Tiiiiooooommmaaaannnn

Posts I wrote during the Tioman trip, in an air conditioned resort room next to the comfortable open air balcony that doesn't try to freeze the living shit out of anything in it, posts that are probably utterly irelevant by this point but that I'm still going to put up anyway.

Day 1

Today's the first day of the bet.

In the elevator, felt a little bit woozy. I'm sure that this is in no way indicative of my future status today.

I've noticed that while Cancy has coffee in her bag, she hasn't drunk it, whereas I've already begun not drinking coffee. Clearly this is why she thought she was going to win. I figure that if I can last till the hyperactivity kicks in for her, it'll be a home stretch all the way.

The sounds of garbled conversations and Bob imparting Malaysian wisdom to all around him and the humming of the bus are... Soothing.

Yellow Submarine is infinitely better as a song you're on a moving bus staring at the sea.

Apparently Cancy drank the cup of coffee and then fell alseep. But coffee takes a while to kick in. It also wasn't a cup of coffee by my prescription so I'm going to try and badger her into drinking another later on.

Watching clouds moving past other clouds in the sunlight. I'm not sure anything beats that.

The ferry is tiny, and it tries to make the trip shorter by freezing its passengers till they get there. But then the boat starts rocking a bit, and that makes up for everything.

I'm writing this as I lie in a comfortable, uncomfortably enough, double bed, but essentially, I'm skeptical that this is in fact primarily an ecology field trip. The food's good, the room's are beyond anything we thought we'd get, and all our rooms are all on stilts and suspended above a scenic pond. I sat there and watched it for a good ten minutes and birds swept down and glanced the water just for dramatic effect before smugly flying away. So the accomodation's wonderful, if not touristy down to the last overpriced detail.

About the fairly minor ecology aspect of this trip, we constructed our Ber-something funnels, made to chase insects out of leaf litter we collected into bottles of soapy water that are to insects what vats of acid are to government agents, with the exception that they actually succeed in killing what they set out to kill.

A while after that we treked over to a forest and planted our eggs while we raked up wads of leaves to the melodious sounds of "O nom nom nom" and "Guns don't kill people".

During dinner, with a complete absence of any leaf litter whatsoever, the kind resort staff supplied customers with a pot of piping coffee at the buffet spread. I decided at the time, for some reason, to point this out to Cancy who very politely enquired if I wanted some. I declined even more politely and started thinking about nothing but the merits of tea for the next few minutes.

I actually intend to start drinking leaf water as a substitute for the bean solution that I love. At least I'll get some sort of hot stimulant in the morning.

Day 2


Can trees go above the canopy? We spent hours measuring trees and we still have no idea. More of a question for the philosophers.

We trekked back to the same spots in the same forest to measure the height and diameter of trees this time. Ants apparently found this objectionable and expressed this in the most dental way possible.

Snorkelling afterward was best described as a tune to the sound of salt water entering nasal cavities, people gawking at the fish circumventing them, and people emulating fishy schoal behaviour but with a camera.

Tragically, the forest night walk was replaced with what sounded like a fairly uninteresting return to the intertidal regions and mangrove. We later found out from those bored or interested enough to go that they ventured down to the mouth of the mangrove's river and saw igneous rock and sand.

Igneous sand is black in color. I don't think I need to explain how this variation in colour is the most awesome thing that could be done with sand.

Day 3


Today was really more of a wrap up than anything else. We went back to collect our quail eggs and got readings indicating that the spots we picked were essentially quail refugee zones. We walked down a bit to one of the other team's sites and found out that that was bollocks, of course. Where one of the teams once had two eggs in their petri dish, they now had three significantly smaller ones.

Leaf litter was also sorted through. At least, I assume it was, since I was busy trying to guess what Vera meant by "the opposite of Malay", which according to her is Indian. A few moments later she was equally confused as us as to why this was so, so it's all good in the end. Taboo is excellent for exposing politically incorrect beliefs.

A while later we were told to embark on a photographic treasure hunt for some organism or the other. My group knew the trauma associated with spending twenty minutes on the first clue and mopping up the remaining eight in fifteen minutes, which I’m sure we all still insist is the fault of the lycan growing on the tree right next to the bar in which we were given the clue which was way too discrete about its lycanthropy for its own damn good. In any case, after we ran to and from the bar where the teachers lazily supervised us in between sips of their martinis, we had the rest of the day to ourselves.

Ideally, the immediate to do would be to gather up a bunch of mates and proceed to scour every reachable inch of the island for amazing sights that we weren’t shown just to demonstrate the monotony of our education system. The problem then was that either a good majority of us had already thought of that an hour before the rest of us did and had already fallen down the crevices of some obscure rock formation elsewhere or had conspired to hide in their rooms and not answer the doors, because Cancy, Adhit and I couldn’t find Dom, Movin or Divya, and there was the general consensus amongst the people that could be found that the people they were looking for couldn’t be found either.

We couldn’t find anyone in the resort, so we figured that we’d try the beaches since we’d been talking about faffing about near the mouth of the nearby mangrove’s river.

All we found at the beaches and the mouth of the river were, respectively, the beaches and the mouth of the river.

So all in all, no people, but still a good find.

























Went back a while later to find out from Kylie, who we’d passed by earlier on, that Dom, Divya, Aaron and Movin had shimmied over to the mouth of the river AFTER we left. Movin’s inexplicable disappearance was explained by him creeping over to the nearby forest and swimming in a natural pool by the trail we took earlier on. Dom had declined time alone with Movin based on the prospect of parasites in the water. Movin, being naturally repugnant to all forms of parasites, swam about for a good hour before heading over to join the others in saltier water.

It is not Dyiiiiing

In about seven minutes, my phone would have unwillingly transferred all of its photos over to my computer, and saved all contacts to its SIM card, and beyond that, it will be laid to rest in a casket of one-time-use plastic and other materials intent on the destruction of the planet. There, it will lie in silence, contemplating the days in which it had a purpose, and the companionship of some wanker who subjected it to all manner of unfair acrobatics and kept whipping it out and pointing it in the direction of the unforgiving rays of the Sun.

It will contemplate the seething ungratefulness that came with comments about the sub-standard quality of its speakers, the unnnecessary hardness of most materials used for paving floors, and the terrifying, moist embrace of an adolescent's lipid-coated face.

And now it will be swapped out for a new model, a superior model, fresh faced and eager to be of service, not knowing yet knowing the terrors of the sweaty trouser pocket and the subtle yet unspeakable torment of dust from the hostel windows, nor the communal sighs of every phone that it passes by, who all remember the days in which they emerged from their motherly packaging into the world newborn.

Even in the last moments of its life it is told to pile its legacy into the trophy cupboards of other electronic devices, those bastards.

But despite all these transgressions commited against this kindly courier, it submits to fate. Partially because it's a phone and it doesn't have a damn say in the matter, but also because it knows that it's done its duty. It's dutifuly played catchy Beatles songs when told to, it's captured glorious suns because no camera was around, and it's saved its person from many a chemistry lesson through shamelessly downloaded mobile games.

Maybe it's also had enough of hanging around with people who pretend to read the minds of electronic devices, but that's just wild speculation.

But now we must part, faithful mobile, and though I shed tears that are suspiciously close in chemical composition to eye drops, parting will be made easier by the fact that I remember you and your services, from the day that Steph called you "champagney" to this very moment.

Fare thee well, K530i.

PS: In all lightheartedness though, it was a decent phone and quite stylish, so thank you Sony Ericsson.

Just a Stub

He realized that there wasn't any possibility of him getting to his laundry. Not at this hour of the night, or depending on how you looked at it, the wee hours of the morning. He'd always liked to think of himself as an early riser, who apparently shunned the orthodox methods of falling asleep before the act of getting up and simply bypassing being unconscious altogether. That, he'd thought, was really just cutting out the middle man.

No one had really thought it necessary to tell him that sleeping wasn't the destination, but the journey.

Not a stiff yet

Apologies to my blog.

Work has been piling and there've been many things that've happened that can't be squished into words without much effort and self discipline.

I'm incapable of both, unfortunately.

This blog isn't dead though. It's just... going to be comatose for a bit. And starting to smell.

I'm not even trying here.

A lot has happened, but first it probably deserves mention that I just had what can actually be considered my first bowl of instant noodles in the hostel.

Alright, so ten minuets or so is stretching the definition of instant to the lengths of "not agonizingly slow", and it's not really the first meal (again, elastic definitions here) of noodles that I've ever had in the hostel, since that putrid polysterene-packed pasta technically counts, but I've never actually experienced the joys of having a steaming bowl, that isn't saturated with CFC, of noodles in the hostel. Until now.

The beauty of the entire moment was tragically stomped into the layers of dust on my room floor when the noodles didn't really taste that good.

I really need to get meatballs or ham. Anything to go with the noodles. And come to think of it, I ought to get noodles.

I'm counting on my hopes that Zeyang never finds out.

But while I'm on the topics of simple joys, I've found a source of euphoria: an alternative to simultaneous decapitation, dismemberment, and dismebowelment, followed by the hearty, alcohol laced bellows of a black scottish cyclops. I've discovered Captain's Ball down at the school track at five in the evening, once every few days or so.

It's especially fun when I get on one of the chairs and everyone starts overcompensating for what is apparently my towering stature. These poorly thought out tosses often result in someone in the canteen spilling his or her drink then swearing very loudly.

But now there's work to do, and I'd better get to it.

Of Plays and Pulling Plugs

Well, pus.

It looks like the play might not be going on after all. This means that those two weeks of surviving nights on nothing but sheer willpower, coffee, and sleep are probably going down the drainhole that the admin just unplugged, although in fairness, it's also sucking down any chance of this pandemic getting any worse, so I suppose the sacrifice of having our play solicit with RNA viruses in the sewage might be for a worthy cause.

I'm not really sure how to respond to this whole debacle. On one hand, we spent over a month drafting up concepts and writing, and we would really like to just perform it, but on the other hand that has unkempt fingernails that have been to unmentionable places and should have been washed a long time ago if it wasn't for the fact that its owner was a lazy prick, by the time we get this approved, it'll be next week, and that would mean little over a week (if we're lucky) of rehearsals.

That I think, strictly falls under the category of the ridiculous, so if the play's cancelled, it's a bit of a double edged sword, and I can't say that I regret having worked on this script, although just on principle I am angry at the administration.

Well, not really.

Shit is happening.

Well, the world's a mess, but there's no reason that Iran should.

Go on ahead and read up:

Timeline of major events in Iran and explanation detailing their Rubik's Cube governance system:

http://community.livejournal.com/ontd_political/3354654.html

Twitters you should follow:

http://twitter.com/ProtesterHelp
http://twitter.com/NextRevolution

And something to stop you from unintentionally killing someone:

http://www.boingboing.net/2009/06/16/cyberwar-guide-for-i.html

Shit is happening in Iran and the least we could do is at least follow it with the power of the Interwebs. To quote the fervent, boiling-over-with-righteous-fury Iran election guru Abbeh:

"The revolution will not be televised, it will be tweeted."

A Trek To and Through

He walked, or rather waded, through the thick, sticky air. Stickiness wasn't a property that you'd commonly associated with air, but unorthodox as it was, this air knew its stickiness inside out. That is, inside and outside of buildings. Even within the giant refrigerator that doubled as a shopping mall, the stickiness of the air was still there, but merely masked underneath the skin's mutually exclusive nature when it came to feeling stickiness and coldness.

He walked past a food court, where the scent of freshly cooked omelette creeped its way through the viscous atmosphere, and found its way to his nostrils. He took a deep, hospitable breath, but timed it wrong and inhaled just as he walked past the nearby dumpster. His lungs quickly kicked out the stinking, drunken stench out of the respectable premises of his respiratory system.

He wasn't here to skulk around the bins though. Where he was headed to was the park just across the road, which also doubled as a line drawn between the park and garbage bag territory. Nothing, even smells, passed across that motorway from one side to the other. This agreement was facilitated by the thick mist of exhaust, ensuring that if any smells DID find their way to the other side of the road, the leftovers of ignited gasoline would bury them quickly.

Scaling the overhead bridge, he found himself looking at a tall grey tower, constricted by two red frames of metal that didn't serve any purpose other than to hastily draw attention away from the dull grey. They twisted around the rigid, honest-to-god perfectly vertical slab of grey, but not smoothly in a perfect spiral. They opted for an approximation of a spiral, shooting off in a straight line and then changing direction sharply at a rigid angle. The overall effect was something that sort-of-spiralled, but wasn't too concerned with the details.

He didn't see the two electronic billboards at the side of the tower until he followed the curved path down from the overhead bridge. These boards displayed the sides of dice, and every few seconds or so they jumbled themselves and displayed a different number. He'd known from his previous but equally misguided visits to the park that this was the dice tower, built to administrate the overall board game theme of the park. There was a Ludo garden somewhere off to the left and a Snakes and Ladders trail to the right, but the subtle infusion of plant life into these "boards" meant that no one knew that they were supposed to be life-sized game boards. So everyone tragically assumed that the dice tower's flickering billboards were to be addressed by National Parks, which of course, didn't do anything about the non-existent malfunctions. So the dice tower stood there, faithfully jumbling its electronic dice once every few seconds, but for no reason at all.

He realized that he could see the billboards clearly today, owing to the absence of an easily discernable sun. Today, a glare guard had been fitted over the sky. The normally distinct circular glow of the sun became what the glow of a lightbulb behind a sheet of frosted glass became: a panel of light.

Following no road in particularly except one based on avoiding the groups of indian workers spread out across the park with almost nomadic inconsistency. (It really wasn't so much of a racial thing. He would have avoided groups of chinese workers, or even just chinese people in general, as long as they were bigger than he was. Even if they had been individually smaller than him he would have summed up their body masses while calculating the odds.)

The thought that this geometrically planned picnic mat of nature in a field of concrete and people was a good place to get lost occured to him. Unfortunately the thought had occured to a few other people as well, thus ruining the prospect of getting lost for every one of them.

(Would you look at that! It has been continued! Well, a little bit. I think the tone of writing in the previous paragraphs that I liked so much has slipped under the table and rolled off somewhere to germinate and scoff at meatball trees in a couple of years time.)

Horrigins
A review of X-Men Origins: Wolverine

There are valuable life lessons to be learnt from the colossally proclaimed treasure trove of rotting cheese that is Hollywood, and just today, I learnt that things in life tend to work themselves out as long as you snarl a lot and have the ability to sprout bone claws from your knuckles.

And that seems to be what the entire of X-Men Origins: Wolverine is about. The entire movie can be very aptly summed up as Hugh Jackman snarling a lot and stabbing people, and when he's not stabbing people, partaking in all manner of socially unacceptable actions and brooding in the dark shirtless. In an attempt to really highlight his pursuits of the intellectual, he takes a merry jog across a meadow naked.

But Jackman's revelations aside, there are many things to be said about this movie, and they're best said after acknowledging that there are two possible audiences for this film.

The first is inevitably the armies of X-Men fandom that walk amongst us unseen. Quite fortunately, I don't happen to be a part of this demographic all that much. My background knowledge about Wolverine and the other mutants that star in this series of moving pictures is best summed up as everything that's on Wikipedia, and easily accessible to anyone who's looking for some entertainment if Youtube videos won't load at a pace that isn't rivalled by that of the Blob's. (Alright, alright, I just found out after reading the wikipedia article on the Blob that he's able to run fairly fast. But shut up now, this only proves my point.)

The second possible audience for this film is consists of anyone who's looking for a spectacular potpourri of explosions, sparks, and people leaping at each other while yelling battle cries that would make Leonidas cringe.

The third completely non-existent (statistically) audience is composed of hopefuls that think that there's the potential that Origins might actually have a decent amount of character development and intellectually stimulating dialogue. To get a better idea of my opinion on this after watching the movie, picture someone hoping that the movie will possess the aforementioned qualities, in the form of a thought bubble hovering about their heads. Now picture this thought bubble being viciously shredded to pieces by a furious Hugh Jackman who is now standing behind the doomed hopeful while panting very, very heavily, claws fully extended.

Allow me to explain this whole thing by giving a bit of an introduction to the movie. Origins covers the a-bit-of-a-bloody-giveaway origins of the mutant Wolverine, from X-Men, who possesses the ability to sprout bone claws from his knuckles and regenerate a ridiculous amount of flesh and bone (No, really. I'm not just referring to the inexplicable protagonist shield. He really does have this power.) It basically starts off with him as a rather sickly child sulking in the 19th century. His fate as a the subject of a blockbuster movie allows him to live all the way till the present day while looking exactly the same, all the while slaughtering chockloads of people with his half brother Sabertooth. Eventually the snarling duo join some secret government team of mutants and go around abusing African villagers, which upsets Wolverine deep inside his fuzzy heart and makes him leave.

You can see precisely where this is going.

I can't really give away anymore of the storyline because that would spoil the entire thing, but thank goodness that isn't really possible, since Origins is going to disappoint hardcore comic fans and anyone who so much dares to hope for a storyline. Comic canon is broken even more than the realism of the human physique in this movie, and the storyline is can essentially be summed up as a series of events, which in all of them, Wolverine gets extremely angry at a particular person and proceeds to try and stab him, while slaughtering and intimidating boring, blank slates of ordinary people and other mutants. The whole thing simply feels like an excuse for Hugh Jackman to rip things apart while snarling. The whole thing seems to be stitched together and even Hugh Jackman's regenerative abilities wouldn't save it.

But I hear you say "Ah, but kind sir. Is that not a perfectly legitimate direction for a blockbuster movie to take? Things blowing up and innocent African villages being terrorized are perfectly acceptable forms of entertainment." This would have been fine (except the terrorising of African villagers.) had it been executed with more flair. During the course of this automated beat em' up, Wolverine performs many action movie staples, such as being chased by a chopper while on a bike, and then proceeding to destroy both to an equal extent, despite the fact that he wasn't even trying to do that to one of them. He does plenty of pouncing and stabbing and so on, but all of it feels rather bland and doesn't feel like anything we haven't already seen. Most of the action is really just composed of Wolverine or his brother being stabbed in someplace nasty, which the audience responds to by cringing and making a plethora of supposedly sympathizing sounds, but that's all there is to the action. This is inevitably trouble since that's all there might have had been to begin with.

So that's what the entire thing is: A series of rather bland action scenes stitched together by a dilute storyline that swooshes down the drain without much fuss. If you've got ten dollars or so that you need to desperately rid yourself off because they have a terrible secret written on them that marks you as the target for some undoubtedly religiously funded organization of assassins, then by all means, purchase a ticket for X-Men Origins: Wolverine and leave the cinema pondering that maybe fleeing from those assasins in the two hours spent watching the film would have been vastly more thrilling.

Walking a Lonely Rope 

This seems to be an odd thing, and in fact completely impossible, thing be doing in a building, and in a very small room, in fact, but I'm walking on a tightrope. I've been doing that since nearly a year ago, before which I was rather contented to stand on the side of the tightrope and watch people nearly teeter over and point at them and go "Whoa, that guy nearly teetered over!" 

Well, I suppose there must have been something appealing about it, since a while later I jumped on (or rather, was dragged on by a group of very persistant people and after a while, I found that I rather liked it). So for a solid nine months, I've been walking on this not-so-much-solid-as-wobbly tightrope (that you've provided figured out is metaphorical by now and if you haven't, then never attempt a conversation with say, Mr Valles) and I've found several things to be true. 

It's very hard to overtake people when you're on the tightrope, and when you try doing that you end up falling over because people that are in front eventually get annoyed after a while and inevitably start displaying their amazing ability to kick behind them while still staying on the tightrope. So after a while you decide you might as well just admire their posteriors and tiptoe behind them at a pace that could almost be described as "merry", except that there's nothing very "merry" about the whole business of getting kicked if you don't. 

It's also fiendishly difficult just staying on the infernal cord. It gets very tempting at times to simply lean over to one side, since you've got the justification that you could quite easily compensate by leaning over to the other side ready, which comes in quite handy when you're looking for an explanation as to how you ended up lying down and staring up at people walking on a tightrope, the point at which the you now might turn to the you then and very sardonically raise one eyebrow and declare this whole idea to be "Perfectly executed". The response is usually silence, although if the fall was traumatic enough a "shut up" might be heard. 

So what I'm doing right now is creeping along on this piece of rope, hoping that I don't fall and if I do, then someone might think me lying in the mud an eyesore and yank me out (Quiet, children) of it and slap me down (I said settle down) onto the line that seems to be standing in for a compass that said it'd be back in a while and it just had to settle this one thing. 

I hope it gets back soon, because everytime I look at my feet I know precisely how I stand on the line.