Let's Go Do Something We'll Regret

Yesterday was, um... Hang on.

Okay yesterday was Saturday. But it's only been Sunday for a little over half an hour.

Friday. Let's talk about Friday.

I woke up in the afternoon and after getting ready for the day, I took my motorcycle down to Devi's to meet Joanna and Amanda. Joanna and Amanda were on the phone when I arrived. I said "Hi" and Amanda asked "Is that your father?" and I said "What?" and then not much else happened.

I talked to Joanna while waiting for Amanda to get off the phone. While that happened, two attractive white girls walked in and talked about whether they were going to stay in Devi's and sit at the table in front of us or leave, never to be seen again. They decided to stay, so that was nice.

Also, it was my dad at the other table. He was at Devi's having lunch with my mum and I had no idea at the time that he was going to be there. Devi's is like some kind of event horizon for coincidental meetings. Every time we're there we have to see at least one person we already know. The food's still pretty lame, though.

This is a picture of my father. I'm not sure why I took it.

Anyway, when Amanda finished her conversation with her mother over the phone, I told Jo and her how I hot I thought the girls in front of us were ("very") and how badly I wanted to talk to them ("very"). I told them about how I had missed opportunities to talk to pretty girls at Pizza Hut on Ian's birthday and at the bowling alley at KLGCC and such, and how I really wanted to talk make sure this didn't end up being another thing I regretted not doing anything about.

Amanda and Joanna told me that I needed to get the perfect pick-up line or something before I approached them, which I thought was ridiculous. I told them I just needed some kind of motivation and then I'd do it. They told me that I couldn't just go up and talk to someone. I told them I could, and I got up and talked to this elderly stranger who was sitting alone at the other side of the restaurant to prove it.

When I got back Joanna and Amanda still thought I needed a pick-up line, but I told them I wasn't looking to pick anyone up. I just wanted to go talk to the girls so that I would not regret not talking to them. I asked Joanna and Amanda to give me some kind of motivation, but they couldn't come up with anything.

The girls at the other table were done with their meal and they were ready to go, so I knew I had to do something soon. Fortunately, Amanda told me that she would let me talk for 10 hours uninterrupted if I went to talk to the girls. That was all the motivation I needed. Before I got up to talk to the girls, I told Amanda that I would only talk for 30 minutes because 10 hours is a bit unrealistic.

I got up and walked over to the table in front. Joanna ran over to my old spot to get a better view. I stood for a few seconds to think of something to say before I finally leaned over and won 30 minutes of uninterrupted rambling.

"Excuse me; my friends over there were wondering how good they looked, and I was wondering if you could help."

Joanna and Amanda were not expecting that at all. When the girls asked which friends, I pointed out Joanna and Amanda for them, and Amanda and Joanna started frantically pointing at each other. When the girls asked which one, I said both. I asked for an objective rating on a scale of one to ten. They were reluctant to answer at first, but I told that my friends would probably never see them again so they wouldn't have to worry about hurting anyone's feelings. They finally settled on a rating of somewhere between seven and eight for both Amanda and Joanna. I thanked them and returned to my table.

I told Jo and Amanda what they had said and they accused the girls of being liars. Whatever, I think seven is a fair judgement for how they were looking that day.

I was very happy that I had talked to the girls since now I wouldn't have any regrets about it. Joanna said it didn't count because I didn't get their names and numbers, but that was never my objective in the first place. It's not like I'd have a chance with them anyway.

After that I rambled on for the 30 minutes that I had won and I enjoyed it. I said a lot of stupid shit, but I think I also said one or two really clever things as well. Overall I'm pleased with how it turned out. Joanna filmed it on her phone, but she hasn't uploaded it yet and I don't think she ever will [edit: she did, the links are in the next post, there are almost an equal amounts of dislikes as likes but somehow being hated by the YouTube community is one of the many, many things that affects my self-esteem]. Amanda and Joanna seemed quite bent on figuring out whether I was gay or not. Women arouse me far more then men do, so I'm gonna go ahead and say that I'm not.

When that was over I drove Joanna and Amanda to Sunway in Amanda's car. We talked about stuff and listened to music and played word association because Joanna and Amanda kept answering "both" or "neither" for This or That, and the game is no fun if people do that.

We dropped Joanna off at her house. Oh yeah, she had a dog. Here's a couple of pictures of it and me:

I look better in the dark and I don't like what that says about me.

After dropping off Joanna I drove back with Amanda, but she was too tired to provide great conversation. I didn't mind though. I let her take a nap while listening to Regina Spektor. The traffic jam was pretty bad. Wanna read something creepy? No? Okay then, because I was just about to say "there's something different about looking at a person when they're asleep. When they're awake you see all their defenses and mannerisms and expressions but when you're asleep you just see... them." Shit, that sounds like that queer vampire's inner monologue from when he was perving on Bella whatsherface as she slept in Twilight.

Amanda woke up and then we went to pick up Geraldine. We parked in an alley and talked about friends and siblings and how Imagine is not a sad song, and then we drove around for a bit. Geraldine got in the car and I let Amanda take the driver's seat, and then I got on my motorcycle and went home.

Ian and I went to the Outback Steakhouse after that.

I heard That's Amore and All Shook Up on the best radio station on Astro and then I went to bed.

I woke up on Saturday at 3:30am. My dad drove my mum to meet up with some people so she could go to Penang for a seminar, and then he drove me to work. We picked up some McDonald's along the way. I had ordered sausage McMuffin with egg meals. I paid for one of them and ate both of them. I talked with my dad and then I went to work.

At work I earned a just little less than RM100 doing this:

Around ten hours later work was over and I was napping outside waiting for Aunty Rosie to arrive and drive me home. I listened to a playlist I had made on my phone specifically for naps. It had taken me something like half an hour to create, but it was so worth it. Naps with music are the best naps.

Back at home I got changed into something less presentable and more comfortable and then I went to sleep. It was five o'clock or thereabouts. When I woke up again it was seven something.

Hannah thinks I have tickets to Paramore or something.

I ate barbecued pork ribs for dinner. Joanna dreamed about Amanda eating pork ribs earlier. It's a coincidence.

I'm tired.

I started a blog on Tumblr today. I have no more followers on my Twitter.

I need to get more space on my phone. I don't have any space left for all the Elvis and additional Jonathan Coulton I want to put on it.

I'm tired and I have to be awake in two and a half hours. Goodnight.

My desk

My contracts (Part-Time, Full-Time, Hannah)

Saturday Was Shit for Jan, Sunday Was Worse for Me

Yesterday was Awards Day. It reminded me why I quit BB. I'm still glad I did, and I still wish I would have left earlier. There is no point to it if I have no friends. I was the only regularly attending person in my age group for, like, three years. There still aren't any 18-year-olds in 10th KL.

Anyway, we (my mum, Hannah, and me) started off by having breakfast in McDonald's, which was nice. After that we picked up El-Hanan and Joel, then we drove over to FGA. Along the way my mother revealed that she was a racist (or at the very least, a bit of a bigot. I thought the Dutch were supposed to be tolerant) and that she thought Obama was a Muslim. Her proof was that she had friends who knew people in America with "inside sources" in the White House. Mmhmm. She also says that he was raised in Indonesia, which is a Muslim country, therefore he's Muslim. Isn't Malaysia a Muslim country? Does that make me a Muslim? Whatever, she's my mum and thus I love and respect her despite her ignorance.

Awards Day itself was pretty boring. I slept through the Junior Section awards. The performances were lousy to mediocre, except for the dancing which was quite good but they weren't on the stage so only the people in the front row could see what was going on in full. Ian got promoted to an officer, and Jan got nothing. Now he knows how I felt. At least nobody less worthy than him got promoted, though. I watched Victor get promoted to corporal over me last year. I encouraged Jan to quit, but he's probably going to stay as long as Cherie's still in 10th KL.

I drove Hannah back home. I still had my sunglasses. They were gone the next day.

I watched a movie on my computer. Maybe not. Whatever, I was either napping or watching TV or on the computer until six, then we went for McDonald's. I spent the last of my money (except for RM10 so I could afford my RM5 tithes for the next two Sundays) on my meal. Hannah said she would pay for half of my meal, but she changed her mind and only gave me RM3. It was good enough for a lime sundae.

When we got home Hannah said she'd watch one of my movies if I watched Peacock, so I did, but she didn't. Peacock had Ellen Page and Cillian Murphy and I don't even know why I'm still listing names. It's a habit I'll break by watching a movie without any Inception actors next. Hope that works.

Anyway I got annoyed with her and decided to bug her, but she grabbed a knife from the kitchen and threatened to stab me, so I dropped the subject and took a nap. When I woke up, it was 2am. I watched the first episode of The Office (UK). It's great. Martin Freeman's in it. He's Watson in Sherlock. That's great, too.

I went to bed at 4:45.

Aunty Rosie tried to wake us up the next morning, but we weren't going to church since we had to pick up the Tans so we told her we didn't need to wake up. She turned off the air conditioning anyway.

At 10am Hannah came in and told us we had one hour to get ready before we had to go pick up the Tans. I told her that I didn't want to drive so Ian would have to take them. I told Ian that he had to wake up but he didn't listen, so I got out of bed and got ready to drive. Ian and Jan took their showers while I was reading the Bible, and Ian was still in the shower when I was done, so I went on the computer for a bit.

When Ian was done with the bathroom, I took my shower and put in my contacts and shaved and deodorized and such, and soon I was done and ready to go. I told Hannah and Jan, but they were taking their time in the living room or something, so I transferred some songs from my computer onto my phone. Hannah started panicking because she thought we were going to be late, so I finished up and went downstairs with them. It was 11:30 and the Tans were supposed to land at 12:30.

When we were in the lift I realized that I didn't have my sunglasses, so I went up to look for them but they weren't on their usual place on my desk. Hannah gave me a call while I was looking around for them. She was insisting that we didn't have time and we were in a rush and stuff, so I decided not to look for them any more and went downstairs. I was hoping to find them in the car, but they weren't there.

Along the way to the LCCT, I asked Jan and Hannah why they came along if they were just going to listen to music and ignore me anyway. I told them they should've just stayed at home so there would be more space for Uncle Elisha and stuff. They said that Ruben and Stefanie were their friends so of course they wanted to come. I told them that if that they should have just driven and left me at home. Hannah and Jan said they couldn't drive, and I said that I couldn't either since my driving license had expired at midnight, twelve hours ago. I told them that I'd probably encounter a police roadblock or something and get fined since I've never been pulled over before and I was bound to get pulled over the one day that I was using an expired license since life is shit like that. Hannah didn't hear anything I said because she was too busy listening to her music, but Jan heard me.

Anyway, I told Hannah and Jan that I'd take the fast lane there since Hannah was insisting that we were in such a rush. I told Jan that his job was to check behind us to make sure that nobody wanted to overtake us. I got a random text from Audrey for no reason and I asked Jan to read it. It just said "Hi". Then Jan started telling us about a dream he had where I took a turn too fast and killed everyone in the car. While he was recalling this dream to us, we were approaching a speed trap, but I didn't notice the cop with a radar gun until it was too late to slow down. I saw a flash which meant that a picture was taken and now my dad was going to get a summons for his car and I was going to have to pay it. I blamed Hannah for rushing me and Jan for distracting me with his dream.

I kept asking Hannah to call Stefanie to check if they had landed yet, but she wasn't getting any reply. When we were getting close to the LCCT there were a whole bunch of traffic lights that were all red, so any time we saved speeding was wasted at the lights, so we could have not sped and arrived at the exact same time and not received a summons. Stupid.

The traffic light right in front of the LCCT had a broken green light, so I was waiting at the junction for a long while before I figured out that I could go forward when all the lights were off. It was the opposite problem that the traffic lights outside Bangsar Shopping centre had, where the red light was broken and so you had to stay put when all the lights were off. The first time I encountered that I assumed off meant go and my motorcycle and me were almost destroyed by oncoming traffic with that mistake.

Anyway, we pulled up in front of the arrivals area, but there was no sign of the Tans. I called my dad and told him about the speed trap and he said that I could split the fine with Hannah. We waited for half an hour before we got a call from them. I got more and more annoyed for every minute that passed because it made my prior speeding more and more pointless and the summons more and more aggravating. Anyway, when they finally called it took them ages to figure out where we were even though they were right in front of us and I was sounding the horn to try and get them to look in our direction.

When Stefanie and Ruben got in the car we found out that Uncle Elisha wasn't even coming since he had a friend who was going to pick him up, so the whole drive over was pointless because they could have just gone with Uncle Elisha's friend back to Puchong and have us pick them up from there later. That way we could have saved petrol, slept in, and avoided the bloody summons.

On the way back we had Ikea hot dogs. This time there were onions, at least, so that was nice.

When we were coming back home from lunch, there was a police checkpoint near the golf and country club where I had never seen a police checkpoint. Of course Ruben and Stefanie weren't wearing their seatbelts. Nobody ever does. I don't understand it. It's such a simple bloody thing to do and it saves lives and prevents fines and it just takes five seconds but nobody in this bloody country bloody bothers. Anyway it didn't matter because I was being pulled over for speeding.

The officer asked for my license and pointed out to me that it had expired last night. He asked me how fast I was going and I told him I didn't know since I didn't know where they had measured my speed and if I had been keeping my eye on the speedometer I wouldn't be in that mess in the first place. The only reason my eye wasn't on the speedometer was because Stefanie was going on about Vampires Suck and I was getting upset that people were actually watching that bloody idiotic piece of cinematic excrement. It's a shit excuse for speeding, though, so when the officer asked if I was going to pay I told him that I was. I asked him how much it was and he said RM300. I asked him where I could pay and he said that they have offices all over the place. I asked him what the deadline was and he said I had one month. I asked him how fast I was going and where they had caught me and he said that I was going 108km/h in either a 60km/h or 80km/h zone, and also they had their speed trap under the overpass from the Golf and Country Club. All throughout my conversation he kept asking me if I was going to pay for the summons or not. I think he was implying that I had a choice (bribery), but I didn't bribe him because I don't want to contribute to this country's corruption problem, and more importantly because I didn't have enough money on my person for a decent bribe.

When I got back in the car, Jan asked me why I didn't just drive off when they asked me to pull over, which really goes to show what kind of a person Jan is (a rather stupid, morally bankrupt one).

I stopped by Lucky Gardens to drop off my license at the driving centre so I could get it renewed. It was closed, so I gave the lady who ran it a call, and she said that I should drop by with RM160 and an appropriate photograph so that I could get my full license and I wouldn't have to renew it for another five years.

I went back home and complained to my dad about everything that happened. Ian came in and told me that everything was my fault, which was true, but it wasn't helpful. My dad took me for a drive to try to calm me down. He asked me to imagine the worst-case scenario, which was that Hannah wouldn't want to split the first summons, so I'd have to pay RM300 for that on top of the RM300 for the second license, and also that my dad wouldn't pay for the license renewal so I'd be out RM760, which was RM10 more than I had in my bank account. My dad said that he would pay for the license, so at the very least I'd still have RM150 left in my bank. He also told me that my mum got in an accident a while back that cost him RM2000, which put things in perspective for me and that got me to calm down a bit. He also told me that Hannah was even worse off than me financially and that his suggestion that we split the fine was just that, a suggestion, so I couldn't count on it happening.

He dropped me off at home and went to go play some golf. I told Hannah that she wouldn't have to pay for her half of the fine as long as she finally did the things she had said she was going to do anyway, which was basically to watch Cloverfield and a bunch of other movies and also to use up a box of wax strips that we had lying around. The reasons why she had agreed to do that in the first place didn't really matter to me, it was more the fact that she had said to me that she would do those things but never did, even though I did everything she asked me to do and stuff. So she's supposed to watch Cloverfield after she goes swimming, but I think she'll find some excuse not to and she'll still get away with not paying for the fine. If she doesn't do that, then I'll be pleasantly surprised. If she does, then I won't do anything for her any more, especially things that involve driving. My license is expired anyway.

Tomorrow I'm going to HELP to get my transcripts, then I'm going upstairs to Pusat Bandar Damansara to get some correctly-sized photographs for my license, then I'm going to the driving centre to drop off my license, the photos, and my dad's money, then when we get back from Redang I'm going to collect my license, then I'm going to the JPJ to settle the two summonses, then a week after that I'm going to call about my new IC, then when that's ready I'm going to go collect it, integrate my driver's license and ATM card into it, and finally I'm going to activate its Touch 'n Go and get some credit in it.

This post in a nutshell: Last year I didn't get promoted because I probably didn't deserve it even though someone who deserved it less got promoted over me, so I quit; this year Jan didn't get promoted because of some bullshit because he deserved it but at least he knows how I felt, but he's not quitting because his girlfriend is still in; also I got two summonses today because it didn't occur to Ruben and Stefanie that they could've carpooled with their dad and so I'm going to be RM600 poorer; also I've got to face a lot of bureaucracy in the next two weeks.