Hey peeps. I’m off to China tomorrow. The details of my trip were outlined previously.

Blogging will be non-existent whilst I eat delicious food and absorb culture over in my ancestral homeland.

I will back in Perth on Sept 24th with hopefully lotsa stories and photos.

(Youtube)

Had a DMC with Ashley tonight about how some girls lead guys on without knowing it. This usually happens with girls who are oblivious to the following two things.

1. Most guys are decent in the company of women. We would be polite, courteous, considerate and we will do nice things for you. But there is such a thing as being too nice. This is when he does things like driving you places even when it’s inconvenient to him, reschedule his plans around yours, and generally being available whenever you need him to be; not just once, not just sometimes, but all the time.

   Girls, ask yourself this question? Would your closest female friends be that nice to you? If the answer is no, then yeah he likes you. Because no guy is ever so nice to you without wanting something. Hell, given a chance, your closest male friends wouldn’t mind boinking you either.

2. Ok girls, let’s just say the guy is stupid too for not expressing himself verbally or physically. Instead, he just keeps doing these nice things for you in the hope of you falling for him without him having to stick his neck out, ie. the chicken-shit way, and you thought that he was just being nice to you. Fair enough.

   But, once your radar starts picking up something more you should start extracting and removing yourself from his atmosphere. You have to stop letting him be nice to you because although you are not reciprocating his niceties, by letting him continue to do nice things for you, you are leading him on by other means. I don’t care how rude or nasty that you think it to be, you just have to be brutal to him and nip it in the bud. None of this “but I don’t want to lose him as a friend” bullshit. Trust me, he hasn’t been your friend for a long time since the minute he wanted more than friendship.

   So yeah, be clean and surgical about it. In the long run, he will thank you for it. Who knows, you might even be able to become friends after he has moved on from you.

The reasons above is also why I am never too nice to my female friends, or be out on one-on-one coffees/dinners with, no matter how platonic we are. Because their boyfriends know the exact same things above as I do – sometimes men and women can’t just be friends. Not really.

On Sunday, I will be flying off to KL and then off to China for a 4-week holiday. The trip will include 4 days in Beijing, 12 days touring several cities that were part of The Silk Road, 6 days in Shanghai and a couple of days in KL book-ending the trip.

The cities that I will be going to as part of the The Silk Road tour will include three cities in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region: Urumqi, Kashgar and Turpan. Xinjiang as you would know is where some of the Uyghur minority has been fighting for an independent state for a very long time. And Urumqi is where they had riots just before the Beijing Olympics, and also last year when racial tensions between the Han Chinese and Uyghur spilled over and caused the deaths of over 200 people. And it was still tense there in July during the one-year anniversary of last year’s riots.

BBC News – China police on alert for Xinjiang riot anniversary‎.

So I’m a little bit apprehensive about going to these places. On the other hand, these cities are culturally significant as melting pots of Chinese, Turkic and Muslim cultures. The food I’m imagining to be awesome. I’m thinking Kashgar and Turpan may be less tense because the Han Chinese are the minority, rather than the other way around in Urumqi. Yeah either way, it will be interesting and I will try to stay safe.

At the start of The Silk Road will be Xian – a city more than 3000 years old, where they found the terracotta warriors. Though I have a sneaking suspicion that I will stand over the edge, spend 5 minutes looking down into the big hole where the thousands of terracotta warriors stand and go, “Ok, what’s next?” Hahah. It’s not that I don’t think I would be impressed – it’s gonna be mind-blowing, but I’ve seen them so many times in documentaries already. Maybe once I go and smell the stale dusty air in that place, I would be awestruck.

As if all of the above is not enough already, there will be the Olympic buildings, The Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square in Beijing, and the stupendous skyline and East-West fusion of architecture in Shanghai.

Oh, food. Have I mentioned food? Goes without saying right? Can’t wait.

Heheh, if only …

(Youtube)

Customer: Hi, I can’t get into my email.
Me: Ok, let me know check your details. What’s your email address?
Customer: xxx@xxx
Me: Ok, and what’s the password that you think you are using?
Customer: xxxxxx
Me: Yup, that is the correct password.
Customer: I’m typing that in but I still can’t get in.
Me: Try typing it again, make sure that you don’t have your caps-lock on.
Customer: Yes, I know that. I’m not an idiot.
Me: It’s an easy mistake to make that’s all.
Customer: I haven’t changed my settings in Outlook. Why would it suddenly start asking for my password anyway?
Me: You may have inadvertently typed it in wrong once and after that it would keep on prompting you for the right one.
Customer: That’s not possible. Have you changed my password?
Me: Erm no. We have just confirmed that that didn’t happen.
Customer: I have typed it in so many times. Are you sure you guys never changed it?
Me: Yes I’m pretty sure. Our logs show no changes for a very long time.
Customer: Hmm, I don’t believe that. I’m gonna try typing it in once more.
Me: *internal sigh* Ok. Let me know how you go.
Customer: Oh. It works now. I’m in.
Me: Oh, that’s good. Glad to have helped.
Customer: Thank you!

That’s 10 minutes of my life that I’m never gonna get back. And by the way, customers are not always right.

Selina stumbled upon this awesome webcomic called Happysad, done by a Belgian by the name of Jeroen Vanstiphout. And I love it! He depicts situations that speaks to me greatly because check it, this is what my life is like currently with respect to love and relationships:

• Plentiful female friends. Platonic. Bang balls.
• Not only that but they are also quite attractive. I’m not bragging. Like all of them. Which adds to my frustration. Bang balls.
• All the nice girls are taken. So far anyway but I’m working on this one. But still … bang balls.

The following two strips describe my love life or lack thereof in a nutshell. So yeah what is it about me and married women, or otherwise unattainable ones?

“At a recent party”

And not that I mind that they are good looking and all that but it does makes me wonder about what I’m missing out on …

“Like fish in a sealed off barrel”

And this one describes my coping mechanism to a certain degree: writing emo posts, dance music and err … pharmaceuticals. Remember kids, drugs are bad, mmkay?

“Rave on”

I have now trawled through his entire archive and I even donated to his tip jar. It’s that good. Go read.

I don’t know if this is happening to you but it certainly is happening with me. As I grow older, although the things that I want in life is still sometimes vague and hard to define, what I do not want becomes that much clearer. The list of things that I’m willing to put up with becomes an ever smaller one and in a nutshell, I just can’t be fucked sometimes.

Meeting new people all the time was very important to me. Being a single guy, this was the only way to ever meet someone to date. You throw yourself out there and by the law of percentages, you hope you will get lucky. You try new things, go to different places and date outside of your comfort zone.

This is probably a bad thing but as time goes on, I’m becoming more set in my ways. I have friends that I click with, and whom I do not have to change or adjust my behaviour for, and it’s very simple and comfortable. It makes me happy. So it makes me question why bother with anything else?

Previously I would drag myself out to a social event even if I was tired or if I had to wake up early for work the next day, when I believed that the sacrifice was worth it, and that it was a necessity. Now? Not so much.

Of course, this probably means that it becomes that much harder for me to meet anyone outside of my social circle because I’m not venturing outside of it. But I deem myself a complete person as of now, and I’m not gonna question why I’m happy by myself or whether I should care. I just am.

(Youtube)

Overheard in the office today:

Female: Why don’t you ask him if he’s on the rag?
Male: Hahah! Erm yeah, as a woman, you should know that the last thing to ask a person who’s on the rag is, “Are you on the rag?”