Where stickmen bleed like fire hydrants out of their eyes.


Lately…


I’ve been busy.


Sort of.


You know.


Assignments and all.


Not to mention some freelancing stints.


(All for the future; coins in the banks as well as words in the brain).


And now.


Surprisingly.


I have time!


So gee, if I’m going to spend it properly, I should at least write something here.


(Know that the previous post was written after one part of the freelancing stint is done, and by then I’ve been staring at the computer for at least 9 hours and it was after midnight and I was, at my own right, so completely arrested that everything I spewed out sounded crazy).


So, yeah. Right. Let’s see…


Well lately… I’ve been busy.


Sorta.


You know, assignments and stuff. Same old same old (plus some freelancing stints).


But it’s not quite entirely the type in which I barely had the time to think of using the bathroom (the math can be done; if I walk outside of my room, open the toilet door, close it, use the lavatory, flush, wash, open the door, close, re-enter the room, I use roughly twice the time I can do with a 7-up bottle). I’ve taken the liberty of working and erm, catching up on things at the same time.


That is, to say, that I work alongside surfing the net and reading One Piece, or streaming Youtube vids, or read some blogs. It’s sort of a 3:1 ratio in work balancing; 3 to work and 1 to be blissfully distracted for a couple of minutes.


This works, somehow, but I get the job done slower than usual. But I get the perks of not overheating or going into cardiac arrest.


And that’s just about it. Nothing new in life, except for that odd beetle I caught in my room, which I kept in an old toy capsule for one day and then let it fly the next morning. It was the size of a 50 cent coin, but the doofus me didn’t remember to take a picture, so there’s nothing I can show about it.


The weather’s been cold. It didn’t matter if the afternoon offered some hours of heavy sunshine; there was this definite chill that lingered, and the air hung in this lazily heavy manner, like an invisible fog. Atmospherically it almost felt like London as we see in pictures, the way its chilliness clung to every window and door like a drape.


And there was rain. Short ones, long ones, and yesterday, a full-day shower.


I think I’m enjoying this cold.


*************


Now, having been streaming vids for almost the entire duration of an afternoon whilst working, it didn’t mean I couldn’t find a couple of neat things.


First off is Don Hertzfeldt's and all of his randomness, here in the Academy Award nominated animation short Rejected.




And also Genre, which I enjoyed the most.




This is Mater and the Ghost-Light, Pixar’s short from Cars.




Daniel Greave’s 1991 Academy Award Winner Manipulation (which, I guess, inspired Genre)



And this one is something for gamers everywhere, myself included, who haven’t heard of the great news from Blizzard and haven’t gone to watch this.





Cheers!

Work Work So many WORK Muahahaha

There’s so much! Too much! Oh dear me daisies and lollipops the work comes and goes and comes and goes and some I take, some I don’t take, but some I really take and now it’s a lot, piling and stacking and it’s too much…

Assignments! Part time freelancing! Grants documents media monitoring research analysis journals mid term pop quizzes creative brief advertisements type type write write DRAW, yes draw quite rightly draw sketch.

And it’s unmanageable, not without proper planning and time dissemination; allocation to perfection, balance of work and rest and play possibly; the equilibrium must not break, the chink must not appear in the armour

(too much too much)

And the flow cannot be impeded. I’ve gotten it planned out, I think. I think if I

(piling stacking pop quizzes mid term creative strategy)

make sure that I keep to the book, stay within the line of act, keep myself in check

(DRAW!)

I’ll surely be able to handle. This is not the first time it’s happening. I’ve handled worse. I’ve made it through all the time. Assignments grants freelance work I’ve handled them, I’ve taken them before with lesser time, I’m sure I can do it.

The victor is always the victorious.

What’s left what’s left media monitoring e-commerce business website chop assignment research grant 1 grant 2 pop quiz tutorial report mid term creative strategy advertising brief…

Well, something happened. Something.




I had spent the whole week mulling it in my mind. At best it felt like a joke that happened over Halloween, foul eggs over heads and ah well-diddly-doo it‘s just misfor-tune. At worst it felt like a nagging frustration, and after awhile it was everything the flustered facets of life that come even if you don’t call for it. Sometimes I go WTF and sniggered (because, if you look at it, it’s pretty darn funny). Sometimes I go WTF and felt WTF. The sort of trouble that you go whatever with, partly because you don’t care, even if it’s stupidly clung.




But the weirdest part is, when I think of it, is that I haven’t really felt angry. Frustrated and jived up, yes, but angry… erm, no, and it’s starting to feel like an anomaly. These were the things in life that made you feel angry, the ones that punches you like an uncalled swing of the fist in the midst of the crowd. I mean, by right, if you’re in my shoes, you’d most likely be feeling pissed. I’m not pissed. I’m strangely calm. I’m just wishful that idiotic things like this wouldn’t come, and damn me if it isn’t idiotic; I think the thing that frustrated me most is the fact that this is downright the stupidest damn thing ever.




This was what happened, and I’ll lay it straight down on the table; I’ve gotten into trouble with a lecturer.




I hear the ay caramba! It felt a little familiar. Very familiar. *CoughTMJCough*




But here’s the real punch line; I haven’t done anything.




It didn’t mean I didn’t do anything wrong. I had played Hangman in class and wasn’t being too subtle about it, but I wasn’t being anywhere near distracting either. But I had played, and I think to her (the lecturer’s eyes), that was enough to land me under the neon limelight. She probably didn’t have a good day, because she went on an outburst. The type teachers get when they’re agitated, when they felt they weren’t appreciated well enough; it was almost standard procedure (my apologies to teachers worldwide; such generalisation don’t do your dedication justice, but for that we have teachers day and a genuine thank you if you’ve been great).




And then the lecturer had yelled at me, and shouted that I’ve been demoralising and disrespectful, and that I still have the gutso to smile through all that (I’ve been looking up at her with my head rested on the table, and by heavens I didn’t know she was staring at me, hinting that I’m the one, I’m the one, and suddenly I was accused of smiling). And then she said that anyone who doesn’t enjoy this could’ve just signed attendance and leave. And then she shouted for me to leave. I left.




And suddenly I was back in Form 3, looking up at Puan Faridah, her eyes bloodshot and brimming, overflowing with maddened craze that that was strewing her hair, roughing her voice, and her pupils just told me, shouted at me, I’ve got the authority, kiddo; I’ve got the crown and the throne and the position and if you’re going to do something, DO IT. I DARE YOU.




I remembered feeling a little angry, and a little shaken. After that it felt pretty funny (I was smiling? Dear goodness gracious was I really smiling or do I look like I was smiling or maybe I should just really shaved the moustache). After that I was alright.




Here was the simple explanation that I’ve realised after my exit from the class; she was having a bad day, I wasn’t being a helpful student, and it was just a big misunderstanding, the bit about smiling and being deliberately oblivious and disrespectful. It was all a bloody misunderstanding. I can live with that. Maybe it’ll blow over. Maybe I’d apologise.




But it didn’t end.




The next day was her tutorials. I went in and kept the low profile (it isn’t hard; my profile, aside from the bulk minus the height, is physically low already. I’m generally more prone to daydream or doodle away than to be participating in class). I got a nice wallop of a jibe at me, which I just smiled to myself. Leave it be, and it’ll die down. Most battles are won without fighting.




And then I went out of class to answer a call. What happened in the class after that was, according to classmates, the lecturer stating that I seemed like a very successful businessman, leaving class to answer the phone so often (turns out that it was the first phone call that I had in her class that I tried to answer, and somehow once was a couple of times). Kelvin wasn’t happy with the jibe and left. I went in and got yelled at again. And then she said I got an attitude problem. And I might get a letter from the dean for disciplinary action. And she hadn’t been unfair, she hadn’t sent me out of the class yesterday (apparently, I left on my own account after she ‘hinted’ who she was displeased of), and that why people like me had to go and ruin her day and trouble everyone and disrupt everyone’s studies…




The only thing I said to her was, “excuse me?” when I entered the class and she asked (yelled) if she should apologise to me.




Oh, right, I hadn’t even made a single retort. I’ve officially pissed someone off by doing nothing at all. Someone pass me a cert. I’ve graduated.




Then I thought I’d go and just apologise, because this is getting ridiculous and my friends are starting to get the heat (great friends as they are, they stood by me… thanks). I called her a few times but she refused to look up. I dragged Pauline out and left.




I won’t meet her until next Monday. I don’t know how I’m going to manage in class without another episode.




You see, back during TARC and the TMJ incident, I had brought it upon myself. I had launched a personal catapult, yelling Fire in the Hole and dove head-on like a brainless moron. At least, back then, I could justify to myself that the trouble I got myself into, I got myself into. My shit is self-collected and scattered around to be stepped. This time, the shit was knee deep and I sat right into it.




I don’t know. Now I’m in a dazed limbo. I’ve gotten my pals in trouble; they had stuck up for me and they’re getting the heat. I don’t know if I should really just walk up to her and call her a paranoid bitch. I felt that I could swallow the shit and go and apologise, provided she’d listen. The biggest part of me now is saying Fuck it, you did nothing wrong, she can’t do jack-shit. But it’s like I said, really. The reason why I’m aggravated is because this happened while I did nothing to incur it.
Ah, yes. Injustice. That’s always a hard thing to stomach. Wherever, whenever.
I think I’ll do that. I think I’ll Fuck it, I did nothing wrong, and she can’t do jack-shit.
Whatever.

*********************
I think, kind reader, you deserve an apology.
I finally got this incident out of the system. For a better use of a horrible analogy, it feels like after one’s done the end bit of diarrhoea, felt shaky for a day or two, and then felt the lightness of the body after a purging. Right. My apologies again.
The trouble of being a writer is that, at the light, sight and blight of everything, one will feel the need to write it down, limn it, mull it over and over and then leave it out in the open. At the end of it, even if one is not particularly satisfied or proud, at least the thing’s out of the system.
I got this out now, finally. And I’m feeling like I’m kilograms lighter.
Thank you, and Goodnight People.

And so said the Man in the Canary-Yellow Tweed (to a dark-skinned individual named Calendar who waters his corn and sometimes massages his legs); “Laughter is a medicine best served with Lamb Chop grilled medium-rare with mash potatoes at the side.” And so, like prophecies made by not being made in purpose, it became true.

I’ll tell you what was fantastic this week. I may not tell you what that was not so good or, in some cases, just preposterous, but I can assure you that things haven’t really gone down the drain, or impeccably ludicrous, or somewhat shambled over a tirade of disasters as it does sometimes (the oh-heavens-this-can’t-be-happening things). Things’ been good, I’m happy, and maybe that’s just what the fuel to life is all about.

What’s fantastic this week is;

The Nintendo Wii, god bless them people of Nintendo, and subsequently my 6th Uncle (or Uncle Raymond, who married my 6th aunt) for buying it back in China when work got him down enough to seek life’s aspirin which is the Wii, and then taking it back. Now it’s in my grandmother’s house, and I get to go over anytime to play (and also find people to play with, because my 5th Aunt and Husband is addicted). The only setback is that here in Malaysia, you can’t find the good games. I’ve been looking, but no Super Smash Bros. Brawl, no Twilight Princess, and no RE4: Wii Edition.

(These are, of course, the *ahem* games we’re talking about).

Kung Fu Panda, and this one you bless the people of Dreamworks for not going with the very, very old and stoic Shrek formula and make something that’s entertaining, genuinely funny, is seriously (if not mildly) heartfelt and have a great few awesome fight scenes thrown in for good measure. Nice. Better than Iron Man, even.

LEGO Indiana Jones: The Original Adventures; this one I thank Travellers Tales. It’s a game, in case you’re wondering, following the same formula of TT’s previous LEGO titles revolving around the Star Wars movies (great games, by the way), though this time you play the Indiana Jones movies. There’s still something really, really fun about punching LEGO tribesman with the classic Indiana Jones theme rousing in the background.

And lastly, the Dude on a Retarded Journey's birthday lunch, held at Chilli’s in 1 Utama.

Kelvin did not use Durex. He now finds his birthday celebration interrupted by some rather disturbing news.

It was good. We laughed. We gave him a Starsucks Coffee T-Shirt. We had fun.

The picture says it all. Notice the thumbs up?

******************

And so said the dark-skinned individual named Calendar to the Man in Canary-Yellow Tweed: “What that ascends as facets of truth, taking place in the stands before the Eyes of Men, are merely facades that show enough but never entirely. These becomes the truth, the shell of the story, and this is what that protects it from being seen as the blight in the Golden Valley.”

(To which the Man in Canary-Yellow Tweed responded in being confused, then proceeded to search the dark-skinned individual named Calendar’s shack by the corner of the side of the corn field for books and, finding none, laughed and sat by the fire nursing Whisky that was not on the rocks.)

In a Bizarre Turn of Events...

I am now typing this on my brother’s computer, which is close to as slow as the Apple Lisa, with a keyboard that I can’t get used to and a mouse that has a population of dust (and the stuff that live with them, such as the Dust Mites and Dust Faeries) underneath.


This PC has been with us for… good god, quite about 7 years now, give or take. Back then it was the hotrod; the mean machine, built for gaming and for gaming only, the other PC perks tagging along as minuscule, overlooked and secondary applications. Now the gaming is gone from it, its hard drives overcrowded, its motherboard switched twice (now a run-of-the-mill cheap substitute) and its graphics card turned from a GeForce4 (the super-power accelerator back then) into a bargain price 3D Integrated Card.


And the fight is out of it, too. Lately I noticed its hard-disc spaces seem to disappear themselves, and the Ethernet card just decided to go kah-poot. It’s taking longer than usual to start and sometimes it wouldn’t start at all, and had to be reset a few times before the windows would run.

Old buddy, I think it’s time to go. I think it’s time to rest.


I’ve been taking time to look at catalogues for a new PC, which should come when my brother leaves for the UK with the laptop. This one will live on, in some ways; I’ll be transferring its hard-disc memory into the new one.


7 years have been a long run. A great run.


****

There’s something wrong with me head. I think it has to do with a mushroom.

Or a toadstool, perhaps. Possibly poisonous.

The mushroom is growing in my head and is taking up space, all the while tossing the left side of my brain into the pits of oblivion, and soon I believe my logic, reasoning and altogether my memories will be wiped-out cleaner than any slate.

It’s a daunting, almost horrible idea, but I think the mushroom has tampered with my means to feel the creeping tendrils of impending brain-death, and has left me in a prolonged state of contentment, littered with the occasional whim to go and dance in the rain.


If you think that I’m merely imagining all these, or perhaps had just jumped to an early, rather preposterous conclusion, then I wonder, good sir/madam, what do you make of the weird symptoms that I’ve been experiencing lately?


I’ve summed up my reasoning and, with the compiled data over the course of a week, came to the decision that a mushroom growth beneath the cranium is only too obvious. These are the symptoms that I have been experiencing;

1) Vivid dreams of a red mushroom, not unlike the ones you can find in Super Mario Brothers, looking at me with eyes as old as the rocks that formed the earth, eyes that carved into pity and slight resentment that said the words; “grow-up power-up!”


2) Lost of memory, like where I might’ve placed that damned camera battery or what are the classes on Tuesday.


3) Lack of reasoning and thinking abilities, like how I can’t figure why the battery would go missing or who might’ve taken it or whether it could’ve just got up and walked away from a life of abject monotony (wait, I haven’t figured that possibility out yet).


4) Unstable and inconsistent state of mind, which is sort of like being smart in one moment and in the next instant, completely stupid. This is determined from the Short Circuit Incident. It goes like this;


Instance of Brilliance.
I was nursing a headache at home and was watching National Treasure 2 when the electricity went off. Apparently the jumper went down, as it does sometimes when the lightning is too assiduous, and it would snap itself down whenever I try to flick it. Confused, I asked the neighbour and it’s apparent that I’m the only one with electricity down. It is undoubted, then, that the house is experiencing short-circuitry.


I noted that I’ve never been taught on how to handle a short-circuit situation and was about to think of calling for help like a helpless little girl when I figured that, why not? Perhaps it’s possible to trace the source of the circuit and isolate it, if you can consider that that the circuit is caused by a defunct application or object. It is only a simple matter of turning off every switch in the house and flicking up the jumper to see if the electricity comes back, then test each switch one by one.


And it worked. I’ve isolated and identified the source of the circuit to the large refrigerator in the wet kitchen (used to store large amount of meat and dog food). I’ve checked and concluded that the plug and its switch has not malfunctioned, therefore the fault must be the refrigerator itself. I’ve moved it out and was preparing to check the motors when I noticed the floor was wet. The wire providing the fridge with power goes all the way to that bottom part of the fridge. The water was causing the short-circuit. Good. It means that the fridge and its motors are functioning fine.


I dried the floor and even took time to clean it up the year’s worth of lizard/bug/rat droppings at the bottom of the fridge, and then I tried to the switch again. The jumper didn’t jump. Everything was fine. I felt pretty proud of myself.


Instance of Stupid.
Of course, there’s always a cause to something. Obviously the water couldn’t have gotten there unless the ceiling was leaking, but it didn’t rain and there were no signs of a leaking ceiling tile (you can tell if there’s a dark grey patch). The fridge has a hole at the corner to for water to flow should someone decided to clean it up, but the hole is at the other side and away from the wire, and the floor that side was dry. It didn’t make sense. Where did the water come from?


So I had to check.


I felt the side of the fridge and found it wet. It flowed a little from the side then. I searched the place where the dish-stand is. It was wet there. I searched under the stove and saw water there. Water had dripped onto the floor from where the dish-stand is. Then I realised; the whole place from the dish-stand to the stove was wet. And then I saw the packet of soup. I’ve bought soup noodles for the brother for lunch. I’ve propped the packet of soup at the dish-stand and never bothered to tie it securely after I was done transferring some fishballs. It had managed to fall sideways a little and a good 80% flowed out.


The soup had caused the short-circuit. Oh my god.


(Oh, and the camera battery I can’t find? My father had taken it out from the charger and had placed it at the top section of my book shelf so it was easy for me to see. I was too busy searching under my bed and concocting conspiracy theories to notice. That makes a DOUBLE STUPID.)


5) Lastly, some headaches that come out of nowhere and from no apparent cause. It would just happen. Mostly when I turn during my sleep, and it would blossom out into a full-fledge brain-numbing-dumbing migraine. How do I put it? It’s like having a chasm in a part of your head, and when you turn, you feel your mind falling into it, falling and falling into the emptiness, but then it’s still attached to the other part of the head and what it could do was just tumble and swing like a pendulum, and the world swings with it too.


There. I have a potentially fatal mushroom growth from within my head. My only way of curing this without having to spend millions at the next money-hungry neurosurgeon is to attempt self-trepanning. This can be achieved with the power-drill and the toilet mirror. A box full of Panadol soluble should work as anaesthetic. It all comes down to how much shock-trauma a patient can take before he kills himself.

God have mercy on my soul.