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).
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).
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