I bought this cute leather bear roboty thing at an arty market at the Tien Mu square last night. Its head and body are two nifty little pouches and the arms and legs are screw-open-able to store little notes or money notes in; the two rings on its ears are also key rings – it’s currently attached to my small leather sidebag. It was a bit expensive, but I guess I sort of view it more as a piece of art rather than something of function and utility.

Today was Dad’s birthday and I’d originally planned to drag him out to a jazz restaurant called Blue Note, but after a long series of events that led us to spend the whole day at a family friends’, we’ve postponed it until Friday night. I don’t want to do a blow by blow account because today was mostly about catching up with grandparents at lunch, a lot of quality time with Dad and tonnes of self reflection with my godmother before cutting Dad’s cake; so here’s two pictures taken from the window at Dad’s friend’s house. In the first one you can vaguely see my Dad; and me and my godmother in the second.

Today was a tremendously long flurry full of back and forth metro rides. I love the Taipei metro, it’s never let me down, it takes me within walking or busing to virtually everywhere I’d want to go. I’m far too tired to elaborate on everything, but today I managed to accomplish the following:

1. Pick up my photos from Wellington & Cara’s bach in the summer (I’m putting them up on the gallery page now).

2. Decided on my ball dress stuff and had it custom made – should be done by Friday 25th – hopefully I’ll be able to get a picture of it!

3. Met up with 2 classmates from when I attended a semester of year 1 at a primary school here. We had dinner at Dayeh Takashimaya (pictured below) and caught up on years’ worth of stuff.

My lips are sealed with the air-conditioned dryness that one gets when stuck in a confined environment with no water. A girl has been continuously wailing for what seems like an eternity – always increasing volume at the right time, always just when I am about to fall into the merciful retreat of sleep; always. The attendants are snappish, they’re getting paid but don’t seem to care. I’m uncertain if I’m even allowed to have my laptop on.

The trip to the lavatory felt like walking an ominous plank, the point at the end which one should fall being unidentified. To think that it was frightening and nerve-wrecking to relieve oneself of the biological flaw that females have a tendency to possess – small bladders. Fifty pairs of eyes having immediately detected my movement down the aisle followed me like hyenas watching prey being caught.

A lapse in my concentration on nothingness has unfortunately delayed my realisation that the aforementioned girl has stopped wailing and singing non-words. Even more unfortunately, I just realised that the reason why the said revelation was delayed is because a younger girl somewhere nearby had begun to cry and scream as if she were being slaughtered. Fanfuckingtastic.

My nose is still blocked as the result of having two hockey trainings in the rain last Monday. I dreadfully await the doom that will greet me when I step into a 30C city with a cold from the southern hemisphere. There is nothing to do. I’m disinterested with the movies on offer and the games aren’t any better. Bejewled 2 has blacked out on me twice when I pass level two.

[this was written on the day of the date above, I just didn't manage to get online to publish it.

Gaaah! I have this horrible habit of packing at the last minute, be it for a week-long camp or big day out, and right now, I’ve just semi-finished my last-minute packing for my 2 week trip to Taiwan. I don’t know what it is with packing, I just hate it so much, so every time that I put it off, I compile a mental list of “must-do”s and “must-pack”s, except that when it actually comes to the packing part, I’ve either forgotten most, if not all of those mental lists, or just am simply in too much of a rush to sort things out!

It’s is now approx. 2.31am. Urgh. Thankfully I don’t have an early-morning flight.

Irrelevantly, I just thought I’d mention how much I love working in the darkroom. I can now finally understand a tiny tiny fraction of the excitement and enjoyment that my mother must’ve once experienced to have made photography her life-long career. Not that I plan on doing the same, but AS Photography has been fun so far.
I have a new-found thrill of putting my exposed paper face-down in the developer so that when I flip it around when it’s almost time to take it out, I’m greeted by a picture in the place of almost florescent-looking purpley-pinky paper (due to the safe light). The thing that annoys me, though, is that a lot of people have taken photography either as a “bum subject” or “just for fun” to the extent that I feel as if I’m the only person who’s done anything at all. In fact, that might even be a factual statement. I’d look around and see dude on one side twirling on a chair doing fuck-all, another one still asking this week (week 11, a.k.a. last week of term one!) how to do a test strip/proof sheet, etc! meanwhile, there’s girls doing test strip after test strip, photo after photo, never bothering to refine the contrast and image quality, it seems. Then there’s the people who haven’t taken any photos for their boards yet. Oh dear.

Long story short, as I mentioned yesterday, it’s been raining. No, pouring. There have been heavy weather warnings everywhere, and then this happens – 6 students and a teacher from a local school died on a canyoning trip. To be honest I’m quite embarrassed to admit that my first thoughts weren’t of worry or sympathy towards anyone when it was announced that 7 people will missing last night; in fact, my first thought was why on earth would anyone go canyoning in this dangerous weather?! Needless to say, that exact question currently being investigated.

This morning at house assembly we did a minute’s silence and our school’s started up a book of condolences for anyone who wishes to write a page in it to be sent to Elim College. The jazz combo and I had rushed to the SAS to check if our friends were on the list of the unfortunate – thankfully mine wasn’t but other people’s were – there are a lot of grieving people around. What a way to end term one.

I love the rain.

There are countless reasons why I love it so I shan’t ramble on for the next half hour, but one of the reasons is that it makes me feel as if I own the world. Not literally. But for example, I attend a school of about two and a half thousand students – now that can get fairly crowded – so when it rains or pours like today, everyone bunches up even more under the sheltered walkways, leaving me with so much empty space to roam. They all (generalisation, I know) hate the weather, they all loathe the rain, and they’re all miserable – but not me. I thrive on it. I think I almost thrive on it more because for once, I’m not the negative, critical, cynical and pessimistic person; for once, I am the exact opposite, whilst sadistically watching everyone get their “omg I just straightened it this morning”-hair wet and messed up.

Surely, I cannot be the only one?

I didn’t do anything overtly social or exciting this weekend. During the day on Saturday I filled in a shift for Cam at the photo store because she couldn’t work for some reason and the boss went off his rocker at her; then there was a gig invitation to see a friend perform, but I was feeling too under the weather, and previously had other plans to celebrate Tak’s birthday (belatedly), so in the turmoil of people altering plans so much, we didn’t end up “doing anything”.

What we did do though, in my opinion, was a thousand times better than what we were going to do: Dan, Tak, Nade and I used to be part of a larger, fairly tight-knit group back in our two junior years of college; but times and people changed so eventually the group split but us four are still pretty close, just that we hardly spend as much time all together anymore. So anyway, Dan recently got a job at the local Subway store, so Tak and I went and had dinner there, then stayed for one and a half hours. Tak sang along to every song that came on the radio, we made comments of how Dan’s co-worker’s hair was hanging loosely in her face, defecting the point of her wearing a Subway hat, etc… being rather boisterous customers, really; and we kept Dan company (whilst embarrassing him) until he finally asked us to leave in humoured shame.

Next we crashed Nade’s house, out of which she will be moving at the end of the month, which will end our era of randomly showing up at each other’s houses and walking each other to and fro, because it’s literally 2 blocks away. She got a new laptop for Christmas last year, so Tak and I spent two and a half hours playing chess on it and losing baaaaaaaadly, because we wanted to end on a win – we never did win,  despite trying 13 times! The point is, even though we didn’t do anything even mildly constructive because we’ve all been so busy with our individual stuff for so long (me with my music, hockey; Tak and his drama and competitive tennis, etc…), even just the simple act of sitting around recalling the “good ol’ times” whilst exploiting the free refills at Subway and leaning on each other singing retardedly along to silly pop songs we shamefully know the lyrics to, was really really fun and exactly what we – or at least I – needed.

Every week, I have to drive almost 20km to and then from my old neighbourhood for my piano lessons (because my teacher is just that awesome, it’s well worth the $40/hr + petrol costs). Along the way, I have to drive down Te Irirangi Drive which is a fairly new road built a few years ago that spans over 10km; it passes the ex-largest shopping centre in New Zealand, several petrol stations, new school, driving range, a million new housing subdivisions and a billion more traffic lights aaalllllllllll the way down.

Now I have to say, I’m not a dangerous driver, and I even quickly glance both sides when I’m pulling out at an intersection regardless of if the light is green – there’s been a lot of red-light runners on Te Irirangi Drive lately, well, everywhere, actually – just in case. That said, I don’t loiter around after the light turns green. I accelerate pretty fast, as smoothly and un-exhaustedly as my ‘94 Mazda Lantis would allow.

So anyway, I love and hate being the first car to have stopped at an intersection along this bloody long road:

Pros: I don’t get stuck behind some slow asian lady that’s too preoccupied with gossiping to her passengers or simply need time to figure out where her accelerate pedal is; which then means I don’t get stuck at the next set of lights a few hundred metres down the road if I drive right on the speed limit.

Cons: This road which I speak of connects South Auckland with East Auckland. South Auckland is generally perceived as a… well, euphemistically, I’ll just say it’s a generally less expensive area than out East.

Anyway, since my piano lessons are now on Friday nights from 7.45-8.45pm, it takes me half an hour to drive each way, which increases my chances of running into a “boy racer” of some description – or at least, someone with a “boy racer” car. Point is, it really annoys me when I’m parked next to one at an intersection, and just because I take off hastily at intersections, they get this idea that I am, or want to drag race them. They interpret the fact that I’m ethnically asian and don’t drive 20kmh under the speed limit as me wanting to “challenge” them or something. All I want to do when this happens (on a weekly basis) is wind down my window and yell over their shitty music that “I’M NOT TRYING TO DRAG RACE YOU, SO YOU CAN STOP PEERING OVER AT HOW I’M REACTING TO YOUR RETARDED DRIVING!”

For one thing, my car is old. It can hardly handle the way I drive to its “comfort zone limits” let alone be drag-raced; and secondly, I have no desire to give these dumb-ass guys (who sometimes wink at me, call out something unintelligent, etc) the satisfaction of finding out what any person with half a brain could figure out – their cars (badly modified, lousy and loud and all) are still a heck of a damn faster than my car.

Actually, what’s worse is when you get a car like this that ISN’T actually faster than my car, but overtakes me nonetheless, holds me up, and then when I try to overtake them, they get all offended, like I’m insulting them simply because I’m late for a piano lesson?!

To help pay for our hockey tournament trip to Brisbane in July which will cost approx. $2480, we’ve been selling Snickers, Mars bars, and an assortment of lollies such as pineapple lumps and sours; but there’s a really big flaw with this all – for every box of 24 that we sell at $2 each (totalling $48), we only get $16 profit, not to mention the fact that I’m the sort of person who just cannot hold onto loose change without spending it. So 6 boxes of sweets and $288 later, I’m owing $34. To be really picky about it, out after selling 6 boxes (well actually only 5 boxes because Rachel didn’t get picked for the tournament team and donated her box to me) I will have made $96. Take away the money that I’ve spent either on purchasing the lollies myself or used for bus money, it only amounts to $62.

$62/2480 NZD.

On paper that seems like an okay-ishhh amount to have made for not really doing much, but babysitting all these chocolates and lollies have been highly annoying. Firstly, in addition to my school bag, I have to lug a huge and heavy-asss bass case (10kg, I’d say) and an overloaded art folder to school, the last thing I need is a flimsily-designed cardboard box that simply cannot handle the weight of chocolates. I looked like a right idiot upon arrival at school every morning, begging my sister to relieve me of one of my awkwardly-shaped bundles. In other words, I think that 3 months of sweet talking friends into buying chocolates off me at the price of my clumsy behaviour at school with a flailing box that I have to wind in shitloads of tape must surely be worth more than such a tiny fraction of my overall costs.

Gah. I sound like a stuck-up, ungrateful snob. I feel like taking back everything I just said. But I’m going to be honest and leave it there. I could go back to working and make thrice that. Actually, I just got a txt to cover someone’s shift on Saturday. Fantastic timing.

Oh, and Microsoft has done it again. Or should I say my school has. Either or – WHY THE HELL DID THEY HAVE TO MAKE IT SO THAT YOU CAN’T OPEN DOCUMENTS CREATED IN A VISTA OFFICE APPLICATION IN AN OLDER VERSION?! Now I have a pile up of English notes that I can’t access because our school decided to upgrade all their computers and software, and simply changing the extension from .docx back to .doc refuses to work. GRRR.