Cheat Work Thursday

I didn't manage to win Shrek the Ogre 's heart. It's all on me, of course. But may I kindly ask as well, failures and rejections, that starting from today you stop finding me? Thank you. Because I think I've used up quite a huge quota of Number of Times You Are Allowed to Lose in Your Lifetime this year alone. Luckily, that also means things can only go up from now on, right? With that, I'm going to end my Shrek the Ogre chapter here. Next!

Each time I hear Green Day's 21 Guns (and The Fray's How to Save a Life) on the radio, I can't help feeling like Green Day is really in my car singing, "When it's time to live and let die, and you can't get another try," to me. I don't catch the whole lyrics, nor do I really understand them, but it feels like part of the song understands how scared I sometimes feel, I can almost hug the radio. Seeing people on the street who are clearly struggling with severe mental illness, sometimes I wonder what happened to them that brought them here, but I'm also afraid to know the answer. One who can often be spotted around Jalan Gurney and Tun Razak is a man who walks around with a stroller (without the baby, of course). The man almost made me skid to the other lane today because I took two seconds longer to look at him, and I was at a corner. Let's promise that the next time we feel defeated, we'll fight and bring back whatever it was that once ...

So I did not have any guests this weekend. It was raining. I did go out for a total of 4 hours in the past 48 hours. I opened my Facebook page, which was solely created for the Farm Town. They gave me 100 lottery coins today. I have not been farming for almost two months now. If you've never tried the game, I'm not sure if you should believe all the good stories you hear. I was reminded of this again immediately after opening it. It always freezes my PC. I still only have that one neighbour who was kind enough to send me a blue bunny (I sent him back a donkey). There was another person who offered to be my neighbour when I told him that I didn't have enough. For people who don't play Farm Town, we need neighbours to earn trophies and permission to employ, and we need eight of them! I was trying to figure out how to add him as a 'friend / FT neighbour' and lost him without his e-mail. Now how on earth do people claim to have thousands of Facebook friends? I als...

I had my usual* Friday lunch with Jones this afternoon (*a subjective term). We went to her company's training centre, five minutes' drive from her office, and I envied her immediately. The clubhouse is a super nice place for staff to use, complete with a spa, which offers an RM50 body massage, and a restaurant, which serves lamb shank and super yummy mashed potato for only RM12! (It's mainly meant for entertaining clients and staff training, but don't worry about me.) The place was cozy, the creme brulee and the sago + ice cream were yummy, and there were not so many people around -- my kind of place. I might drop by and bug Jones more often. Sometimes we'd just eat in one of the cafeterias in her building (another nice place too , seriously, I don't understand what these people do ). Other times, we'd go to any restaurant in Sogo, or if I could drive fast enough, we'd go to the Nasi Ayam Hainan in Bukit Bintang. Or if I could convince Jones , s...

Between work and trying to make new friends and be skinny by this Friday, I did manage to find some time for my self-mixed-and-obviously-mad-delicious mocha, blanket and my favourite TV shows. (I thought once CSI NY, Desperate Housewives and Lost ended their seasons, I'd be left with nothing to watch and finally get to start working on some... new life projects . It doesn't work that way. TV shows are invented to get you glued all year round.) Big Love S3, Mondays 11PM I love discovering other people's cultures , though, of course, finding it out from a TV series... might not be the best way to do it. Sometimes I'd look back into mine, fascinated with the differences* and similarities and how people (and I myself) think about them. Dirty Sexy Money S2, Tuesdays 10PM Though I love the show, I can understand why it was axed. Some series run their course quicker than others. (CSI did three seasons ago.) Sex and the City S1, Wednesdays 11.30PM / Tuesdays 12AM I...

For the past several weekends, I had guests staying at my house. This reminds me that maybe I should dig back that very-old-and-now-forgotten plan to get a new place. A real home. With a matching fork and spoon and at least two plates of the same kind, or a sofa that was not bought in 1981. My bedroom after some effort of tidying up looks ok, trust me. I mean, if you think my bedroom is bad, you shouldn't see my kitchen and living room then. There's a highway next to my apartment building now. My favourite tree-covered hills in front of my balcony and bedroom windows are gone. So I've been sleeping 20 metres from a busy highway for about a year now. Yeap, twen-ty. Though the highway doesn't bother me that much these days, I still dream of waking up in my underpants, grabbing my towel from the balcony because we know it's one of the perks of living next to a jungle to quietness and inhaling the freshest air in the morning. Bliss.

This kind of coincidence creeps me out. A few hours after I posted my previous post, I got a surprise visit from a friend I last had coffee with in Dec '07 (if my memory does not betray me). Apparently, they were worried when I could not be contacted. I confess, I've been screening a few numbers. After trying to reach out for almost two years to no avail (because ten years would be too long?), I've accepted that not everything has to go my way. I was ready to close a chapter. I didn't expect some people would be looking for me now . I felt guilty instantly, thank you. So I admitted to the screening... and it was awkward... but we just sort of laughed it off in the end. I think 😅. I read that single people usually have more friends because they tend to make effort to network. I have to say it's... a challenge. Making new friends now is not as easy as it was when you were 17. For example (as I'm going to limit this post to work-friends), I, for a start, d...