aurora

A crazy friend who has been trekking across Europe for the past six months just posted Facebook pictures of the northern lights, or Aurora, she took from Tromo, Norway.

Up till now I never really wished to travel Europe, because I view it as something trivial that goes down waaay below my list of priorities. These pictures triggered a want within me that I didn't even know existed. Perhaps I wanna just leave my responsibilities at the door for once, to be my crazy nomadic friend and travel the world aimlessly for six months while leaving the world to its squabbles and worries.

These pictures made me realise how I've lost my mojo, the one that kept me going through the late nights at work and early morning classes. It was something I tried to medicate that with the occasional trips to the bars chased down with a vodka mixer or ten, but not even Tiesto's bumping concert could remedy that.

I guess after all this, I just eventually grew tired of number crunching and fancy schmancy engineering software. I tire of having to balance my expenditure every week and project the numbers so I can afford a goddamn trip to Amsterdam. I tire of work and responsibilities and adulthood and the family's new Tanjung Bungah house loans and bright futures and I want to be a fucking hippie.

But in the end when all is said and done I will return to my responsibilities and weekly balance sheets just because I won't ever allow myself to be one. Sigh. Strange how an image of dancing colours in the sky could bring out the whining pansy in me.

Tell me, does it make sense that you find yourself pining for a (not so old) flame on her birthday, even though the only communication you had with her were a mere few MSN chat logs since the breakup? Or was that just the pent-up libido talking?

Yeah. I thought it is the libido too.

hello from beyond the cyberspace grave!

Ahem. Now I know I haven't been writing since....June? Oh God, this blog isn't just dead. It has been buried and decomposed and disappeared into the darkest corners of cyberspace, and I shouldn't even bother trying to resuscitate it in the first place.

But I'm bored, and I got an extra hour free (woohoo!) because of the daylight saving time. Having a 25 hour day is awesome, I can tell you, and it couldn't have come at a better time too, at the end of a long week. You might be surprised to know that against all odds of me using this wonderful 25 hour day to sleep/watch porn/go shopping/drink myself silly/complete mindless RPG quests where you have to kill the naughty, naughty wizard holding a (usually big busted) damsel in distress, I have decided to curl in bed with a novel. The Girl With a Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson. If you are looking for something as thrilling as Dan Brown's novels, this is what you are looking for. It is a mystery thriller that is both intelligent and gripping with a really macabre twist, I assure you. Most importantly, will keep you so engrossed that you will forget about the 10 degree temperature nibbling away at your balls. However, please bear in mind that the suggestive book cover has absolutely nothing to do with my impulsive purchase of it.

Oh, and I bought myself a simple little digital camera to take pictures of the beautiful autumn scenery, so there will hopefully be more pictures on this blog. I would LOVE any generous tips and tricks on how to tweak digicam pics into something that would even remotely resemble whatever those £400 DSLRs can spit out. Xinxian, I'm looking at you, that is if you still read this zombie of a blog. You and your ridiculously blue (but beautiful!) skies that could only be created by sliding Photoshop colour panels and other wizardlike whatchamacallits.

Apart from that, nothing much changed in these few months, except that my four years of crunching numbers have come to fruition in the form of a piece of paper that is supposedly an engineering degree (um, whee?), my Masters course still holds me a slave to the education system, and that somehow I have once again landed myself in a fling, one which eventually evolved into a long distance relationship which I have no idea on how to go about with. I need help. Advice. Stat!

the only thing a man with a plan needs is a determination to see it through come hell or high water

Yesterday while I was in the waves of alcoholic delirium I glimpsed a little bit more of my 10 year road-to-riches plan. Because you know, alcohol makes everything clearer, and we are talking about five near-consecutive Jagerbombs right here into a bloodstream already infused with beer and vodka.

russell peters was SERIOUS!!

Here's a quick survival tip for you guys who may or may not one day find yourselves fighting to get across an impossibly packed dance floor at the club on a Saturday night with a tray full of empty glasses in your hands. If you were to ever hear the piping trumpets of the opening YMCA tune, drop that tray and get the hell out of the dance floor even if it meant punching six-foot angmohs in your way because if you don't you can, and you will, inevitably get slapped by the countless hands that shoot up when the Village People goes "whYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY".

White people seriously love their anthem.

three weeks

Last Saturday it suddenly hit me that I am now thousands and thousands and thousands of miles away from home and hey guess what I have to work for my moolah now and there is this thing called financial planning because no I can't call my mom to bank in some money or expect my big sis to drop by with a few greens everytime I run out of cash so welcome to the life of an adult's responsibility now if you will excuse me I must unload the hissing dishwasher and try not to burn my hands oh did I mention that I have an assignment due on Monday? Because I do, and it is proving to be a real bitch.

On a lighter note, the lecturer praised the assignment highly, I am so getting that oversized Zara beanie now that I am earning some quids, and last night at work some busty blonde who probably has a fetish for Chinese boys actually rushed over (I kid you not) and tried to dance with me. Like, yeah okay I am really flattered but the idea of getting fired after only two shifts isn't very appealing.

Also, now that I find that my pictures always brighten boring, nonsensical rants, here is a one of me in York, once again reaffirming my manhood by placing a World War 2 artillery cannon between my crotch,

Admit it. A WW2 era, gigantic phallic cannon between my legs? I drip with so much manliness that even Rambo would turn gay for me.

york!

Hello people! Tomorrow I shall be going off to York!

Actually the only reason I'm tagging along this trip is because pretty much everyone else I know is going, so what the heck. The Gothic cathedrals over there seem pretty cool, and since I've always wanted to visit Amsterdam Vatican City for the cathedrals I figured that this would be a great trip to warm up my pilgrimage as a God fearing Christian.

Just kidding. I just wanna take pictures of me pulling faces at the gargoyles. Ooh. They have some sort of a haunted house too. Now that would spice things up. Heh.

hello from uk!

I know, I know. I should have brought a camera with me, or at least a phone equipped with one so that I could camwhore left and right and put up pictures of my room on Facebook for the pleasures of whatever weird voyeurs that might lurk out there, like every other Joe in my course. So much for me and my basic phone eh.

Oh, and if it wasn't obvious already in that picture my balls were slowly dropping off from the cold. Summer my ass. When I heard that it was summer in the UK I went "Oh that shouldn't be too bad perhaps a cotton hoodie will do. After all, summer is all about the FUN IN THE SUN and PLEASANTLY WARM temperature, right?"

Wrong. We actually had hail yesterday. It felt like God was pissing kidney stones on us.

It had been two weeks since I landed in the UK, and well, despite my complaints about the weather, I am really starting to call this place home. Oh suuure, there were that two major assignments we got on the first week itself, or that series of vaccination we were subjected to (I am extremely terrified of needles, because they seem to go into the flesh like a hot knife through butter okay how could you not be terrified of that), but Sheffield's charm is starting to get to me.

And what charm, you may ask. Well, first of all, 7 out of 10 women here are HOT. And I mean Megan Fox hot, not the Malaysian (meh) Dreamgirl hot. When I dropped by one of the clubs I actually felt intimidated by their sheer number and hotness. Like okay ohmygawd she looks like Emma Watson meets Kate Beckinsale okay okay act cool why the fuck are you holding your beer like that stop crossing your legs ACT COOL you wuss!

(For those of you who might make the likely conclusion, I swear that is not the reason I'm getting a job at the clubs. A senior offered me that job, cross my heart)

And the lecturers! They are so friendly that it scares us okay. Back at TARC the typical engineering lecturer would be a balding old man with inch thick glasses walking about with a frown. Okay lah there is one guy here who is something like that but he keeps on giving us tips on how to increase our marketability as engineers next time so that makes him pretty alright.

I have another lecturer who brought in a football during the first lecture, declared that she (yes, a she) is a Sheffield United fan (whooo Sheffield!!) and then started tossing that ball at us so that the person who caught it would have to stand up and introduce themselves. You know lah TARCians all damn shy wan so some actually ducked in their seats to avoid catching that ball. Damn funny. Then there is another guy who has a killer CV, ex-Boeing engineer and all. He actually calculated how much we are paying for a minute of his time, which is 20 pence btw, and then triumphantly declared that, and I quote, "For every five minutes you come late to class, you wasted £1."

I think it had some effect on us, because everyone is penny-pinching here and £1 is a big deal to us because you could actually buy a can of baked beans and live on it for half a day! I survived on microwaved food for a week (do not attempt that because I found out the hard way that a diet of irradiated food is extremely bowel-unfriendly) before I summon up the guts to go within a five feet radius of the oven and cook something by myself without burning the entire building down.

I ended up with a reasonably edible chicken sandwich and omelette. My skillzzz has greatly improved since then, because I just made an awesome chicken and egg salad for dinner! And the day before I made grilled chicken breasts and scrambled eggs! Ha! The best chefs in the world are men, didn't you know?

...

Okay lah maybe I need to use slightly more diverse ingredients. The pork shoulder at Sainsbury's look really, really yummy :)

lonely nights once again

I am writing this post with a whirlwind of mixed feelings raging within me. My RM331 last minute transit flight down to KL to UK is in less than four hours and still I sat here tapping away at the keyboard to convey whatever that is on my mind, only to delete them because I think that my writing skills, which had been sedentary for months are no longer capable of pulling out those emo mumbo jumbo as beautifully as before.

I would probably regret the decision not to sleep when I keel over at the KLIA departure hall. Oh well.

She sent me a message just now, the girl whom I was with in one of those bizarre off-on-off-on relationships again which I used to think are really amusing until I got caught in them. It was like one of those sappy, semi-unhappy endings you see in a chick flick. Boy meets girl, boy and girl falls for each other, boy and girl does the birds and the bees, boy has to go off somewhere far, far away for a long time so he, reluctantly, calls it off. Girl, also reluctantly, takes it in stride and seals it with a three-paged message, complete with a kissing smiley.

Sigh. Even till the end she remains as the girl who turned my world upside down.

I think the hardest part about leaving Malaysia was me wanting so much to return to KL to see her and not given the chance to because, well, it's either that or risk my parents' wrath for leaving them before it is time.

Okay. Enough of this lest I lose possession of my balls. =/

just a passing thought

We all have our ugly sides, regardless of whether we are conciously aware of its existence or not. I did somehow acknowledge these personality scars deep within, but it wasn't until recently when driven by pure boredom at work, I read this certain #1 worldwide bestseller self-improvement book that thrusted an unsuspecting me into a face to face confrontation with my version of Mr. Hyde.

I should lay off those psych books. Seriously.