Yep, so I'm back from our class gathering. While the sanitation may not have been entirely up to my standards, or that the barbecue pit was pathetically small, I certainly had quite a bit of fun the past couple of days. In any case, it was rather eventful.
Upon locating our food vendor, I discovered that food can be amazingly dense. When densely packed. Ahead of me was a three hundred metre walk or so, carrying very heavy food in bags whose straps seemed to have been designed to give me rope burn. The straps, were literally ropes. Thin, hard ropes that dug into my palms and the bases of my fingers the entire way back, until Shaun so kindly offered to switch loads with me. Yeah, he was carrying a tray of dry noodles, while I was lugging a bunch of what could have been inside the Witch King's mace.
At least the chicken wings were nice.
Later that night, Hongjie arrived, and we immediately got to setting stuff on fire. I convinced my classmates that we were doing an experiment. Which was true. How well does leaf litter burn? As it turns out, not very well. It took us several attempts to get an appreciable fire going, and even then it did not last very long. We tried several things, including adding butter to some leaves, to see what would happen. Eventually, I decided that corn is a fun thing to burn.
So we stuck part of a small cob into our leaf-litter flame. Nothing really interesting happened for a while, until the relative quiet of the night was pierced by a loud popping noise. Yes, we had succeeded in making popcorn. One piece of popcorn, to be exact. Spurred by this, we continued to try to keep the fire going, in hope of achieving a greater volume of popcorn. This popcorn, while probably inedible(given that we were making it on the floor) would serve as an interesting item.
Unfortunately, three sparse pops later, the smoke was getting a bit too thick. We abandoned the idea and left to purchase some sparklers.
Fwoom.
I had not expected to be part of a pyrotechnic showcase that night. Fire fire fire fire fire.
Out of sheer devotion to creating a sign in the floor, using sparklers, I forgot to get food for Hongjie. I was about to reserve some satay for him, but then the skies... Did not darken. They couldn't get darker. It was night. Anyway, it rained. A lot. On our way out to Burger King, we ended up going in circles because neither of us could see ten metres in front of us. This was made worse by the fact that our spectacles, becoming splattered with rain, made it just about impossible to see anything that wasn't a pair of rain-splattered spectacles. One inside-out umbrella, and a couple of pairs of sodden shoes later, we managed to get out of the area so that he could go home.
The next day was spent slacking off. In a very conventional manner. We watched the extended version of Return of the King for the entirety of the afternoon. Stuff happened. There isn't really a lot to say here other than that there were a lot of things said, that could mean very different things in separate contexts.
Which was pretty much the best thing about the gathering. It was nice, to be able to get back with my old classmates and joke about the things we used to entertain ourselves in class. I ended up playing Halo 2 co-op with Leonard and Daniel, and there was a lot of damning each other to having the Teletubbies being imprinted on each other's retinas. No, seriously, what other form of psychological attack could be more deadly? Progress through the game, however, was slow, because a certain person kept killing me for fun. And then another certain person would get into a tank and blast the first certain person in the face. For fun. Each action was accompanied by liberal usage of "
All in all, a very fun time. Just need to work out the bills. That'll have to be done next week, since tomorrow I'm off to Malaysia! Where I have no idea what to do. What does a guy like me do in KL?
Argh. I really should get to my notes. Whilst battling the urge to fire up some C&C3, or playing Bloxxors on Albino Blacksheep. But before that, a meme. Okay, so here are ten random facts about myself.
1. Each blogger starts with ten random facts/habits about themselves.
2. Bloggers that are tagged need to write on their own blog about their ten things and post these rules.
3. At the end of your blog, you need to choose ten people to get tagged and list their names.
4. Don't forget to leave them a comment telling them they're tagged, and to read yours.
1. I have a whole bunch of stuffed animals stashed in a variety of places all over my room. I used to play with them, in ways such as using them as targets for improvised paper-ball shooters. Those of them who have white eyes with painted-on black pupils look really freaky now, because they don't have pupils anymore.
2. I have 553 unread email messages. I ignore everything that isn't news. Because I have something deeply against those people who spread those "There is a kid with no arms, legs, liver, brain, and llamas. If you do not spread this email around, he will spontaneously mutate into a bear that shoots laser-beams out of its nipples, and then proceed to kill you" types. I also hate the ones that give very obviously false information like "drinking iced water will freeze the fats in your digestive system, causing it to clog up and fail."
3. In other words, I have a large dislike for bullshit.
4. In corridors where the light from the ceiling lamps is reflected off the concrete floor, I tend to watch the closest "bubble" of light on the floor, observe how it seems to grow and magically swoosh under my feet as I walk over it. At the same time, I would stare at the my shadows as they shrink, becoming smaller, but also darker, as I near each lamp. It's like watching someone get compressed.
5. In church, or anywhere else that I am similarly and inevitably bored, I imagine epic battles between various, nameless people. Through this, I have come up with some very interesting ways to destroy someone who has phasing abilities. I figure that if you stick a spike through his head while he is phased, and then kick him in the crotch, he would lose control over his phasing and unphase - with a spear still in his head.
6. I will clean my desk tomorrow. Oh wait, I'll be overseas tomorrow. So I'll clean it when I come back. When I come back, I will clean it the day after.
7. I truly believe that very abstract art is rubbish. You know, stuff that can be appropriately titled "Bunch of Lines", "Irregular Shapes", and "Little Kid's Vomit". And to think that people actually buy those things.
8. I have two voices in my head. They are both my voice, but slightly different. One of them always takes the side that brings me the most enjoyment in any situation. The other tries his best to come up with reasons why I should not do something. I generally listen to the first voice. However, when the second voice is more reasonable than the first, he suddenly changes his voice. Or maybe it's the other way round.
9. I want to learn how to add vibrato to my voice. Sometimes it seems to work, sometimes it doesn't. Usually it's more "wavy" than "vibrating".
10. Chocolate. I feel like eating chocolate, right now. Not the fancy, expensive kind. I mean the cheapo, probably-not-even-chocolate kind. Or maybe it's hazelnut cream that I am thinking of. But I'm pretty sure it's chocolate.
And so now, I am tagging Jeremy, Daniel, Sze Chuan, and Shaun. Write something. Here, look, you don't even need a topic for this one.
Oh, and why isn't "blog" considered a real English word yet? Or is it just that my Firefox dictionary is outdated?
*GAH PHOTOBUCKET ISN'T WORKING.
-Joe