Monochrome.

We, by which I mean Mara A and Mara B, had our grand dinner last Saturday.

We held in the small meeting hall at Wisma Mais (where we stay). At first the plan was to have it in a ballroom somewhere, like Concorde Hotel, but there was a lot of trouble with funding and transport. The venue didn’t matter one bit though, you could tell everyone enjoyed themselves.

There was a lot of eating, and prize-giving, present-exchanging, more eating, slideshows, videos, performances, etc. Five hours flew by without anybody noticing.

Theme was black and white. I bought a new shirt and tie and surreptitiously borrowed my dad’s blazer. Which was… three sizes too big. But the outfit still turned out okay, like I was intentionally going for a secret agent/killer bodyguard kind of look.

And by the way, I won an award! For going home every weekend. I’m not sure what the point was, but I accepted it graciously. Never reject free Toblerone whatever the reason.

This is me and Amin singing Glee’s version of “Don’t Rain on My Parade”. I wish somebody recorded it. It was hilariously bad. The thing is, we practiced and practiced until it was perfect (and it was pretty good, too). And we wrote down the lyrics on our hands so we wouldn’t forget the words. And we even brought the printed lyrics along with us just in case.

We still forgot the words anyway.

—

In other news, we’ve moved to the new campus. Don’t have much pictures.

I like it a lot. Cleaner classrooms, bigger library, three-person tables, it finally feels like we’re in a real college. It’s really only half-finished though, only the academic building is up so far. The rest of it will be up after we’re long gone. That would include the swimming pool, rock-climbing wall, jamming studio, food court, and student hostels. Heh.

Absolute final exams are in mid-July so we’ve got less than two months left together. Not sure what I can say about that. I’ll still be hanging with the medic students after that, I think, but the kids taking pharmacy and optometry will be someplace far, far away.

—

Are friends delight or pain?
Could bounty but remain
Riches were good.

But if they only stay
Bolder to fly away,
Riches are sad.

-Emily Dickinson

And suddenly, wizards.

He stroked his beard thoughtfully.

His name was Jerry Coshequin, the High Wizard of Traam, also known as The Necromancer. He wanted to be known as The Necromancer because he was embarrassed of his real name. Nobody was going to take a wizard called Jerry very seriously.

The Necromancer stroked his beard, because it was a natural thing for wizards to stroke their beards, and also because he was thinking – strictly in a sagacious manner – about how best to slay the evil dragon that kept gallivanting into the city and setting everything in sight on fire, apparently just for fun. Jerry quite liked fire, actually. It was his specialty when it came to magic. The problem was that the things the dragon set on fire tended to include the townspeople, and that upset the king.

As the High Wizard of Traam, it was Jerry’s duty to serve the king, and by extension the townspeople. The king of Traam happened to be his brother, Archibald Coshequin, more formally King Arch The Pernicious. It goes without saying that Archibald was a rather unfortunate name for a king.

Jerry heard footsteps behind him and turned around just in time to meet his awkward apprentice, Bleeble, running straight for him.

“Master, master!” said the apprentice. “The dragon’s back again, and she just set fire to old Jack Noir’s house. Something needs to be done!”

“This is unprecedented,” said Jerry. He wasn’t expecting the dragon to be back just then. He hadn’t figured a way out to defeat it yet, but he had better drive it away at least. But she was a tough dragon, and Jerry could have used some help. He looked down at his apprentice.

“We’re going to need more wands.”

—

Wrote this myself because I was bored after exams were over. I was inspired by something else I’d read.

I actually like it a little. Maybe I’ll even try to finish it. That is, if I get any more ideas. I kinda went blank after that last line.

The goggles do nothing.

I’m back in my hostel somewhat early, it’s Sunday night and apparently there aren’t any classes tomorrow. Oh well.

Exams were alright I guess. I’m only a little worried about the essay sections for Islamic Studies and Chemistry. I was never any good at Chemistry. It’s so tedious to memorize all those letters and colours and catalysts. Augh. Makes me want to dunk my face in H2S04 just thinking about it.

The past two weeks were pretty fun though. Amin managed to borrow his Kancil off his family so we had a car we could drive around in. A bunch of us went out for snacks practically every night, almost invariably ending up at a 7-Eleven. We’ve got a lot of 7-Elevens here. There’s even one right across the street from where we live, but we just wanted an excuse to drive around. It’s really a nice town to drive around in at night – not many cars and quite a lot of trees.

We even went to i-City in Section 17. During exam week. That’s quite an achievement.

Pose shot right on cue.

Basically it’s this field with a lot of trees. Except most of them aren’t even real trees, but electric ones. And colourful. Really colourful. It’s like a rainbow went and punched a forest in the face.

It was all nice to look at, but there wasn’t much to do. It’s only nice to take pictures there if you have the right kind of camera. With all the glare you get from the trees, a lot of pictures just don’t turn out right. There’s a bunch of shoplots nearby, but a lot of them weren’t open. I heard they were booming once, but since a lot of people started coming, the local council raised the rent price through the roof and not many people wanted to do business there anymore.

That’s it for now, gotta sleep. Toodles.

If I were a nucleotide I’d be adenine.

Everything looks at least 20% flatter than usual.

I’m back to my trusty old glasses for a while. I ran out of lenses, and since my horrible eyesight has a nice case of astigmatism to go along with it, they’re special order and will take about ten days to get here.

People often ask me what’s it like to have astigmatism: I usually tell them it’s like living in one of those edited security footages, when sensitive stuff like the robber’s face, or the brand of his clothes, or the brand of the store he was just robbing, gets blurred out – you get random places that blur out more than others.

Incidentally, ten days is when my mid-sem exams start, with the last paper on Saturday. And speaking of exams, I’ve got the MUET speaking test next Tuesday. The reading, writing, and listening portions were all handled last week – again on a Saturday. The MUET is quite important since we need to get above Band 4 to get overseas, but we can just take it again if we don’t do well.

So – today is Saturday. Also it happens to be Labour Day. Which means there was potential for an extra day off, but since it fell on a weekend it got burnt. There is something terribly wrong in the way my Saturdays are going.

About our new campus, we were supposed to have moved in by now, but the management pushed the date back again, so the new plan is to move right after our exams end. Frankly, I won’t be surprised if they keep pushing the date back and we never get to see it. It’s funny how a university with the word ‘management’ in the name, is pretty bad at management.

I guess my plan for the next week is to sleep on time, brush up on Genetics, Islamic Studies, and Chemistry (my shakier subjects) and occasionally talk to myself in the mirror to prepare for the speaking test.

Now all that’s settled, would you look at the infernal Mega Mac?

Now in Japanese.

Unfortunately, no, that isn’t a joke. Someone really thought it would be a good idea to put that much meat into one burger. It’s almost as if they threw in the lettuce as an afterthought, somewhere along the lines of ‘oh wait, we’re not supposed to kill them immediately’. Just think of all the cholesterol in there. It’s a heart attack in buns. Gosh.

Didn’t stop me from eating one last Thursday, of course. I was hungry. I guess it’s like a regular Big Mac, but with more ‘beef’. *drum beats + cymbal crash*