My Pencil Broke or Pointlessness
I spent 6 and a half hours online yesterday and nearly missed dinner as a result. It's not my fault, you know, if the hostel cybercafe is lacking in business and consequently sees the need to have a promotion. One ringgit per hour on all weekends. Who can resist?
...OK, so lots of people can resist. However, that doesn't include me so I didn't resist and went online. Plus MapleStory is having some kind of Christmas promotion going on too and it's having double EXP gains! (Which, you see, inevitably leads to me having gone up another level yesterday.)
But on the credit side, I saw people online that I haven't seen in ages, like Meow and Cheeky for example, and I suddenly noticed that I chat very differently with different people: apparently I have no problem splitting my personality into hundreds of different pieces depending on whom I'm interacting with.
Yesterday, for example. I compared the conversations between myself and Meow, and it's mostly banter. Kidding back and forth with plenty of "lol" popping up here and there. And when it's with other people (whom I mentally label as not-very-good-with-English), the conversation is peppered with question marks and "liao" and "ba" and all kinds of other benglish terms, which I don't use (apart from "lah", occasionally).
And apart from the choice of vocab, the tone is markedly different...but I don't want to analyse it just now because I don't need to convince myself that I'm any more mental than I already am. After all, I already know I'm on the way to psychotic and amnesiac, I don't need to call myself schizophrenic and multiple-personality-disordered too, right?
Anyway... I'm just really relieved at the progress we've managed to make with the church caroling group. They sounded quite hopeless last week, and this week they're actually carrying the tune. Sure, they're imbalanced and the tenors and basses keep on drowning out the sopranos, but I can actually hear what they're singing. There's actually some melody coming through in spots.
And that was the hardest song they're going to learn this year...I didn't see any point in delaying it til later and having them all go through last-minute panic... but after years and years of caroling, you'd think they knew everything by heart by now. Apparently not.
Whatever.
In any case, the rest is just formality: deciding on the costume for the year, preparing candlesticks and candles, mapping out the route to take, waiting for people to request visits and preparing the schedule, making sure everybody has petrol in their tanks... and then, of course, I'll have to deal with the last-minuters (Clause has assured me there'll be plenty of those). Hopefully they'll be able to carry a tune too.
I spent a bit of time complaining to Meow yesterday about the sudden demands on my time: apart from moving out, now I've got a bunch of duties to take care of, plus I've got family all over the place who want somebody to stuff. Maybe I ended up sounding rather whiny, but... oh well. Everybody needs to be whiny sometimes.
Basically, it seems like everybody assumes a student on holiday is just pining for places to go, food to eat, and work to do. The demands so far are a headache, though: moving out, I can handle. I can clean the room up in less than three days if I work up the motivation, and anyway I'm going to have to get outta there soon.
However, the next intakes that I can follow are in September (the February ones are impossible due to the RBS), which means that I'm going to come outta there in February with another 7 months of idleness waiting for me. Trust me to wind up with the maximum spare time possible.
But then I've got to visit my grandparents, who've been calling rather often (actually it's my fifth aunt calling on their behalf) for me to appear down there before the year is out--impossible, because if I go down I want to stay for at least two weeks to properly unwind and relax, and there simply isn't another two weeks of spare time for me.
And of course I'm going to have to make the obligatory habitual visit to China, but not necessarily the Big S, since my dad recently changed jobs AGAIN (apparently he was headhunted and offered a huge salary or something, I don't know the details) and now he's moving to some place in the middle of nowhere called Wuhan. It's supposedly the fifth biggest city in China, but what is that compared to the Big S?
And, of course, the China visa lasts 45 days so that's another month away. And I bet while I'm there, my mom will try to make me useful and force me into some kind of work. Cleaning house or teaching my siblings tuition or something. She already wants me to work HERE, which really is impossible because, as I told Meow, nobody hires people without degrees or any sort to do desk jobs. And I'm really not cut out for manual/menial labour, like sales assistance.
Incidentally, Cheeky began work today as a sales assistant. He'll be working 8.5 hours a day, with a salary of about 850 a month after EPF deductions. It's not too bad, but it wouldn't do for me. For one thing he's working in a clothing store, and for another I simply haven't got the physical power to stand around for 8.5 hours a day. Plus I don't think anybody in the place knows more than the very most basic of English. And the clincher: there's nothing nice to eat that is cheap in Just-Go.
...OK, so lots of people can resist. However, that doesn't include me so I didn't resist and went online. Plus MapleStory is having some kind of Christmas promotion going on too and it's having double EXP gains! (Which, you see, inevitably leads to me having gone up another level yesterday.)
But on the credit side, I saw people online that I haven't seen in ages, like Meow and Cheeky for example, and I suddenly noticed that I chat very differently with different people: apparently I have no problem splitting my personality into hundreds of different pieces depending on whom I'm interacting with.
Yesterday, for example. I compared the conversations between myself and Meow, and it's mostly banter. Kidding back and forth with plenty of "lol" popping up here and there. And when it's with other people (whom I mentally label as not-very-good-with-English), the conversation is peppered with question marks and "liao" and "ba" and all kinds of other benglish terms, which I don't use (apart from "lah", occasionally).
And apart from the choice of vocab, the tone is markedly different...but I don't want to analyse it just now because I don't need to convince myself that I'm any more mental than I already am. After all, I already know I'm on the way to psychotic and amnesiac, I don't need to call myself schizophrenic and multiple-personality-disordered too, right?
Anyway... I'm just really relieved at the progress we've managed to make with the church caroling group. They sounded quite hopeless last week, and this week they're actually carrying the tune. Sure, they're imbalanced and the tenors and basses keep on drowning out the sopranos, but I can actually hear what they're singing. There's actually some melody coming through in spots.
And that was the hardest song they're going to learn this year...I didn't see any point in delaying it til later and having them all go through last-minute panic... but after years and years of caroling, you'd think they knew everything by heart by now. Apparently not.
Whatever.
In any case, the rest is just formality: deciding on the costume for the year, preparing candlesticks and candles, mapping out the route to take, waiting for people to request visits and preparing the schedule, making sure everybody has petrol in their tanks... and then, of course, I'll have to deal with the last-minuters (Clause has assured me there'll be plenty of those). Hopefully they'll be able to carry a tune too.
I spent a bit of time complaining to Meow yesterday about the sudden demands on my time: apart from moving out, now I've got a bunch of duties to take care of, plus I've got family all over the place who want somebody to stuff. Maybe I ended up sounding rather whiny, but... oh well. Everybody needs to be whiny sometimes.
Basically, it seems like everybody assumes a student on holiday is just pining for places to go, food to eat, and work to do. The demands so far are a headache, though: moving out, I can handle. I can clean the room up in less than three days if I work up the motivation, and anyway I'm going to have to get outta there soon.
However, the next intakes that I can follow are in September (the February ones are impossible due to the RBS), which means that I'm going to come outta there in February with another 7 months of idleness waiting for me. Trust me to wind up with the maximum spare time possible.
But then I've got to visit my grandparents, who've been calling rather often (actually it's my fifth aunt calling on their behalf) for me to appear down there before the year is out--impossible, because if I go down I want to stay for at least two weeks to properly unwind and relax, and there simply isn't another two weeks of spare time for me.
And of course I'm going to have to make the obligatory habitual visit to China, but not necessarily the Big S, since my dad recently changed jobs AGAIN (apparently he was headhunted and offered a huge salary or something, I don't know the details) and now he's moving to some place in the middle of nowhere called Wuhan. It's supposedly the fifth biggest city in China, but what is that compared to the Big S?
And, of course, the China visa lasts 45 days so that's another month away. And I bet while I'm there, my mom will try to make me useful and force me into some kind of work. Cleaning house or teaching my siblings tuition or something. She already wants me to work HERE, which really is impossible because, as I told Meow, nobody hires people without degrees or any sort to do desk jobs. And I'm really not cut out for manual/menial labour, like sales assistance.
Incidentally, Cheeky began work today as a sales assistant. He'll be working 8.5 hours a day, with a salary of about 850 a month after EPF deductions. It's not too bad, but it wouldn't do for me. For one thing he's working in a clothing store, and for another I simply haven't got the physical power to stand around for 8.5 hours a day. Plus I don't think anybody in the place knows more than the very most basic of English. And the clincher: there's nothing nice to eat that is cheap in Just-Go.
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