Panthera Sapiens Ellipsis: The Blog

So it’s the second-last day of my time in Patience today, and I’ve only actually seen the Pig once; it’s definitely his fault, since he keeps on oversleeping and being too tired and/or late to actually go hang out before he needs to sleep for his job the next day, and it’s not like I clutter up my time… yes, I’m slightly annoyed, why do you ask? But it’s still been a pretty good time here—I spend nearly every night out with people (and a different combination every time at that), which is a bit of a strain on the wallet but apparently everybody believes I’m going to get a job soon and have a salary double or triple theirs and so they have no worries on my behalf. Personally, whenever people ask me how I am, I start off with “alive” and then add “and jobless” to allay the odd look that pops up on their face, and then if I met them at church they say it’s all in God’s timing and if I met them elsewhere they say it’s not as if the economy in Malaysia is all that much better anyway, I’ll p...

It’s slightly past midnight on what I consider the second day of my time here in Patience, and so far… well, not much gallivanting has been done. I’ve mostly confined myself to the house and areas reachable by walking; I’d planned to go out on the town with the Pig for a drink, but he was indisposed. But I might as well start from the beginning, which is to say, this morning. I woke at roughly 9.30am or so, to the entreaties of my mother to move my grandmother’s lounge chair downstairs. (It appears that old people tend to lounge chairs, or something. Maybe there’s some kind of visceral comfort to be gotten from sitting back in metal frames with broad plastic strips on them.) So I did that, and then had breakfast—simple stuff, nothing amazing, and then washed the car and my Crocs, which used to be white but were by then a sort of scuffed gray; all the morning and afternoon the Internet refused to connect, which was why I acquiesced to the chores without grumbling too much. I also we...

I’m typing this from in Patience, one of the last places I expected to be at this juncture in time. How sudden changes can occur, eh? And it’s only, perhaps, typical of my life that such things should occur just as I’m expecting life to go back to usual. So I’m here, and… well, let’s see where to start. Without the benefit of the Internet to quickly check where I left off, and yet certain that I certainly posted within the last few days, I suppose I might as well recap the events of everything since the eighth of July, and then we can slowly slice off the redundancies if there are any. But I doubt there will be any, since I don’t think I’ve posted anything since leaving Singapore. So that’s where we’ll start. On the night of the seventh of July, I received an SMS from my father saying that my paternal grandfather (I have only the one; my maternal grandfather is long dead, and from all accounts nobody but the worst of drill sergeants would have gotten along with that man) was very ...

I'm typing this from the grandfolks' place in So Hour, where I have been for a little less than thirty-six hours. It's been an interesting time so far, so I suppose you'll want to know absolutely everything about my life since the past update nearly two weeks ago--and, as my usual habit goes, even if you don't you're about to find out anyway! ...then again, nothing much of note has happened since my last update; I've mostly spent the time getting used to the house--there's a lot to keep on getting used to--and looking unsuccessfully for jobs, and hanging out with people, but more on that in a bit. Mostly I stay in the house and listen to the landlady's random mutterings, and I have to admit she's getting on my nerves rather. She's a sixty-something-year-old woman with the figure of a dessicated pear and the face of a gargoyle (not the real-life stone-carved ones, more like the ones from the Disney animated series) and I'm really trying to...

So it's Friday night, and the... let's see... it's nearly four days and a half since I moved into this new place, and of those four I've only spent one full day in the house; every other day I've gone walking out to explore or get stuff done; my schedule of living hasn't changed, much, though. I suppose I should introduce the people I'll be living with for the next year, barring giant surprises that send me off to goodness knows where and force me to forfeit the month's deposit... so first off I'll start by saying that I don't live alone. It's a small unit: two bedrooms, one living room, one kitchen-cum-dining room, one storeroom; both bedrooms are rented out, and I (and the roommate) occupy the one nearer the kitchen. It's very clean--the landlady has a thing about germs--and most of the furniture is pretty old. There's piles of stuff around the kitchen and store room, apart from the space on the ground where the landlady sleeps. The...

...has it really been only half a month since Australia? It seems so much... longer . My sense of time has gotten warped, what with not having anything occupying my time... Let's see if I can piece together any sort of coherent memory of the last two weeks. I'm sure I'll be able to. Not in as much detail as the Australian account, of course, but that's to be expected. Let's see what I can remember. We might have to throw coherency out along the way, though... I suppose I might as well lay out a baseline, so you don't imagine me living the footloose and fancy free life, all bobance and bounce and fricasseed Freakazoid and come away with entirely the wrong impression and start thinking that the events I tell you about are just the tip of the iceberg and really I'm doing all sorts of really amazing things I'm just not telling you about. So here's my new "average day"... On an average day I wake up anywhere between 10am and 12pm; the first thin...

I got back from Australia a couple days ago, and have a great deal to write; fortunately for everybody I brought a notebook along, and filled it up every day with an account of expenditure (mostly for the parents' benefit, so they know how the money went) and activities, and so you're about to be told about five days' and four nights' worth of strenuous activity! ...well, not quite strenuous. But the benefit of having a notebook to record things in is that I'm going to be able to go into a fair bit of detail, and that means you have a lovely big wall of text to look at! But first the... Record of Expenditure (all figures in AUD; these items not listed in chronological order) 26th May Return ticket (Brisbane Int'l-Nerang): 57 Go card: 40 Lunch (rump steak) 9.95 Dinner (pizzas) 5.60 Observation tower ticket 21 Running total ≈114.55 27th May Theme park and farm tour tickets 157 Breakfast ("big breaky") 7.95 Tiger...