestyle means that a large part of all our contacts live in a different time zone or continent altogether.

I watched Transformers 2 last night; it was pretty good, even if it began to start throwing out--I can't decide if those were loose threads or plot holes or sequel hooks--near the end of it, what with suddenly having teleportation and robot ghosts (plus an afterlife!) and the idea of lineages and robot families (I can't help imagining the Jetsons' robot maid at this point) and various other strange things. And of course Megatron and Starscream got away in the end, which would be the most blatant sequel hook of them all. The Pig took great delight during the movie in identifying all the vehicles, the companies that produced them, and their current price (as well as also identifying which ones aren't on the market yet or are still prototypes)--he's a bit of a car geek that way. This sequel's got a bit more slapstick humour, though, plus a good deal more toilet humour than the last; still, the cinemagoers (the theatre was packed!) seemed to appreciate it.

The Pig's gone off to Betel Island, where he'll be for the next 10 days or so unless he visits KL too; which means no late-night excursions for awhile, no suppers and movies and such; and of course when he returns his classes will soon start, so it's not clear if I'll be seeing very much of him from now on. I think I might go swimming later; it's still rather warm weather for my liking and it's been awhile since I got a good swim--the last time I went there it was with the Pig, and his stamina in the water rather leaves something to be desired; not to mention that we ran into a few ex-Loch Yuck-contacts there (my fault for insisting on going over to talk to them, that) and so I ended up treading water while they discussed cars and lives and holiday activities and practiced leaping into the water from poolside. I'm no good at socialising, I must admit; either I'm tongue-tied or I'm voluble, and there's not much of an in-between for me. It's something to try to fix.

Subject registration is tomorrow afternoon; I very much hope I get the slots I want; fingers crossed, of course.

Bored People Are Bored

It has been a month since I typed the above post, or very nearly so; it's not all me being my procrastinating self really since I only got my laptop back yesterday (it was with a technician for the past two weeks) and I'd not thought to do the typing during the two weeks before that. Also, the laptop was a bit busted up: some time after the previous post, I had a fit of destructive experimentation (it's what I call it when I get the idea to study something by completely taking it to pieces, though usually it's limited to rather more easily replaced things) and began unscrewing the laptop in an effort to see if its internal bits were running okay.

The Pig, when told about it, decided I needed semi-professional-bordering-on-amateur help (apparently he started his university days as a computer engineering student before deciding he hated studying electronics and switched to mechanical engineering), and so I screwed everything back on and took the whole lot to his house the next day for some tinkering during which we first took off all the little fiddly screws, then the casing (he did this one because he didn't think I'd be able to find the little notches without breaking something, possibly his magnet-headed screwdriver or the casing itself), and then the inside bits--the DVD cartridge (I call it so because that's what it looks like--no idea what the official name is) and other little colourful things. Someday I shall Google the service manual and learn what they're called; I do know at least that I managed, while the the Pig was absent (he got a headache and went to take a nap while I moaned about wanting to Google for help), to remove the RAM and somehow knock the processor loose. Somewhere in all this we also managed to get the LCD screen disconnected from the rest of the computer, which is why the laptop had to spend those two weeks in the technician's and also is why after that day I was completely unable to use the laptop, being forced to use the desktop of my hosts.

So the laptop is back, and we owe the technician 700 bucks for the shiny new crystal screen (the old one was a matte); this laptop will either go to Fifth Hun with the kid brother or to Spore with me, though both the kid brother and I hope for the former outcome--the Fifth Hun desktop is not in the best of conditions either. I might encourage the kid brother to frequently dust off the fan or something, though, because when the Pig and I opened the casing, it was fairly choked with dust. (Also, the former outcome has a necessary corollary in that I will have to get a new laptop for myself, and the Pig says there are fairly decent ones available now.)

The family arrived on the 10th and the 11th of June: the parents and the kid siblings on the 10th, and the Gobbler on the 11th. I returned to my own house on the 9th (anyone who knows me through the Internet will probably recall the 8th as the last day of me being online for quite awhile), and spent the rest of that day and part of the 10th cleaning it: the floor was dusty so I swept and mopped it four times, managing to get very sweaty in the process, and also getting distracted by the many books left behind that I haven't seen in ages, including Loch Yuck's old yearbooks. Huge disappointments those things, packed with bad grammar and ugly photos. On the 9th I swept and mopped; then the Pig arrived and we went off to buy some things I thought the house needed--toilet paper, detergents, cooking oil (the relative who takes care of the house in our absence had thoughtfully stocked us up with cooking gas), and some soft drinks and shandy; then I had dinner with the Pig by some little local market by the seafront; all the way there he was enthusing about lobsters the size of an arm and swordfish longer than he is tall (and he's not exactly shrimpy), and while there were no giant swordfish or lobsters of any size that day, we ended up sharing a lightly-fried prawn longer than my thumb and index finger combined, and that was while it was still curled up: stretched out it was easily 50 or 60 cm long, and proportionately thick as well. It was very satisfying, though it did cost a bit (around RM 35).

The family arrived on the 10th, reaching the house around 6 or 7, and spent the rest of the day and a good deal of the next three or four days spring-cleaning: more mopping, cleaning, wiping, laundry, gardening, sweeping in random spots that nobody would look at in a hundred years--it doesn't sound like much, but it was hugely irritating to me especially since I didn't see any point to it all. My idea of a comfortable holiday is one where one lolls about waking up late, going for long leisurely walks or swimming or sitting around chitchatting; my parents disagree, and think a holiday is when you can catch up on all the work that you weren't able to do during your working-days (in my case, the semester). Of course this isn't helped by them still being morning people and me still being more of a night owl than anything else; after being used to waking up at 12 or 11, being woken every morning at 6 or 7 or 8 or 9 with shrill yells is... less than enjoyable. Even more so when you realise you're only being woken up so that you're awake, and not because the floor absolutely has to be swept and mopped by 10 or something dreadful will occur (other than the wrath of the parents). It's absolutely pointless and I still don't see the point in waking up to sit around doing nothing.

The Gobbler arrived on the 11th, just as the throes of the cleaning spree were starting up. Being in a Sporean school, he only had about two or three weeks of holidays; but he only stayed for about 6 days because there was an exam due immediately upon school's restarting and he wanted to give himself a week or so to revise. As a result he arrived and immediately plunged into frenetic activity, to the parents' great approval--you know the sort of thing. With such limited holiday time, I'd probably not even leave the hostel; I'd prefer to sit back and relax while I could. Not the Gobbler--with limited holiday time he decided that he was going to do without adequate sleep or rest or something, and decided that all his time would be that horrible modern idea of "quality time"--waking at 6 for tennis, then breakfast, then rushing around meeting friends and distributing souvenirs (which reminds me that I haven't distributed mine--and they're from last December!), then more rushing around. And of course there was no small talk with him, not when time was so limited. I think I liked him better when he was less rushed and not everything had to be deep or meaningful or profound, when ideas and insights were more like the gleam of a small shiny stone you accidentally find while playing in a sandbox and less like some sort of commodity that you had to mine out of every other person at every opportunity. Certainly there is the time and place to engage people in discussion about their hopes and dreams for the future, or how they think they want to grow personally in the next year, or what useful life skill they want to learn with their leisure time. But not all the time, and not every place! It may make for what he feels is meaningful conversation but it certainly is less than enjoyable. Profundity and wisdom are all well and good, but there must be someplace where people can just kick back and be people, foolish or shallow as they may be, without constantly being instructed to consider themselves and every possible future ramification of their attitudes or emotions or actions...

But enough of that. The Gobbler came, plunged into activity, was a veritable whirlwind of activity, and then left; I have only a sort of confused impression of seeing bits and pieces of him every now and then. In the meantime we went to islands, beaches, dinners, church, malls, and did a lot more cleaning than is strictly necessary to continue living comfortably in a house of any size. At the moment the cleaning routine is down to simple maintenance--sweeping, mopping, laundry, the dishes, garbage disposal; so there is all the more time to spend sitting about.

Relations with the family are still what they usually are; the father appears, dictates, generally radiates disapproval of our activities when he's not wrapped up in his own, and now has added "being a man" to his list of resolutions for me, which apparently includes taking initiative and being responsible and waking up early and sleeping late and not reading fiction and reading self-help books and applying them to one's own life with immediate results and doing whatever he wants as soon as he wants it done and getting grades "to the best of my potential" which I'm rather convinced by now isn't really all that high. To be honest it sounds quite drab and dreary and I think I'll at best be a partial man--I mean, I do see a certain amount of value in initiative and responsibility--what the heck does he think motivated me to buy groceries and clean up the house before they arrived, anyway? Utter boredom?--and as for self-help books--phooey I say, I harbour great distaste for such things. And as for the idea of giving up fiction! We've had one or two clashes already, neither of which ended well. After yesterday (Father's Day) and an apology (from me, of course), we're on relatively good terms, though he's still more partial to the other siblings than to me. Can't blame him, they're a lot better at accepting the idea of holidays not being used for rest than I am. Still, the relative peace is very nice, and we do at least talk cordially now...

Other than that... there's nothing much to report. I see the Pig relatively often, and by now I think we're starting to run out of places in Patience that serve good food--the list has run all the way to Burger King (admittedly they have awesome stuff!) and Archie de Corner, which apparently serves nothing good except chicken chops, is one of the next entries on the list. All the same I'll probably go back to Spore several kilos heavier than when I left it, and then proceed to slowly lose it again, or not; most of the people I've met in Sabah say I've gained a lot of weight in the four or more years' of absence, and the others just didn't mention it. We also occasionally watch movies--they're a quarter of the price they would be in Spore and I'm taking advantage of that.

I'm also decidedly sunburnt after that island trip with the Gobbler and his friends; it was meant to be a reunion between himself and the friends he'd made at Loch Yuck, but the family decided to tag along and so I ended up there too. We went to the island (this one was called Sappy; the one I'd visited with the aforementioned Canadians was Man You Can--names altered, of course) in the morning, arriving there around 9am. We took a table, left a lot of stuff on it--we'd decided to bring lunch in the form of a great amount of sandwich ingredients--and off went the children into the sea while the parents lay back on rented rattan mats on the sand in the shade. We'd also rented snorkeling sets, though only one of them was still functioning perfectly after half an hour--one was leaky and the other one somehow detached the snorkel from the goggles with no way of putting the two back together. We went swimming, which was easy with the sea's additional buoyancy but difficult with the sea's currents; and let me say that Sappy Island is much nicer, at least as far as seabed scenery goes: Man You Can Island had little isolated fist-sized pieces of coral, flapping lethargically above the sand and looking very much like the last individuals of a species on the verge of extinction, which I supppose they were; Sappy Island had a veritable carpet, green and yellow and pink and undulating like a sea of fangirls squeeing. the other thing about Sappy Island was that the seabed takes sudden dives and turns, and one of those forms a sort of bowl-like structure with decidedly steep walls. The kid brother and I came across it while swimming around the edges of the safe swimming area, and it was decidedly a surprise; we'd been going across the carpet of coral, and suddenly the carpet fell away and we were looking down a depth of (it looked like) 20 metres or so of perfectly clear water at corals dotting the place and fishes merrily swimming around as if knowing we couldn't follow them. It was utterly beautiful, floating there above the bowl, and I wish I'd been able to see it more clearly (the snorkels and my spectacles couldn't be worn simultaneously and thus my field of clear vision was limited to around 7 cm or so).

We ended up swimming around, more or less continuously except when we went on a bit of jungle trekking and when we surfaced for food, until 3pm when we showered, packed up, and left the island. That was probably last week--the 15th or 16th I'm guessing, because the Gobbler returned to Spore on the 17th. I began peeling last Saturday--the 20th; and by now enough skin has been peeled off me to form a sort of wing-like shape on my back that reaches over my shoulders and looks like it's about to meet at my sternum. It's quite a nice shape actually, and I think it's not entirely due to Sappy Island alone; the weekend before this, my church had organised a little outing to a little beach and though I did wear a shirt throughout that outing, I did get noticeably more tanned after that; it was quite fun, actually, because a member had brought an inflatable dinghy and large plastic oars, and I and three other guys took it and went paddling off, got caught in a wind (being inflatable it was difficult to steer and was very easily pushed around by wind and sea-current); we hitched a ride back to shore from a passing obliging fisherman (whose boat was not inflatable and was gas-powered).

The electricity just got cut off again, by surprise; the second time in a week. It's very annoying, especially with temperatures and humidity being as high as they are; these days I start sweating again within five minutes of getting out of the shower. It's very highly annoying, and is compounded by the location of the house being such that the air is very still--or perhaps it's a state-wide thing due to the humidity in the air making it hard to move by natural wind. I don't know, but my palms are already sweating (an inheritance from my paternal grandmother, because my paternal grandfather apparently does not sweat from his palms).

From A Computer Not Mine

My last post was May 21st, which means I have--let's see--16 days' worth of typing-up to catch you up on, plus whatever ramblings I come up with on the side. Essentially you're in, dear reader, for another wall-of-text post that might just eat up my next three hours in typing. You'll probably take about one-sixth that to finish reading it, of course.

Life is still much the same, but reading the May 21st post--mostly about the RAID driver--I feel it behooves me (that's a nice word, actually, behooves is. It sounds as if I were about to turn into a cow or some sort of cattle.) to elaborate about the life I lead here in Patience, or have led for the past two weeks-odd.

I commonly sleep around 12am or 1am, waking around 11am or thereabouts (today I slept at 3am and woke at 11.48am, making it my latest yet), after which I descend the stairs. I am currently living with church friends--the exact relationship is friends-of-parents and parents-of-friends, but their children are away studying and haven't returned for summer break yet, so I'm occupying one of the spare rooms. I usually eat two meals a day: breakfast/lunch and dinner: the slash is there because I generally eat either breakfast (a light meal) or lunch (a heavier meal), almost never both, which is understandable given the times of waking.

My day is thereafter usually spent online, periodically clicking on the Hunter's Horn on MouseHunt (I reached the maximum level in Restaurant City some time ago and have therefore gotten bored of it and its bandwidth-sucking abilities), mostly reading webcomics and TVTropes and occasionally blogs--Crazy Scary's blog is remarkably often updated these days. Quite likely he is also feeling the effects of this large block of free time.

My hosts are somewhat healthy-living, and usually return to the house around 5 or 6, upon which they often (about four days a week at least, at last count) immediately change clothes and head right back out to a little beach club where the wife plays tennis, the husband walks sedately on a treadmill, and I roam the beach for about an hour or so. The beach is a lovely one, not too terribly polluted, lots of life, and extending quite a distance every way. Leftwards are the small shelled creatures--miniature whelks and hermit crabs and regular small crabs, the balls the crabs produce while making holes dotting the surface of the beach in pretty patterns, partly due to the patterns made by people walking over those balls and flattening them. This goes on until one reaches a small jutting bunch of rocks, which one could conceivably go around and continue on if the rocks didn't keep jutting out into relatively deep water. Rightwards, the sand is washboard-like and very hard, which hurts my heels but then dulls into a sort of blur thumping pain that is barely noticeable after awhile due to the comparative great pleasure I take from walking in water. When the tide is out, this section of the beach gains about 30 to 40 meters more in the direction of the sea, and one can walk out onto large patches of seaweed and watch beached starfish frantically scrabble their way back to water or, failing that, burying themselves and leaving behind little five-pointed indentations in the sand. This section of the beach has fewer crabs, but they are larger and crabbier--upon seeing your shadow, they dance and raise their claws up and then proceed to run in a random direction, forcing you to not move for fear of accidentally stepping on them as they run under the shadow of your foot. More often than not they run into an incoming wave, then stop and bury themselves so quickly you start to think all crabs receive formal training in ninjutsu--or that ninjas have performed extensive study into the hiding methods of crabs. Further on, there are jellyfish--small blobby things with stubby tentacles that drift apparently completely at random, and are immensely adorable; however they drift in seaweed territory, and it leads to some moments when something soft brushes up against the back of your calf and you're not quite sure whether it is jellyfish or seaweed. At the very end of the right side of the beach there is a hotel, where you can occasionally see barbecuers (almost always foreign). Walking to the end of either side, from the club, takes about half an hour; thus a round-trip usually lasts an hour, if you don't occasionally stop to watch the aquatic life or look at the scenery (for the sunsets are quite beautiful things).

That's only the average day, though.

I am not the only one in the church here who is back on summer vacation; there are two others, a brother and a sister, who were from here but have gone to Canada to pursue studies and have returned from there, and last week five of the sister's seniors, who have graduated, came over as part of their graduation trip--it seems to be a world-wide phenomenon, this graduation trip thing. At any rate they came over, and that kicked off a few days of entertainment--semi-solitude is all nice and well, but after awhile one begins to crave physical contact with other humans of roughly one's own age group.

We went to an island (that was the first day I met them), which was nice. Man U Can Island's rather too popular with the tourists, unfortunately, and the beach isn't sandy--it's composed, apparently, mostly of bits of broken coral and shell which makes it extremely painful to walk on for long periods especially if you don't like squinting at the ground. However, there were little omnivorous fishes that we found when we started eating in the water; we were, at the time, eating buns and fruit and chicken, and fed them buns first; they liked it. So a bit of fruit went in, and that was received even more enthusiastically, upon which a bone with some meat was offered them and they immediately went all Vashta Nerada on it--the bone was picked clean before it hit the seabed. And that was just the little fishes barely the length of one finger joint--they were gossipy, it seems, because they soon attracted larger fishes (around forearm-length) that would see a bone and nibble on the fingers holding it. We also went banana-boating that day. Banana-boating involves the boaters (at least three, at most five) sitting on a speedboat and taken a safe distance away from shallow water (in our case we went practically out of sight of land). At that spot, the driver unties some ropes, dropping a large inflated thing made of three balloon-cylinders made of hard plastic into the water--a cross-section of it would probably look like an upside-down Mickey Mouse silhouette. On the topmost cylinder is where the boaters sit, and it has little handgrips; the feet are supposed to go on the two smaller ones. The entire thing is connected to the speedboat by a long length of rope, and once all the boaters are on, the speedboat takes off and the driver attempts to drop the boaters into the water by making the boaters overbalance--either through sharp turns, or go-stop methods, or whatever else their creativity comes up with. Each set of boaters is allowed two falls, and then the ride is over. After that we snorkelled in a No Snorkelling zone (we later found out that this was because of the tides, which turned the No Snorkelling zone into a No Exit zone), got reprimanded for it but got a lot of lovely views of fishes (much more colourful than the Eat Everything Fishes!) and photos out of it; and after that one of the Canadian graduates found a sea cucumber and much fun was had--my personal favourite is when I managed to poke it enough times to get it to spew water halfway across a table's width. We then played cards (apparently my eyes are so narrow that my winks go unnoticed), ate, and went away. I'm still waiting for those photos to turn up on Facebook.

A few days later we went whitewater rafting, though the Wikipedia article says we actually only went roughwater rafting, the term whitewater being only applicable to rivers of difficulty level 3 and above; we went on one of difficulty level 1 and 2 (there were two sections of river but I'm not sure if it was respectively or not). It was entirely fun, mostly because getting river-water in your mouth doesn't taste as bad as getting seawater in the mouth; also, rivers are great fun to swim in as long as you don't stand and get your foot stuck (not that that occurred). The company even supplied a couple guides with waterproof videocameras and shot DVDs that they later sold to the rafters, and (naturally!) we bought one copy amongst the eight of us and I think I'll be getting my duplicated copy tomorrow if the company wasn't tech-savvy enough to use copy protection.

I've been going out for dinners and suppers with the Pig, so it's not like I just sit around the house all day typing extra-long blog posts; however he's maintaining his habit of randomly falling sick which makes these rather erratic. My laptop persists in its troubles, and has refused utterly to even load ever since a few days ago when I and the Pig attempted to open it up and cure it; the surgery perhaps was far too invasive (the Pig insists that it's all due to me touching the heat sink and processor), and now I fear the laptop will need professional care or replacement. I'm hoping for professional repair to be effective, because replacement will be very expensive and besides I forgot to back up all the data I have on it and would hate to lose it. And then if the laptop's restored to functionality I shall start on that external hard drive!

The Life of Leisure

It's been awhile since my last post, hasn't it? Or has it? I'm not too terribly sure myself--at any rate it's possibly less time than I think--or possible more. It's hard to tell; I've been in Patience for a little over a week now: my flight here was on the 18th and it's now what, 8 days? 9? since then. It certainly feels like a bit more. But one's sense of time is different when there's no assignments to do, or classes to attend, or suchlike.

At the moment I'm not living in my own house, though my family does possess a house here; it's reasonably well-kept because a relative goes down every week or so to hang around it for a bit, make sure all the parts still work, runs the car for a bit and tops it up as necessary. I'm just not going there yet because I hate doing laundry and cooking and especially cleaning--sure, slipping around on soap water is fun, but not the kind of thing you want to do for a whole day especially when you've got things on the floor that can't take too much exposure to water.

Life? Well, let's see. It's been going on. It's hard to imagine I've only spent one weekend so far with all the many things that've happened, though I suppose I'm not used to having more than one non-repetitive event occur per week; and in the past 8 or 9 or maybe 10 days, a lot of non-repetitive events have occurred. I've not got photos, but my memory should serve to recall the basic details well enough.

I arrived last, let me see, Tuesday; but I should begin the story earlier, because the last you heard of me was in So Hour--if then--and my flight went from KL; you will no doubt want to know the in-between. So thus it goes.

The fifth sister of my father, whom I shall call Fifth Aunt because that's what I do call her, has a son and two daughters; the son has begun (at the time when I was there he was due to begin) studies at TAR--ACCA accountancy. And as that is in KL, I thought that perhaps they might go up early and I would go along with them, saving myself the hassle of ticket-purchasing and an amount of travelling-time; not to mention that I had not been able to procure a place to stay yet, and that was a main sticking-point in my plans to just go up myself.

Therefore I stayed in So Hour, in the house of my grandfolks, until after dinner on the 16th of May (which, in So Hour, takes place around 6 or 7 pm); then I had my cousin drive me to Fifth Aunt's house, where I stayed the night, chitchatting and catching up with her and the cousin who should by now have started classes--I shall call him Pig's Tail, because that is what his name more or less translates to. The next morning at around 6am, I was woken by my cousin (I suppose he felt rather less need to sleep, this being a rather big thing for anybody who hasn't constantly moved around since youth) and got up, repacked anything I'd taken out (my toothbrush and that was about it really), and off we piled into a little rented van. There was myself, the cousin, three of his friends who were also going to TAR but not all going to study Accountancy, the driver of the van, Fifth Aunt, and two other mothers (of the additional friends). The adult women were very worried (you could see it) and the young ones... well, not so much so.

It was a decidedly interesting journey, mostly because only one of them had actually been to the rented house before and knew more or less where it was; other than that I was the only person in the van with anything more than a passing knowledge of KL and unfortunately my sort of knowledge of it doesn't extend to the location of every student-rented building in the immediate vicinity of TAR; thus the journey went smoothly until we entered KL, upon which the van was a cacophony of "Stop and ask directions!", "I think it's over there", phone calls to people to say where we were and ask where should we go next?, and so on. Very deafening and I have no idea how I managed to go through the whole thing without breaking down and yelling at them all to be quiet and not worry so much and we'd get there eventually. The place eventually turned out to be located behind a dilapidated restaurant that's been there for at least 15 years and quite possibly is older than I am; and the rented apartment itself was dilapidated too: dust all over the place, water that didn't run so much as limped along through the pipes, and at least the electricity was working.

We spent two hours cleaning the place--the three mothers naturally were the main workforce here, sending everybody else running to get sponges or buckets of clean water or brushes or rinse the mop or help them hold something steady while they gave it the scrubbing of its life. It took us two hours but eventually the mothers pronounced the place fit for human inhabitation (I noticed through all this that there were no spiderwebs. It was very odd.) and proceeded to take us off on a journey for more things--easily-portable wardrobes, mattresses, curtains and curtain-hooks, gas stoves, plastic cabinets, and various other things. It was 6 or 7 before we were quite done with that place and even so the mothers couldn't resist talking about the crime rate in KL and how important it is to keep one's keys close to oneself at all times and such like before going off back to Patience in the rented van, probably talking all the way back about how worried they were and how completely unsuitable KL is for poor young things with no parents to guide their every step.

I spent the night there, sandwiched between Pig's Tail and one of the other male occupants of the apartment. It was quite interesting watching the group dynamics; Pig's Tail, you see, is commonly a very taciturn person, doesn't talk much, etc. but that's only in the presence of family gatherings, and apparently only when there's no computer nearby and the only people around are cousins and aunts, uncles, grandfolks, etc. In the presence of friends he lightens up a great deal more. It was quite reassuring (yes, I worry about my cousins too. At least, some of 'em. The Brats could be found tied up and dead in a ditch tomorrow outside this house, with all their organs harvested for black market sale, and I wouldn't turn a hair other than to wonder if the parents knew yet). The next morning I woke, around 6, and left along with some of the occupants who also had to wake up that early. Pig's Tail also woke up to send me off.

It was about 3 hours' journeying to get to the airport and check in and everything; my check-in luggage was about .5kg short of the limit, because I was wearing my trekking shoes and had put my flipflops in the bag. (When I was wearing the flipflops and had the shoes in the bag it was 1 kilo overweight. Those are very heavy shoes.) I left the apartment around 7.15 or so; it was about five minutes from the apartment to the bus stop, ten minutes by bus to the LRT station (we happened to arrive with the bus so there was no waiting), about fifteen minutes' waiting for a sufficiently empty space on the LRT trains, half an hour on the LRT to get to the Central Station, five minutes to find the shuttle buses, another ten minutes of waiting for the shuttle bus to start moving, about 75 minutes or so of the bus ride, and then I was at the airport and ready to check in. I was the 38th passenger to check in on that flight, if I remember correctly; I certainly went online, on the WiFi (weak thing it was too, kept disconnecting and I couldn't open MSN and had to communicate by Facebook chat), at around 9.45 (boarding at 10.40 which gave me 50 minutes' chatting).

I arrived at Patience, and almost immediately due to a snarl-up of communications it was three hours before I was fetched from it and arrived at the house where I am currently staying.

And thus I am now here in Patience, in this house (which is not mine).

My hosts are a middle-aged couple, whose children I know through church and who also know my family quite well. The children are currently away, and will eventually return. I could dissect their personalities for you, but you'll find out enough from these posts anyway, if you read; so I'll not do so. They're very devout Christians--well, if you hadn't known my beliefs before you certainly ought to by now--so they somehow shoehorned me into attending an all-day conference thing of some sort on Saturday. To be honest of course I didn't put up too much resistance since I hadn't got any plans on that day anyway so I said okay.

In between Tuesday and Saturday, I found out that my computer has issues with routers and cannot go online for some reason--I am typing this post in WordPad which is primitive but at least won't crash my computer every few minutes. I also found out that my external hard disk will not work for unknown reasons--Jogger and I discussed it over MSN and it's probably something loose in it, but I can't open it up because I haven't got screwdrivers and I don't know where the screwdrivers are in this house. On the other hand it might be something in the power supply or whatnot--I've never, I realised a few days ago, tried to use that hard drive in this country. It's always only been used before in Spore, China, and Hong Kong--never Malaysia. Of course that shouldn't explain it, but at this point I'm willing for even an inane reason to hope that I won't have to scrap that thing and all the data in it. My laptop also somehow lost a driver (it is apparently called the IDE Controller, and is listed as an AWHNBLAHBLAH thing) and now keeps telling me to update that driver. I tried. It won't update (partly because I have no Internet connectivity on this blasted laptop). I'm very seriously considering getting a new one.

Saturday came, my hosts and I went to the conference, met some other friends from church there, and sat down to listen. Very unfortunately it was not an enlightening experience in any way--the man may have gifts of all sorts but preaching and teaching certainly aren't in his skillset. It may also have been because the speaker was a Sanguine and tended to get carried away with anecdotes, little jokes, metaphors and descriptions: at one point he ended up spending ten minutes describing a metaphor as an analogy to some sort of simile and the audience--at least, I--ended up not getting his point entirely. If he had had one to make to begin with. It was all very incoherent and I didn't find it at all useful. On the other hand... Charismatic Christians are differentiated from other denominations by their huge insistence that God should play an active, visible, audible role in their lives. At least, that's how I see it; and one particular result of this is that they believe that prophets exist and can relay God's words directly to you, because you're too dense or un-gifted or naughty for God to speak to you or be heard by you. Or something. I find the theology behind the idea somewhat eyebrow-raising to say the least; though admittedly sometimes God works a lot too subtly for the common person to hear. That's the whole idea behind the mystics running off to be hermits and monks after all, the idea that you get rid of all the wordly distractions so you can act as an uncluttered pipeline of a sort... but I digress. This speaker chose, after the seminar was done, to pray for every single person attending, which ended up including me. He turned out to be rather accurate, which I'm not sure to be happy about or slightly creeped out about. The idea of a near-total stranger (and don't you give me that stuff about everybody being siblings-in-spirit because that does NOT automatically get you my approval) knowing stuff about you that only God should know... is less than comforting to me. And of course the fact that he was doing it in earshot of a lot of other people just decreases that comfort even more. (Then again, I'd turned my phone's voice-recorder on and had accidentally recorded what he said about the three or four people he was talking to before me, so... yeah.)

After the seminar, I was invited to sleep over at the house of a couple of church friends (they'd attended the seminar too) so I did, and was introduced to TED.com: quite entertaining that site is. Pity about the buggy Internet connection, though, because it froze up halfway through Bill Gates' speech and we went to sleep shortly thereafter.

Sunday I went (with the aforementioned friends) to church (leaving my camera behind in their house in the process), and was recognised by about 30% of the people there; 70% of the church was totally unfamiliar faces to me, which I suppose is a good thing really. We talked a bit, and then that was that for that.

I should add a note here that my hosts are also members of a club located by a nearby beach; thus they go there almost daily for tennis, gym sessions, etc; and I usually go along with them to walk on the beach, usually in about five or six inches of water and sometimes a bit more, depending on the length of my shorts at the time--they're not all the same length. In fact we went there the evening I arrived, and a lovely rainstorm came along and I thought it was a nice way to make up for the irritation of sitting in an airport for three hours calling people up to find out just what had gone asnarl and why nobody was already there to pick me up. In any case it's a lovely beach: quite clean, there's crabs and snails and things all over the place most of the time, and in some parts of it if you wade out to knee-height, you can quite suddenly come across a clump of jellyfish--little cute bubbles that nevertheless inspire the most amazing fits of terror. And crabs, of course, tiny little territorial buggers that react to your shadow falling on them by raising up their claws and doing a little side-to-side dance, covering random bits of sand and kicking up a little cloud in the process--and then the dance stops, and the sand-cloud clears, and the crab has vanished safely under the sand. I've accidentally set off a lot of crabs a-dancing, and once even accidentally stepped on one. It was quite a nip, but only painful because it was unexpected--if I'd seen it coming I shouldn't have felt it at all, I think. Sometimes when the tide is especially low, starfish are exposed as well and then you're treated to the sight of a lot of little five-armed (or less; some of them are injured) critters slowly undulating their way back to water. Some of them don't even do that, preferring to burrow under the sand so that they get to the damper layers underneath. Overall it's an entertaining sight, because starfish are not very stealthy burrowers: they can be found by the star-shaped indentations they leave behind (or rather above) them. I unfortunately have very few photos of these; due to having only gotten my camera back yesterday (after Sunday), I haven't had the opportunity to photograph very much. I fully intend to remedy this.

It was, I think, on Saturday night that the Pig first SMSed me after my arrival in Patience. Unfortunately my phone was on silent as it always is, and I didn't read it until far too late to respond. On Monday night he called instead (clever move that, really), and we went out to supper and eat. I got back at 2am, to my hosts' disapproval the next morning; fortunately I've gotten into the habit of always having keys around when I go out so I didn't have to wake anybody up to get back into the house. On Tuesday night I went out again for supper and came back at 3am, having discovered a wonderful little place that apparently serves insomniacs because it's a collection of little mamak stalls that open beginning from 1am or so; I also visited his new house (new to me: he's been in it for a couple years or so by now) and--my goodness--I want a screen like his. And a laptop, of course. And pretty much everything else. I feel like a pauper really: a very ill-equipped pauper. Wednesday morning I woke quite early, having got about 4.5 hours' sleep, and went out with the church friends and some of their old schoolmates and some other schoolmates of theirs (they used to be local, then moved to Canada, and now are back for their summer holidays too) to an island.

It was a nice trip: I've always liked water anyway, and the sea spray was absolutely delightful. It was partly disappointing that the beach of the island in question was mostly composed of bits of broken coral and shells, which made it painful to walk on; and trash left behind from previous visitors (it is far too popular an island!), which made it painful to look at. But we didn't spend too much time walking on the beach or staring at the trash, because the fishes distracted us. We'd been swimming for awhile, and eating in the water (or, rather, eating just above the surface of the water) when we noticed fishes. Thinking we'd feed them, we dropped in a bit of fruit and watched the fish attack it ravenously. We next dropped in a bit of meat and the fish went Vashta Nerada on it: the meat spun for a bit and turned into a bone. And then the big fish appeared, having somehow caught scent of the meat or perhaps the little fishes were gossipy. I'm not sure how, but we soon were feeding bits of meat on bones to the big fish too. This lasted awhile, during which the big fish demonstrated their ability to grab and swim off with small bones, as well as their propensity to nibble on fingers when the bone had no meat left on it.

We then went on a banana boat ride (two of the others went parasailing), which was also decidedly enjoyable. A banana boat ride occurs in the following way: you go on a speedboat out on the sea into deep waters, after which the boat-driver unties some ropes and pulls a large inflatable cylinder down, leaving it to drift behind the boat attached by some very long rope. The cylinder looks like an upside-down Mickey Mouse silhouette in cross-section, so it doesn't continually roll over and over like a log. On the part of it that is supposed to be the top, are five handlebars. You sit on the topmost cylinder, holding on to one handlebar. At least three people are needed, though (obviously) a maximum of five people are allowed on. Once everybody is on, the boat starts off again (it stops while the driver deploys the inflatable thing and you get on), and the boat driver does his best to get you to overbalance and fall off. Two falls and the ride's over; but the falling, admittedly, is the most fun part. My particular bunch of people was most entertaining, because our first fall didn't all happen at once; one girl fell off first and was left in the sea some distance behind, upon which the 4 of us still hanging on yelled to the driver that she'd gone overboard. The driver made such a sharp turn back to her that we all immediately fell off. The second one was far more simple, and everybody fell off together. As a side note, my watch strap somehow contrived to snap during the first ride; fortunately it didn't fall off, being stuck to me by sweat, sea, and forward moment; and I had the presence of mind to grab onto it as soon as I saw it was broken, so I didn't lose it in the fall. I'm quite thankful for that.

After the banana boat rides and falls we went snorkeling, eating, swimming, photographing, shell-and-coral-collecting--essentially what anybody does on an island. It was good fun, and it eventually ended and we all went back on the last boat available (I think it was, anyhow), at around 5pm.

Later that night I went out again with the Pig to catch the premiere of Terminator: Salvation. It's not too bad, quite entertaining, although in their effort to be all techy and stuff the directors omitted a lot of science and research. Helena Bonham Carter put in a minor appearance as a somewhat deranged technician. Admittedly she does the deranged role very well, but one somehow wonders if she isn't getting a bit typecast. The movie wasn't too bad, and after it we visited the Insomniacs' Mamak Collection again (as I'm starting to think of it, because I don't know its name--the Pig calls it Lido or something like that).

I woke up today at 7, 9, and 12pm (but got out of bed only at 12).

Screwdriver of Better Size

I'm typing this from Patience, where I have been for the past four days or so... I wasn't expecting to have Internet really but living with friends who possess a router has its advantages. At any rate I'll be online for a little bit, maybe the next two or three days... might be useful seeing as how the exam results are coming out tomorrow (if I remember correctly). Not that I'm terribly wild to see them, but I might as well know the bad news sooner than later.

My ability to inflict unknown sorts of damage on electronics all around has manifested itself again, or perhaps it's just the laptop showing its age: something called the SCSI/RAID driver has got itself uninstalled somehow, and now every time I start the computer up, up pops a little Install New Hardware dialogue box that then proceeds to inform me that the New Hardware could not be installed properly and probably won't run. I've no idea what the significance of that is, but attempts to System Restore to an earlier state where this driver was working have failed repeatedly. It almost sounds like I need a reformat (plus something to deal with the annoying overheating malady). In addition my 3.5" hard disk, on which is about 250GB of photos, videos, episodes, movies, and various things... is undetectable on my laptop or on any of the desktops within reach. I did try to get Jogger to help me with it but there's only so much one can figure out from over MSN... I'll probably get one of the people from church to help me, surely there has to be somebody there who knows something about repairing electronics (preferably without wiping all the data on it but if it's necessary...).

It's usually times like these that I wish I had a genie or something. Aladdin was an idiot--though of course he was, according to the original sources, 15 or something--certainly not the kind of age one entrusts with (semi) cosmic, (near) phenomenal power! But then look at Jafar, too. Not the best wishes in the book, but then again they didn't have computers that keep overheating back then. They do now however, and at any rate if I had such wishes I'd likely draw up a long list of legalese to avoid any vaguaries and unexpected corollaries, etc, and still forget one large gaping loophole or something.

Life As I Live It

The holidays are upon me! Well, they've actually been upon me for the past two weeks--it's a strange feeling to have the days pass so unmarkedly. I spent the first week of the holidays in school, naturally, packing things into boxes and moving them into the new room/temporary storage area; that, fortunately, came off okay despite me again falling through the cracks in the bureaucratic wall, not appearing on lists, etc; but all the same I got my new room and accompanying new roommate, with whom I exchanged exactly one line of dialogue:

Me: "Uh... hi."
Him: "If you'd move your boxes I can take my table away from beside your bed."
*moving occurs*

And thereafter I said nothing to him and had nothing said to me, which was a pity because his belongings looked like they might have an interesting owner; of course, I was only in that room for a little over 12 hours anyhow, of which about 5 or 6 were spent asleep; so it's not all his fault, I suppose. I spent the next day travelling from the hostel to my current location--So Hour, the grandfolks' house--and will be here until I can get my aunt to decide on when she wants to go up to KL; hopefully she'll choose an earlyish date or I'll have to let her go up alone because I really don't want to miss my flight. As it is I'm already three days behind my travel plans: I was expecting to be in KL three days ago now.

Of course, I still don't have a place to stay in KL... the Coconut's place is off-limits for obvious reasons, and everybody else is having classes and certainly hasn't got the time or space for me. Well, almost everybody else--I could probably ask Jogger's parents, except I'm not terribly familiar with them for one thing and for another I still don't know when I'm going up, and I don't want to sound as if I'm making hotel reservations even if that is basically what I'm doing. Of course if worst comes to worst then I can stay at the local inn, since Cheeky (an outside shot at best really that one) isn't even going to be in KL while I'm there. A most inconvenient situation. Actually, erase that... worst comes to worst, I'll temporarily bum with my cousin up there for two or three days and then leave for Patience, or else I'll go up on the 17th and stay overnight at the airport and fly the next day, insanely overpriced food be damned.

Life here isn't too bad. I get to sleep earlyish and wake whenever I will--the first two days found me up just before lunchtime, but my circadian rhythms have got more or less back to normal and now I wake just after everybody else finishes breakfast. Also I have a double bed (I'm not sure if it's a normal double or a Queen or a King), which is large and very soft and quite comfortable, though I do need to put up the mosquito netting at nights and take it down in the mornings. And of course there's food all the time, healthy food too, and cheap--a bunch of noodles the size of my fist costs about RM1, and my fists are not tiny ones.

The homebrew's going much more slowly than I'd thought; there's just too many factors and they're quite overwhelming: attack types, vulnerabilities, terrain effects (which then makes me need to create a whole world full of realistic geography), the different skills and their effects and what happens if you put them together... and all this, of course, for a game that few to no people will ever play, because nobody in this continent seems to have any interest in tabletop RPGs. Curse you, Internet MMORPGs!--but honestly it's interesting crafting things, but I like the things I craft to have some sort of use, and this one doesn't have any obvious one.

Boredededed and Liquoredededed

So, the exams are over--the very last one was yesterday afternoon--and already I'm quite bored out of my mind with nothing to do. Well, technically I do still have a roomful of items to catalogue and boxes to obtain and pack it all away in, but I've three or four days yet to do that in and I'm in no hurry.

I've still got the best part of 35 centiliters (about 350ml, or roughly 3/4 of a 500-ml bottle) of liquor yet to go--it's about three months old really since I bought it in late February and it's now almost May. I don't really plan to let it last longer than the next week, which means about three shot glasses a day of Creme de Bananes (as it is labeled) a day for the next few days after dinner before bed: I should have some interesting dreams. I've also got a lot of other comestibles to polish off, which shouldn't be so much of a problem either as long as I've got water to wash everything down with--or so I think.

...I'm bored. Very bored. Bored enough that I can spend minutes at a go staring at Restaurant City and wishing I had people to do things with, like go see a movie or clean the room or even walk to a mart and collect spare boxes; but the exams are over, the locals have scattered like the winds, and the nonlocals have either gone home or are hidden behind a roomful of boxes or have something to do--and I, I am bored. Blah.

In other news I've got an idea for my homebrew tabletop. It sounds workable to me.

"Those who Disobey shall be Regarded with Condescension"

So, I've had a lot of time and conversations recently, mostly over MSN but one or two in my own head, and at least one over Facebook and one over the phone. And over the course of all this talking, I find myself... expressing opinions of intense dislike of certain, shall we say, habits of people. In fact they're not so much habits as character traits (flaws, from my point of view, but who's to say the handkerchief was supposed to be spotless?), and... I simply cannot allow my views on these things to go unannounced any further. Not many people will read this, I'm certain, so it's safe to assume I shall not be offending anybody; and anybody who manages to plough through the entirety of this post will almost certainly be intelligent enough to understand my arguments. Not that I flatter myself that my blog attracts intelligent readers, but that the lack of photos and the proliferation of verbiage are sure to drive away all but the most perservering of readers.

We address the first issue: spelling. I'm an administrator of one forum, visit two or three others on a regular basis, and occasionally get drawn into discussions over MSN and... oh, my heavens. What, in the name of the one thousand seven hundred and twenty-eight positive integers before 1729 causes these people to spell the way they do?! Replacing "y" for "i", "d" for "t"--it's phonetic spelling all over again, and while it may be somewhat acceptable in SMSes or over MSN where things want rapidfire replying (and even so I manage to type perfectly well), in fora it only serves to tell me that these people, whoever they are, never had an English module they didn't barely pass. Either that, or they're actually taking pains to write in this amazingly illegible method: being unable to scrawl with indecipherable handwriting, they choose to type with near-illegible spellings. It's gotten to the point where I barely even notice people typing "u" for "you" or forgetting to capitalise the first letter of their sentences or special nouns; those are just too widespread to even begin to attempt to tackle. I will not even deign to consider the causes of people randomly adding "x" to the end of their words--"hahax" being the most-often encountered, but surely there are many more similarly-mangled specimens of the language out there--this falls below even phonetic spelling and descends into the territory of Black Speech. If Tolkien wrote the LotR in modern times, the orcs would speak in this. Leetspeak, while irritating, at least admits a certain sort of spelling system, else the symbols should become impossible to understand; combined with this, it becomes a sort of visual illustration of hell. I find this particularly painful because it seems to be primarily a characteristic of Malaysians and Singaporeans, both of which claim some level of English education, and yet write like this... and then, of course, they have the gall to claim education, and then invoke Godwin's Law by calling grammarnazism. Patriotism be thrown to the winds, I say: with apparently the majority of the population that visits fora typing like this, and the rest being apparently completely illiterate, it leaves a very small literate and intelligent minority. Suffice it to say that there's a reason I read very, very few blogs by Malaysians, or Singaporeans for that matter. Naturally, I do not mean by this that the Western Hemisphere is free of such people--the existence of an Eragon fanbase tells me that somewhere out there are a few million people who've effectively switched off their brains and hold out their wallets, bleating for pulp. But nowhere else have I seen such... such effort being put in to mangle the language beyond comprehension. It reached its apex some days ago, when somebody unapologetically told me to look beyond their "back englsh" to the supposedly intelligent message behind the misspelled words and the broken grammar. It's just a pity that I believe intelligent thoughts are expressed intelligently, or at least intelligibly, and if you want to claim intelligence--go learn yourself a language.

Next: chivalry. Wonderful word, is it not? Conjuring up images, for what seems to be a neverending sea of women worldwide, of them gently swooning into the strong arms of some cleft-jawed, doe-eyed, muscular man in plate armour who's just braved the fiery breath of a dragon and all just for poor little ol' them. And with dragons being extinct at the moment and plate armor being out of fashion, I find more than one female exclaiming over chivalry being dead. Good heavens. Grow up. Oh, certainly they don't always say so. What they say is something like "I bumped into somebody and they shot me a glare instead of stepping aside and laying their jacket on the ground for me to tread on", or "I made you dinner and why are you not worshipping the ground I walk on yet?", or simply "I don't like your non-servile, non-fawning, non-ingratiating manner, and you are nothing like the knight in shining armor I want". I think it's about time men started making demands in return: "Why are you working when you should be reclining on the swooning-couch?", "How dare you attempt to do anything other than clean and cook", or simply "I don't like your non-servile, non-fawning, non-ingratiating manner": the two attitudes go in like vein. What they basically both boil down to is "everybody of the opposite gender must behave in such-and-such a way, to my satisfaction, towards every other person of my gender". And that, let me tell you, died with feminism. Gender equality, the idea of men and women having equal rights, was a good thing: I won't deny it. Women are a valuable addition to the workforce and have many capabilities that men don't, such as maternity leave and lawsuits to get sexually-harassing men out of the force. However it's got to the point where the genders are not only equal, but interchangeable, as seen in the whole idiotic brouhaha about his/her/zir; and of course, women have been told that they are strong and powerful and can do anything! In essence I see this whole idea of chivalry as utter bosh; it strikes me as something akin to a person with perfectly good hearing demanding that people communicate with them with hand gestures and loud voices, or an Olympic-level runner asking for a piggyback ride. Common courtesy makes its reasonable demands--be generally nice to each other as social situations allow or require; get rid of the idea that your gender merits you special treatment from the opposite gender, or at least be consistent--if you insist on being given special treatment, act like you need it. If you want to be given a piggyback, be lame; if you want hearing-aids, be deaf. Otherwise, please don't complain when people treat you as normal, regular old you.

And next, those who create trouble for themselves and then, when offered help, turn it down because they don't think the help's good enough. I'm the first one to admit that I get myself into scrapes every now and then--but I ask for help, and am grateful for it when received! On the other hand... really, however, this speaks for itself, and I get so, so, frustrated with them, not least because this is a feedback chain and they'll just keep on repeating their troubles because they'll never want the help--either because the help will require them to change something they find oh-so-important, or... no. There's no other reason I see in these people--they're the sort who think if they complain enough about something in their own power to change, then somebody up there will notice and get bugged enough by their many many complaints and change the rules of reality to suit their particular needs. Absolutely ridiculous, but that's what happens when people start thinking oh, they're special and the entire universe worships their discarded toilet paper.

...and now I've just worked myself up into a fine old fury, when I was planning to use this as a catharsis and get it out... how counterproductive--but really, when it comes to it, I'm glad I've at least vented somewhere, even if it's not to any living person. I wish I had one of those sometimes on hand--but I don't. Quite likely never will really.