Happily Merrily Christmas Eve!

It was a great festive season and we were spared from the dreadful and devastating vocal straining singing practices which took place from 2pm to 12am everyday but well, since it's Christmas, we somehow managed to convince the "captain" to free us, it was so nice of her, oh yeah, it's a "her" can you imagine...

I've got a couple of invitations for Christmas Eve gathering, one is going to famous club, drink, dance and get wasted, the other option is a nice Christmas dinner in a decent restaurant, a cup of hot espresso and quiet chat. My angel somehow defeated the dark side and I chose to go through the night peacefully.

Emily,my junior, and I drove,and the next thing we found out that we were stuck in the day-to-day horrendous KL traffic on our way to One Utama, and the second blow was getting a parking space!!! That is what happened when we have the biggest cars market in the region! After we managed to grab a parking lot, we went into the mall and it was unsurprisingly crowded. We then met up with another group of friends who were already there for King Kong.

As planned, we're supposed to go to TGI Fridays for dinner but they served only Christmas sets which were pretty pricey. We then moved to Chilli's Grill & Bar, another famous steakhouse, which served ala carte on that night. The person in-charge told me to leave my name on the waiting list, and he told me I'll have to wait for another two pages of names, which will roughly take another 2hours, crap! But nevertheless, we waited, doink!

We had a great meal in the restaurant and filled with satisfaction despite having us waited for 2 hours! Further on, we proceeded to The Curve, a striking new mall which located just around the corner. We drove there, of course, and by right we can reach the mall in barely 10mins, but Emily and I missed the turn and we ended up at Penchala Link,which led us to KL and we made a huge turn back to Bandar Utama. We reached The Curve in half an hour time hahaha!

We met up again with those friends at Starbucks and got ourselves coffees. Then we sat down and had a great time chit-chatting. We engaged in a lot of funny and controversial conversations for example what's the point of going to a club, gf-bf relationships etc. Through all those conversations, we missed the 12 o'clock Christmas countdown,by the time we found out it was already Christmas, 10mins passed midnight!

It was indeed a peaceful and quiet Christmas Eve because we are supposed to scream the bloody countdown but no one did! LOL! We left Starbucks at 2am, some of them left for home,and left Lay Geen(another junior),Bong(my buddy) and I.We drove all the way to Cheras to pick Jessyca up (another buddy of mine who just returned from her China/HK tour with family).We carried on with a mamak session in Cheras itself until 4am. After sending Jess home,3 of us,refused to admit exhaustion,we later on went to Kayu,another mamak at SS2,until 6am. We finally called it quit and reached home at 6.30am!!

It was a quiet and peaceful night, but i suffered a terrible and horrible hangover the following day,as if I was drunk from partying in a club! haha! That was my Christmas Eve. Cheers~

Semester Break?Gimme a Break!

I am supposed to have a month break in the last semester holiday, but ended up having only 10 days, can you believe that? At the beginning of the holidays, I was in the campus to help out in the pre-conference preparation, and then moved on to UKM for NLDS 2005 for a 5 days conference, for that I've spent 7days in total. And finally, I'm back to my hometown.

When I was in BP (Batu Pahat,Johor, my hometown~), I used up the first few days for a major hibernation :P, I was so freaking exhausted from the 7 days long conference. After recharging myself, I was able to meet up a few members of the Peanut Gang~, as they returned from Sydney and Melbourne for Summer break, and they have 3months!! Met up at cafes and food places for a few nights, and chatted non-stop!

One of the Peanutters, named Evelyn, got so much to share because, as usual, she has encountered enormous amount of weird incidents and met freaks, in Melbourne (believe me, after listening to her bizarre encounters, Melbourne is not as nice as we always think it is!), she has got a friend who wears a jester hat with bells, oh yeah, you didn't read wrongly, with bells, when he hang-out with her! What a freak, right? And then she has a friend, whose name is Calvin,Kelvin,Kevin or whatever-vin who wears a Frank Muller watch, a KL bloke who'll travel to Switzerland to shop for Rolex watches (heard that his mom spent a total amount of RM800,000 worth of Rolex watches in the previous trip to Zurich!) Those are a few extraordinary people she met in Melbourne... hmm.... interesting!(there are actually a lot of them but it's going to take a few pages on this blog) And later on, Evelyn got her xmas+birthday gift which costed her dad up to RM 10K, i think. She got herself a Prada and Dior bag plus a Tiffany & Co. stuff. Ironically and contradictingly, she has symptoms of being like her freaky friends back in Melbourne, but i bet she's loving it, so it doesn't really matter though!

Then i met Sher Mayne and Ben Jinn, another two renowned Peanutters! Before they started sharing with us what they had been doing in Sydney, i thought Ben is going to complain a lot about his younger sister, Sher Mayne, but shockingly Sher Mayne started off by saying "Geez cannot stand my brother lah!". Both Evelyn and I were surprised by that unexpected quote...but what happened? What the hell a guy like Ben would do to piss his sister off? Sher Mayne couldn't wait but to "share" with us, Ben made her call most of the respective sports resources to find out what time Ben's favourite Aussie sports team will arrive in the Sydney airport, so that he can sneak to the terminal, wait for the players to arrive and ask for either photographs or autographs! He had to ask Sher Mayne to do it because he has been calling them too many times and they eventually recognized who's on the phone! LOL! And not to mention, he stocked up his entire apartment with tonnes of sports equipments bought over from Ebay that basically took up more space than his sister's bags,shoes,dresses, and make-ups! Funny friends!

Those are the days when i was in BP with my friends, other than that, i had a class gathering in Starbucks Mahkota Parade with a bunch of my "long-lost" classmates, haha, those are my secondary six friends who almost lose contact when everybody moved to different universities around Malaysia and Singapore. It was considered a successful gathering though, more than 10 of us showed up! YaY! And had a great chat, apparently a lot of them have changed, as in prettier and more handsome...which is a good thing lah! And they made me stay overnight in Malacca!! But i sorta shirked their hospitality and moved to another friend of mine, also one of the Peanutters (you must be wondering how many members are there in the Peanut Gang, well, the answer is 6, with one sesat-ed, so, currently 5 active members including me). This bloke is called Jason, a bloody-good-buddy of mine since primary school! He's now studying in MMU, Malacca, the place where i stayed after the class gathering. We went out to watch a soccer match between Arsenal and Newcastle on ESPN Live, it was such a wonderful night,because Arsenal lost muahaha! The next morning, i met up with a couple of high school friends in Malacca, also studying in MMU, we had lunch together, followed by a few rounds of pool games in the town. Then they brought me to Malacca Central (sounds pretty catchy isn't it, but actually it is just a bus terminal haha), got myself a bus ticket back to BP which departure time is 4.30pm. At 4.15pm,they rushed me to the bus terminal and i waited stupidly at the platform,i waited anxiously,looked at my watch,and sh*t it's already 4.45pm!! Without any hesitation, i ran towards the ticket counter and the fella said "Ah? Bas dah lama lepas, kau tunggu kat mana?" Jesus Christ i thought, but i remained calm,i took out another 6bucks to buy another ticket,which scheduled to depart at 5.30pm,what the hell?!? Wasted 6bucks i can buy myself a cup of espresso! Apparently,it was my fault,did i mention i went to the loo right after i reach the bus terminal? the bus left when i was IN the loo!!

Alright, reached home safely, fortunately, it wasn't a very dreadful ride back home,it took me 2 hours to reach BP. The next day, went to Johor Bahru for shopping, with my family, boring and shitty what can i say? Looking at my mum and elder sisters trying out clothes and shoes, and at the same time becoming their fashion consultant with no pay. Sigh... I'm getting too old for these stuffs, liking-shopping is my history now,lost all my patience to do these! I prefer to just sit at a cafe, drink and have slice of cake. My dad seems annoyed too whenever the women wanna do shopping! Both of us will just ended up sitting in a cafe,either looking into space or reading the papers.Well, we're just guys, nothing abnormal i reckon.

I've got only 10days in Johor, and after that,I traveled back to UM in KL, had singing practice almost everyday from 2pm till 12midnight, it was crazy! I got my throat into trouble after singing too much...which led to flu and cough.Damn! Singing practice daily from 18th Dec till 23rd Dec. Fortunately, the person in charge of the practice has her own things to do during xmas eve! so we managed to skip the singing part muahahaa!!

Gosh I gotta run now, friends waiting, supposed to be somewhere now,enjoyed telling what i've done in my semester break, which was sucky!

Ciao~~

Is religion really a religion or just a philosophical acknowledgement?

Last night, my friends and I met up in a cafe, and we started talking about movies. Eugene, a buddy of mine, recommended us The Exorcism of Emily Rose and he said the show was creepy and religiously-complex.

In the movie, there were 6 demons which possessed a girl named Emily Rose (it is based on a true story, and the voice of the demon was recorded...holy!) One of my friend, who is a Christian commented that in real life there're demons and god. But the thing is, not everyone believes in religion, billions of people have a religion they choose to follow, the question is, how clear they are about that religion? Is it really a religion? Or just a philosophy which billions of people choose to believe and follow?

People talk about Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Taoism, Hinduism and all other existing religions. And they believe so much in the religion they accepted, none of them actually sit down to think and talk about whether religions are just a creation of a normal human being or they are really a creation of God. It could be a philosophy which was founded by some guy in some time ago, and why people choose to believe in it without questioning further? And they did not actually think that they are worshipping an ordinary person but not the God!

And it does make it sounds a lil' closer to "People worships the CREATOR of a religion, rather than worshipping the CREATION-or the religion".