Long way from paradise

I told a friend of mine that my (ex-) room had become seriously messy. And she went, "Messy? You should see my room!"

No one believes you when you say your room is messy, 'cause everyone sees their own room as the messiest.

During the last month of college I'd become so swamped with work that I'd only spend 6 hours in my room per 24-hours - 5 for sleeping, 1 for showering. (Often also, 1 for showering and zero for sleeping.)

Obviously I couldn't be bothered with things like cleaning lor hor.

Wasn't until finals were over and I had to clear out my room for the summer that I realized, OMGwtf my room has become a total pig sty!



Just before I started cleaning up.


I didn't throw in anything as photo props loh, I actually lived in that condition for at least a month.

The only "tidying up" of that mess that I do before going to bed, is move my laptop to the floor.

You don't even see my dresser in this photo, which I must say is the single most messy thing on my side of the room. I had such a headache clearing all that stuff.

Oh did you see? Humongous Jalur Gemilang on my wall! Something I got while at Pyramid with Fui and ZiHui, mere hours before my flight to the US.

Laundry basket on the floor, full of clean laundry that I'd been "too busy" to fold and put away. (In actuality, whatever free time I have is spent catching up on sleep or surfing the net for a bit.)

On the floor, books from my french, philosophy and sociology classes. Heels from Spring Waltz I couldn't be arsed to put away. Empty plastic drinking bottles. Unnecessarily huge cardboard box in which stuff I bought off eBay was shipped, stuff that took up only half of box space whattheheck.

At the foot of my bed and over the chair, dirty clothes I'd worn but have no place to put because the laundry basket is still full of clean laundry.

On the study desk, brown paper bags from Out-takes, the meal-to-go option for people who are too wrapped up in work to have proper lunch at the dining hall, to busy to care that they are paying freaking $11 (~RM40) for a sandwich, a drink, a bag of chips, an apple, two cookies and a very pathetically small, ridiculously disgusting packet of baby carrots.

I don't even eat the apple, cookies and carrots (well duh, I am not crazy), and I often give the chips to people, so basically I have been paying RM40 for a sandwich and a bottle of water (occasionally, 2% milk). Too many times, I tell ya, too many times.

Also, notice the fairy lights! Damn cool, kan? My roommate bought those for me when she went back to California. She had the same thing on her side of the room, and when you turn off the ceiling light and plug both our fairy lights in, our room looked crazy cool! So bright you could see everything in the room very clearly.

Ignore the shitty choice of bed spread color. Wal-mart was running out of the ones with sizes that we needed, since every single freshman was there buying the same thing, so it was either sleep a week without sheets and wait till they replenish, or stop being so high-maintenance and just go with whatever shitty color they have.

Funny thing is though, when I went there they had only two colors left of this size (mine is the shittier one of the two). This other girl was also there at the aisle, and both of us were were eyeing the less-shitty color and "fighting" for it in our very, very subtle way. But then she had her mom with her (grrr), so victory went to her. I was unhappy lah of course, and immediately formed a terrible, terrible impression of her. Halfway through the semester however, she ended up being one of my closest friends, and that framed photo on top of my desk shelf is one of her and me under a beautiful autumn tree that she gave me for my birthday.

Weird how things play themselves out like that. I told her about our Wal-mart bed spread battle and she couldn't stop laughing.

And do you see the rug? I am confident it's the dirtiest rug on my floor, if not my entire dorm.

I tried vacuuming it once, but the vacuum cleaner sucked (LOL, it sucks, get it?), so I gave up and never bothered cleaning it ever again. It was the home of gazillion times billion sand particles, dust, fallen hair and goodness-knows-what that gets transferred from the Big Outside to our Filthy Rug by means of shoe-sole transportation.

Random info:
I spent the whole of Friday night cleaning my room, and did 5 loads of laundry. Can you freaking believe that? Put in washer, wait 25 minutes, take out laundry, put in dryer, wait 45 minutes, take laundry to room, fold. Took me the entire night, because every other person on campus was also cleaning their rooms and doing laundry so there wasn't enough available machines to do all 5 loads simultaneously. Basically spent the entire night walking to and from the laundry room.

Then hor, I packed my clothes that I won't be bringing home into a large trunk. Went to say goodbye to friends who were leaving, and when I came back, guess what happened?

I found my clothes covered in dirt and dust and little pieces of grass! My roommate had so intelligently decided to give the rug a long-overdue fling (or whatever is the correct verb), and right in the direction of my open trunk! Whatthehell when I go back I have to wash those clothes again!

ZiHui, see DumbKing on the left bottom corner? I hang it on my bed wan loh! And that bear with grossly oversized tummy is also buried somewhere in my bed. I have so many random things on my bed, but since I always crawl into bed at 3 AM, I couldn't be arsed about clearing them and go to sleep surrounded by books and stray clothes and sweaters and various electronic chargers and stationary.

Anyway.

People who come into my room often comment on two things.

One, how much the Malaysian flag looks like the American flag.

Two, how much the Malaysian high school uniform (seen from my Wall of Many Photos) looks like the outfit worn by Belle from Beauty and the Beast.

Can you believe I still have this photo?

No kidding.

Something I never, ever realized until I heard it from "completely objective third party observer(s) with absolutely no personal interest in the matter" how much it reminded them of Belle. (Fav line from She's the Man!)

I dunno if that's a cool thing or not, but I figure it's pretty awesome to be able to say you resemble Belle 5 days a week! (Made much more awesome by the fact that "belle" means beautiful in french!)

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This post so syok-sendiri hor, write so much about my room as though it is so damn interesting to anyone other than myself.

But don't judge me hor, don't criticize me for being so messy to the point of being such an inconsiderate roommate. Trust me when I say my roommate is quite possibly THE messiest person I have ever seen and will ever see.

Worn underwear thrown all over around her bed (not into a Dirty Laundry pile okay, all over the floor!), unfinished food packets on dresser and desk, boxes of Stuff everywhere, grass bits on her bed (shocking!!!), basically just all-round first-rate Messy Person. Somemore that is not even during busy weeks okay, it had been like that since first week of college.

Most shocking - the weekend before finals, I came back to my room to find a drunk, blabbering guy in boxers lying on my roommate's bed. My roommate apologized, said the dude is too drunk to go to his room, is it okay if he stayed the night here? I said yeah, no problem, he can sleep here. I dunno why she bothered asking for my permission, since this dude had slept in our room a billion times, before another guy came along and figuratively kicked him out of my roommate's bed to make room for himself.

But but! The drunk dude had puked on the floor, and all my roommate did to clean the puke was wipe it up a bit, and cover the spot with a towel. Damn disgusting I tell you, the electric fan had to be turned on the next day because the room smelled of puke! Plus that is just the spot she bothered to (had enough towels to?) cover up, it would not surprise me to find out there were more areas of the floor the dude had decided to puke on.

I don't think she ever did clean it up properly, so for the whole week (thankfully last week of college!) I walked around in socks and flip-flops because I am a Thinking Being who figured it is the best and only protection against accidentally touching any puke-infected spot.

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I dunno what I was thinking when I wrote the last post. I guess I was still a bit disoriented from jetlag and reverse cultural shock (LOL excuses), and super frustrated about Malaysians' ignorant comments on others' sexual preferences, so forgive me if I sounded like such an ass.

I still wish we were more educated in things like gender and sexuality, but what I said was uncalled for.

Dui bu qi!

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Okay this thing is getting too long, byebye!

This is Home

Ayam bekkkkkk!

Yahhh I'm so back.

For months I'd been so excited at the prospect of going home, but when finals ended and the time came for me to clear my room and pack my stuff to go home, it was oddly bittersweet.

The cab was scheduled to come pick me up to go to the airport at 3 A.M., so two of my friends who hadn't left Grinnell yet came over to my room and helped me with my last bit of packing and stayed with me till the cab arrived.

They were doing the whole countdown thing ("Two more hours!" "Another 30 minutes!"), and frankly my thoughts then were, "Oh no! I want to stay now!"
I couldn't imagine leaving my Grinnellian life.

It's probably because of that thing I learned in psychology class, that when a big event comes closer you get this weird aversion-ish feeling towards it or something. (Frankly I do not remember much from psych class.)

But I have a much better explanation for it.

Thing is, going to college in a small, rural town where the nearest city is an hour away, where there are absolutely NO other real Malaysian, is very very very different from studying in, say, Melbourne or London where you have enough Malaysians to have a Malaysian gathering. It's even different from studying in a US college where there are at least a few people whose home is the same place you call home.

For one thing, Grinnell is completely, absolutely detached from anything and everything that I associate Malaysia with.

There are no Malaysians in my college to bridge the mental gap between Grinnell and Malaysia, no Malaysian restaurants or enough people who know about Malaysia to be that connection between small, cornfield-surrounded Grinnell and that tiny country in the south-east region of Asia.

Nothing in Grinnell reminds me of Malaysia, and nothing in Malaysia reminds me of Grinnell.

So going from one place to another is like turning my life 180 degrees around (somemore time difference also 13 hours okay!).

Plus the facts that Grinnell is so rural, and so small, and that we hardly leave the campus much since everything we ever need is on campus, I feel like I've been living in a little Grinnell bubble all this while.

And the thing is, Grinnell is not like the world. Grinnell is not even a good representation of America, which is something both my sociology and philosophy professors cared to remind us while discussing the typical American society.

The one thing I absolutely love love LOVE about Grinnell is that it is absolutely, without a shadow of doubt the MOST accepting 120-acres of land I've ever set foot on.

It is where you can be who you are, and for the most part, won't be judged negatively or discriminated against for it.

It's not yet perfect, and occasionally you get homophobic comments and racial slurs, but on the very rare occasion that it happens, the entire campus comes together in support of the community discriminated against.

Over there, there are drag shows and cross-dressing parties, there are little rainbow flags in the mail room in support of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered community.

In Malaysia, the common line for expressing how lame something is is "That's so gay!", homosexuality is perceived as a mental disease for which you need counseling to be cured of, and I've seen how on one occasion someone described a girl as not-pretty and looking like a "tranny".

Forget likening someone to a transsexual to convey her "not-pretty"-ness, the fact that you're making such judgments shows a lot about what sort of person you are.

These very same comments, made on the Grinnell campus, would've caused an uproar.

But in Malaysia, it is common and completely acceptable it seems.

I love how chill it is in Grinnell. There are people who dress up, but there are many lazy days when people come to class in sweats and slippers. There are athletic, super-fit people, and there are chubby people. But no one makes comments on how fat someone else is, there are no highly annoying girls who tell people how fat they are when they are not actually fat. In one year of being in Grinnell, I've come across less appearance-based comments than I've experienced in a single month in Malaysia.

Somehow, being in Grinnell makes me super comfortable about myself. Here, I am a lot more self-conscious, just because looks play a big part in how a person is defined by others.
I never realized it until I left here and experienced something totally different from the Malaysian way.

Going to a liberal arts college had been the best decision in my life that I've ever made for myself. So even though no one outside the US knows about LACs (other than people going to LACs), even though I could tell a Malaysian employer that I graduated from Grinnell and for all they know it could be a chapalang community college, even though I will never inspire the same respect and awe as someone who says he's studying in, say, University of Melbourne... I will never, never trade my Grinnell experience for anything in the world.

For nine months I hadn't spoken to a real Malaysian face-to-face, hadn't come across anything even remotely Malaysian.

It feels a little weird to drop that life to come back to this.

Not to mention the fact that I'd been ridiculously busy the past few months, and now suddenly I have absolutely nothing to do.

I cannot even imagine how coming home after graduation would feel like.

But but but. Malaysia is home, always will be.

It feels so good to be able to drive again!

Feels good to not have to wear layer after layer just to go out! (But then it feels like this Malaysian heat is slowly cooking me up.)

Feels good to be with people who are more or less stuck with me forever, for better or for worse.

Feels unbelievably good to be in my own bed, in my own room, sans roommate.

Feels good to just finally, finally be Home!

Hai you liu tian!

My life is messed upppppp!

Actually, all my friends' lives are messed up.


At 4:30 A.M, my MSN Messenger shows that everyone else is online too. But no one is chatting (not counting very short conversations like "What you working on?" and "When you going to bed?") because everyone is busy trying not to fail a class.

And no one goes for lunches anymore because everyone sleeps through them.


The other day I didn't shower for 24 hours because I was working at the science building all day and really really didn't want to interrupt my flow.


On Saturday, when I was working at the Grill, the most popular item sold was RedBull. One girl bought 10 cans of those things!


I have never had a single sip of RedBull before coming here. But now, when you need to pull an all-nighter, you need to pull an all-nighter!


Finals week is screwing us up.


I have too much work. Too too too too tooooo much work.



Horrible horrible eyesore and bad bad bad pain in finger joints from looking at the computer screen and working on papers in eight-hour blocks too much.


Mei guan xi, 6 more days!

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Happy birthday Zi Hui! =))))))))))