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Narcasistic? This a blog!

(I realized I spelled 'existent' wrong, just for you spelling Nazis out there.)

Lap Report:

Experiment 1.01

 

Title:

The Effects of Music on the Weather.

 

Utensils:

1 Aspire 4920G with Virtual Surround Sound

1 Herbie Hancock’s ‘Mwandishi’ (1970)

1 early evening rain shower

2 ½ hours of lightning

3 cups of hot Chinese Tea

1 late Lab Report

2 Quizzes I have yet to study for

 

Aim:

-          To investigate the effects of music on precipitation.

-          To differentiate the different genres of music and their effects on the natural environment.

-          To convince myself that it really is not my proficiency on the guitar that is affecting the weather, causing my friends in college to ask me to hold the music till they can reach their cars or the train station to avoid the rain.

 

Procedure:

1. Wait for precipitation to build above my house.
2. Observe effects of playing Herbie Hancock’s ‘Mwandishi’ (1970) on the rain, if it is getting any heavier or lighter.
3. Repeat Step 2, but by playing on my acoustic guitar.
4. Break out in maniacal laughter every time lightning strikes and surroundings visibly darken.
5. Tell self: ‘You know you really ought to be studying for your quizzes next week. It is a short semester and you really should read up on your material whenever you can,” and think looking over at unfinished Lab Report, ‘And you have to finish that Chemistry Report rather than making up your own on LiveJournal.’
6. Take long, cautious sips of hot Chinese Tea and disregard Step 5.

 

Results:

1.

Type of Music	How heavy rain is *
No Music	5 (point nine nine)
Herbie Hancock’s ‘Mwandishi’ (1970)	2
My Guitar Playing	2

*On a scale of one to five. One, being Gene Kelly’s ‘Singing in the Rain’ (1952) and five being Roland Emmerich’s ‘The Day After Tomorrow’ (2004).

 

2. Studying and Lab Report remains unfinished.

 

Was the experiment a success? Yes! For result two, anyway.

 

Conclusion:

1. This study has led me to believe that the swollen masses of precipitation we call rainclouds are secretly the dead spirits of bygone piano teachers. The ones with really bad temper. Having played Herbie Hancock, the rain seems to subside. However, it did not stop. Suggest further study with different genres of music (the ‘Clair de Lune’ by Claude Debussy compared to  Journey’s ‘Don’t Stop Believin’’).
2. What leads me to conclude that rain clouds are, in fact, piano teachers is that shortly after playing the first album: my guitar performance was met with indifference. Suggest further study to decide which is worse: being terrible or being ignored.

I go home so I can wait for my family to come back.

Cue Sax.

 

Morning’s come, it’s seven in the morning. Everyone who was with me since three has returned to their beds for the next two hours before class. I’m holding the fort at McDonalds with their piss-weak coffee and a head full of wanting to go to sleep but can’t because I got classes almost back-to-back up to four starting at eight. Classes I need to go to: assignments, that I have been working on all night, that need to be handed in then and those last vital tips for our finals that really makes the whole education part sort of wasteful.

 

Cue sound of traffic, the shouts of orders from the counter which springs to mind the image of vegetable mongers in the wet market back home, and the giddy laughter of underage girls from the prep school next to college whose parents were too lazy to cook breakfast, gave them a fifty, and told them to get a burger or fries or something at the McDonalds.

 

At exactly half past six, the throng of students sweep over the road in front of the McDonalds in the twilight like the waking dead in so many zombie movies: dragging their feet, the odd eye making wild circles, and hands clutching books like rigor mortis had eaten through the flesh. Entertaining as they may be with my brain so juiced up on caffeine you could probably wring it in your hands and collect liquid attention, I hate to imagine once the coffee runs out I’ll be no better than them except that they’ll be the ones wide awake.

 

The sax dies away with the coming of the morning, here the violins are married with the sound of the oboe as it enters into An American in Paris. I’ve been doing my Concert Reports all night, see. Soon I’m going to cut the crap, and get to class.

 

This is life.

Does anyone see when this is being written?

 

Head aches. Snot bubbles. Skin warms. Body weakens. Could sleep all day. The pills, they do nothing! I’m packed like an Oriental baby in Chinese winter: it’s too fucking cold in here!

 

Wide awake at four in the morning, must have gotten something along the lines of seventeen hours of sleep yesterday. The teh tarik is all but an idle gob at the bottom of a strewn aside plastic wrapper, and the Single Beef Burger Special is swimming in gastric juices. City very still, very dark. The sort of night you want to slice your car through a divider pushing two hundred. Nice night to take a walk out with the chances of you getting knifed in the back is very certain.

 

I have a test at eight o’clock in the morning which is in four hours. I studied all the wrong chapters.

 

Now I’m aching for something familiar.

 

College is proving very tiresome: classes don’t excite me anymore. The more I talk to people the more tired I grow of their antics. There are days when I’m hungry, but I’ve exhausted all varieties of food in SS15, I rather go starved.

 

I’m sick in a lot of ways. I want to crawl into my turtle shell of disillusionment and peer slanty-eyed at the passing of these times, while blowing my nose on a blue-striped handkerchief. Criticize everything, everyone, and then laugh to myself in all my cleverness. But really, I just miss the company of some old pals.

Wesley reads from The Romantic Period’s Berlioz’ Symphonie Fantastique’s Fifth Movement: Dream of a Witches’ Sabbath. He recites animatedly: “It is she who comes to the Sabbath! …A howl of joy greets her arrival….She participates in the diabolical orgy….”

 

Carissa and Samantha lean forward and ask me, “What is an orgy?”

 

I fumble with my words, so naïve are they: how do I tell them? “Well… when a group of boys, and a group of girls… they come together and-”

 

Tilla turns around and puts an arm around the neck of her chair. “It’s group sex,” she put it blandly.

 

“Yeah, uh, group sex.”

 

In front of us, Ryan is asking Boon Han the same thing: “Hey, what is an or-gee?”

 

“Okay, if you and me and J.C. all got together…”

About to be four o’clock in the morning: spent the first two hours of the day eating out, the next two studying for Calculus, doing laundry: making sure I have clean underwear for the week before I start cutting leg holes in grocery bags again. Been writing deep haiku on the walls of my hostel that reminds the students that something is way beyond their basic intellect when all it really says is that one boy, twenty, is bored to the earwax staring at numbers and numbers and numbers and…

 

…numbers and numbers and the sky is clouded over from my window. Disposition: same. Been feeling all sorts of melancholy, depressed, hopeful, guilty, proud over the weekend. Should write about it, I guess. Bags are heavy under the eyes. Finish this last Simpsons episode before hitting sack.

SS15, where you can dance among the traffic jams and impromptu music comes from an acoustic guitar in a corner of Starbucks, and people ride the park benches on their skateboards, and when gunshots are heard in SS14, the whole of Asia Café instead of getting up to flee, runs to the scene of the police shoot-out. People get robbed everyday, or people get themselves robbed everyday. They can always afford a new whatever was it I lost? Students live in the plastic thrash riddled, mouldy and algae-ridden, piss-stained sauce-dip of wall-partitioned Semi-Ds (they’re used to the taste now). And everyone is challenging everyone on the cheapest place for last-minute tofu and vegetarian char-siew substitutes, and somehow still splurge on Lorong food at midnight.

 

I make SS15 sound all that, the college town experience. Some people might disagree with me, but it’s a matter of perspective: were you held up by eight motorcyclist ‘cause you went out too late? Do you remember how good your first Ramli Burger tasted? Do you grit your teeth seeing all these rich people, and their college-never-ends attitude? Why is there a topless guy sleeping with my roommate on his bed at 11AM both smelling of alcohol and sweat? Some people love it, hate it, sit on it and ponder for five months and still don’t get it, take the two hour transit in the Klang foul-weathered and traffic jam-ridden roads till their knees are swimming in rainwater and just want to get through with it… one thing’s for sure, you’re definitely always doing something or near something happening.

 

And for the next two months, it’ll be about as entertaining as chasing strays with a canister of lighter fluid and a matchstick. Or not.

With the second Semester of CAE students, all the skeletons come screaming out of the closet. Discuss.

 

I’m at the end of the last semester of the year. Every year there are two long semesters for the students of CAE, ending with a short semester in the month of November. My last paper, Introduction to Public Speaking, ended on a Friday last week to an Italian dinner with the class and a Jack Daniels on the rocks. I don’t even drink, but the occasion seemed to call for it. I went back red as a virgin bride and ready to fuck the bushes.

 

And that was it; my whole tenure at ICSJ ended with crawling out of a bottle on the Pantai Baru Highway. If it were not for Tynn, I would probably wake up facing the sky in the Sri K.L. swimming pool naked, erect, and stiff as rigor mortis. And that’s all you’ll see above water level. You’d only need the soundtrack to Jaws to accompany the terrified screams of primary school students.

 

Thoughts as I would float there in an island of my own cheesy, tomato-ey, pasta-ish regurgitation: “What have I gotten myself into?”

 

“Remember that old J.C. in that college back home? Remember hedonistic-nihilistic? Do you still think of Wing Yie? How long has it been since I’ve gone back home? Why does my crotch feel as if it’s on fire?” Things I imagine I would have little time to ponder before I’m taken on camera phones, put on YouTube, and have been made a global internet sensation when the Police chase me well-hung all throughout SS15.

 

But since none of that ever happened: I won’t bother answering any of those.

 

The second semester started getting really hairy towards the last few months, when those tired stares and resigned sighs seemed to suddenly make a whole lot of sense. Addictions? Check. Weed? Check. Assorted medical conditions? Double check. Destructive ex-girlfriends? Ilyas eats that shit for breakfast. All this needs is a Phantom Planet theme song. We even have a setting which we can use a two syllable acronym to call and have panned out to Alex Greenwald’s warbling.

 

The first semester, ah, those memories are still warm like a bat out of hell. Stalking the campus town like the world owes us the middle of the road to do as we like. Back when you always bumped into someone new in college, who you would not fathom would become some of your closest friends. When there was always something going on this evening and that. When I still had a Mohawk. What were we? Care-free was what. The way I put it: when you’re a kid, you don’t know the difference between right and wrong. When you’re an adult, you don’t care for the differences between right and wrong. Well, we were the caramel centre.

 

Yet the first semester was suffocating. You have little time for yourself when you live in the hostel where your friends barge headlong into your apartment door so they can take your wheat crackers and defile your baby bolster in the most suggestive of positions (Sorry, Amos). Every five minutes (…and again). Or redecorate your room because you fell asleep without locking the door, or run naked back and forth through the corridors with a plastic grocery bag the size of road kill for cover. I never felt lonely once, and that was probably what got to me. I was never alone.

 

Aaron said that we’re just those sort of people. I have to have time to myself to meditate on the greater meaning, and self-fulfilling prophecies, and why men have nipples. I felt dried out and my creativity limited to a caricature of someone sporting a French beret and calling himself bohemian. But that did not seem like the biggest worry in the world, since my mind was always kept on other things.

 

But it’s a cycle. It always starts out optimistic before everyone gets a little comfortable with each other, and our little eccentricities begin to peel the skin and muscle back for the good or the worse. Your good friends will become your okay friends, your okay friends become your best friends, and your best friends become your worst friends. And it usually stays that way. Self-esteem is shot, pride makes a lunar landing, and Asia Café still gets your order wrong.


More coming soon.

 

    Alright, truth is, I haven't even begun working on that post. And I probably never will. I'm just lazy as all fuck you could stick a 6-inch needle in my eye and I wouldn't flinch.

    But I've been working on other things in the meantime, like readying the INTI Music Club for the next semester. The old committee has resigned with the last semester, most of which were graduating, and I inherited the Chairperson post from the very obliging Kit Ming. Which is a pretty big deal, if you guys know how much I've been harping on even before I started the May Semester about doing big things for the Club. With the last semester, we've seen the INTI Music Club in the dumps. So I want to see to what heights I can take this club to. It's my baby now.

I'm getting there.



Soon.

Seven of my best shirts, two jeans, two shorts, one pair of jams, seven pairs of socks and undies. It's all pushed to the bottom of the luggage, spaced out evenly, and there are still the blankets, the toiletries, and the other college paraphernalia. Looking at all of it, my room has so much junk yet I could fit everything I need in one of our smallest luggages (My room doubled as a store room after our baby years and the several foreign maids).

            And there'll be another bag for my laptop,


                        the sling-over for my electric guitar (which I'm ready to argue over when the day comes and my parents protest),
                                    'The Kite Runner' (a birthday gift from Mei Cher and Ley-Lynn) and 'Kingdom Come' (by J.G. Ballard 'cause the scenario fits). Lastly, and probably the most chunky of my personal effects: photo album. Even if I don't go through it half as much as before, I'd like to think it'll help me through some of the rougher patches while I'm there.


            I wish I had more stuff to bring, other than this Japanese Daruma doll for fortitude in the coming term papers. My guess is that I'd bring everything if I could too. I'm making a pretty big deal out of this for someone who gets to go back home every weekend for homecooked dinner, I can't imagine what it would be like when I get to the States. Sometimes I wonder if I would end up feeling more at home in the U.S. than I am in Malaysia.

I keep looking at the calendar and checking my watch. I've been watching these past eighty-two days, and the past three months has seemed to have both gone by too fast and crept along too slowly. I had plans, and sometimes I wonder where they went. I sit in cafes, with the laptop turned on and the music on loud, looking busy. But I know sitting behind the screen that I'm looking at the same tired sites, all short-lived internet gimmicks and political commentary both angry and colorful. Even Wing Yie has found someone new.

            As I stabbed the mashed potatoes of last Sunday's lunch with friends from college, everyone was light-hearted about having finished the last of the term papers. They were leaving for Redang some nine hours later for their three days, two nights. They turn to me. In the Kenny Rogers' over half-eaten chicken cutlets, I said there were a lot of things I had to get done for INTI College in the next few weeks. But I had my registration done up the day before, the subjects for my course selection finished some few weeks ago, and I was only moving out in May.

            I couldn't swim out to that departing sealiner if I wanted to.

            I've been questioning my right to be proper depressed about this. It's no big deal, really. I think about the KLIA-Kansai and sitting some hours before departure. And there are those messages over the intercom telling you when is which flight, and you feel a little put-off that it isn't yours. So I'm waiting for my plane, Boarding Pass in hand, browsing the duty-free. I could stretch the analogy, and I am leaving home.

            Somehow I can't completely grasp what I'm leaving behind. If I knew, I could prepare myself for all the shiznit come my way. What if I'm sitting in the twin-sharing college dorm-room, some fat hairy Indian guy who likes little girls sleeping across from me and it hits me like a cold iron that I'm crumbling? I can't have all the answers, but optimistic is all I can be when I already signed the papers, blood and all.

            My family members are each taking it differently. Mom is upset, but Dad is cautious. Dad wants me to live by myself, but he wants to see results. Mom just wants me to stay home, as I imagine all Moms do when their kid leaves at that age. My brother is completely oblivious.

            Last February, I was in a friend's place and these problems all seemed very far away. It was Valentines night, fireworks like the moon was being blotted out, and we were two college students talking from two different perspectives: her having lived out by herself the last few years, and me, just about to begin. She goes back to her hometown whenever the chance, between juggling college, two teaching jobs and an internship. No time for a boyfriend in her busy schedule, I teased.

            I want to appreciate my family like she does.

            If you heard my life philosophy, you'd ask what's my bother? I still believe in it. But I still want to have a good time, end imminent, life futile, all-black mascara. And it's not all let's curl up on the floor and wait for death to take us, sweet mercy. It gives me a reason to make something mean to me now. And I hope this two years, and the next two abroad: is the most I can make of it.


             I still haven't mentioned the part about studying. I'm surprised I'm actually excited about American Politics.

March 10th,

(Felt like I needed to write a piece on the elections, so...)

                        An election in Malaysia lacks quite the same festiveness (but no less backbiting) of the States. It has become an identity to associate one’s self with either Democratic candidate, even if you’re not familiar with either’s stances or have any idea who John McCain is. In Malaysia, it may lack the sparkle, sure, but it’s simpler.

 

                        All the parties and independent candidates can be divided into either the Opposition or the hegemonic totalitarian overlords: and those aren’t the words out of my mouth. It’s the collective criticism of every Malaysiakini columnist and inmate at the ISA dungeons guarded by the Doctor’s goblins. And one can’t help but find it funny that for the first time after eleven general elections, watching democracy in practice, everyone is turning around with a real stupid look on their faces.

 

                        It’s not that I didn’t believe in the merits of a fair election. What with the last several swathed in allegations of phantom voters, and the silencing of oppressive voices who say otherwise. I guess what we all needed was a rousing example of the people’s executive power over their country.

 

                        And even on the consecutive day(s) after the ballots were cast, everyone is feeling uneasy. If you're familiar with our history, and seeing the sort of demographic I cover here, which is few but makes it a whole lot more easier to categorize, you'd know why.

 

                        But with the results of this election, people seem to have grown more optimistic. Lee Kuan Yew can stop pointing the sharp long end of 1,056 m of criticism. For the first time in many years, I feel a little better about Malaysia.

                                I got extra wantons today with my noodles.
----

21st March,

            Holding up a finger to the little indian boy, I lectured: "If you want his Mentos, you have to say please."

 

            The boy bellowed out 'bagi'. He cocked his head forward, but the other boy continued to pull the candy out of reach. I waggled my finger: "No, you have to say please."

 

            He looked perplexed, and paused looking my way. "Please?" he said, a little sickeningly sweet. The boy with the candy kept shaking his head.

 

            I am the Dalai Lama. "Well, you know what to do then." I am the Pope John Paul.

 

            Obviously they didn't know what I meant, by then a few of them had gathered around the frolicking lot. All of them turned to look at me for an answer.

 

            Assume the lotus position of the meditating Buddha. Let peace come over you. Ohm.

 

            “Hit ‘im.”

           

And I'll be performing. Yup. Here's a precursor.

More information here!

Also, kids, Bryan is selling iPhones for cheap. Don't forget to mention my name.

These are some of the entries that I started out with, but were never posted till now.

3^rd January:

Tuesday morning: the clouds were holding their breath long enough (till the fireworks were over and everyone’s well-drunk and pissing in the neighbor’s mailbox) that with a big sneeze the whole of Johor and Terengannu will have to celebrate their 2008 face-down in a flooded ditch. There were no small droplets, no slow thrumming on roof shingles. Just one violent whoosh as the skies betrayed the first sunny day of the year. Just dreary old weather and a chair leaning against the handle of a radio station door to which ‘The Final Countdown’ is being processed to millions of listeners across the country.

Three hundred and sixty-five days, such an odd number. We’ve circled around the sun again, congratulations, star orbiting metaphysical fulcrums. Twelve months of a whole year for the last eighteen years and every celebration becomes one muddled ambiguous memory. The heralds, again, at the door of the New Year called, shouted, yelled, flailed their feeble arms and screamed of a portending renaissance and days of good fortune. The number eight, after all, presented itself as an auspicious date for the Chinese. And young people, in general, are usually superstitious about reinventing themselves after every year. With resolutions being ticked off using the mental permanent-marker, and a bright blue-eyed Zack Effron-gaze of one who is toe-to-toe with DESTINY.

Everyone wants a do-over. I don’t. I liked how the year went: I had a happy relationship, I made a lot of honest friends, and I led a suitably unexceptional but comfortable life. For the first time in eighteen years I didn’t look towards the New Year with bated anticipation but with dread. So final, the celebration! So fast, the time.

Maybe if I was two years younger I would have done differently: called people up, told them I loved them, sung my favorite songs, written a really inspiring entry here, and become very, very annoying. I’m doing none of these. Instead, I feel as if I repeated the monotony that plagued those last few December days that I might segue into the New Year with the least bit of revitalization. Like botany. Or watching the Hallmark channel. I imagine that if I keep this up: I might be able to resume motor functions and meet people again without the drudgery of that January optimism, probably around the first week of March. You’ll know when by the enormous purchase of Skittles, DVDs, comforters, and FHM Magazines but most of all by the manila cardboard sign duct-taped to the front of my closet door that reads ‘Time Machine: open in seven weeks’.

23^rd January:

I’m running again.

The sole is weary, says the limb to the head. The head is too tired to listen. It’s sweaty and it’s singing with every corner. An exasperated sigh, another flight of stairs. But the college dances to its own rhythm while I run to a different beat. To see someone running through college, there are only two things that goes through the student’s mind: one, whoever he is, he’s not from around here or, two, he probably won’t be around here for much longer. The college crowd runs the accelerated pace of a snail doing the 100-meter dash on its back. This is what goes for normal around here: to stop, take a look around and be noticed. It’s photosynthesis. Either way, it was hard not to notice the speedy apparition darting around corridors in the college campus without some nod of approval that the college’s amateur administration probably had some hand in it when they leased this poor fool unto the college.

15th February:

Its birthday morning, I am in bed, and I am not nineteen for another hour. But all I can think of is of an old high school crush. About the pale skin, the browning hair from the lack of proper vitamins, and the Million-Dollar Colgate grin that we associated all Sungai Long girls with. There in my room, a phantom of the female anatomy was dancing at six o’clock. Like a black and white film where the redness of her lips are made pronounced in contrast to the grey silhouette of her body. And then, I am a year older, but I do not hear her leaving.

Its birthday half-an-hour from nine, somewhere between breakfast and Anderson Cooper on Channel five hundred and eleven, and I part the morning paper right at the funnies. My horoscope for the day reads “Aquarius (Jan 21 – Feb 19): Today starts well enough but then things start going belly up until you are ready to give up.” and I almost take it seriously.

(Friends surprise me, anyway. I get bongo drums from my family.)

18th February:

The sun bakes, the earth smokes, my people fry. Great fires from his yellow ass! The spherical bosom in the sky emanates with sunlight. O, Sol. The hippies stare into your face and you blind them with black circles forever impressed upon shrinking pupils. While the water thins and the wheat withers in some places, people dare bask and bare their nipples at you on the shores of California. You are both cruel and fun, a thing for Incan sacrifice. The Thunderbirds may bring the rain, but you are above the clouds.

O, Sol. This punitive shmuck to you may bitterly hide in the small places. But you have browned my skin. You have melted my Chocolate Sundae. You have singed my toes on the beaches of Pulau Kapas. And you have come after the monsoons that have all pulled their trousers back on: and the New Year is this bright, shining thing.

For clarity:

-         Left college, furthering studies in an American Degree Program elsewhere.

-         Currently looking round for a) college/university, b) a place to rent, and c) a part-time job.

When things in K.L. begins to weather a little, as it does when the year has its last call for drinks, its curtains close: people in a mad scramble to squeeze its final days like a dry lemon look for places to go. I am no exception to the rule. I chose Ipoh over many other places that I knew would be thronged, shat upon and ate out of in big numbers. Hopefully not necessarily in that particular order. Nobody goes to Ipoh. You don’t see key-chains with Ipoh impressed upon cheap colored plastic or beaches cordoned off by a wall of hawker stalls.

I arrived on a Friday afternoon, with little under five hours of sleep, and a head full of Michael Jackson’s Greatest Hits. In every direction with but a hint of Agoraphobia, was flat green carpet peppered with brick houses and Limestone Mountains. And there was a light breeze, not warm, not choking, with air I would like to imagine as 78% less dusty than back in the city. But I had my complaints: there was just too much sky. The whole countryside phenomenon of the ‘peace and quiet’ at that very moment terrified me, despite it being the Point.

The Point was to see for myself half of what Bryan tells me over breakfast and coffee to be true: mostly because these stories seemed so much more exciting after the hundredth explanation of De Moivre’s Theorem by an obviously clueless lecturer. I had my doubts about legendary gangster Michael X, or the shunned DiGi Yellow Man, or handsome Australian dude who brought the three city gangs together as one. But he always told them with a measure of pride that Ipoh is where it began for him. If not, there was always Salty Chicken.

Well, Ipoh was as uneventful place as any. Not as uneventful as Terrenganu, but to my belief, pyromanical religious sects seemed to be a pretty big thing if it were to make the news: so Ipoh would have to be bumped down between Melaka and a puddle of mud. But Ipoh was something else entirely when the day’s ended and everyone’s in the bosom of the early morning.

We looked out upon Ipoh from the Kinta Mall parking lot.

“I used to fuck there.” He pointed to a flight of stairs, “But now there’s graffiti and… argh, they really messed up the place.” Bryan took another draw of his cigarette and let the smoke trail from his nostrils like confused ends of a chimney, “If you take a look there, that’s the happening place. The ‘Bangsar’ place.”

Not too far away from the building a couple of streets away, the neon signs of night clubs highlighted shone like a night at the circus. Bright, colorful, and to its essential purpose, Loud.

“I’ll bring you there later,” he said, turning to me, “But.”

“But what?” I pressed, turning back to the florescent glow of parking lot gray.

“You mustn’t tell Eileen we’ve been out. She doesn’t like it when I go out at night, thinks that I’m… you know.” He said sheepishly. I smiled. “Anyway, while you’re here, you should get something for your girlfriend, yeah?”

Hours later, I find myself sitting at the back of this typical Chinese restaurant and local night-time haunt called ABC. To either side of me, as I’m given the impression is someone well-known: here’s the first DiGi Yellow Man who is not the Yellow Man anymore, you see. And him? He starred in Point Blanc’s music video as a dancer. What was the song? Make a guess: ‘Ipoh Mali’.

“You know, everyone in Ipoh hates that song?” Someone tells me, and we both laugh. Decent people. We would drive around Ipoh in the early hours between six and eight. Ipoh still young in the day, going past my window at some 70 miles per hour. Boring story.

Not so boring was the street fight, Monday morning when someone flew into ABC and returned with a cleaver dashing into the maddening crowd in the distance. And we had the best seats, which wasn’t such a good thing. Turning around, everyone had scattered from the table: leaving but four of us to look at one another more than a little sheepishly.

“Now I’ve seen everything Ipoh.” I said, with a smirk.

I got my peace, and a little quiet. That was when I became a little tired of everything. I packed my bags and left. And in the city quite unlike the Kedah jamboree at the age of thirteen when I dreamt of Sungei Wang like a drunken binge for ten days and wept when I saw the K.L. Twin Towers: I just thought this was all my troubles returned. But it was home. And I can be accused, brought to the back of the chicken-run and shot for the cliché of how much I missed my dirty ugly city.

I didn’t even feel like strangling my brother when I came home. I wondered who became more bearable: me or him? Happy Christmas. War is over. For now.

Spent Christmas drunk at Tommy's place. Four cups of Rum and Coke. Gambled. Won quite a bit. Made a lot of people unhappy.

October 17^th 2007:

Things have been going swimmingly. Nothing that you wouldn’t want to throw a rock in and watch the little fish go circles with a trail of bubbles, something like (A) (A) (A) (A) (R) (R) (G) (G) (H) (!) (D:). This makes me wonder if you can make a guppy pass out by scaring it into its fishbowl. Note to self: pay visit to Joe’s Siamese fighting fish.

Things have been going swimmingly. Things, ie; Life, digestion. Maybe I just need to settle in a little more before I realize I’m actually dissatisfied. So far, I take comfort in the monotony: no antagonism, no competition, no violins, no red curtains. Things have been pretty boring actually, but comfortable.

I’ve also begun listening to classical music, working out and eating a daily supplement of bread and salt. Am I growing old before my time? As I say, by next week, I’ll be purchasing airbus tickets to the old country and following pink tour flags through jade factories. Bring your little red books!

Secretly, I am rather terrified. I like this life: suitably unsurprising and well-settled. I wonder if I’m going through some quarter-life crisis. Daniel’s even begun making a list of things to do before thirty. I can’t even think of one. I’ve always thought them trivial, that once I’m dead- they probably won’t seem to matter. But even thinking that makes me skeptical.

I don’t want much. I have a thousand dollars which to me seems like a large sum that can get me anything I want: but I don’t want much except for small miscellaneous things like chewing gum and colorful hats. All I really need are my books, my music, my guitars, some monotonous work, and a day out with my friends every other week and life would just be peachy. And I have all that.

Oh well.