building the tower

went to ikea last night expecting some pretty sparse crowd, since it's a thursday. and what a shocker i got. it was absolutely packed. apparently there was a sale on. an ikea sale? they might as well start handing things out for free. which they did. with certain purchases of course.

and sure enough, something caught my eye and i had to have it. it was glistening in the, uh... pretty artificial lighting in the store, begging me to whisk it away from the treachery of the life in a shop. and when i finally got around to collecting it, i immediately realized the downside.

there is obviously the length. i dare say that this is perhaps one of the longest items they have in stock. it's a pain in the ass to just navigate around the store with it. and it barely fit in the family vehicle even with the back seat down. had it been any longer, we might just have to tie a string to it and dragged it home. and then there is the weight.

this cd tower is not heavy. an elephant is heavy. an american is heavy. this thing is biblical. i almost had to give up an arm just trying to wrestle it home. and then there is still the not-so-enjoyable build process. but at the end of the day, i guess it's all worth it. now i have a proper altar to worship my growing record collection. and there's even room enough for one more tower next to it.

it's like walking into a record store at home. now, i don't understand the fascination with a walk-in closet, but i sure as hell know what i want when i have my own place - an entire wall of these.

there's just a slight problem left to sort out though. rearranging the records in alphabetical order. arghhhh...

+listening to: die to live by steve vai

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just give me some truth

               

the reason for the radio silence over the past couple of days is quite a frustrating one frankly. as of tuesday night, around 7.43 pm CCT, facebook no longer works.

i usually have a substantially high level of tolerance for all things ludicrous. in secondary school, a bloke who sat next to me shat himself on his pants. i kid you not. and i merely laughed it off. once on a 16 hour flight to chicago, the girl to my right vomited continuously from the instant the aircraft took off till the moment it landed. and i'm not exaggerating. i might have thrown up a little in my mouth, but that's about it. you get my point.

i must profess that i have no qualms with sensible government censorship. we all need something to tickle our funny bone, and if a little censorship makes the government feel all warm and fuzzy inside, i'm all for it. after all, every dictatorship needs a certain amount of paranoia to justify themselves as a totalitarian regime, no?

just the other day, i was reading a certain online synopsis of the transformers movie that had just come out, and i realized that the government had inevitably taken out an entire hunk of potentially mind-blowing action. and as you could imagine, i was furious. then i realized why they did it: it involved an expose and had that scene remained, millions of little children would have grown up with the warped idea that every specimen of the female species possesses the perfect pair of uh... you know what i mean. and 20 years from now, the unfathomable disappointment on such a massive scale might just spark off a plundering birth rate that would be unprecedented. there, the government: 1, hollywood pervs: not.

okay i made that up. but that's besides the point. first there was no youtube, no blogger. i can live without youtube for a couple of months and there's always other ways to blog, like for example email. and then over the last week twitter stopped working. and i was puzzled. maybe it was a network glitch, because i haven't exactly had the best experiences with my internet provider. then on tuesday, it was facebook. that was the moment i realized how naive i had been.

yes, the chairman himself or the "president" as we now call him has never done anything to annoy me. in fact, so far as i can tell, he has never done anything at all. and yes, we no longer use "long live chairman mao" as our official greetings, yet this is still the same regime it was 20 years ago. nothing has changed.

who are the busybodies who say that we can’t upload ugly mugshots of ourselves for our imaginary friends to see or twitt to the world every time we take a dump? the nitwits who say that we should, i quote, "achieve the four modernizations"? where do we begin? how about you stop meddling with our internet?

a question. it’s addressed to all the self righteous, politically correct, back room, conservatives who advise the government: “i am chinese. why is that a good thing?” i bet they don’t have an answer. and until they can come up with one, chances are we’ll never win at anything other than table tennis again.

call me unpatriotic if you like, and don't blame me if i have no sympathy for the nincompoops running this country. a little truth wouldn't have hurt.

now excuse me while i'm off to conquer the sofa.


+listening to: just give me some truth by eddie vedder

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out

today i've discovered a new vice:

ah hah. yea. yup. yes. coffee gum. how awesome right? who would have thought you could combine two of my favorite things into one.

that said, they've still got a long way to go in terms of the flavor. they should also have created products like gourmet coffee gum. how about an espresso gum? or... i don't know, caramel macchiato gum? just a random thought. heh.

anyways here's a view from one of the places i've been to today:

it's a bookstore. actually calling it a bookstore is a gross understatement. to be more accurate, you could call it an ORGY of books. 6 freaking floors of nerd-o-logy to be exact. my head hurts from just thinking about the place.

walking around town is exhausting. actually it's already exhausting enough just walking around in a single mall. and it seems like someone's building a new mall every other day. the rise of capitalism is... mind-bogglingly awesome and appalling at the same time. how often do you get to say that huh?

headed home after a pair of chucks and a scoop of haagen dazs... i love haagen dazs. the most american ice cream you can ever get that doesn't sound anything remotely amercican.

+listening to: neon by john mayer

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sundays are supposed to be sunny

headed out to the wetlands park with my family and relatives yesterday. spent one and a half hours driving there and... it started pouring the moment we arrived.

so we sat around waiting for the rain to stop, had ourselves some lunch and when the rain finally subsided, it was too wet to go anywhere. so the rest of the day was well erm, forgettable at best, picking stupid lychees on a lychee farm and watching ducks swim about a pond.

i don't like lychees. and i hate ducks. it's pretty much a dead ringer for a win-win situation.

tornado!


no tornado






lychees


ducks


harbor

+listening to: society by pennywise

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talking

sometimes all we need to do is talk.

just came off the end of a long chat with a good friend, whom i shall not name. let's call him Z. now Z is unsure of himself and what life holds for him. he's tired and drained from not being able to achieve certain things he set out for himself. and from what i gather, Z isn't really happy about the state of things on the larger scale either. he feels trapped in a rat race. like... another brick in the wall.

i had felt the same way before, and i understood what he meant. it's hard to get a grip of what life has in store for us. and me? i don't know... i've always gone about my ways, i envied some, loathed others. all i know is that my life is what i make of it.

the more i talked, and the more i thought, and the more i talked, i started to realize, that what really kept me going boils down to one thing: the belief that i'm going to do something amazing. i don't know when it will happen because it hasn't happend yet, or what i'm going to be doing. but i just believe.

it's always easier to be sad, and be pessimistic about things. it's our natural reaction to the fear of the unknown. maybe it is also because it takes a certain amount of courage to trust and believe, that things will turn out for the better in the face of impending doom.

and it helps sometimes to take things in from another perspective, to see things in a different light; we all have our own inclinations and biases. sometimes "i don't know..." is perfectly acceptable. after all, we don't and can't possibly know the answers to everything. we have to find those out for ourselves.

so hey Z, brother, if you're reading this, here's something you didn't know about yourself: you are AMAZING.

as a matter of fact, this applies to everyone of us. we're all here for a reason. there's no doubt. just trust me on this.

+listening to: guranteed by eddie vedder

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urgh

this is kinda awkward, because i've never imagined that this would happen to me in my entire life, ever. sigh.

it's like 5 am in the morning, and... and i'm sitting here watching korean drama online. this particular one is called Autumn in My Heart (가을동화, 秋天的童话), which belongs in the same series as Winter Sonata (겨울연가, 冬季戀歌). and i suspect i might have shed a tear or two some time during the third episode. but it is only a niggling suspicion though, because i'm a man and thus i'm incapable of crying.

now do not be mistaken, i am no steve mcqueen either. for he is the type who possesses strong smoldering sexuality, the sort of man who could punch a horse to the ground while driving a mustang sideways through the streets of san francisco. i, on the other hand, much prefer to retain a healthy dose of sensitivity. i'd like to think that i'm the type who could get a lady's clothes off by playing chess.

it is hence in my firmest beliefs that all korean scriptwriters practice some form of dark arts, and that their sole purpose of existence is to harvest people's souls through the television screen. because as hard as i'd tried, some part of me knows that resistance is futile, because, to quote one of my favourite lines from the godfather, "just when i thought i was out... THEY PULLED ME BACK IN."

ok i gotta continue watching. someone's fate is hanging in the balance and if i don't watch this, i might have to resort to looking at clips of kittens coughing up hairballs on youtube for the rest of the week. and even that to me is only slightly more comforting than getting stabbed in the eye with a pencil. so for the sake of my health...

+listening to: nothing

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yay

today marks a happy day! completed my last hospital check up. everything is proceeding according to plan. and my thumb feels great!

and i also got to see transformers 2, like finally, in a kick ass cinema, on IMAX, and in ENGLISH! how sweet does life get? i did get a little disappointed, cause it's just so not fair that the decepticons have got so many more awesometastic transformers than the autobots. all the autobots acquired since the last movie are a couple of bikes and 2 douchebag little minivans? i mean come on, you can do better than that, like seriously. not gonna criticize the plot too much, we all know there really isn't much of a plot to talk about. but i do think that the sexual innuendos are a little crude and tasteless, especially with all the little kids watching. not to mention that they are not that funny at all.

oh well at least i'm a happy man. nothing too heavy on my mind now, just got a wish granted. and i'm happy.

and oh, to all the boys out there who are obsessed with megan fox: yea she's hot. get over it.

+listening to: nothing

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losing june

the passage of days.

losing time and losing self.

repentance beckons.


a nightmare to remember - 5:25 ~ 9:02


+listening to: how deep is your love by red hot chili peppers

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