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.

that little bank book

I never thought that love could be expressed in numbers…until now.

My parents have always been secretive about the family’s financial status, always telling us that we have no money and no we can’t have the cool stuff your rich friends have because we are broke. I do smell the occasional rat when on certain rare occasions they drew out a large sum of money from seemingly nowhere, like the time when they paid RM 27,000 for my Proton Saga in cash. “But it was just a Saga! Besides, it was on sale,” they had insisted when I grilled them about being able to make the payment in cash and not in installments as everyone else would have normally done.

To be frank, I have always somewhat resented the fact that we are financially inferior, or so as I was led to believe. Money was almost always an issue, and when you have an expensive hobby like bodybuilding it strains the pockets even more. I know this sounds childish, but the resentment probably stemmed from the fact that I didn’t get to party as much as I would like to with my other rich friends in Penang, or that paying for fuel for the car seriously bit into my spending (someone actually expressed shock that I managed to last for two months on a full tank…well now you know. Not everyone could gallivant all across KL just like that, you know), or that I have trouble maintaining actual relationships because I could not pay for dates that often (pretty much an oversimplification of the previous relationships, but that’s an entirely different matter).

In a nutshell, yes I do sometimes resent the fact that I didn’t get an unholy allowance as I would have liked.

So I have been busy gathering the documents and information necessary for my UK visa application during the past week, the visa requirements demand that I show financial evidence that I am capable of sustaining myself in the UK, tuition fees, living costs and all.

Boy, I thought. This is going to be tough. In late 2008 my parents bought £10,000 when the UK currency dived, but a closer review of the costs involving the top-up degree and subsequent Masters course calls for a staggering £20,000. Of course, working part time while in the UK could contribute a lot to that number, but the bleeding visa officials nevertheless demand that we show evidence of such financial capability or risk being rejected for a visa. Fuckers.

I made a call to my dad regarding this matter, who listened quietly while I explained.

A short silence.

Fine, he said. I will have the documents sent to you soon.

True to his word, I received mail which contained the necessary financial statements two days later. I shook the contents out of the envelope, and two items dropped onto my lap.

A bank statement from CIMB, confirming the £10,000 in fixed deposit, and…an Amanah Saham Malaysia bank book with my name neatly printed in a typewriter font. Funny. I didn’t even know I have an Amanah Saham account.

I flipped the book open and…oh God. The numbers, they just pounced at me. I stare in disbelief at the pages, marked with numerous transactions printed across the pages which dated back to the year 2000. I was only Form 1 in the year 2000 for chrissakes.

Words fail me. All these years of saving up with the security of my future in mind. All these years of denying not just me, but themselves of little luxuries that they could very well afford just because they wanted to fortify that little bank book a little bit more. All because they could one day hand that little bank book to me and proudly tell me here you go, here’s everything you need to build yourself a future and make sure you make good use of it.

The day that little bank book dropped into my lap I grew up a little bit more. My unfilled desires for material goods; the one terabyte external hard disk, the top notch gaming computer, the Vios, the seemingly bottomless fuel allowance, the dinners at fancy cafes, they all seem so painfully childish now that the little bank book lay open in my lap, its seemingly insignificant numbers dancing across my line of vision. Whaaaasup, they seem to say. It’s good to meet you after all these years hidden in the back drawer of your mom’s closet, so let’s get down to business and prove a thing or two to the visa officials, shall we?

How do you express love in numbers? My parents did it through a little bank book, saturated with the years of transactions that was made in hopes of buying me a future they never had. Something tells me that they got a few more of those stashed somewhere in the house with my other siblings’ names printed on it, waiting for the very moment when the numbers in them are needed.

UK, here I come.

The relationship started out as just another fling but yesterday after yet another argument fuelled by her decision to leave college I realised how much she had grown on me when I spent that night wide awake and bothered. It has been two weeks since we last saw each other and I am already sorely missing her schoolgirl giggles and Colgate grin.

Groan.

all I want is to find an easier way to get out of our little heads

And I can barely look at you
But every single time I do
I know we'll make it anywhere
Away from here

Light up, light up
As if you have a choice

It is almost 5 in the morning, and still I sit here in front of the computer with my fingers poised over the keyboard, frozen. Not because of a lack of thoughts to communicate, but rather an overwhelming volume of them to a point where it bottlenecked itself and leaving me at a loss for words.

What are you thinking about? Someone asked.

The missus, I replied. Friends. The past. UK. Masters. The future. How it all seemed to be linked together by the invisible web that is the butterfly effect. And how Leona Lewis's rendition of Run always makes everything seem alright.

when I least expected it

The girl I am dating just told me she wants to drop out of college. I am still speechless.

vegetables and sex. who would've known?

Despite the apparent stick in their ass, you have got to love PETA for their creativity in coming up with highly suggestive commercials to get people to quit eating meat.

Oh, and Whoopi Goldberg made a spoof of the commercial. I dare not click the link lest I have my already fragile eyes vaporised at the very sight of her straddling a cucumber in her undies.

another tirade on exams and our bright sunny future, just to keep the 'Geek' in the blog title relevant

...I should learn to summarise my blog titles.

Anyway, hello! Now I know I have been absent from this blog for weeks, but you would have to forgive me for placing my final exams and the many, many exciting nights I spent crunching numbers and the wide wonderful world of trigonometrical calculations at the top of my priority list. I somehow held on to my sanity by indulging in a perverse sort of pleasure by using my thesis draft as rough paper for my calculations. Yes, my thesis draft. I like to think of it as an indirect fuck you to the college that put me through hell writing a 100-page thesis. In case you are wondering, I do see the humongous flaw in defacing my sweat n' blood covered thesis for the sake of the exams that the same effing college that I am trying to spite put me through, BUT REALLY! I need a reason, any reason, to hold on to my sanity.

Still.

It has been a while since I've walked out of exam halls smiling, eager to compare and discuss page-long calculations that still rattles in my head, every fucking symbol of it. Perhaps it is the fact that it is my last examination, perhaps I just wanted to go out with a last hurrah and a bang, perhaps I finally pulled myself together since my first fuckup at the dawn of my Advanced Diploma, perhaps it is the good karma surrounding me as of late, perhaps it is merely God 's way of apologising for a shitty 2008, but boy did I kick that examination's ass.

While we're on the topic of education and our bright futures and all that, my parents have just acquired the email of a cousin who is working in UK. Now, said cousin is some bigshot electrical engineer earning big bucks like nobody's business there, and it's pretty hard to ignore his existence even though he lives tens of thousands of miles away mainly because of his tendency to purchase local real estate as though they're like kuihs sold at the random roadside, something that his mom who is also my aunt would trumpet to the entire satellite family with every million dollar bungalow he buys.

Needless to say, my parents placed their shining hopes on me to follow his footsteps and buy houses left and right too, hence their insistence that I do some sort of Masters and park my ass in the UK for a few years. Nooooooooo pressure at all, people.

So I was thinking like how hard could it be? Because seriously, I was actually told that a friend's housekeeper who merely services an entire Nottingham hostel drives a frigging Z3. A Z3!! Or how another friend's friend who is working as a translator at a hospital could earn enough dough to start buying LV and Burberry shit left and right. Now being the sunny bright optimistic me, I concluded that saving up to buy millions of ringgit of real estate in Penang couldn't be rocket science, so I decided to look Google his company, MyMeth.

(Perhaps it is just me, but did anyone notice ANY form of weird, illegal-sounding wordplay in the company name? MyMeth? As in Meth Saya? As in saya punya METHamphetamine? Just wondering. Hmm.)

I saw the company description on their website and immediately started doubting my sunny optimism about making enough to buy houses in Penang like kuihs.

MyMeth specializes in both hierarchical and flat methodology which covers both physical and timing convergence aspects of sub-130 nanometer design and verification: design partitioning for floorplanning and placement; workable methodology for clock-tree synthesis; congestion analysis and prevention; sub-microns process geometry effects.

I am not from an electrical engineering background, so hey who knows these bombastic jargon could be really just ABCs to the average EE engineer and that my rainbow bunny optimism may be right after all but then they just had to write down shit like nanometer design and sub-microns process geometry effects. Okay it is fucking rocket science. Sigh. So much for my dreams of waltzing my way to bigass bungalows in Penang.

Oh, and on a happier note, Happy Chinese New Year everybody!

(Despite the apparent trend I absolutely refuse to replace the 'New' with 'Niu' because please, people! We already have enough butchered English phrases without adding the cheesy, painfully uncreative ones. Replace 'New' with 'Niu'?? Ohmygawd you're so clever how is it possible that you thought it up you should be on Jay Leno's ohmygawd.)

2009

I don't know about you, but I have this personal superstition of mine where I believe that whatever you were doing at the very moment before the clock struck twelve on a significant date would symbolise the outcome of the rest of the year that follows the said date.

In this case, I ushered in 2009 with more than ten glasses of whiskey and beer coursing through my veins, screaming 'HAPPY NEW YEAAAAAAR' in unison with the rest of the club, deafening myself in the process. For that brief moment amidst the flurry of clanking glasses and bottles amongst friends and strangers alike, everybody became friends. Compared to how I celebrated the eve of 2008 by poring over obscenely huge tomes of Fluid Mechanics, I'd say that this 2009 would be a helluva better than 2008, and judging from the number of people who declared how glad they are to see the end of last year, I guess that I am far from alone.

2008 was a year of changes and discovery, for better or worse. I am looking forward to this year, where there will be even more changes to come (graduation and UK baybeh!), as well as one more chance to hit the reset button to undo all of 2008's disasters. After all, is that not the very reason we sing the traditional Auld Lang Syne at the twelfth strike?

For auld lang syne, my dear,
For auld lang syne,
We'll take a cup of kindness yet,
For auld lang syne!

To you, I hope that the confrontations and the distance that popped up yesteryear would be forgotten and forgiven in time, and that perhaps one day the awkward silence between us would cease.

To you, I hope that you would forgive me for being a jerk to you despite your sincerity. I hope the scholarship would open up new horizons for you and your brilliance would find its rightful place.

To you, I could hardly guess what is going through your mind right now but I do hope you know that I have never once looked down on you and that I do indeed consider you a great friend. I really hope it stays that way. Let us smoke up when I'm back for Chinese New Year, shall we? :)

To you and you, I am sorry if I have ever led you on.

To you, I strongly believe that something existed between us for awhile, but perhaps we were both foolish to rush things. For what it is worth you were never a rebound, but someone who happened to be in the right place at the wrong time.

And there was indeed a storm of trials and tribulations. Right now at the end of it all I looked back at the turbulent year that was and saw how much I had grown from the fires that tempered me. Perhaps this is a little too much to say for a 21 year old (I am NOT 22 till I am 22), but we grow through the lessons learnt in suffering, do we not? I resolved to make 2008 the best year ever, a resolution that, in a disturbingly mocking manner, spiralled downwards in the first half of 2008 but then materialised in the late months of the year just in time to save me from the noose in my drawer.

But you know what? It may have its low points that plummeted to the depths of hell itself, but I cherished the 2008 rollercoaster ride, every fucking second of it. I sat through the dreaded EC exams which even the brains of my course shied away from. I took up a job as a student assistant at the college gym and loved every moment of it. I met and made more friends in this year alone that the rest of my college years combined together. I won the Best Prototype award for the ProDEx competition. I finally mapped out the next ten years of my life. Most importantly, I discovered myself during that year; the good, the bad and the ugly.

In the infant hours of 2009 I shall make the same resolution again, just because there is absolutely no reason not to, come what may. I do hope that you too make a similar resolution, for auld lang syne, people. For auld lang syne.

another story for another time

Like a grain amidst
the sands of time, I live just
for a moment's past

I never realised how much I have severed myself from until one fine day when I tried to seek my volatile emotions once again in another effort to express myself and came up empty handed. It was an unpleasant feeling, kind of like waking up one day to find that one of your limbs, now a stump flecked with dried blood, had been hacked of messily with a blunt axe and then remembering that ta-daaa!! It was you who did that hacking.

There are stories, there are endings and then there are unfinished endings. We live, we are being for a while, we spun the thread that is both the story and our life and then we die, at least for this year. Too much has been said and unsaid, done and undone to the point where I wreaked havoc on everything that I knew and loved and in the process I killed myself along with my demons in an attempt to give everything and everyone the finger. Dramatic, you say. How else would you describe it when you woke up one day and discovered that while you no longer bondage yourself with the troubles of your past, you also no longer recognise the person within you, who now looks back at you in the mirror with a donned iron mask?

I believe I owe a few people an apology, one each for the most diverse reasons anyone could think of. God forbid that I would consider such vagueness as a proper apology for what I've done, but please do forgive my tremendous ego which had, if possible, been augmented to ten times its original size in the past few months, and I really do think that the sheer weight of it alone is giving me chronic neck pains. For what it's worth, I am learning a new lesson every day with the occasional lent hand or two, and then perhaps one day when I'm done being a bastard and my ego has shrunk to its original size of a baby elephant the iron mask would slip off by itself.

"A black comedy of unfortunate events and atrocious timing. Have you read A Midsummer Night's Dream? The chain of events and furious emotions triggered by a prank gone wrong is almost reminiscent of the whole situation, and up till now I still keep and eye out for an elusive Puck and his vial of pansy juice."

"Memories lie well. It is always this ridiculous obsession with capturing things that don’t endure. We often search for constants; was it because of nostalgia? Insecurity? I reject the pointless reminiscence of the nights spent under that street lamp. Isn’t change good? Think of the possibilities! I have always been blissfully comfortable in the same circle of friends to the point when I didn’t recognise the social opportunities that present itself. The other day I smiled at an attractive girl at the line of the warehouse sale who smiled back, and for the next 10 minutes our eyes shyly flitted across each other. The last time that happened the whole solar system was aligned in a straight line. Come to think of it I haven’t chatted up a stranger in years ohmygod I’m a disgrace to the human race."

The entries above were written in my old blog circa June and May 2008 respectively. There is something about rereading the thoughts that you plastered on cyberspace more than half a year ago before so much have changed, which brings to mind the iron mask once again. Those words were snippets of emotionally charged posts, written in the delirium of unbridled feelings that embodied itself all over my blog, and well, to look back upon them once more through the disenchanted eyes of the mask was...surreal. Ah, to look unto with the lenses of practicality where once upon I was blinded by the fires of my own emotions. It makes everything easier to destroy, which I did, but then again the cornerstone of whatever that existed then still stood, wavering but defiant. I chose to spare it, which may be the smartest decision I have made this year.

I am tired of writing about this. This story has lived and played out its life, a dying star with one last twinkle before it fades from the black sky to make way for the birth of new stories. And thus I shall end this as a story that was in past tense, a story that will remain to be just another story from a long time back, to be just another story hidden behind a shadow of a smile, a story never again to be told but perhaps whispered one more time beneath the orange glow of the lone streetlamp.