I love KL.

I used to think I had a pretty good sense of direction. As I conquered the roads, I would periodically look over my shoulder and laugh at every traffic light and intersection as they feebly attempted to stop me from going where I wanted. Nothing could stand in my way. I was King. Normal people got lost, but no, not the King.

That was before I attempted to navigate central KL and boy, was I in for a surprise.

For those of you unfamiliar with downtown KL's road network, this is what it resembles from an aerial perspective:



Yes, a gigantic worm orgy, with each major highway lazily attempting to copulate the backalley or train track five tiers below itself.

Actually no. It's far worse than that.

Exploring KL would make even Indiana Jones cry. It would've made Frodo Baggins, having conquered the fires of Mordor, scream in anguish if he found himself lost and trapped in the depths of Malaysia's central concrete jungle.

I stayed the night after prom and spent Tuesday bumming around KL, until of course I had to eventually go home [carpooling and all].

So we start out with all the roads looking familiar but then whoops, wrong turn. Suddenly good ol' KL is about as recognisable as Mexico City in a solar eclipse - not only am I unable to identify a single road, even the signboards look like they're trying to explain brain surgery to me in Russian. Not a particularly good indication.

Every turn we took we seemed to be simply going deeper and deeper into KL, like those dudes in Saw II that just can't get out of that house. It appears that the King has been brought to his knees.

And finally, just as it looked like I was going to be stuck in KL forever and grow old and have children without ever leaving the city boundaries, we hit the highway. Wham BAM, home free.

I got home, kissed the ground a few times, and did what every righteous man who was lost and then endowed with the gift of direction should do: go on Google Earth.

Hmm, things appear much simpler now... so all I had to do was go here and here and I would've gotten to the highway...

Hah, KL may have defeated me once, but never again. Ladies and gentlemen, the King was getting back on his feet.

Wednesday, time to go to KL again, this time a different buddy wants to go to the British Council in Jalan Ampang (as to why we were going to the British Council, until today I cannot figure out).

Reached there without event, pretty straightforward way of getting to the place - because fortunately, the Brits had the sense to put their office somewhere that could actually be found. And then, time for the return journey.

Oh man, round two of Man versus City. I felt like I'd been preparing for this all my life, memorising satellite imagery of the city, taking note of landmarks on the way there, blabla. I was born for this. This is my destiny. It's like Luke Skywalker about to kill the Emperor - this is fate, written for me by omnipotent beings out there in the sky, sending me down this path once more so that I could face off The Evil Roads of KL, and see the light.

Hah, time for victory. We start out rather well... wait hang on, is that the KL Tower on our left? It's not supposed to be there. Who the hell put the KL tower over there?

Ah, shit. Not again.

A quick intermission for those of you planning to navigate using Google Earth: take my word for it, when you're on the ground and when you're analysing the city from 35,000km in the air, it kinda looks different.

Honestly, kudos to whoever designed these roads, you make an excellent trap artist. It's quite an engineering marvel to construct an infinitely looping set of roads that forces your prey to perpetually go round and round in circles until they eventually give up and die of exhaustion, which was what I was about to do.

For reasons that support my own sanity, I shall not recant the entire experience of having to chisel my way out of KL for the second time in two days, but let's just say somebody upstairs must really like me to bestow freedom upon myself in such rapid succession.

Okay I'm running out of stamina here, bye.

I'm free baby.

Board up your windows, hide your children in the basement, and load up those ol' silver bullets, because I'm FREE baby.

That's right. No more A-levels.

But more importantly, no more chemistry.

Until today I cannot understand why anybody would actually want to study the subject - or more appropriately, why on Earth *I* decided to take it. Talk about massive lapse in judgement. Ah, I was so young and naive back then - all it took was for me to nonchalantly fill out a form and I plunged myself into a world of pain for the next 18 months.

Shit, I'd rather stick my foot in a mousetrap than look at another organic reaction again.

Those of you who are voluntarily taking chemistry-related courses after A-Levels, well you guys have been forsaken. Sorry, that's how it is. You will forever be tainted with the stain that is Chemistry. I will smell you out from a mile away. I will smell your children out from a mile away, and your children's children, and all the other hypothetical offspring you haven't even had yet. You have contaminated your bloodline, and for ten generations your descendants will pay the price.

If we meet up at a class reunion 20 years from now, you can say hi to me and I'll scream and run away. Chemists have no souls. They are empty shells, once mortals but now filled with treacherous and evil knowledge that no man should have.

You can see it in their eyes. There is a void, a glimmer of evil in each pupil that would make even Sauron piss in his pants.

Yup, I'm a veteran now. I have been to no-man's land and back. I have sinned and won redemption. I have seen the other side, had lunch with the devil himself, and lived to tell the tale.

And now, I am free. Hell yeah.

Bored.

I'm bored.

Yep, right now, smack in the middle of my exams, I'm sitting at my computer bored out of my wits.

Confident? Hell no. In fact, I have absolutely no clue why I'm not dragging my lazy ass back to the books where I can revel in self-induced mental torture for the next ten hours, especially considering the fact that I'm pretty behind in just about every module.

It's not that the panic hasn't set in - I'm just not doing anything about it, for some funny reason.

It's like sitting through a Hollywood adaptation of some Asian horror flick, where the lead hot blonde actress is happily taking a walk in a random deserted area when SHAZAM, out pops the super hairy/damp/twitchy ghost with bangs longer than Harry Potter.

And instead of running away as if Bono just started singing in the next room, said blonde just stands there screaming in terror until she's eventually off-ed by a fuzzy mythical creature resembling Tom Cruise in The Last Samurai; and all you can do while watching the movie is smack your forehead in frustration.

Well, that's my situation. Except in place of the blonde, you have cynical ol' me, and instead of Bono, you have chemistry (which is marginally worse, you might argue).

The fear set in quite a while back, it's just that I'm still standing there proverbially (and possibly literally) screaming in abject horror.

I hope I snap out of this pothole soon.

Revelations

My arch-nemesis the one and only Quah-man (or better known by his online persona, Alejandro Miguel McSexy) recently wrote a little something-something about life flashing before one’s eyes at the moment of death – how in that brief fragment of time before you kick the bucket, you get one last look at your entire existence from start to finish.

How in that one second of dream-time, years and years of real-world time can elapse.

My measly paragraph and half-assed sentence do the concept little justice, so here’s the quote directly from his blog which came directly from this movie I’d never heard of, and it pretty much sums things up:

(Ethan Hawke):

I heard that Tim Leary said as he was dying that he was looking forward to the moment when his body was dead but his brain was still alive. You know they say that there's still six to twelve minutes of brain activity after everything else is shutdown. And a second of dream consciousness, right, well, that's infinitely longer than a waking second. You know what I'm saying?

(Julie Delpy):
Oh, yeah, definitely. For example, I wake up and it is 10:12, and then I go back to sleep and I have those long, intricate, beautiful dreams that seem to last for hours, and then I wake up and it's ... 10:13.

I’d recently sat through this horror flick called Wind Chill, which honestly seemed more like a pseudo-philosophical drama than a horror movie (thank you very much, artistic film interpretation), and it briefly brought up a concept called “eternal recurrence”, first thought of by some philosopher dude named Nietzsche.

Basically, eternal recurrence means that after you die, you simply live your life over and over again infinitely, exactly as it was before, down to every thought and detail.

And no, it’s not reincarnation, that’s sort of a second life in which you keep all your memories but come back as something else.


Philosophical jargon aside, it got me thinking – what if either this eternal recurrence, or the life-before-your-eyes thingy didn’t happen simply as an inevitable consequence of death? What if it was a choice?

What if at the moment of your death, an angel (or some other equally shiny magical character of mystic proportions) offered you a chance to live through your entire life all over again, completely it was before, without changing it in any way – what would you say?

Would you go through every minute of anguish, every second of embarrassment, every bad decision, every failure, all over again just so you could experience those precious happy moments in your life one more time?

Or would you simply go “Hell no. I’ve had some good times, but going through all the shitty parts of my life once was already more than enough”.

Discounting expletives, I’ve very much been a ‘no’ person for most of my life.

The good moments have been there, yes, but they’re quite simply cancelled out by the multitude of wrong decisions I’ve made and bazillion craptastically embarassing situations I’ve been in to the extent that there’s absolutely no way in Xenu’s holy name that I’d go through any of that again, ever, not even for the most terrific of moments I may have experienced.

But the last year has swayed my decision a little, I think. Going to the college I did was really an amazing journey – no, not the shitty campus (or even then, lack thereof), the horrible management, or the total lack of facilities, but all the people I met along the way.

Befriending them, listening to all their different stories, working and dealing with them have all left their mark on me (mostly for the better, I hope) and I think I’ve come a long way from being the grumpy hermit/nerd cross-breed I was in school.

Back to the original question – whether I would go through it all again… I think yeah, I would. And no, that’s not because college was oh-so-fantastic (okay honestly, it wasn’t that spectacular, in fact some bits genuinely sucked), but because I’ve learned so many things along the way that I can see the world a little differently – so much so that I’d go through all the shit in my childhood all over again just for the all revelations, knowledge and awareness that I carry with me now.

Looking back at my past, I’ve definitely made a lot of bad decisions in my nineteen years of life, and screwed up even more. So many humiliating moments and simple things I’ve made worse, and then of course the multitude of missed opportunities and outright failures - all more than enough to make any of my flashbacks about as pleasant as dunking my head in a flaming tar pit.

But you know, as I was writing this I suddenly had me a little epiphany – that really, all of that nonsensical bullshit that happened to me is in the past. Long gone, distant if you will.

When I look back now, it's not that I have less regrets now than before (which would be profoundly illogical unless I randomly contracted amnesia), or that I have more happy memories to nullify the crappy ones, it's just that I realise all of the bullshit that happened to me along the years is so incredibly insignificant in the grand scheme of things.

And I’ve got a long time between today and my eventual death to fix the mistakes I’ve done, to let go of what went wrong before, to dispel all notions of regret, and to finally reach a point where when the sparkly angel finally approaches me on my deathbed and poses the question to me I'll hit back with nothing other than a solid “yes”.

[This is my long overdue emopost for the last day of college, officially on May 16th but considering I’m having extra classes this week, that was quite a load of bull. To my college friends, and of course my secondary school friends whom I refuse to ever let go of, all of you made this journey worth it. I love you guys (almost as much as you love me)!]

The Chicken.

I was sitting in the kitchen eating breakfast one morning, when, like the setup of a bad joke, in walks a chicken.

I kid you not. A chicken is walking around my backyard.

So, I think to myself. There’s a chicken in my backyard.

I stare at the chicken. Said chicken stares back at me. I tell you, locking eyes with magically appearing poultry is not a particularly great way to affirm one’s sanity.

Why is there a chicken in my backyard?

Cluck cluck.

I guess sleeping at 4:30am for three nights in a row does this to a person. Finally, I get to experience sleep deprivation symptoms first hand.

[Chicken starts pecking at the tiles]

It’s the physics. Has to be. Physics Unit 6 does some seriously messed up shit to your brain. You’re beginning to crack, man.

Clearly, I was the victim of espionage of some sort. Question is, who was the bird working for?

Time to bring out the ol’ charm.

Me: Hey there, hot stuff.
Chicken: ...
Me: Don’t talk much eh? It’s okay, I like ‘em that way.
Chicken: Cluck.

Well I'd love to tell you my Bond-movie-esque tale from here on, but I’m cutting this article short because I really have to go hit the books, both literally and metaphorically (first exam in 2 days). Anyways I took some pictures of the chicken, which turned out not to be a figment of my cynical imagination after all:



Sitting, quietly. Thinking. Contemplating. What goes through that evil avian mind?




Suddenly, the chicken sprang into action, annihilating grain after grain of rice. No mercy for the carbs.

My god

My neighbour's house just got robbed, not 10 minutes ago.

I was sitting happily at home arranging my stationary in alphabetical order, when I hear crazily-loud shouts and screams coming from the houses a couple rows behind mine. As in, insanely loud. Quite a few people generating them, too.

I jump into the car with my father, grab a couple golf clubs, and head over.

Five Malay guys on 3 motorcycles, all armed with parangs, came along and robbed my neighbour. Smashed all her car windows. At 9 fucking pm. My god.

Their being armed to the teeth, obviously her next door neighbours couldn't emerge from their houses - so they shouted like there was no god damn tomorrow. One man went up to his gate and told them to their face he was calling the cops. Their response?

"Panggil la. Panggil polis."

Yes, that's the sorry state of our country where even armed robbers don't give two shits whether or not you call the cops on them. When even during the robbery they can leisurely rev their motorcycle engines like the start of a fucking rally.

Seriously you gotta be shitting me. What happened to burglars quietly breaking in, grabbing your TV and sneaking out? Now they ride up in gangs and do their robberies in public for everybody to see, and have the audacity to engage in a little verbal spat with people who bother to call the cops.

Come on, I even live in Damansara Utama, just across the road from Taman Tun. Not exactly the Bronx, is it? And houses facing the main road still get robbed at 9pm.

The hell is wrong with this country?

It's one thing to be afraid to walk in a deserted area at 3am, it's something else to live in fear inside your own house at 9pm.

The worst thing is, we actually have a neighbourhood watch - this private security firm drives around all night in a white car, and the asswipe wasn't even there when it happened. My god.

Although something did comfort me slightly tonight - when we got there, the robbers having just fled, we were soon joined by another 12 or so of our neighbours who had rushed over armed with just about anything they could find.

Some walked. Some drove. I saw a guy with a hammer, a few with golf clubs, hell even an old guy armed with nothing but his walking stick had come over to check.

We stood around for a few minutes, going over what had just happened, a rag-tag bunch of neighbours who had probably never spoken to each other before tonight.

It did give me a sort of newfound respect - that out there, somewhere, there still existed some good samaritans who actually cared.

Although, unfortunately, not that it makes a difference.

What the...

I've had a lot of people, both strangers and acquaintances ask me recently what the hell went wrong with this site in terms of both content and writing style. So I did what I always do when criticised: do a Dwayne Johnson eyebrow raise, then go back indoors to my Rubik's Cube.

Either ways I decided to flip through the more recent articles posted, both out of love for the writer of this site (me) and the curiosity as to what led to these snazzy criticisms.

Having done that, the first thing I uttered out of reflex:

"What the hell is this retard talking about?"

It was only a few seconds later, of course, that I realised the retard in question was actually me, though I quickly gave myself a hug and felt all better again.

Wow. Some of the shit put up on this blog recently was so badly written that as soon as I re-read it, I totally flipped out, and then I jumped out the window onto the road and drop kicked the newspaper man who happened to be making his rounds.

I start anger management classes next Tuesday.

Star Newspaper can kiss my ass anyways. I sent them my "Designer Writing" article and they published it, but first the editor brutally massacred it and chopped out every element of sarcasm and humour until what was left resembled a letter some namby-pamby boarding school kid of ambiguous sexual nature would write home to his mom on a weekend.

Where was I? Oh right.

I immediately realised that the more recent items I churned out lacked both the basic eloquence required to deliver a point (or didn't even have any actual point, for that matter) and the blunt sarcasm required to pull off a humourous post. Long story short: it turned into a big steaming pile of badly-written emo shit.

Admittedly, 2008 has sucked. A lot. Possibly one of the worst years in my life ever, but what the hell. Enough of that crap.

So now I'm going to stop bitching about life and start bitching about... I dunno, I'll find something else to bitch about. There are always things to bitch about, if you look hard enough.

Oh look, it's dinner time. Bye.