There is a certain state of mind, when it comes to blogging, that needs to be tapped into first. For some it is a sense of deep calmness. Still others find it a place to unload their semi-truths and poetic musings. For others it is the lure of attention, a prospect of focus lavished unexpectedly on them which is only the surface of the waters that beg for one of human's most simple needs. But for those who are a little apathetic, those of the facebooking generation and the guiltless downloaders, of which I am a proud member, it is the overwhelmingly powerful feeling that they have absolutely nothing better to do.


So here I am again, after a more or less complete lunar cycle's absence, not that anyone noticed. */emocorner* */snaps out of it* Sometimes I feel it's better this way, having no one around. I can trick myself into believing that hardly anyone reads this boring crap, thus freeing myself from constraints of political incorrectness and the like. Meaning I can say whatever I damn well want to, since no one is listening anyway.

But that's not the way it works of course. The only reason humans have speech is to communicate, and if communication is non-existent then what's the point of talking? I wonder if that's why some people don't talk much. They have nothing to communicate with to the world. Maybe they didn't have a chance to.

And the fact remains that somewhere, perhaps in a cute little Romanian house, or a cybercafe in Milan, or a forgotten shack somewhere along the beaches of Rio, a person sits on their armchair/stool/butt in the wee hours of the morning and clicks the I'm Feeling Lucky button and stumbles on this little deposit of emotions and (I'm stating a possibility here, not that I'm sensible enough to be of consequence, let alone lucid enough to be sensible.

Liberte! Liberte!

I will readily admit, albeit after having downed (though not all together) at least three glasses of Traminer Reisling, that I am not an idiot savant when it comes to dates.

In fact, were it not for the timely intervention of one Shakti Kaur a.k.a. Shaks, the indelible reminder by whom thundered out of my phone at me one drunken tipsy night while I was squinting in vain to read Making Money in the hotel balcony's half-light:

"DOESN'T THE 26TH OF AUGUST RING ONE VERY LOUD BELL IN YOUR BLURNESS-STUFFED
EAR??"

As usual, such astute rhetoric from a former drama associate turned fellow book fanatic who, being a girl, is particularly intuitive in memorizing important dates and recognising my lack in ability thereof.

Audible sigh, so I set down to writing a (now belated, holy crap) birthday post for Mmi, forum associate turned MSN associate turned partner in crime, sounding board, encouraging critic, theological rant buddy, late-night companion, and all round mushroom goddess.





It may either be an unfortunate or fortuitous fact that the one person on this earth who rides the same wavelength as you can be more easily found on the net than in real life. It sounds sad, yet it's probably a blessing in disguise; most people never really know what they're like until they meet themselves.


And it's true that we're almost too similar for our respective sanities, Mmi & I; with the lame jokes, quirky asides and inadvertent slang-dropping, it's a wonder we haven't annoyed each other to merciful non-existence yet.
And for some reason -no matter where we start off with- our conversations always end up on the philosophical, edging on existential side. Yet this is where Mmina shines: For here is where she displays a remarkable amount of insight into some of Life's most depressing Conundrums.

For all our concordant trains of thought, however, for either of our open/neorotic mindsets, there exists an intrinsic difference between us: Where I am selfish, so is she selfless. Where I am cold, so is she warm. Our respective capacities for compassion lie at opposite ends of the spectrum.

If there was a prize for Person Most Like Me Without The Egotistic Bits, she'd win it hands down.


As this birthday post comes to a close, I want to say that I truly remembered, that I took the time to burn three simple yet deviously elusive numbers into my cranium, I really do; but while exaggaration is a tool of the trade, dishonesty is not: So let me apologise for the lateness, as well as probably not being around when you needed me too; I did agonise a bit over the present, since I can hardly get you anything tangible, short of sending an ugly mug over by snail mail, which would probably be broken pottery by the time it gets there, so-


Here's a sunset from start to finish, taken from last week's jaunt to Bukit Tinggi; hope you like:

Orange slide, the sky that it reflects
Sponge's pride, being dangled

Spider!

The apprehension that was caught alive
It's okay even if I don't hide it
I want to have colored dreams

RIDE ON SHOOTING STAR

With the voice of my heart, like a shotgun I kept on singing

Grunge hamster, be grown up
Lobster of revenge, bring it along

Sniper!

I'll say, "What can you see in that fringed world?"
I want to touch it before I aim for it

RIDE ON SHOOTING STAR

Searching for you, and in withdrawal syndrome
I told a lie

RIDE ON SHOOTING STAR

With the voice of my heart, like a shotgun I kept on singing

Happy birthday, Mmi~

In the land of the blind, the one-eyed cat is king.

A ragged ear, whiskers

Like stalks of wildgrass

Twitch

To jarr the perfect asymmetry:

The Rogue.




A solitary eye of sable

Luminous,

To gaze out in casual fascination

Like lamps of piercing darkness:

The Seer.




A mangled visage

To shatter the illusion of the World;

Like the last living being that draws breath

Abreast

The Night.





Beating a hasty retreat from chicken rice, mundanity, and delusions of poetic adequacy, ==.


Cherries~

There I go again.

It's like a disease. Everytime I write, all the long, impressive-sounding words come out. It's not intentional. I can't help myself. Slip of the mind, you know?


But it gets to the point where writing here is like painting with a brush ten times the usual size. You dip it in words and you paint on the canvas of a post - great care taken not to apply too much pressure - else the brush slips, and huge blobs of 5-6 syllabic words are painted. People are left staring, slightly in awe, but mostly in confusion at the array of colourful blotches.


When sometime later, the painter looks back on his own "masterpieces", they hardly make sense to him either.




Bombasticism.


People think it's a good thing to know almost every word in the dictionary. It's not. Sure, you impress some people in the same way, oh, a circus seal impresses us by balancing a ball on its nose. "Wow! How clever," you remark while clapping enthusiastically, because most of us wouldn't know how to juggle a ball for nuts.



Sure, it blinds the teacher to grammatical errors when marking essays. The reasoning is that a person who knows his dictionary inside-out could only have been careless when it comes to punctuation - which is completely wrong.





Unless you don't mind if your name gets spelled wrong on your tombstone;

"Here lies Gabriel Gun,

Who might've been Gan

But we're not sure.

He was quite blur

To let us write

His epitaph

With poor eyesight

and one bad draft."

But the point is this: What's the point of knowing so many words if you don't know how to use them?

On a related note, what's the point of using so many words when one or two will do?



Bugger.




Then again, there may be some use for the jumble of technical jargon jostling for space in my head. As observed by Calvin:

* * *

Stayed up for the Perseid meteor shower tonight. Then I went outside to find that whatever bits of the north hemisphere (where the stars were supposed to fall) that wasn't blocked by my house was covered in the only tufts of cloud in the whole upturned ricebowl of the sky.



Arrg. So much for some new pics. And my eyes are getting that frying-in-deep-oil feeling when I stay up till 3.


At least there's no college tomorrow.




Morning all~

See the paper faces on parade, every one a different shade

I'm not sure it was worth the 4 hours frantically cobbling together what was basically a placard with holes in it from disparate pieces of paper and aluminium foil held together by glue and curses.

I'm not sure it was worth the 60 bucks admission, or exhuming that old dinner jacket from its casket under the bed, or even the application of contact lenses, which I heard were damn eye-wateringly itchy.

Frankly, I'm not sure it was worth all that fuss for a masquerade ball, 3 hours of an unfilling six-course dinner, various pleasant performances, two lucky draws (the majority of which were scooped up by the Ausmat cohort), a best mask competition, and a lot of shaky photos taken of people sans masks, all of which I won't post here to spare you the....pleasure.

But what can I say? It was fun.

The dancing especially. Some people can really bust a move. Julian and Vno, for example. If dancing were words they'd be poets. Contrast that with a guy in an old dinner jacket who skittered around the dancefloor looking like an epileptic seizure standing up. But that's okay. I doubt anyone could see through the strobe effect on the lights, flashing like a million cameras at the Oscars and half-blinding everyone in the vicinity, which was probably why they put it in the first place. No one can see how badly you dance when everyone's busy trying to keep from being stepped on by everyone else too blinded to see straight. You gotta love them strobes. If beer helps ugly people find love, strobe lights make left-footed chickens look like greased lightning.



I've been feeling a curious lack of angst recently. It's unlike my usual self, what I like to call "brooding" but more accurately described as "emo", "boring" or the classic "stoned". It's a nice feeling, this lightness of mind, though it probably spells doom for any opinion I might have left after such a dose of ambrosia. Which basically means nothing I write here anymore will be of any interest to anyone with a brain...



Why is it that all the best literary works are serious, brooding, and dark while the stuff that gives you a glowing feeling afterwards hardly get a mention? (Ok, if you can't relate to books replace "literary works" with "movies", or whichever area of geeky expertise you prefer. Excepting tanks.)

Because the former is deep, that's why; it plumbs the depth of human emotion, it propels the mind to think in widely divergent directions. Compare that with Confessions of a Shopaholic, a read that tickles you to the bone (or so I hear) but doesn't make any inroads into the human psyche. Unless to prove beyond a doubt that some women can't live without Shopping; which isn't bad or anything; just something we all pretty much knew since the dawn of time.

But it's kinda sad that more happy things aren't mentioned in the history books. There's one in my house called The 20th Century: A Pictorial History and it's full of inventions, war and famous people, but not one mention of a stirring "feel-good" event. Even beer, one of the greatest inventions known to man, isn't in it. Goes to show, doesn't it?

Maybe because Happiness is such a hard feeling to pin down; it's like a wave you crest or a mountain peak you scale; sooner or later you'll have to come down, because it's tricky to stay at the top. The concept of Happiness also differs widely from person to person - one man's beer is another man's dishwater - but the feelings of sorrow and loss, as well what we feel them for, is universal.

So in the end, chick lit will never make it into the puffin classics; likewise, people will go blind on cereal before Scary Movie gets in the running for an Oscar. But maybe fluffy, mindless fun will get the last laugh. Michael Bay himself must be in stitches all the way to the bank after the overblown, much criticized vehicle that was Transformers 2 raked in $394 million at the box office. And don't get me started on Twilight.



Wealth or fame. Fame or wealth. Hmm. Somehow, pragmatism always wins out.



Until some bright spark invents a means to live quite comfortably on ideals -

An attack of high spirits. Who do you call?

The past week has been eventful in the way everyday life is: head-banging fun for me, mind-numbing boredom for the rest of humanity.


It's funny how some things never change. The world, for instance. It never changes; it just stays the same, only more so. But that's a story for another day.


In this instance, what doesn't change is Life at College, or more specifically, Life at The Little Outpost In The Jungle between two Pinnacles of Civilization (Sg & Kl) that is Sunway College JB.


Yes, nothing ever happens around here. We don't have a futsal court. Some people did turn up for our expos, though I'm not sure they really count since you could count the number of people who came with one hand. There is that Masquerade ball what came up in three weeks time 20 days ago. Odds on at least two-thirds will crumple, trod on, break or otherwise forget to bring their masks tomorrow night. And I don't have a date. Boohoo~



It's not all fun and games though. Everyday is a struggle to make ends meet, playing silly buggers in class, holding races to the mamak stall at lunchtime, skipping M'sian Studies for DotA and fooling around with the door sensors on the only working lift on campus. Mucho stressful indeed. I only hope all this effort won't go to waste during exams.


But Life at College has pretty much settled down here and had kids. What with all the rumors of couples, gangbanging on birthdays and table graffiti; it's like high school all over again. Only with cars, bad fashion sense and much, much cleaner toilets.



Speaking of cars; last wednesday, instead of his Vios, Adrian brought his venerable Wira.


The sms Prasad sent to him after test driving it says it all:

Ur car is the best car on earth man. It rocks. Sumre d oil metre nt wrk. Who needs a radio for ur car wen ur car gt AWESOME sound frm the exhaust pipe. Den pleasant perfume frm d car! Cool seats wif dusts!!Best power steerin car which turns dam smoothly..D car dam safty cz wen u lock d car frm inside it cnt unlock.Bumper is well-modified til no place to stick ur num plate!! I luv ur car bro!! Thnx for d drive mann! Sure ur vios ntg compared to d wira!*

- Prasad Unrated, July '09.

*A bit of clarification for those born without sarcasm detectors: Steering was quite heavy, turns for only 1 full revolution and a half, and gets stuck at all the wrong times. Perfume in question was exhaust fumes from the back. Aforementioned radio was missing - like a mad cybertronian dog had bitten a huge chunk out of the dashboard and ran away sniggering.



And for those you who like the pictures on this space, thank you. Sorry for none today, but vacations are like weddings - you get them every few years, once a year if you're lucky, and even when you do they're so full of a maudlin commotion that when all's said and done mostly everyone is happy, and happy mostly because it's all over and done with.

Wedding nights, on the other hand -




But that's another story.

Cheerio~

Look.

It would seem an odd coincidence that nihilism and contentment, while being opposite states of being, both involve the doing of very little: If probed, neither would be remotely interested in doing anything remotely interesting. Yet the difference is in the underlying reason: the former won’t go to the movies because it is pointless, the latter because it doesn’t need to. But isn’t it funny how getting from one point to the other involves quite a flurry of activity in between?

Curious.

"Slowly walking down the hall
Faster than a cannon ball
Where were you when we were getting high?
We were getting high
We were getting high"

I'm all for champagne against drugs

And smoking.



In the earlier years I was taught the evils of this weed, indoctrined against it quite thoroughly by beloved Moral textbooks, subliminal messages in my tv and the gruesome posters they always put up outside the school toilets. In secondary school it was lumped together with the other cardinal sins: drugs, unprotected sex, criticizing the government. By association, people who indulged in such debauched practices were viewed in the same light, so hardly any of us cared to have a go -virtually all our school days were spent smoke- , scandal- and riot-free. For all the crapload of crap they crapped on us, the MoE really did a good job of safeguarding their future generations against immoral practices.



So I never really wanted to try out smoking. Curious, maybe, yet not enough to overcome my fear of addiction. But obscure memories of my grandfather lying on his wicker chair dying of lung cancer beckoning me with his voice like sawblades asking me to try pulling his finger off sonnyboy (which wasn't funny at all O_O ) probably didn't help either.



Funny then, how it seems perfectly natural for two colleagues to light up after lunch at the mamak stall, how the smoke billows out in breaths of rose-tinged pungency, how the rest of us politely ignore the smell and carry on as normal. Certainly it's not that bad. There are worse things than chowing down next to a chimnley. Like not being able to spell chimnley right. Daww


Maybe I won't mind as much when I'm older. I might even take it up like her.

If I lived that long I would try to hasten the dying process too.


In other boring news I've just seen Half-Blood Prince; and my, how stunning Emma Watson has become over the years. Too bad can't say the same for Lavender and Ginny, though Ron and Harry even it out by looking more or less like pasty-faced siew pau - Edward Cullen got no dope on this :





So I did my turn for Hollywood; and to be honest I thought it was okay. Disappointing at times but hardly boring. Camerawork was lousy. Transition between scenes were a little disassociated, weird angles, etc. Many comical moments in this one, most of which fall flat, but watch out for the Liquid Luck sequence. No customary battle at the climax (?!) but Dumbledore dies. (I suppose I should've put a SPOILER ALERT before that last sentence, but I guess it's too late now.) Acting was decent but not outstanding, yet I really expected more. Doesn't less action = more character development? Oh well.

BM translation was impeccable as usual; Dumbledore's words when he was craning into the basin of enchanted water in the cave were immaculately translated into "itu mestinya mabuk." *long exhalation of air* Makes you wonder if the decision to revert Science & Maths was a farsighted move after all....

Saving Gandalf from the nasty Gollumses




Quickie: JB Westley's Annivesary Dinner was fun. Venue was Peking Restaurant near Sutera Mall so the food was nice. The good thing about 7-course meals is they allow you to digest your food before the next course, so you end up feeling quite, quite satiated. Met with some old chums over free dinner and a show. Not bad for a church we've been AWOL from for 4 years.


Not much else of note. 'Cept I've been thinking about halting this blog. No one reads this space, and anyway it takes around 3-4 hours to write a post. Not least 'cos of all the distractions Youtube and the internet brings. =(

Until (much probably much much) later -

Part III of the Boring Holiday Photo Montage

It is apparent that no one can feel 100% secure. The christians find their security in God, atheists in their self-righteousness; but where then does that leave the agnostic?



For some time now I’ve been feeling like an anchorless sampan, carried hither and thither by the currents of an uncaring sea. Should I divine my future in the stars, or scry my fate in the swirls and eddies of the water?



It’s really really cold in the ferry.



So we spent a night in Tioman. Would’ve been the standard two, if not for your typical Malaysian timing, which involves a mad rush of packing on Saturday after procrastinating about it for the whole week, leaving at 10am the next day, two hours to dock, 12pm, wait for ferry, two hours to board, 2pm, bump and grind in freezing boat, two hours to Tioman, 4pm.



Total time, 6 hours. Would've been bearable enough, if not for your typical Malaysian love of a certain spiky fruit with a distinct pong, the aroma of which enveloped us and refused to go away, not even when we got on the ferry, haunting us like a jilted lover's ghost with gastrointestinal problems.




But like everything one goes through, it's an experience. Better than staying at home playing Happy Farm on Facebook. Better than vegetating on the couch, or bumming around CS, wasting hard-earned money on b-grade action flicks you can get 10 for 3 at the completely legal I assure you dvd seller beside the hawker centre. Nope, definitely better than that.

"I dreamt I was a paper boat
who wanted to be free;
I cast off from my
harbor and sailed the seven seas

I had some great adventures,
a scrape or two, or three;
But then i found i was alone, adrift upon the sea

I relished the open space at first
As far as I could see;
The sky above,
the sea below
A perfect symmetry.

Yet 'ere I gazed upon the view
I yearned for something more
another boat
to share it with
a comrade oar in oar

I scoured the seven seas again
though all I looked around
The companionship I sought for
was nowhere to be found.

Till now have I searched fruitlessly
a futile quest it seems
Mayhap I'll always be this way-
Oh well. It's just a dream."

~Toodle pip!

insert funny quote here

Hello all!

Let me start off by saying Happy Father’s Day to all you fathers and fathers-to-be out there . You may not be celebrated as much as mothers, but you fulfill a different role (or sociological niche, as my bio teacher calls it) in the shaping of your children’s future. For those who are good at this sort of thing - bravo. For those who aren’t, but keep trying anyway - bravasissimo - your effort is equally lauded. =)


(In case you think I’ve forgotten someone, I said it to him last week. [I got the date wrong, okay?])




Now that that’s out of the way. I want to say I love my camera. (Wait. For those of you who can't stand my long wordy posts, just scroll down for the pics. Don't leave a comment)


Anyway. I love my cam. I really do. I love its crisp shots, the detail you can cram into each pic (3000x2000 pixels usually) and the endless tweaking it can be subjected to, which renders the post-pics editing obsolete. Pretty much the only thing I have to do is resize the pics before uploading them.


So now that we’ve established the fact that my camera owns. I want to say that sometimes I can still be jealous of rae. Or more specifically the teeny widdle camera she totes around everywhere. You know, the kind no self-respecting facebooker is caught dead without.



Why, you ask? Because it’s so small. It’s compact. You could stick it in your jeans and people will think it’s your wallet. Secondly, as a direct consequence of this it’s unobtrusive. Meaning you can snap candids of price tags/ concerts/ unwary friends in compromising situations with relatively low risk of getting caught.



Not so with my camera. It's bulky. It's hard to carry. When you're not taking photos with it it's a dead weight. Often the fact makes me lazy to drag it everywhere, thus missing out on some good photo ops (sunrises, gatherings, etc.) Like last night I had had some some really good peach wine - light, silvery sweet with sour aftertaste - and i wanted to take a nice pic of the bottle with the food and atmosphere and all, but i didn't bring it. Who takes a camera the size of a shoebox to dinner, i ask you? Instead i brought back the bottle and took this:

Which of course isn't the same at all. This is ....dusty. Nostalgic, even. Not to mention more boring than anything.



Secondly, as a direct consequence of the first reason, my camera is very obvious. It looks almost official. When I have it out at functions people automatically assume I'm the journalist/ photographer/ student body officer. It makes heat-of-the-moment shots very hard to make. And sometimes people get offended....


Like so.


So now we've established the fact that my camera doesn't own, at least not in all aspects. But still its pretty good methinks, and its handy for taking close-ups of very small and very fast movings things.....

taking into account that this is a water droplet the size approximate of a pimple, and the time period it was on that patch of surface was probably 1/555 seconds, , due to the fact that said surface was above 100C, enough to melt clothes
as illustrated by the recent fashion statement in my lab coat.

Which brings us to the other topic of conversation, Sunway College's Open Day last sun. Though it might as well have been a closed day for all the visitors who showed up. The upside of this was that we were mostly left to our own devices (muaha), so the remainder of the day was well spent making ice-cream,

playing with faux blood,

and the taking of dumb photos.

Ah, college. =)

Part 1 of the Boring Holiday Photo Montage

So two weeks ago we all went up to the Village Hidden in the Mist for the standard Malaysian holiday; though when I say Village I mean Amusement Theme Park, and when I say Malaysian I really mean taking ages to reach there..... ages to get back.... stopping along the way to go shopping.....visit relatives.... go shopping..... and take life at a leisurely pace (which is basically just bumming around.)

Ah, Genting. Recollections of this assortment of Rollercoaster Tycoon rides
are hazy, but they can be vaguely summarized by this

this,

and this.
Thus armed with such immaculate grasp of the geography, I boldly went forth and got lost took hundreds of photos with impunity - right up until the battery expired. (Note to self: remember to actually charge it beforehand)

So anyway, nothing much has changed between now and then; exceptions being

,

and

+

, which are those game booth things but I only had the telephoto lens with me at the time so only close-ups here (heh).

But that's just me. Other people might remember Genting for this

this,

and subsequently, this.

.

It's always refreshing to revisit old haunts after a considerable period of time has elapsed. Pull the blanket of forgetfulness away to see old things in a new light, new things in an old light, and other things missed in hasty youth.

Like the cloud bank that rolled in on our way up, the mystical beauty of which must've escaped me on previous trips since I don't remember it being this foggy.

It's even more pervasive up at the hotel, rolling in unexpectedly and casting halos on every light source in the area; where the ceiling looks like the one at Harrods. Not that anyone knows where --or what-- that is.

I must confess that out of the handful of trips to Genting, I've never once stepped foot in the indoor theme park. Not that the rides were spectacular, but the real attraction lay in the various youth-oriented clothes stores here. With some very magnanimous discounts.

Only in the Indoor Theme Park....do you get London and Paris (and Michael Jordan) cozying up against each other,

venetian boat cruises with their rather creepy boatmen....

...whose resemblance to certain ex-classmates is uncanny.
No hard feelings, Mike. In other news, Genting also has its fair share of suspicious activity: This bunch of shady-looking characters were spotted sneaking out of the arena of stars, a concert hall supposedly usually barred from public...

Might they be part of Wang Le Hom's entourage, perhaps?


Another random observation is the ah long graffiti running rampant in the lift lobbies and carparks; seen here is only a bit of it but the full scope of the blight can't be said in so many words (mine, anyway)

According to one of the staff, the workers tasked to get rid of all that never finish the job, because the industrious ah longs keep coming back to stamp their signs all over the place again, and the bloody vicious cycle continues. Think about all that paint.





There are other vaguely interesting things, of course, like the discovery of lichen(at least I think it's lichen) on tree bark; apparently it's cold enough for this







But lastly a Hayao Miyazaki moment to savour, if my below-par photo editing skills didn't ruin it so:



Really, the view was magnificent.