Of My Moleskine Notebook

So it’s that time of the year again.

That time of the year around the Gregorian-calendar-using world, where we all can’t help but get a little retrospective. Where we find ourselves in airport waiting rooms, our near-empty schools or offices, where we can actually cruise at 40km/h on the main road, or where we find ourselves stuck in one massive traffic jam of one exodus or another; looking back on the year we had. Or perhaps, even the decade.

Various newspapers have been publishing lists of the best and the worst of what has been christened the Noughties since late October, but I’ve only started thinking about this a few days ago. It then hit me completely when I was sitting on the loo a few minutes ago nursing the latest Monocle, reading Tyler Brule’s closing letter at the back.

While this year has been rather quiet on this blog front, it was rather eventful for me.

I actually started the year on the wrong foot. I couldn’t get into two boarding schools which I thought would hold the keys to The University and The Bright Future I had always envisioned. To add on to the disgrace, I had only a few days earlier, made one of the biggest brouhahas in my teenage life by having some friends at my house while my parents were out, and while it started with chicken and peas, it ended with the entire group scrubbing out pieces of vomit from my parent’s persian rug. The ‘rents arrived home the next day and I was grounded for the next 3 months.

So with my tail between my legs, I redeemed the bursary I won at Sunway two years ago in a quiz. The same scholarship which I had overlooked because I thought my future was to be pinstriped shirts and grey blazers, vast halls and prep and not the more laid back humble atmosphere of frappes, sandals and 5 minute walk to a mall. I wasn’t appalled, I was crying my eyes out.

But things happen for a reason and the reasons soon came to make sense. I met a whole new set of people who are chilled out and going through the same cross-roads as I am. I spent my time doing Model UN and doing work for two student councils. I took my own bloody sweet time to get my driving license. I bought my first pair of Converse shoes (which I would never have thought of doing in a prep school, God no). I have successfully worn out those shoes. I loss half a dozen debates but always feeling amazing afterward. I finally won my battle with Math. I went to Langkawi with two crazy girls and brought back stories we’ll still laugh about in years to come. I fell in love. I did my SATs, TWICE.

I grew up.

Going to Sunway made me realize one essential fact I couldn’t have gotten anywhere else. It made me realize that it doesn’t really matter. It doesn’t matter which school you went to before, unheard or international, private or shit-comprehensive. It doesn’t matter what your background is, how you speak, what you like or what you wear. You are made up of more than the some of all your parts, and people accept you for the bigger picture. Everything else becomes obsolete.

The bigger picture also meant that despite not having to pay the equivalent of a small car for A-Levels, I still had the chance to run after that Bright Future I thought I had lost. Sure, circumstances were not ideal, I was still enjoying the distractions of having a freaking mall on my doorstep, and I didn’t have Mander Portman Woodward coaching me day and night. I still faced plenty of discouragement from all corners, but at the end of the day I filled in those blue forms and I got the interview. I got vast amounts of time from teachers who were willing to spend extra time with me to learn. So I can’t say I’m any further from The University whose picture I’ve kept in my notebook since Form 2.

Though while at some junctions I found myself making choices, at times I found that life makes them for you. A year ago I was reading Elaine’s US uni application essays prepping myself to know what to say when the day came that I would be doing the same. A year later I was fighting with my parents and it came to the conclusion that I was not applying. At least unless after my A-Levels. I’m still sore about it. But if one thing this year’s taught me, is things always come through differently than you would think. So dream big.

Tomorrow morning I’m trying to break my record and wake up before 7 since I’ve come home. I’m going to return a long overdue library book which somehow renewed itself while I was away. I’ll perhaps make my last run up the three flights of stairs to my locker.

So, in terms of an education, 2009 was just as it was. Laid back but not far from luminous. Here’s retrospective for you. Haha

It’s my last night in the UK, and my first and final attempt to write.

Lying awake in bed fighting off the vestiges of jet lag nearly three weeks ago, I knew I felt odd; yet I couldn’t put my finger on it.I lie awake having words form at the back of my eyelids, never finding them again in the morning. And tonight, like so many other nights before, the frustration takes me in disgust.

A holiday is precisely a vacation. A moment in time where one vacates ones routine in order to embrace things beyond the confines of daily life. This trip has been about vacating the mind. I wake, I talk, I eat and sometimes, if I feel like it, I read.

It’s so beautiful how comforting it is to arrive in a foreign land and stock back on creature comforts that make you feel like you’re home. It’s self-reassuring when you go to the news agents knowing exactly what paper you read, or political magazine you align to, and which flavour crisps you love.

Or even something as simple as going back to the estate where you spent a good part of your childhood. Having clear kodak memory of what tree used to be where, which slot opens the door; and as you run through the barns and private rooms, that you know the exact overlay of the land, just as you have years before.

Yet the current affairs section of the paper -while it may interest you terribly- covers a domestic issue that doesn’t concern you in the least. The political mag you got  fights for the advancement of a nation in which you have no right to vote, and while you support their effort, the MPs that catch your attention are continents away from the constituency where you live.

Admittedly, some things remain constant. Nothing much gets in the lay of the land; and architectural fortitude has lengthened the permanence of buildings.  Yet we always fail to see that the people that we relate to to these buildings are more evanescent than ever. People age, people settle, people then will pass.

Just as, while people roughly stay the same, the mind of the growing young adult does not.

So does it surprise me how much it hurts – or how it doesn’t really – feeling so fascinated and belong, in a place where you know is not yours to call home.

Home is where the heart is. I love this city, and hopefully, someday; it’ll love me back too.

It’s been just over a week since my AS exams were done and over with, and it’s been just over too long since I’ve bothered to feel anything enough to write. I don’t know when that time will come, but I think it’ll come. Somehow.

How are you doing folks? My sleeping patterns this past week is the shit. I sleep either too early or too late and resolve to only get out of bed when that nauseating throb of lethargy really gets to me.

My desk has had a crazy influx of ants lately, the source of their mad excitement something I discovered to be stale polo mints at the bottom of my pencil case. I’ve discarded the crap, but even as I type this, I have this impulse to squash any form of movement at the corner of my eye.

Not that this makes for brilliant blogging subject matter. But I just wanted you to know, y’know.

And so I was in the Philosophy/Logic section, looking for books for the Thinking Skills entrance test for A Certain University when an unknown number came through on my phone.

“Ainaa Hafizah binti Azhar, saya daripada MPH bookstore”
-”Er, ya?”
“Awak ada order buku?”
“Er. Tak, kut.”
-”Ya, ada.”
“Eh. Takde. Buku apa ni?”
-”Entah lah. Dalam plastic”, and he went on, “awak ada dekat rumah?”
To this I answered “Haaah. APA?!”

About three hours later I arrived home and there it was, three books daintily stacked on the sofa; one of them with a cheque with my name printed across.

I think it’s the first time I’ve ever heard my mother acknowledge my writing, and it was rather funny how she tried to narrate what it was about to my father, to whom this must seem completely foreign.

Flipping through, cringe-worthy would be the biography section, while most people wrote about growing up liking Narnia and C.S Lewis, the younger me pontificated my love of prose and Nabokov. I’m afraid I may have come a bit as being up my own arse.

It’s a rather queer feeling though, reading something you wrote at 15. Trying to decipher how in God’s name did you ever possess so much passion and eidetic flair, when three years later you find yourself with a dumbed down level of college English, over-using phrases like like y’know, and yeah, exactly.

I’ve only been able to read a few of the other stories so far, but dear sordid blog reader, do rest assured that despite them omitting one line, that being the title of this post, I was the only 15 year old of the whole anthology who incorporated a graphic – though somewhat romantic- depiction of sex and -heavily implied- homosexuality, subtly enough to be published by a Malaysian bookstore.

Hehe. Now, some things never change.

There are various discerning magazines lying strewn across the bedroom floor, and the laptop on the bed is whirring softly. Radiohead is playing in the background, and the comforter is a mess with books, bags, more magazines and pillows.

I’m lying on my best friend’s bed which I’ve not done since we both left school, and despite it all, it felt like the single most reassuring thing I’ve felt for a very long time. Hanis turned 18 today, and with a box with five different slices of cake and a package with new lingerie (traditions always stand), I made my way up the staircase that I would have taken four to five times a week without fail a year ago.

While I play around with the dials on your SLR, trying to keep up with your new accounts of college life and connections with the lives we thought we left behind, I can’t help but look back at how far we have changed since last year.

Last September, we were both school girls in baggy white tunics. We knew what we wanted from life and wouldn’t settle for less. Our lives were spent between being in front of the CS3 making edits on typography to chasing an exam we both knew we didn’t give a shit about. The light at the end of the tunnel was getting out of school, and the long stretch of holidays where we could do whatever we wanted. To intern at a proper magazine, a think-tank, to host a play, to write a fantastic discourse on life. We knew we wanted out, and we knew we were going to explode. You with your photography, me with my pen.

Did we settle for less, or have we merely learned to manage and make do with whatever things have dealt out for us? Should I be bothered that our tight troupe of friends and believers no longer breathe and exude the passion we once held at sixteen? Is this what it means to grow up, when you accept what is given to you, and you learn to let things go?

So this might just be me growing up, when I choose to fill my extra hours integrating some function or another in the cold recesses of the library. This is me making that one step of maturity when I fill in uni applications for subject codes which I don’t know I will love but which I know I will have to learn to.

This is me growing older when I lie on my side, pulling lint from your jeans, denying, but knowing deep inside that our paths have diverged, despite me being happy with how things are going for you, and contented with how I’m going.

But it’s us growing older together, nonetheless.

No matter how much things have changed, and no matter how many calls we missed from each other in the past months; no matter how we’re both at the opposite ends of the valley, no matter the fact that you have a good friend in college named Ainaa; no matter how great of a photographer you have developed to become; and no matter what any of us are ever going to be.

Happy 18th Birthday Hanis.

<3

Nearly seven months in, and still not a single proper post about college. This may seem as procrastination in the very essence of the word to some, but let’s just stick to the pop-psychology way of diverting blame and that I was emotionally repressed for the good few months in Sunway or something.

Perhaps I could link this whole existential denial to the fact that I always somehow thought Sunway was some kind of halfway house between places where I wanted to be. Correction, a halfway abode between places I thought I was meant to be.

January was spent acclimatising to new unchartered concrete and air-conditioning, crouched over a corner in the library finalizing applications and personal statements. Rejection number one, but I knew this application was going to be just right. February was spent running for the student council, organizing little sales and getting comfortable with people. In March it was back to rejection number two, and three.

Since then it has been a series of ups and lows, all finding their place in the tiny lines of my little red book. I’ve not written in my real journal because I fear that when I do open up the page I won’t have a single thing to say.

College has had a somewhat numbing effect on me. I do not go into a frenzy about some new book or a new film or some thing or another. I find no comfort in having no one to push me to my limits, no one beside me that inspires me to do more.

I have gone for months without reading the papers, except for the few weekends I actually bother buying the FT or the few evenings that I actually have the energy to read The Guardian. The stack of books I bought in December, thinking I would have to replenish by the month’s end is still the way it is; appreciated yet forlorn.

There is no spark, no fire, no drive. Farhanis tells me I don’t seem to have anything to say anymore on the phone, because that’s the way things have been. I didn’t want to say anything, and I got comfortable with saying nothing for a very long time.

There is also a sort of philistine experience when you thought you just got your way into a centre of new educational opportunities. There are no deep philosophical conversations in student cafes, the arguments you would find yourself in are pedantic and so-high-school.

People honestly don’t care. And you try to learn not to care too.

I’ve got a backlog of emails I’ve not replied because I just can’t seem to put myself to say the things I should have months ago. I’m sorry if I don’t reply your messages either, or picked up your calls. And I know why you’re doing that to me too.

It’s one thing pushing something away and hoping it’ll never come back and having to pull it back and work things better.

Oh God, why are all my posts so fucking depressing?

I’ve been spending my allowance on a lot of old magazines lately (oh what a surprise), and two days ago I scored a good find at Bangsar Village. One was your everyday 3 month old Nylon, but I also picked up an issue of American Esquire for eight ringgit.

It was the December 08 issue, so they had this whole section of people who are – or, in this case 6 months later- shaping the world in their respective fields.

One of the articles was about a computer game designer who creates these simple but adorable 8-bit games that have a whole deep existential flair to them. His game, Passage, was said to be by tech-reviewers as proof that gaming is in itself a type of art comparable to music or literature.

According to the interview, he lives in a hut on a meadow with his family, keeps electricity to a minimum and does his coding in a super old-school dell laptop. Like, super cool, kan?

Intrigued, I checked out the game, read the reviews and had a few rounds.

So basically it’s just this rectangular box on your screen where you have to keep moving on to get to somewhere you don’t know any shit about. The far corners of both ends of the screen is blurry, and only gets clear as you walk onto them. Your character is a super pixelated blue-eyed brown haired character. It’s possible to move up and down, step on some chests to get more points, but basically moving itself gets the number tally on your upper right screen going on.

Thirty seconds in, you will meet a girl with green eyes, and just as pixellated as you are. Walk into her, and a big heart will form and the whole game will go on with her being beside you. Being with her means you can’t walk into certain passages where you could get more points from treasure chests.

As you play on three minutes into the game, you realize your pixel-hairline is receding, and before you realize anything, your wife’s hair is turning white. The environment in the screen turns from yellow to red to blue to purple. Your character starts to bend double.

And then your wife dies and in her place lies a tombstone. You could move around a bit, but you too, stop and have a tombstone in your place.

There are no monsters to kill, no quests to partake on, and nothing to kill you; except inevitable death.

In the three odd trials I had of the game, I tried marriage. I tried being single. Then some other strategy came to mind. Do any of you remember in one of the old Mario games, in the first 10 seconds of the game, if you don’t land or jump on the turtle-shell, then you won’t ever have the chance to go back and do it?

Well I tried that out. I avoided the girl, ran on in the game, collected about 300 points and jumped on every goddamn chest I could get my square little legs on. Then I ran back to the yellow environment to get to her. It worked.

We fell in love, though seconds later we grew old. Our hair turned white, we bent double, and she shortly died thereafter. My points were about 500+.

I was reading the reviews and there was this really sweet comment from some guy who said when his game-wife died he merely left his character beside the tombstone and died beside her. He played the game with his real-life wife nearby and couldn’t bear to think about leaving the tombstone.

So Passage tells us that it’s possible to go and run after ‘having it all’, to go back and fall in love. That it’s possible to get great points by chasing treasure chests alone, but that 4 minutes in, it just gets boring and pointless.

That at the end of our five minutes, we will all have to die.

That it actually feels better to die knowing you have loved and lost.

Than die alone with nothing but 700 points you will lose anyway.

And yeah, before you have to ask me about the cryptic past posts, and the new Facebook updates in between, I did meet someone with slit brown eyes. We jumped on treasure chests and hid behind library shelves. But our five minutes was up. And we let go.

Passage by Jason Rohrer is available here. His personal page can be found here.

The lower-ground floor of the library, for the most part of my being here, is usually half empty. All areas between and behind shelves would be completely devoid of any human life, leaving the lone librarian with the 80’s hairdo, ponderously pushing his trolley of unread political science books no one actually reads.

This past month has seen an exodus of students who would lug big bottles of water and their thick, earth-shattering ring folders, making homes out of the otherwise empty carrels. You know it’s exam season when you have to comb through rows of seats to find none un-occupied nor used as a sleeping pod.

In the midst of my own last-minute revision (can there ever be such a thing as consistent revision in the classical system?), I find myself in moments of wanton distraction and thought. As beautiful as it may sound, being surrounded by shelves heavy with discourses on history, to the more often read pop-psychology, to literature and beyond, I can’t help but feel that there is something sterile and unromantic about Sunway’s library.

Is it the overhead fluorescent lighting? Perhaps its the pallid depressed looking inhabitants, blasting bad screamo music from supposedly cool emo headphones. Maybe it’s just that sometimes the library feels like a temporary hide-out for people wanting to get some a/c.

I sometimes wonder how it must be like for the librarians. Do they go to work everyday feeling like they’ve been given a purposeful existence? Do they feel like it is their task, their god-given duty to sow the seeds of intellect into the apathetic post-pubescent? Or do they just arrive at 8.00 a.m. like most of us, to start another 8 hours of card scanning and book arranging?

Philip Larkin wrote a bulk of his poetry while working as a librarian at Hull University, my sister’s alma mater. He’s probably the most oft-quoted British post-war poet (‘They fuck you up your mum and dad’, anyone?) who I’ve still not found an opportunity to slip into in any of my GP essays. There’s always this underlying tone of nostalgia and regret, of loss and premature wisdom about his stuff. The sad meaningless sex, the sad meaningful sex, and the constant struggle to search for that something deeper, the intimacy beyond the sex.

Sometimes I wonder if the quiet man behind the check out counter has some sort of Larkin-like life after he punches out at five. Does he take the free shuttle bus home to a small apartment filled with half-drunk coffee mugs, leaving brown stain rings on stacks of papers he’s been working on for months? Does he smoke away his nights, lounging around in a kain pelikat and a milo ais, as he nurses some Perec or Le Clezio?

How does it feel dedicating your life to such a sturdy unchanging place where its visitors are constantly changing and leaving? Do they resent our youth, our temporary existence in the air-conditioned cement and steel space? Do they too hope for a day when they would leave the carpet for better pavements elsewhere? Or do they, like Larkin, find the place a temporary residence to rest their everyday existence, as they nurture their other lives elsewhere?

Either way, while I see the same faces everyday, we never have spoken more than the usual card, grunt, thank you. They don’t care whether I’m borrowing something they know I won’t make head or tail of (Pure Mathematics, Longman Publishing, 1993), neither do they respond to my exuberance upon finding something long catalogued, unread, and hard to find (The Story of Penguin, Jeremy Lewis).

Not that I’m asking for everyday chance encounters with the 80s hairdo man where he would pontificate about Ayn Rand or something, but just that it seems to me everything in the library seems like a transaction.

The sterility of the place comes from how it is only used when it is needed, and never seen as anything else otherwise. A place for a nap, for those last minute homework completions, to facebook your status (is Bored and Tired and omggggg hungry la!), and of course, to study for the tedious exams that everyone’s lives seem to revolve around.

No conversation about some new piece of literature, no soul-searching, existential struggle. No poetry from no prose-filled mind.

Early this year, a friend of mine was having trouble locating the Economics section and was given a rather disgruntled answer when the object of her search was in fact a row behind her.

Dear reader, can you blame me for thinking what the answer would be if I chose to ask, “I am looking for the Critic for Pure Reason”, and being answered,

“We’ve been looking for that for a while, too”.

You can’t really compare the experience of being a piece in between thousands of bodies, stuck together by sweat, grime and a shared passion in one cause. Hanging on to your dear life with your arms around the people who you grew up knowing better than yourself. The bond only created by the profusion of DNA, live rock music, and experience. The bonds of old: renewed.

//

Holding hands beneath the table in the auditorium; as the lecturer at the podium tries her best to preach the values of tolerance and harmony, while not actually practicing it herself.
Knowing that we are the only example of this; as my fingers encircle your palm, as your thumb slides down around my wrist: as we make a step into the unknown. Knowing, we are the epitome of what this class stands for. A bond that neither of us ever thought we’d know.

//

The comfort of new strangers. Making space and making time to accommodate people unknown before.
Yong Tau Foo in the cafeteria before a rushed and soporific economics class. Slow walks to the cab stop to catch a ride to the mall, books : left behind. Heartfelt conversations about the new life that we share together, as we huddle in dirty cosy cafes. Finishing our iced teas before running back to campus in the rain.
Bonds made : new.

Here’s a cheer for some existentialism thought-
as I cross my legs
being somewhat sandwiched
between Science Fiction
and art critique;
between the Beckett
and Translated Poems from the Sanskrit.

His skin like
translucent Chinese Moon
eyes all beady and austere-
those hands:
large, warm and damp.

Possibly- (or so they say in GP)
the best things to hold
at 17 and purified-
virginal and terrified;
when all belief and thought
cease to be held on to.

In carrels like pews for prayer
I bent my knees and hoped
that reason would come;
come barreling through
this exasperating furrow of silence-
all rage, all worry-
writhing in my insides.