I found this little paragraph in my computer, shall post it for the heck of it. Wrote it on Sunday morning.

I’d like to pretend that I do not care whether or not anyone wishes me at 12, on the dot, or to have someone phone me at midnight, or to have friends and acquaintances wish me on Facebook. But I do, and I thank God for surrounding me with all these amazing people. I will do my best until the next time I deserve a day to slack off and mess up my closet and be merry and condescend everyone in the world, in three hundred and sixty-five days.

Big brother was nervous all day. He smiled throughout the day as everyone prodded him about. Ma said I could bring a couple of friends so I dragged Rinny, Nanas and Zuzu along. From my house, the procession of relatives and friends of the groom drove off to the bride’s house. We were welcomed into a house filled overflowing with human beings. I steeled myself and shot them. Nanas, Rinny and I got to sit somewhere to my brother’s right so we could get good profile photos of him. It was my second time being at an akad nikah. And heck, I was anxious on behalf of the brother. I mean, it sounds utterly simple. The father of the bride was to address the son-in-law and in turn the son-in-law is to answer and accept the daughter as his wife. But all in one breath – so that it could be misinterpreted in any way. Should either of the two men stutter or pause, the process would have to be repeated. Until they get it right.

The father-in-law messed up the first time, accidentally calling my brother “Naqiuddin binti Tajuddin”. (“Bin,” big brother corrected him.”) The crowd just burst out laughing good-naturedly and the mood lightened up. On the second try, praise to Allah, the marriage solemnisation went well. Big brother said his lines easily, and it is no mean feat when his then wife-to-be’s name was Sharifah Mardhiyyah binti Syed Ariffin. I officially have a big sister! I think I will give my future daughters totally fancy long names just to give their future husbands hell. Yes, that is what I call thinking ahead … by thirty years or so. Anyway, the newlyweds spent the rest of the weekend grinning.

A brief moment of humour.

“I’ma man!” “He’s a man!”

The immediate family. Photo by Rinny.

Overly happy friends.

Today, we went for the bride’s wedding reception at a hall filled with blue people in Shah Alam. That is, the theme of the day for Mardhiyyah’s family was turquoise/ cerulean. My family dressed in silver – or as my brother prefers to call it – gunmetal, for the occasion. A makeup artist came over for big sister and I. She used Make Up Forever makeup. As she applied makeup, she would explain what the products would do and promptly inform us of the price. (“This makeup brush is RM 180, this powder is RM 100 – both of them, three hundred ringgit!”) At first, I was bloody shocked to look at myself with flawless skin in place of my stressed Engineering student skin. After ten minutes, I was happily camwhoring.

Tried to MMS this to Hun, but failed.

We reached the hall after some time and there was a mini procession leading up to the stage. Big brother and big sister sat on the stage for a bit and then lunch was served. My parents, my uncles and my aunts got the VIP table, sitting alongside the newlywed couple. My cousins and I were deposited at a table. Not such a bad thing, really. The food was good and they gave out teabags as souvenirs. After a couple of photo sessions, my family headed home first. Big brother and big sister stayed back to mingle with what must have been a thousand people.

Turquoise!

Sometime after I reached home I invited Hun and Rinny over for tea. Really, I just wanted to show off my makeup to them. Hun met Ma, big brother, big sister, my aunt also known as Cu (who launched into a tale about a once shy girl named Qistina). Best of all – the boyfriend got to sit down with the father to talk serious business. We were just there, sipping blackcurrant tea (from the wedding earlier), when Fa dropped himself into a chair and started communicating with Hun. Rinny and I went to the kitchen (to laugh to our hearts’ content) and observed the two engineers from afar. I felt bad after a while so I dragged Rinny back onto the terrace so we could like, make Hun’s experience less worse. I sent my spouses home with kuih and glued myself to the laptop for the rest of the night. Ah well, it was a good two days despite all the hullaballoo.

Well, this is old news, but I have to get it over and done with. Happy belated Bon Odori! Oh, and happy belated birthday, Zuzukins! I hope you will enjoy the book I gave you. (Use it well.) Off to the main topic.

Hun, Nanas and I went to Bon Odori. It was my very first time experiencing it. It was … overwhelming, to put it mildly. Everywhere we went we were swallowed by torrents of human beings. Fen and Nanas were supposed to come along with Hun and I. Fen insisted she was sick (which was okay) and went to C2Age (which was not okay). When Nanas tagged along the experience was similar to babysitting  a pervert during a date. To avoid the traffic, we departed for the festival two hours and a half earlier. It was already crowded by then, but not this crowded.

Bloody crowd.

Hun fed me green tea ice cream, salmon mentaiyaki and onigiri. He bought unagi donburi which was quite delicious, despite the meagre portions. I cannot stand crowds, so Hun and I parked at the stands and stayed there until we went back. Nanas squeezed in next to me and we took photos from afar. The dances were very simple, but interesting. Japanese opera, or Noh, is quite nice once you get past the throaty voices. I wanted to photograph Japanese people in yukata but there were very few of them. Most of the crowd were random people in casual clothes who look like they would end up drunk by ten.

The stage where the dancers and taiko drummers were.

One thing that dead impressed me was the perfect, on-the-dot timing of the Japanese. Now, my watch was fifteen seconds slower than whatever clock the festival organisers were using. The opening ceremony was to start at seven, and on the dot, 45 seconds past 6.59 PM on my watch the taiko drums were struck. The first of three dances began at 45 seconds past 7.14 PM, and so on and so forth. They were accurate to the second. The Japanese must be the human equivalent of atomic clocks! We left in the middle of the second dance to avoid traffic. After sending Nanas home, Hun and I went Upstairs in the most innocent sense of the phrase. Upstairs (ha!) is a cosy little café near Nanas’s. Went home after some Snapple-sipping and chatting.

Nanas and I.

Hun and I.

Last week, I got to go home on Thursday. Once I reached home, my dearest mother dragged me off to her room so we could play dress up. Basically, I had to choose from ten or so outfits of her choice. I swear she sabotaged the clothes I was going to wear. I settled with a forest green baju kurung, which Ma found utterly divine. Fa said it was ugly though. If Hun (who looked more cyan than green, but nice anyway) shared the same opinion with my dad I would have ditched him and wasted the rest of the evening in a fit. But he said I looked nice, so we went off to his friend’s place for the wedding. It was the first time I had been to a nikah. There was no drama because the groom got the words right the first time.

There were tons of people I had never met before. Hun introduced me to his friends – almost all of them were engineers. They were one whole clan of friendly engineers and a doctor and a finance person. One of his friends liked making dirty jokes and groping guys – the male version of Nanas! I thought of bringing my camera, but it would have been a little awkward. The food (for hundreds of guests) was prepared by the family itself and it was pretty good. I was eating this raspberry cheesecake thing when everyone was summoned for a photo session. Although I had just acquainted myself with them they included me in photos, which was nice. After the photos were taken, my cheesecake was gone. We went back after bidding goodbye to the friendly people.

All green!

Nothing much has happened since, except for breakfast with Stepo and Zuzu, my usual weekly lunch with Lin, Rakesh skipping classes (and lunch with Lin) and a long-awaited date with Hun. We had Thai food – green curry (which had ten perfectly-cooked prawns), chicken fried rice (with no visible chicken bits) and ai tim tab tim krob (which will be left undefined).  For some reason, a weekend without the boyfriend and/ or proper outing with friends felt a bit like jumping off a building in slow motion. I never used to go out loafing so often. I just bummed about at home playing computer games, solo-loafing. As a result, I still have not finished playing Jade Empire and Eufloria.

We had lab on Wednesday morning, but it was very simple simulations using PSpice. No practical work at all. I kind of miss those digital oscilloscopes, which are beyond rad. I swear, the simulation assignments we got in the first year of degree were far worse. For my Microcontrollers and Microprocessors assignment, Hun re-taught me how to connect the LCD screen and power supply to the breadboard properly when he picked me up last week. Apparently, I had connected it to the wrong end but without resulting in dire consequences. No components died! Everything is fine! Everything lights up!

Anyhow. I did a demonstration for my assignment group mates and everyone went ecstatic when the blue LCD screen and LEDs lit up. We are probably going to Jalan Pasar next week to shop for more electronic goods. For our assignment we are to build a count-up/ count-down timer with an LCD screen a couple of buttons. We were also told, to be “creative”, whatever that means in an Engineering context. (Stanley wants to design a timer that looks like a robot face.) I hope all goes well though. I want A’s for all my computer-related subjects. Just because.

Our utterly gorgeous blue LCD screen!

LEDs are adorable, but not as adorable as ceramic capacitors.

Last night, I had dinner with Hun. He gave me a wonderful evening and some components – diodes, microcontrollers, LEDs, resistors, capacitors that looked like Smarties, among others. He is selling all of these components to me for only RM 50 or so. He has been such a darling (this sounds so posh!), helping me with studies. We stalked tennis players from his balcony. If I had a balcony to lounge on, that is what I would do all day. In Phnom Penh, houses were tall and narrow, and had stretches of balconies. Homes were constructed to have balconies all around for all the floors with the exception of the ground floor. I was too giddy to go to sleep, so I upgraded my WordPress to version 3.0. The installation had a few kinks that I only managed to smooth out today.

It is amazing what one lousy line of code can do. I have had problems for my WordPress.com stats for two years or so – that is, since the last version upgrade of my blog. I suck at updating. Then after adding one measly line to my footer.php file – all was well. For the life of me, unless I put some serious effort into studying PHP I will never, ever understand it. This is the line I added.

<?php wp_footer(); ?>

I woke up this morning eager to test the LCD screen Hun had handed over to me. To my horror, I discovered that the potentiometer had fallen off the breadboard. I connected the power supply anyway. It didn’t work this time. A couple of the components overheated and I spazzed in a bad way. I munched down a peanut butter sandwich, cursing, then went to one of the faculty’s labs. They had brand-new digital oscilloscopes, which was so cool I immediately put the thoughts of possibly having burned some hardware behind me. What is a little component when you get to fiddle with a brand-new instrument that works so fucking awesome? Rakesh, my lab partner, and I finished the experiment early after collecting excellent date. We went off for a Yemeni lunch of lamb kabsah with Lin. I showed them the components I got and Rakesh tried to fool Lin into believing that the LEDs could display alphabets and other nonsense. Needless to say, Lin rolled her eyes in his honour about five times during lunchtime.

Darned potentiometer, for falling off.

We got back to campus and I did not feel like going to class. So yeah, I skipped two hours of class conducted some lecturer that everyone hates. I will allocate time to study Laplace Transforms later. At least, I hope so? I think I would be able to study if I stay away from my laptop or Gay Squad or boyfriend or other forms of distractions. I continued working on websites and things, before heading off to three hours of class. Arvind was very hyperactive today. Each time the lecturer mentioned marriage he would exclaim very loudly. Rakesh kindly informed him that he was good-looking and he went all quiet. Hahaha.

Today, I thought my phone service was barred. Celcom had been threatening to bar me for a fortnight already. Sometimes they would phone me. Sometimes they sent three text messages in the same row. I know, my phone bill reached a new record last month. It practically doubled. Turns out, my phone speaker temporarily died. It came back to life after I reset it. I have idled for long enough already, so I have to get back to my lab reports and whatnot.