Thursday, March 29, 2007

Losing it

This semester, Thursday is one of the dumber days; wake up at six in the morning for a one-hour class at eight, then a two-hour break before a class at eleven... Then a very long break which only ends at five, for another lecture, which ends at seven. So, I find things to do during those really long breaks.

Today, I decided to draw. The idea came when I wondered; what would it be like if my mind snapped? What would happen if the relatively cheerful, happy-go-lucky, can't-bring-me-down, high-on-life Zhen Yao finally loses it? Then the pen started moving...:


All without the aid of liquid paper!

Everyone has a limit, I think. A point of no return, after which a person's sanity is irrevocably scarred. After that, it's cuckoo batshit crazy time, people. If such a fate were ever to befall me, keep a camera at hand to record all the stupid things I do while I'm stark raving mad. And once you think you've been entertained enough, institutionalise me and hope for the best.

If I recover, then show me the tape. If I don't, please oh please stick a .44 magnum revolver up my mouth and proceed to blow my brains out... I heard it's not as painful as hanging, and I've always wanted to go out with a bang.

Pointless Fact of the Day:
From this day on, I'll end my posts with a random, pointless fact. The trick to appearing more intelligent than you really are is to load yourself with this sort of useless trivia, so you'll always have something to say in a conversation.

Anyway: Malaysia's inflation rate is somewhere between 3% to 4% last year. Zimbabwe's, on the other hand, is around 1,700%. This means that, say, a bottle of milk which costs $1 today, would cost $18 in a year's time.

Zhen was here at 8:55 pm, 3 comment(s)

Sunday, March 25, 2007

Riding my corkscrew

I finally got the scan of the on-ride photo that was taken on the Corkscrew during the Orientation Party three weeks ago:

I invaded their shot, whooo~
Courtesy of adrianchoychoy.blogspot.com

It's not of a particularly spectacular quality, but it'll do.

But speaking the corkscrew, a couple of the Buddies and I accidentally discovered the euphemistic quality of the ride names in Theme Parks. Consider, for example, the Corkscrew. Imagine (this is for the gals) a tall, dark and altogether friggin' handsome Latino with a deep, booming voice, suavely asking you:

"Baby, would you like to ride my corkscrew?"

And then there's other possible permutations of this effect, all using the names of Genting Theme Park rides:

"If that's not your cup of tea, how about getting into my tea cup?"

"No? Then would you prefer to fly the dragon instead?"

"How about riding the rolling thunder?"

"Want me to bump your boats?"

"Or would you rather get wet riding my flume?"

"Come on, baby, come with me and you'd be in the arena of stars. I'll give you the space shot of your life."

'No? Seriously? Okay, okay, what would you say to a round of splashing around in my rainforest? Eh? Eh? Whaddaya say?"

"Really? Alright baby, let's get it on..."

"Come ride the rodeo like they did
in Brokeback Mountain..."

Zhen was here at 8:53 am, 4 comment(s)

Tuesday, March 20, 2007

Bushed

I'm pretty bushed. Nowhere near as badly as I was back in Hell Week 2006 (refer to the archives), but my time is consumed as quickly as shark's fin soup* at a Chinese wedding dinner. I now go for choir three times a week, and the workload for being in the MUSA council is slowly gaining momentum; so is Nature Society stuff, for which I helped sell Dunkin' Donuts to raise funds for an upcoming trip to an elephant sanctuary. And then, there's always the assignments and tutorials.

So I wake up at 6.30am for classes that begin at 11, sometimes going to uni on days when I don't even have classes (farewell, Tuesday), and at least two times a week I leave home at 7am only to return in the wee hours of 11pm.

And that's the way I like it.

Uh-huh, uh-huh.

*Usually made of mock shark's fin, partly because they're endangered, and partly because a lot of couples are too stingy to fork out so much cash on real ones. It's pretty ironic, since only the Chinese eat shark's fin, but if there's anything more universal than the Chinese's love for shark's fin, it's our parsimony. Thank goodness for that. Save the sharks, people!

Zhen was here at 10:42 pm, 0 comment(s)

Tuesday, March 13, 2007

The picture at the top of the page

A couple of weeks ago, I was reading an article in The Economist about America's continuing troubles in Afghanistan. The picture at the top of the page was in my opinion one of the best ever to grace the pages of a magazine (of likes which include Scarlett Johansson and Keira Knightley on Vanity Fair, but that's for a totally different reason):


How could a photograph of a raid on a Taliban hideout be so beautiful? The notion seems so wrong, but somehow, the end result, the picture itself, seems so right that I can't really find words to describe why I like it. Like I said, it just seems so... right.

If I had a high resolution version of this picture, I would've had it for my desktop background already. Sadly, I don't.

But we'll always have Scarlett. Methinks that's not too bad a consolation.

Zhen was here at 9:13 pm, 0 comment(s)

Thursday, March 08, 2007

Monash Orientation Party 2007 (Sem One)

I've been to Genting Highlands many times more than the average person. This semester's orientation party for the freshies (on Saturday, 3rd of March) gave me an excuse to head up the mountain yet again, and to post a bunch of pictures for not much reason at all.

Acting cool for the camera... and failing miserably.

Typically, a Genting trip involves going on the several more interesting rides in the theme park. Hence, the trip began with the Buddies (the orientation facilitators) leading groups of students on routes towards those rides. The first two on my group's route were closed, so we went straight to the Spinner, a not-so-thrilling warm-up ride before we headed to the other marginally-more-thrilling rides (hey, it's Genting).

It caused chronic dizziness, though.

Next on the list was the flume ride. After a relatively short queue time of about 20 minutes, we finally got the chance to get wet.

Things like these never get old.

After that I got myself dried. Who said Malaysians were stingy?

And then we headed to a proper rollercoaster, the Corkscrew. Unfortunately, the designated cameraman wasn't around to snap any pictures. Even more unfortunately, a group of freshies have yet to send me a scan of the on-ride photo that was taken...

What's left on the interesting ride list was the only one still worth riding in Genting, in my opinion; the Space Shot. It's the one thing that still induced that piss-in-my-bloody-pants feeling I could find in the whole, wretched, theme park deprived country. Bah.

Having two girl friends screaming hysterically next to you adds to the fun.
And then there's that urban legend about the girl whose long hair became caught in the machinery, decapitating her. Dahlia, our beloved MUSA president, took no chances; she hooded up.

At lunchtime, everyone headed to a certain meeting area, where Domino's pizzas imported all the way from Subang Jaya were then served to appease the 130 or so voracious appetites present. And once the food was downed, I hosted a game of charades. Each group had two actors plus three people guessing the names of movies. Nothing really special here, besides the usual hilarity that ensued when people had to act out Brokeback Mountain or American Pie (hint: both resulted in pseudo-shagging).

In between rounds, I made the time to join the guys for a round of Rasa Sayang singing.
(Note: In-joke)

Andrea loved the performance; here's her million dollar reaction.

When charades ended, a human scavenger hunt began. We (MUSA council members) sent them all over the outdoor theme park in search of us, while the remaining buddies led the groups around the place. It wasn't too hard for us to get caught in the beginning, but it started raining and the game was transferred to the First World Plaza, where there's always a flood of people; even more so as it was Chinese New Year. No interesting pictures here...

My group; half Malaysian, half Sri Lankan.

Finally, after all the games were completed and the prizes awarded (Borders book vouchers, yum!), the important parts of the Orientation Party was over. The three buses made their way down the mountain. I got stuck on the third bus, whose occupants were mostly so passive and asleep that I failed to rile them up even with a terrible rendition of Britney's Oops I Did It Again. A complete "What the hell?" moment. Boooooooring.

In bus number two, passengers slept at their own peril.

I guess that's it. This post was mostly to make up for the dearth of photos on this blog. My sincere apologies to those who expected something more profound. Not in such a philosophical mood today, especially since the goddamned Streamyx is giving me so much connection troubles that it took me three hours over the period of two nights to get everything uploaded onto Blogger! Bloody friggin' hell.

Zhen was here at 12:15 am, 1 comment(s)

Sunday, March 04, 2007

One Big Happy Family

As of today, Chinese New Year is officially over (in my previous post, I was only referring to the holidays).

It's during times like these that you take the time to meet your extended family, times of which includes wedding dinners (especially prevalent among the Chinese community).

Some of the people who attended one of these weddings.

And since I meet some parts of the family only once a year, there have been several occasions where I bump into relatives I never knew existed, especially those who are only weeks or months old. Whenever that happens, I get reminded just how massive my extended family is. It is in no way as large as certain Indian/Pakistani tribal families in which people marry their aunts, but by Malaysian standards, I believe it's big enough.

Let's cut to the chase and run the numbers, shall we? I have three uncles and five aunts, with a total of 20 children between them, as well as eight grandchildren I call my distant nieces and nephews. So you can imagine how fun it is at Chinese New Year gatherings, with all of us packed into one place trying not to finish all the ba gua (rou gan in Mandarin, jerky in English) before the celebrations are over.

Oh yeah, that's only my dad's side of the family. My mom has five brothers and six sisters, and they were quite a productive bunch; I have 32 cousins on my mom's side. And these 32 waste no time in getting married and making babies, either (two of my cousins even tied the knot at 20); 19 children between them, to be exact.

Add that all together and I have a grand total of 52 cousins and 27 nieces and nephews(!).

The most efficient family size is still four or five, I believe.

And how the heck did a family manage to get this big, you might ask. Well, picture this: Your wife is pregnant at the same time your daughter is. That's what happened in my mom's family; she was the youngest daughter (but not the youngest child), and she was born the same year her eldest sister gave birth, too. Isn't that the slightest bit weird, or what?

Oh wait, I forgot to mention that my grandma on my mom's side is the third of three wives.

And the crowd goes wild!

As a result, each year, there are about two or three weddings to attend, and two or three new babies popping out, too, but it's usually more. A really big and happy family, huh? Share the joy and all that jazz, huh? It doesn't help too that both sides of my family are made up of loudmouths, so gatherings are always noisy as hell. Which is a good thing, really.

I must have been really emotional about something.
I can't remember what it was.

That probably also explains why I sometimes just can't seem to shut up. To my defense, I now get to blame it on my genes, so if any of you have a problem with my piehole, I can accuse you of making fun of my family.

However, one downside of having such a huge extended (Chinese) family is that the monetary spoils from my ang pow collection activities usually sucks in comparison to what most of my friends get. Sometimes up to ten times suckier. Sensibly, the more people you have to give ang pows to, the less money you'll put in one of them. In effect, the funds get too diluted. Hopefully, the belief that luck comes in each of those little red packets holds true, or else my entire childhood has been cheated of so much extra pocket money that could've been.

But since I'm not that much of a superstitious fellow, I'm pretty much sulking already. To those of you out there with ginormous families, I think you understand how I feel.

And to the rest of you people, may your families not be as dysfunctional as ours. But if it is, you can do anything about it, can you? Heh.

PS: I'm not kidding.

Zhen was here at 11:34 pm, 0 comment(s)