2.  Do A Britney.
A-Saloon provides free computer and internet services as you get your hair done. Rates are as low as RM33 for Junior Stylist Cut and RM50 for highlights. Shiseido Fuente Professional hair products are used throughout the whole experience.
The salon is located at the Blue Atrium, First Floor. Ask for Jenny Yong. You can ask her for an ‘Ainaa’.

3.  Read Kerouac’s On The Road.
Appreciate an American classic road trip book as a means of escapism from your kiasu Asian life. Revel in the staccato prose of jazz, poetry and the phosphorescence of youth as Sal travels from the East Coast to the West and back again.
Restrain self from dropping out of A-Levels/University/Life to find that odd un-Asian notion of self-actualization.
Also, check out James Franco’s reading of a short excerpt of the book, here.
Big Bookstore Taipan has a selection of old stock Penguin Classics (Silver) Kerouac for RM16.90. The new 2008 print of silver Penguin Classics are stocked by reliable bookstores for RM 60.50.

4. Watch a selection of inspirational and soul crushing foreign films.
A good place to start would be Louis Malle’s Le Feu Follet (1963) where we follow our protagonist, Alain Leroy, a fellow suicidal depressive (yes, just like you) through his last day in Paris, visiting friends and old haunts, lighting cigarettes in well cut suits, looking to find a reason to keep living. Enjoy the cinematography, the philosophy, and the oh so terribly beautiful ennui of being suffocated by youth and privilege. Because just so you know, he doesn’t find that reason in the end.

Le conseguenze dell’amore (2004) will amaze you with its unique storytelling chronology. Set in Lugano, Switzerland; the story starts you off with a million and one questions and fills in the gaps slowly through the arduous Antonioni pauses. Need to be mentioned cinematography includes watching a slow motion 360 overhead camera spin, cool as fuck driving in a BMW 7-Series from hotel to Credit Nationale in less than 5 minutes, and watching an Italian man light cigarettes in really well cut suits.
It’s much deeper than that. But you’re depressed so we don’t need to get there do we?

Das Leben Der Anderen (2006)
Il y a longtemps que je t’aime (2008)
Le scaphandre et le papillon (2007)
And finish your depressive cinematic romp with yet another beautiful screening of
Reprise (2006)

5. Create two playlists to get through periods of Self-Loathing and to kick start The New View.

Self Loathing Recommended Tracks:
The Veils – Lions After Slumber
Cat Power – Hate
Sufjan Stevens – Casimir Pulaski Day

The New View:
John Mayer – Vultures
Florence + The Machine – Blinding

“No more dreaming like a girl so in love so in love / no more dreaming like a girl / so in love with the / wrong world.”

6. Maintain Good Karma.

Reply back dated emails, return long due phone calls, and send simple text messages to people you should really be speaking to on a more regular basis. Renew ties you have long forgotten, and maintain the bonds that you should keep. Fulfill promises you made years ago, and eat humble pie in instances that you know you did wrong. Return others’ books and things, buy birthday cards and candy canes, and remember to call your grandmother.

Be thankful for what you have, count your blessings knowing that you’re only ever accounting for the tip of the iceberg. Enjoy the simpler things in life. Realize the amazing blessing of seeing the sunrise every morning.

And out of your darkness, when you do find moments when you can feel something that may be the faintest hint of happiness, embrace it.

So when others breach on areas that may overlap or hit you hard with issues surrounding your breakdown: answer graciously, and truthfully. Then move on.

7. Drown yourself in frozen yoghurt.

Recommended selection includes quarter large red tub of Original Tart flavour, quarter Death By Chocolate, and a variation of either Taro, Pomegranate and Strawberries. Load up on the oreo dust and kiwi fruit and finish off with a drizzle of muesli.
Tutti Frutti Frozen Yoghurt stores are available around the Klang Valley.

8. Pray.

That you’ll make it through this. And you will.

“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.

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

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?

//

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.

SPM is just around the corner in my face; but all I can do is zoom out on my iTunes, jogging, watching French movies on the pretext of ’studying’, pampering myself with scrubs and rubs; and spending too much time following my mum around town looking at stuff in supermarkets.

The picture is a basket Azlan and I shared when we were in Mercato a month back; when he was accompanying me in Bukit Bintang while we waited for my mum.

Simple pictorial reason to why in a decade to come, the faggot and I should up our sticks, get married and move to Pahang where we shall have kids by artificial insemination.

I seriously think I should stop listening to this depressing Japanese shakuhachi music.

Between those free hours I have noticed that the boy sitting in front of me has arch-long legs like a raphaelite beauty; the soles of his shoes seeing better days. We  speed past the park and I can’t stop laughing. Minutes later; I am relishing the feel of the humid breeze running through my hair as I zoom past the neighbourhood on a bicycle that is not mine.

So here I am. Sitting in the mamak nursing one two many neslo-ais-kosong/teh-si-ais-kosong, listening to an Indian man reason out why this year Anwar will win. My New-Statesman dealer is off gallivanting in Morocco and Switzerland, and I can no longer have the energy to keep up my old habits. I am growing old.

And here I am, too. Waiting impatiently outside the principal’s office with translated copies of the same proposal. I  am worried, because I need everything in black and white. After all those years of learning, I am now left at the helm. Holding on with fear, holding on happily.

Anna Wintour, Tyler Brule, Marvin Scott Jarrett.

My bedroom floor is littered with magazines that I have yet to finish reading; old and new; and the polo-t-shirts of my brother’s that I have now claimed mine. There is a bouquet of dying flowers decomposing in my kitchen, and earrings on my dresser that I won’t be able to wear. He is beautiful, but he doesn’t mean a thing to me.

My laptop, feeling, looking forlorn. There are so many emails I need to write, too many I need to reply. My Wordpress screaming PATCHMEUPDATEMEDE-SPAMME.

To my friends here and away; hope you all are very well. I am alive, but I am hardly ever here.

If you are wondering about what I’ve been doing for the past week, or if you were waiting for a disastrously hilarious and amusing post about all the interesting things I’ve come across this week, then you’d be quite disappointed to know that my week had consisted of two main activities.

Reading the weekend paper. And eating.

Well not really. I did go to the gym on tuesday, watch four dvds, go out with my sister’s boyfriend to buy him a laptop, go out for dim sum, walk around Soho, perform experimental cooking and experimental tempera paint making (it’s a long story), and erh, as I have a crappy hazy memory on holidays, nothing much.

Right at this moment, I am also watching Top Gear (yes, very much a Lad show) but I am also thinking about Simone de Beauvoir’s The Mandarins (very much a feminist that woman). I am thinking about a part in the story where Henri, a journalist who owns a newspaper called L’Espoir, and how he at first wants to keep a neutral front on the paper. Meaning how he didn’t want to have any political preference, which was quite the thing for papers at that time, (as much as it is a preference now) as the book is set in war-time Paris.

Now this came out of random really, as I was reading the papers and wondered why my siblings prefered The Times to The Guardian. I usually buy The Guardian, but it has come to my realisation that my family does buy more of The Times, when they can actually be arsed to buy the paper. I remember asking my brother about this a few weeks ago on which political front The Times represents, and he probably answered something that didn’t really etch into my memory, something something centre, (wouldn’t be different if he said front-back-left-right-centre).

Truth is, I can’t find it out myself, as I’m hardly overseas long enough to observe the paper and the local news here, and also because my father is against me wanting to get a subscription to the New Scientist, let alone The Sunday Times. And well anyway, back to the point, it made me realise the fact that when in most countries, even when there are no impending wars or big political ongoings, papers always take sides, may it be left, right, or neutral, subtly but still something there; yet the papers in Malaysia however, blatantly sound the same.

I remember the time when the whole Mahathir/Anwar case was going on and how The Sun (pre-it’s reincarnation into an advertisement infested circular) were anti-Mahathir and therefore did some things unsatisfactory to said politician. Most of the reporters in The Sun were then fired and well, it went completely down hill until it’s new revamp into the circular it is now. Its rise from its fall was admirable, but I can’t help but feel sorry for the insatisfactory being of a paper it is now, a polarised difference from the adamant, passionate free speech reporting it once had. So yeah, that’s meddling with politics for you.

I like the newspapers here, regardless of publisher. Though I must admit, maybe the Guardian’s new layout has made me more attracted to it, but unlike the notion my brother accuses me of; I’M NOT ATTRACTED TO THE SIZE. Having a tabloid size isn’t really a problem to me but the reporting. Though I must admit, The New Straits Times looks like a tabloid now, with it’s size, it’s new logo, AND it’s reporting. So maybe the layout does play a part on how you look at it. Hell yeah.

Another observation with the “DO-NOT-MESS-WITH-POLITICIANS” rule is one I was reading about these entrepeuners in Russia and how when they start to mess with Vladimir Putin they end up in jail or getting exiled. Which is funny. In a sad way.

Now, you may have realised that the title of my post wasn’t refering to stir fried newspapers and a russian politician all at one time as a dish, but more like a train of thought I have right now. The only missing part is the Fry, which is another thing on my mind right now, Stephen Fry. I was watching his movie Bright Young Things the other day and the thought that came to mind was “this movie is awesome.”. After watching the extra features: “this director is awesome”. Why this guy crossed my mind again is because I was just looking around Borders on Friday and I realised a row of books written by him.

I was tempted, believe me, but for that price I would rather buy something I wouldn’t get at home and a hardcover for the price difference. But I didn’t buy a book in the end. Because I bought a Jeff Noon book at Waterstone’s about half an hour before knowing we were going to Borders. But for one thing I know I can’t get that Jeff Noon book in Malaysia.

Then I went to Borders again on Saturday, as this time George wanted to get himself a book (he got Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World as recomended by yours truly), and we were passing by the Gabriel Marquez section which is beside Stephen Fry section and he noticed this book I didn’t really give much thought to until he pointed it out. Moab is My Washpot is the title. I read a bit of it, and it’s good. But it’s an autobiography and I wanted something more substantial. And light. I’m going home on Economy Class with only 20kgs.

So I got Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. And it’s a nice novel and all. But I am STILL tempted to get Moab is my Washpot. But I’m scared I’ll go over the 20kg limit.

Then I realised why his name is so familiar, as I remember watching him get an honorable degree from my brother’s alma matter when attending my brother’s graduation last July. And the fact that he has a show on tv called QI. And that he’s actually more influential around here than I thought.

The book? I’m tempted.