Leaden Eyebags
Yeah, I know, sorry I haven't updated here for ages. Yes, I know the blog is (by my standards anyway) almost dead of neglect. Yes, I know you're all rabid and eager for news of what's going on in my amazingly and impossibly exciting life, but all the same I haven't been able to update for awhile. The Gorillas' horrible connection probably has something to do with it: the rest is due to the fact that for the past few days, I've been really very busy and whatever time I spent online was taken up in DotA.
Let's get back for a proper recap; after all, I haven't recorded anything for the past, maybe 2 weeks--gracious, it does seem ages--and so I've got plenty to write down here. And in any case I've got lots and lots of free time to do all the typing; let's just hope you've got heaps of patience, or you'll never get to the end of this post. You do realise, after all, that if I can type about 14 inches of post about one day's events, I can certainly take up a few hours of your time with a really minute description, complete with commentary and off-tangent musings, of the last 14 days... well, I'd say maybe 16 days. I'm almost sure my last post was on the 10th, or maybe the 12th. I can't really remember.
At any rate I'm quite lethargic today: the days surrounding Christmas are almost always some of the most tiring days in my calendar, in the good company of my examination periods and the occasional cleaning frenzy. Well, I guess it's unavoidable, what with me being Christian and being quite enthusiastic about celebrations of almost any sort. I think I'm almost pathologically cheerful sometimes; that's usually just before a depression kicks in and I wonder why I see the world in shades of black and gray. But today I'm planning to just sit in the house, go through my music tracks, type up this amazingly long post, and generally loaf around. I've even got leftover spaghetti from last night to heat up and devour, which makes today's meals very low-maintenance. Tomorrow, of course, I'm planning to meet Silver D and her boyfriend for lunch (although I suppose he's probably rather unenthusiastic about it) and maybe there'll be captain's-ball afterwards, if it doesn't rain. But until then, I'm merrily sitting in front of my laptop, blasting music to the empty house while I tap my way through the empty space on the new WordPad file on my screen at the moment.
So I'll start with the days after the church camp--yeah, the one I wrote about in the last post. Those days--amazingly, I can't remember much about them. I suppose they were particularly relaxing ones, full of loafing around and playing DotA (I'm deeply ashamed to say that I've forgotten almost everything I crammed for in the exams--but only almost; I'm pretty sure a quick read will restore my memory), and the occasional practice for caroling. It's traditional for the youth of my church to go visit houses of the congragation and sing carols, after which the owners of said houses tend to serve up massive amounts of food for the carolers. I know because I remember them singing in my house when I was 4 or 5 and my permanent address was still in KL... and I remember them because they finished off "O Come All Ye Faithful" with a rather nice modification that I still can't quite pin down in my memory.
So that's how the days passed: in a haze of captain's-ball (I remember playing it 3 days in a row and Mrs. Gorilla continually being unable to play due to unforeseen emergencies on all three days) and rain (which cancelled quite a number of captain's-ball games) and DotA (which seems to be quite a craze amongst the guys at the moment) and various Christmas-related activities (caroling practices, various other practice sessions, and decorating sprees). At any rate that's how they passed until the 22nd, which was the first of three days of caroling this year (we usually only have two).
And then the 22nd to the 25th (that's a total of 4 days, in case you've forgotten all your math too) are decidedly blurry. I do remember, on the 23rd, visiting Jogger's place after caroling and playing DotA from midnight until 7am--then sleeping until 4pm, then gobbling instant noodles and rushing off to caroling again. That was quite nice, since we managed to defeat the Toddy Train for the first time ever--he's usually so good that nobody can even put a dent in his HP without dying. Of course, we were on infinite-mana mode, which may account for it, but it was still a very nice thing: I haven't seen Jogger so hyper in awhile. Of course, he did get rather sleepy around 5am; I had a little advantage there, since after the exam cramming, I've got practice staying awake and sedentary for long periods of time.
And, of course, the Toddy Train whipped us both the next round, but we've still got the Noob-Pwns-Pro bragging rights until we decide to let him off.
The last night of caroling was the most stressful one, I must admit. One of the members we visited that night happens to be a particularly frightening individual, as far as I'm concerned at any rate--by which I don't mean I find him frightening, I just mean he's impossibly overaccomplished. Then again, him being very obviously Melancholy (and something else, probably Choleric but certainly not Sanguine), it makes sense that he has the biggest house I've ever sung a carol in--the house is in a very posh gateless neighbourhood, heck! and he had a SGD 2,000+ fibreoptic-constructed Christmas tree--, makes porridge out of wild boars that he kills by crossbow, has several thousand at least invested in a mini-cinema with an amazing sound system, and sings bass better than a lot of people I know. Which makes him one of the most opulent people I've ever seen yet. At any rate it was a new experience for all the carolers, singing to an audience of at least 100 guests (and some of them professional musicians too!) through 3 microphones and amplifiers. At any rate it seems we did OK (or he didn't go and scream at us to disappear after the first song).
I think we sang better on the next two houses than we ever did before--stress does amazing things to the human voice. Besides, on the last house there was loads and loads of food and we stuffed ourselves silly (with the permission and encouragement of the hosts).
Christmas Day this year has been somewhat bittersweet. The morning was nice, very nice indeed: I haven't seen the church so full before--about 180 people, which may not be a terribly impressive number to those from megachurches, but it's a lot to mine. It was quite gratifying, even if we'd only ordered enough food for 140 or so (yeah, I guess even churches can underestimate God sometimes) and the guests gobbled down everything before I could get at the food--well, to be honest I was waiting for the line to thin out before I came along and finished off the leftovers, but then I realised that some of those people were taking second helpings and not letting the line thin out at all. At least I did manage to get coleslaw and potatoes and a little salad; Claus was less fortunate or maybe less discriminating and wound up with a couple bowls of fried rice and little else. The service itself was pretty good too, I think the speaker we invited spoke quite well. Of course he's only God's mouthpiece, but one can't help thinking it doesn't hurt if the mouthpiece has a sense of humour too. Still, the bit he mentioned about keeping the wrapper and throwing away the gift was, I thought, quite an apt analogy for the time.
It was after the service was over and we were cleaning up the debris that the Gorilla told us to start taking down the Christmas tree and the various wreaths, baubles, Styrofoam snowflakes etc. I thought it was a little early to be doing so--it was still, after all, technically Christmas--and then he told us that there was going to be a memorial service that night for a church member's friend's husband who'd succumbed to nose cancer that morning, and I'd be wanted to play the piano at it, and naturally Christmas trees and wreaths, baubles, Styrofoam snowflakes etc. are very inappropriate when there's a casket in the immediate vicinity. It unfortunately happened that I'd had my own plans for Christmas night (primarily involving eating and loafing about and lots of laughing at each other) and playing dirges at a memorial service for someone I've never met didn't strike me as particularly festive.
Still, I went. Free Tea volunteered to accompany me along, and he even managed to put on a suitably serious expression. Well, as serious as he ever gets, anyway; I do declare he's Sanguine to a fault, but he does keep life interesting--plus he doesn't mind getting cuffed on the head or neck every now or then and getting laughed at. (Which is, in my book, a pretty big plus. The laughing, not the cuffing.) It wasn't a very happy thing, but well, I guess it couldn't be helped. It's traditional for people to die, after all, I just couldn't help thinking it was terribly importuning of the man to die at that time.
Still, Free Tea and I had a little talk later about what funerals should be like. You already know my idea of a proper funeral, after all: "funeral" doesn't start with "FUN" for nothing, is my opinion. At any rate the service eventually ended and I paid my respects to the widow, along with the rest of the youth who later turned up: the Coconut and a few others; then we returned to the Gorillas' place and went from doom-and-gloom to merry glomming of cakes, downing of various carbonated drinks, and roaring at a Korean movie (Mrs. Gorilla has gotten quite hooked on them). Certainly that movie was pretty good. "Please Teach Me English" it was called, and I don't think I'm ever going to get over the scene of a grown woman leaning over her balcony and screeching "I LOVE BACTERIA!" to the night sky (and the unhappy neighbours). Of course, she meant "Victoria" but it's still funny--especially when she later gets told by a hotel that they "have no Bacteria or Bacterium staying here".
This morning was the funeral service before the cremation--and, of course, I played the piano. It wasn't so bad, although I'd have liked to sleep in a little; still, I did get to nap later when I got back to the house, although I had 40 kilos of 11-year-old boy lying on me for part of it. At this point I should explain, perhaps: the Gorillas have three children, which in my opinion are infinitely more civilised than the Brats will ever be, and the eldest of them (Green Thumb) is the aforementioned 11-year-old, 40-kilo boy. The other two are girls, and I can't think of suitable nicknames for them yet. And Green Thumb happens to be a very determined cuddlebug: very few days go by without him asking for a piggyback ride or jumping into my lap. I don't mind terribly though; he's easy to convince when a piggyback is unavailable (either because of inappropriate timing or because I'm only half-conscious at the time), and having somebody on one's lap is really quite comfortable, though the head does get in the way when one's trying to watch TV.
(I only wonder if the trend is likely to continue, because if it does, by the end of my course I'll be piggybacking a 14-year-old with goodness how many kilos on him, which does not bode well for my back.)
In any case I slept until 2pm, when I woke up because the two younger girls were in and out of my room packing their bags and getting stuff they'd forgotten on the previous trips; the Gorilla's entire family is out taking a 3-day holiday and so I'm alone in the house at the moment, or at any rate until Claus's girlfriend gets back from work, assuming today isn't her day off and she isn't coming back at all, which means I get to finish all the leftover spaghetti on my own.
Let's get back for a proper recap; after all, I haven't recorded anything for the past, maybe 2 weeks--gracious, it does seem ages--and so I've got plenty to write down here. And in any case I've got lots and lots of free time to do all the typing; let's just hope you've got heaps of patience, or you'll never get to the end of this post. You do realise, after all, that if I can type about 14 inches of post about one day's events, I can certainly take up a few hours of your time with a really minute description, complete with commentary and off-tangent musings, of the last 14 days... well, I'd say maybe 16 days. I'm almost sure my last post was on the 10th, or maybe the 12th. I can't really remember.
At any rate I'm quite lethargic today: the days surrounding Christmas are almost always some of the most tiring days in my calendar, in the good company of my examination periods and the occasional cleaning frenzy. Well, I guess it's unavoidable, what with me being Christian and being quite enthusiastic about celebrations of almost any sort. I think I'm almost pathologically cheerful sometimes; that's usually just before a depression kicks in and I wonder why I see the world in shades of black and gray. But today I'm planning to just sit in the house, go through my music tracks, type up this amazingly long post, and generally loaf around. I've even got leftover spaghetti from last night to heat up and devour, which makes today's meals very low-maintenance. Tomorrow, of course, I'm planning to meet Silver D and her boyfriend for lunch (although I suppose he's probably rather unenthusiastic about it) and maybe there'll be captain's-ball afterwards, if it doesn't rain. But until then, I'm merrily sitting in front of my laptop, blasting music to the empty house while I tap my way through the empty space on the new WordPad file on my screen at the moment.
So I'll start with the days after the church camp--yeah, the one I wrote about in the last post. Those days--amazingly, I can't remember much about them. I suppose they were particularly relaxing ones, full of loafing around and playing DotA (I'm deeply ashamed to say that I've forgotten almost everything I crammed for in the exams--but only almost; I'm pretty sure a quick read will restore my memory), and the occasional practice for caroling. It's traditional for the youth of my church to go visit houses of the congragation and sing carols, after which the owners of said houses tend to serve up massive amounts of food for the carolers. I know because I remember them singing in my house when I was 4 or 5 and my permanent address was still in KL... and I remember them because they finished off "O Come All Ye Faithful" with a rather nice modification that I still can't quite pin down in my memory.
So that's how the days passed: in a haze of captain's-ball (I remember playing it 3 days in a row and Mrs. Gorilla continually being unable to play due to unforeseen emergencies on all three days) and rain (which cancelled quite a number of captain's-ball games) and DotA (which seems to be quite a craze amongst the guys at the moment) and various Christmas-related activities (caroling practices, various other practice sessions, and decorating sprees). At any rate that's how they passed until the 22nd, which was the first of three days of caroling this year (we usually only have two).
And then the 22nd to the 25th (that's a total of 4 days, in case you've forgotten all your math too) are decidedly blurry. I do remember, on the 23rd, visiting Jogger's place after caroling and playing DotA from midnight until 7am--then sleeping until 4pm, then gobbling instant noodles and rushing off to caroling again. That was quite nice, since we managed to defeat the Toddy Train for the first time ever--he's usually so good that nobody can even put a dent in his HP without dying. Of course, we were on infinite-mana mode, which may account for it, but it was still a very nice thing: I haven't seen Jogger so hyper in awhile. Of course, he did get rather sleepy around 5am; I had a little advantage there, since after the exam cramming, I've got practice staying awake and sedentary for long periods of time.
And, of course, the Toddy Train whipped us both the next round, but we've still got the Noob-Pwns-Pro bragging rights until we decide to let him off.
The last night of caroling was the most stressful one, I must admit. One of the members we visited that night happens to be a particularly frightening individual, as far as I'm concerned at any rate--by which I don't mean I find him frightening, I just mean he's impossibly overaccomplished. Then again, him being very obviously Melancholy (and something else, probably Choleric but certainly not Sanguine), it makes sense that he has the biggest house I've ever sung a carol in--the house is in a very posh gateless neighbourhood, heck! and he had a SGD 2,000+ fibreoptic-constructed Christmas tree--, makes porridge out of wild boars that he kills by crossbow, has several thousand at least invested in a mini-cinema with an amazing sound system, and sings bass better than a lot of people I know. Which makes him one of the most opulent people I've ever seen yet. At any rate it was a new experience for all the carolers, singing to an audience of at least 100 guests (and some of them professional musicians too!) through 3 microphones and amplifiers. At any rate it seems we did OK (or he didn't go and scream at us to disappear after the first song).
I think we sang better on the next two houses than we ever did before--stress does amazing things to the human voice. Besides, on the last house there was loads and loads of food and we stuffed ourselves silly (with the permission and encouragement of the hosts).
Christmas Day this year has been somewhat bittersweet. The morning was nice, very nice indeed: I haven't seen the church so full before--about 180 people, which may not be a terribly impressive number to those from megachurches, but it's a lot to mine. It was quite gratifying, even if we'd only ordered enough food for 140 or so (yeah, I guess even churches can underestimate God sometimes) and the guests gobbled down everything before I could get at the food--well, to be honest I was waiting for the line to thin out before I came along and finished off the leftovers, but then I realised that some of those people were taking second helpings and not letting the line thin out at all. At least I did manage to get coleslaw and potatoes and a little salad; Claus was less fortunate or maybe less discriminating and wound up with a couple bowls of fried rice and little else. The service itself was pretty good too, I think the speaker we invited spoke quite well. Of course he's only God's mouthpiece, but one can't help thinking it doesn't hurt if the mouthpiece has a sense of humour too. Still, the bit he mentioned about keeping the wrapper and throwing away the gift was, I thought, quite an apt analogy for the time.
It was after the service was over and we were cleaning up the debris that the Gorilla told us to start taking down the Christmas tree and the various wreaths, baubles, Styrofoam snowflakes etc. I thought it was a little early to be doing so--it was still, after all, technically Christmas--and then he told us that there was going to be a memorial service that night for a church member's friend's husband who'd succumbed to nose cancer that morning, and I'd be wanted to play the piano at it, and naturally Christmas trees and wreaths, baubles, Styrofoam snowflakes etc. are very inappropriate when there's a casket in the immediate vicinity. It unfortunately happened that I'd had my own plans for Christmas night (primarily involving eating and loafing about and lots of laughing at each other) and playing dirges at a memorial service for someone I've never met didn't strike me as particularly festive.
Still, I went. Free Tea volunteered to accompany me along, and he even managed to put on a suitably serious expression. Well, as serious as he ever gets, anyway; I do declare he's Sanguine to a fault, but he does keep life interesting--plus he doesn't mind getting cuffed on the head or neck every now or then and getting laughed at. (Which is, in my book, a pretty big plus. The laughing, not the cuffing.) It wasn't a very happy thing, but well, I guess it couldn't be helped. It's traditional for people to die, after all, I just couldn't help thinking it was terribly importuning of the man to die at that time.
Still, Free Tea and I had a little talk later about what funerals should be like. You already know my idea of a proper funeral, after all: "funeral" doesn't start with "FUN" for nothing, is my opinion. At any rate the service eventually ended and I paid my respects to the widow, along with the rest of the youth who later turned up: the Coconut and a few others; then we returned to the Gorillas' place and went from doom-and-gloom to merry glomming of cakes, downing of various carbonated drinks, and roaring at a Korean movie (Mrs. Gorilla has gotten quite hooked on them). Certainly that movie was pretty good. "Please Teach Me English" it was called, and I don't think I'm ever going to get over the scene of a grown woman leaning over her balcony and screeching "I LOVE BACTERIA!" to the night sky (and the unhappy neighbours). Of course, she meant "Victoria" but it's still funny--especially when she later gets told by a hotel that they "have no Bacteria or Bacterium staying here".
This morning was the funeral service before the cremation--and, of course, I played the piano. It wasn't so bad, although I'd have liked to sleep in a little; still, I did get to nap later when I got back to the house, although I had 40 kilos of 11-year-old boy lying on me for part of it. At this point I should explain, perhaps: the Gorillas have three children, which in my opinion are infinitely more civilised than the Brats will ever be, and the eldest of them (Green Thumb) is the aforementioned 11-year-old, 40-kilo boy. The other two are girls, and I can't think of suitable nicknames for them yet. And Green Thumb happens to be a very determined cuddlebug: very few days go by without him asking for a piggyback ride or jumping into my lap. I don't mind terribly though; he's easy to convince when a piggyback is unavailable (either because of inappropriate timing or because I'm only half-conscious at the time), and having somebody on one's lap is really quite comfortable, though the head does get in the way when one's trying to watch TV.
(I only wonder if the trend is likely to continue, because if it does, by the end of my course I'll be piggybacking a 14-year-old with goodness how many kilos on him, which does not bode well for my back.)
In any case I slept until 2pm, when I woke up because the two younger girls were in and out of my room packing their bags and getting stuff they'd forgotten on the previous trips; the Gorilla's entire family is out taking a 3-day holiday and so I'm alone in the house at the moment, or at any rate until Claus's girlfriend gets back from work, assuming today isn't her day off and she isn't coming back at all, which means I get to finish all the leftover spaghetti on my own.
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