Annual Christmas Procession 2002

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Did I die and go to heaven? πŸ˜‰

Our town has a history of having a Christmas street parade every
year. This year’s had a praise and worship thing going on before the
actual parade and was held at the Sibu town square. I went there at
around 7 pm with Ting Chuan.

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Silent night, holy night.

There weren’t many floats around this year though, there used to be
heaps and there was a competition to see which one was the best. I
don’t know if they still have that competition going on, but there
wasn’t a lot of floats around.

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The drivers of the floats actually need guides to navigate.

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The crowd watching the procession.

Anyway, after the church service was over, the procession started
with a float followed by several walking groups and then another float
and so on.

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Cherubic mascots on a boat float.

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A float mounted on a trishaw.

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The back of a float.

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Ghetto.

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A float with a nativity scene.

There were groups of various denominations and churches. There were
a lot of bands which are affiliated with church groups too like the
Boys Brigade and the Girls Brigade, to name a few.

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A very satanic looking Santa Claus with huge heart shaped testicles giving everyone the finger.

I also stumbled upon my church’s (Wesley Methodist Church) group and
one of the lay leaders invited me to join their entourage. I didn’t
feel like walking though, just wanted to take a couple of photos, so I
declined. I also saw my ex-college’s group who was also part of the
procession. I saw Remy, someone I haven’t seen in several years. We
used to talk a lot in college and it’s good to see her again.

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Remy and myself.

Anyway, going back to the floats, there was two in particular that
stood out. One had a giant TV screen showing Christmas carol movies
complete with karaoke style lyrics at the bottom. The other had several
girls dressed as angels standing on the float, which we all agreed were
aesthetically pleasing. Hmm…am I talking about the float or the angels?

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A closer look at one of the angels.

There was also a massive police presence to provide crowd control
and several streets were closed off to traffic to make way for the
procession. There was this group with children carrying balloons. On a
whim, I stopped one cute little girl who didn’t look more than 6 years
old who had two balloons and asked her for one, and she gave one of
hers to me. hehehe Thanks dear!

Well, we were standing near the exit of the town square so we
managed to see the procession first. It wasn’t really long, perhaps the
whole parade took 25 minutes.

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Cute.

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Frilly.

There was something nice that happened though. A pretty girl dressed
as an angel who was giving out sweets gave me one. I was pretty
surprised as they only gave those to children so I looked up and who
did I see but Alice Lim! She’s from my high school, I was in Form 5
when she was in Form 1, but I know her from seeing her pass by my
father’s office every day to get the record attendance book (she was
the class monitor). It’s good to see her again and I’m glad she still
recognizes me.

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Alice in the parade.

Anyway, after the procession, we walked around Wisma Sanyan for a
while and came out the other side only to find the procession winding
up there. We joined and walked with the procession for a while and I
gave my balloon to a balloon-less little girl standing in the crowd.
She was shy and her mom told her to say “thank you”. Heh. That’s my
good deed for the day. My car was blocked by the procession, so we had
to wait for a while until all the groups have finished. I did see Alice
again though when the parade came back around and snapped a pic, and
she said Merry Christmas. πŸ™‚

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This is a clearer picture of Alice taken 6 months ago.

Setting the record straight

Okay, I’m so fucking pissed off right now it’s not even funny. I
happened to chat with someone in IRC (identity withheld for privacy
reasons) and she told me that she has heard a lot of bad things about
me. I seem to be a popular topic of discussion among the locals here
last time due to the fact that my father is the principal of one of the
biggest schools in town and God knows there was a lot of juicy gossip
going around when I came back from New Zealand during 1996/1997 to do
my Form 5. Happens a lot in small towns. I usually don’t mind, but this
particularly nasty rumor is so untrue and unlike my nature that I feel
compelled to write about it.

MPI = Methodist Pilley Institute (my ex-college)

Snippet of an edited (removed off topic stuff) IRC chat log with nick removed:

< > u study at mpi b4?

yeah i was in mpi before
you too?

<> mpi student complain about u

complain about wat?

< > u copy their assign
< > hehehehe
< > u realy nakal ho

eh
i didn’t copy
that girl gave it to me willingly
its different
:p

< > they say u smart in pc.. can hang in other pc.. then copy their assign..

okay now that is really not true
i never copied anyone’s assignment before
but a girl did give me her project

< > now i know the answer..
< > they lie..

but i know a lot of mpi ppl hate me
coz i easily pass the imis exam
but they had to take it a lot of times

< > luckily 2nite the god let us meet here… and u explain .. the true..

and i was quite arrogant, saying it was easy etc
so i know a lot of ppl dun like it

Here’s the thing that happened. (referring to the part where I said
the girl gave it to me willingly). There is an exam called IMIS which
has 6 modules and one of them is a project which is graded internally
(ie by MPI instead of the UK IMIS body). The project module only has 6
different types of questions. One of the 3rd year girls which I know
did the same one two years ago and she offered her past project. She
said it’s okay if I modified the code and passed me the diskette the
next day. I couldn’t make sense of the code and the girl spent a lot of
time helping me to modify it, including once on the day before it was
due where she had to drive to a cyber cafΓ© in Wisma Sanyan to finish
everything for me. I feel really bad about never getting to thank her
properly (what an asshole I am) but I don’t consider this cheating. I
wanted to buy her dinner at least, but she won’t hear of it, saying
that she’ll accept only when I pass, but by the time the results were
out, she has graduated. If you happen to read this, you know who you
are. THANK YOU! I mean it.

Now moving on to the cheating issue, I have never cheated or “copied
anyone’s assignment”. I don’t need to. I don’t mean to be an arrogant
fuck but EVERYONE was worse that me in my batch. I would have failed my
sorry ass if I were to copy their assignment (which I wouldn’t do for
moral reasons). I didn’t even care about the internal exams, ask any
lecturer who had taught me. I didn’t care about failing the internal
exams and didn’t do any work besides disrupting the class because all I
needed was the IMIS external exam to apply to Monash University. A lot
of people resent me because I passed everything with only one try with
Credits and Distinctions. On the other hand, a lot of the people in my
batch had problems with English and while they could rote memorize the
textbook, they just couldn’t express themselves and couldn’t answer
questions that even slightly deviated from textbook examples. I admit I
went around swinging my dick and talking about how easy the IMIS exams
were and how I got good grades without even studying (I actually only
studied the day before the exams) and it’s easy to see how people can
resent that considering they had to put in a lot of work plus they have
the language barrier to overcome.

I know I shouldn’t let it get under my hair like that, but I can’t help it.

People can say that:

1. I used to take drugs (but I’m NOT saying that I still do).

2. I got kicked out of high school in New Zealand for truancy and disciplinary issues.

3. I hung out with “congregations” of people who wouldn’t be considered model citizens in NZ and Kuching.

because those are true

People can’t say that:

I cheat

I’ll never do that, I’ll rather take a fail than cheat. The two times I’ve cheated on exams in my life was:

1. Changing the spelling of Paleolitic to Paleolithic in my Form 1
history test which the teacher asked us to correct ourselves by
exchanging it with the person beside us. I asked my neighbour to give
it back discretely and rubbed off the wrong spelling and corrected it.
The guy behind me (forgot whether it was Raymond or Xavier) immediately
said “hor cikgu, Huai Bin tukar jawapan” which translates to “teacher,
Huai Bin is changing his answer”. The teacher didn’t make a big deal
out of it, but I was so scared she would tell my parents. That was the
first day of our prefect duty and we needed to stand in front of the
other students during assembly. I can still remember a guy commenting
that I looked scared and he thought I had stage fright but it was
really because of the exam answer thing. I just couldn’t get it out of
my mind (no kidding) for several years. I would think about it and get
depressed and go outside and make myself fall down to scrape my knee to
get my mind off it. Oh, and I used to stuff my whole fist into my mouth
when I got anxious about the teacher telling my parents. It hurts
because you need to really open up your jaw to do that, but it gets
your mind off things. There was one time when I was with my father to
get some groceres and I met my Form 1 history teacher and I soooooo
wanted to get away I nearly cried and made up an excuse that I had a
really bad stomachache. Thinking back, it was stupid to get so anxious
and depressed over something like this, but my parental upbringing
tells me this is a Very Serious Offence TM and I was afraid of what my
parents would do when they found out.

2. This was in Form 3 and we had another History test. I had a crush
on this girl called Winnie and she didn’t study the 4 chapters that
would be in the exam today. So she made up a plan where she would study
one chapter, Sing Ling would study another, Raymond would study another
and myself would study another so effectively the four hive minds would
know every answer to the questions. I didn’t want to do it, but I was
infatuated with her at that time so I agreed. How did we cheat? We were
sitting together and we used a mixture of hand signals and feet tapping
and outright lip synching to communicate. πŸ™‚

I just got off the phone with a friend and she told me that being
angry about something like this is rather immature coz it’s not worth
getting your panties all in a twist over something you can’t control –
like what other people say. Perhaps that’s true. However I did spend a
lot of time typing this so I’m going to post it anyway. Thank you,
loyal reader, for reading this rant and have a nice day.

Oh, because of this rant, I haven’t finished the annual Sibu
Christmas parade write-up + pics that happened today. I’ll do that when
I when I wake up tomorrow. Damn those fuckwits for spreading those
rumors and taking up so much of my time to write this instead of the
parade write-up.

Scattered as fuck

Oh man I haven’t laughed this hard about something for ages. πŸ™‚ I
was driving my car and got a cigarette out and opened my window. I
searched around my pockets for my lighter, lit the cigarette and threw the lighter out of the window
(!). It was sooooooooooo funny I had a laughing fit for 2 full minutes,
complete with tears and real belly laughs. hahaha! My friend, who
didn’t see the incident, was puzzled by my apparently unprovoked mirth.
It might not be funny to everyone, but it cracked me up to no end coz
it reminded me of the last time a similar thing happened. That was a
couple of years back, I had bought a new pack of Marlboros, got one out
and offered the pack to my companion. She took one, and threw the nearly full pack out of the window!
hahaha! That was so funny, and we had laughed so hard I nearly crashed
into a lamp post. She didn’t know what possessed her to do that, but
thought it was because her mind suddenly thought that the pack was
already empty. I didn’t know what I thought when I threw the lighter
out today, but I’m glad it happened coz I haven’t laughed so hard while
not on cannabis for a long time. It sure feels good to REALLY laugh. πŸ™‚

BTW, I’ve noticed myself making silly mistakes like typing “I’m”
instead of “I’ve” and “anyway” instead of “anyone”. Possible brain
damage or just scattered as fuck? I wasn’t like that before.

The Bell Curve Cocktail

OMG I did a very, very stupid thing this morning. I went to my usual
pharmacy to get some diazepam (Valium) and alprazolam (Xanax) and
incidentally asked if they happen to have Phensedyl, GHB or worst of
all, ketamine (!!!). Oh, the stupidity. The pharmacist really
looked at me ONE KIND when I asked about ketamine. I felt like kicking
myself for asking about ketamine. I hope this doesn’t change our
relationship. It would be too bad if I lost my only benzo source.

Anyway 50 mg of diazepam (Valium) + 600 mg of caffeine + 2.5 mg
alprazolam (Xanax) seems pretty fun. It was taken in that order
(diazepam, caffeine, alprazolam). Perhaps it could be a cheap
alternative for a bit of fun if funds happen to run low.

Veritas’s el-cheapo recipe for getting high:

Recipe name: The Bell Curve cocktail (TM)

Ingredients:
50 mg diazepam (Valium)
600 mg caffeine
2.5 mg alprazolam (Xanax)

Cost:
Diazepam (Valium) @ 50 cents for every 5 mg tablet = RM 5
Caffeine pills (No-Doz) comes to about 25 cents each 100 mg = RM 1.50
Alprazolam (Xanax) @ RM 7.50 for a 2.5 mg blister pack = RM 7.50

Total cost: RM 14 or A$ 7

Modify dosage according to personal tolerance.

It’s pretty fun if you have nothing better lying around. It’s like
feeling mellow at the beginning, stimulated and pumped up at the
middle, and nice and nodding off towards the end. The best aspects the
benzo and caffeine shines through. It starts out really mellow and
after the caffeine kicks in it feels very stimulating and the euphoria
comes in waves and yet there is no “caffeine fatigue” and there is no
anxiety which can happen with larger doses of caffeine. After a while,
you start popping a 0.25 mg Xanax pills every 10 minutes or so after
you’ve enjoyed the stimulating caffeine. I think it feels better that
way instead of eating all the Xanax all at once. I’m eating them like
candy. Mmm…very funny feeling. Started out relaxed and anxiety free
and chilled out, then peaked on a caffeine high and then slowly
progressed to a pleasant nodding off stage. I had a feeling of being
slightly drunk, felt heavy and uncoordinated (stumbling), but in a
pleasant euphoric sense, during the trip. Highly recommended (and won’t
damage your wallet too much) if you don’t have any alternatives.

Ramly Burger

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I love the Ramly Burger stalls that makes those homemade burgers.
Well, the patties are obviously not homemade, the burgers just tastes
that way. After eating the usual McDonalds/Burger King in Melbourne,
it’s good to have one of these again. Mmm…it just tastes so homely.
Burger ayam special satu!

China Seas and China Candy

I woke up really early today and got some breakfast and went to
Bukit Aup with my girlfriend to walk around before she took the
afternoon flight to KL.

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This is a picture of us making sad faces at the digicam.

Anyway, she’s currently on a plane flying over the South China Sea
(if I got my geography right). I love you dear and take care in KL. Me?
I’m sitting in my room, eating candy my parents got from their trip to
China that looks like it has been wrapped in intricate colored
wrappings but is actually peanut candy coated with a shiny sugar layer
which makes it look like a wrapper, but is actually not.

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Of mice and men…

mouse.jpg

I woke up feeling rather bummed, and the cat, sensing my less than
stellar mood, made a motherly sounding meow and produced a dead mouse
(sans head) and put it in front of me. Perhaps it thought I was hungry
and wanted to share her personal stash of food. I apologize for saying
“bad cat”. Force of habit. Thanks for sharing.

My girlfriend will be heading to KL tomorrow afternoon. She’s going to continue her course there. 11771554.

Pavlova Magic

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I made a Pavlova
[users.bigpond.net.au] today from one of those egg shaped instant mixes
called Pavlova Magic. A Pavlova is a dessert popular in Australia and
New Zealand. I got it from Melbourne before I came back and finally got
around to baking it with my girlfriend today. It was pretty easy and
fool proof to make, there was a packet with the Pavlova mix in the egg
and an instruction sheet. Basically, I just filled the bottom part of
the shell with luke warm water and the top part of the shell with
caster suger and mixed it all together. The instruction sheet has a lot
of strange instructions in BOLD like “turn the cake mixer to full speed
for ONE MINUTE ONLY” and “put the resulting mix into the oven and TURN
THE HEAT DOWN TO 110 c IMMEDIETLY”. Whatever.

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We didn’t have a cake tray so we just dumped the mix into a baking
tray and shoved it into the oven. The Pavlova turned out pretty good
though. It was crispy-ly sweet at the bottom and nicely aerated in the
middle and wonderfully sweet and creamy at the top. However, there was
a lot of sugar syrup at the bottom of the Pavlova. I wonder if that’s
meant to be?

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Wow, am I domesticated or what? πŸ˜‰

Together Tea House

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I went out with the guys today to Together Tea House. It’s the one
behind Methodist High School (my alma mater). It has been open for a
couple of months, but I haven’t been there before. You have to take off
your shoes before entering the place and you sit around a very low
Japanese style table.

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Interestingly, there is a pit under the table, so you can sit
normally and put your feet into the pit if you want, or you can just
sit cross legged on cushions.

pit.jpg

The food was okay, but nothing to write home about. I had the Heng
Hua fried bee hoon (rice vermicelli). I’m Heng Hua but puzzlingly, this
is the first time I’ve heard of a Heng Hua style fried bee hoon. πŸ™‚
Anyway, we also had some kind of sushi which was alright. I had a fried
ice cream for dessert too, it was pretty good, but people don’t come
here for the food anyway.

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The main business of the day would be tea, and we also ordered a pot
of some kind of tea, but I forgot what it was called. People come to
the Together Tea House because they have a traditional tea ceremony
thing going. We didn’t know how to make the tea though, and the only
waitress seemed more interested in talking to the other staff instead
of serving the customers. However, we got another waitress to do the
ceremony for us, and it was pretty interesting. The tea was good too.

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Anyway, the most interesting thing in this place is the toilets.
It’s so gaily (gayly?) decorated that taking care of business becomes a
pleasure. πŸ˜‰ I was apprehensive at first at the logistics involved in
going to a public toilet when I didn’t have any shoes on (we left our
shoes at the door), but my concerns turned out to be unfounded because
they have a courtesy pair of slippers inside the toilet, which was
thankfully dry.

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