The day started with lunch at a McDonald’s, specifically a children’s birthday lunch. Hahah! Normally it’s Happy Meals all around but we chose to have items from the regular menu, and we had it inside the train next to the playground. Because we couldn’t fit in the playground, and we didn’t play any of the usual birthday games that the McDonald’s staff would put on, in the end we basically paid to have lunch in the train carriage.

But it was something different and it was my first McDonald’s birthday ever.

A few hours after lunch, we headed to Scott’s restaurant for the night time celebration. He made us really good food: we had fried wontons, chicken wings, beef curry with rice and an awesome beef soup.

After the meal, we had the second cake of the day.

Throughout the night, there was a lot of alcohol consumed. Woo! The success of the night were jugs of Chambord, a French black raspberry liqueur, mixed with lemonade and lime. That got everyone happy and easy going and then the drinking games started.

After a while, we gave up on the pretense of a game and just drank. Hah!

Which got us all even more hyper and crazy. The theme of the night was “Barbie is a SLUT!” which meant that most of us came in wigs and costumes. Which meant a lot of props to muck around with.

And naturally, all of us whipped out our cameras as a result.

It provided endless laughter.

I got in on the fun too. This was supposed to a spaceman James Bond with chicks kinda thing.

Happy birthday again Sel! It was a full on awesome day!

The above is a clip of cosplayers, people who dress up as cartoon, comics and video-game characters, listening to the Black Eyed Peas’ song “Imma Be” at the recent Comicon in San Diego. It’s awesome. The funniest thing is them reacting to the song in character.

(via Topless Robot)

John Hughes’ movies were a big part of my teenage years. Through fantasy and a keen sense of what teenagers go through, they offered a sense of hope and optimism that the ordeals of life and love is not as bad as one would think. And most of all they were funny.

Among movies like Pretty in Pink, Sixteen Candles, and Home Alone, my favourite John Hughes movies were Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, The Breakfast Club, Weird Science and Uncle Buck. Even those of his movies which were not predominantly about the tortured lives of teenagers like National Lampoon’s Vacation and Planes, Trains and Automobiles were great.

If I have to pick my favourite lines from a John Hughes movie, they would all be from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off:

Bueller? Bueller? Bueller?
Don’t worry about it, I don’t even have a piece of shit. I have to envy yours.
Life moves pretty fast. You don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.

And then there were the theme songs. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off had that infectious tune by Yello called “Oh Yeah” which was used in a lot of other movies, but I thought that it fit this movie the best.

Uncle Buck had Tone Loc’s “Wild Thing”.

Weird Science had … “Weird Science” by Oingo Boingo.

And fittingly to end this post, Simple Mind’s “Don’t You Forget About Me” from The Breakfast Club.

Thanks John! I could not have imagined my 80s without your movies.

I had to go and tempt fate today …

First half of the working day was great. I was breezing through my work, getting things done and answering and solving most of the problems presented to me. I stepped out for lunch and the sun was shining on a perfect Western Australian winter day: not too hot, not too cold, just very nice.

There I was chowing down on my favourite burger, a Double Bacon Deluxe, sitting by the window watching the crowd walking by. On the stroll back to the office, I lost count of the number of pretty girls that I walked past.

I was thinking to myself, “It can’t get any better than this. Man, I really really love Perth.” And I was smiling all the way back.

When I got back into the office, I immediately updated my Facebook status:

So in love with Perth some days that it’s unnatural.

Then I got a call from a customer who swore at me. Figures.

Tham, Simon and I had drinks last night. And when three single guys get liquored up, the conversation inevitably turns to women. The main thesis of the night was that in order to get a girl, our tolerance for bullshit has to be high. That no matter how nice the girl is, she will have her idiosyncrasies and most of them will be peculiar to the male brain.

Which is not to say that our wives and girlfriends don’t have to deal with our shit either. No one is perfect and so, bullshit tolerance is required from females too. Though here’s my thought on this: what if you don’t need someone to tolerate your bullshit? What if you don’t care enough about that to want to reduce the bullshit that you inflict on potential girlfriends? Or what if you don’t tolerate enough bullshit to withstand a relationship, such that you don’t expect someone to tolerate your bullshit in return, and so you subconsciously prevent a relationship from starting?

All of which describes how I have been in the past few years. I will get interested in a girl but the moment I spot a character flaw that I don’t want to put up with, I lose interest. So far in hindsight, I am glad that things have happened the way they did and how my sanity-preservation instincts had kicked in. How long I’d maintain this mindset I don’t know. Though maybe I should up my bullshit tolerance a bit more, just enough to get me laid perhaps. ‘Cos you know, it’s been a while.

Last night I had an appointment with the mortgage advisor. The title to the land that I was buying will be available next month and I wanted to see what my options were. In short, I had just the one option. A lot has changed since last November when I first explored the idea of building the house that I wanted on the land that I had just agreed to buy.

About a month ago, I had lost the permanent casual job that I had, there was no expected pay raise from my full-time job, and some extra hours that I usually do now for the company might be curtailed. To summarise, my earning capacity has decreased and so has my borrowing ability.

So that one option that I had? It’s to borrow enough to just pay for the land now and decide later about building on it. I will be losing out on approx. $14,000 in the first home-owner’s grant but that’s not too bad. With a lot of people rushing to get the grant, current home building prices are artificially inflated anyway.

I was a bit disappointed of course but going into yesterday’s meeting, I already had an inkling that that was to be the outcome. Although I’m very glad that I didn’t get the land title back in May when it was supposed to have come out. I would have decided to start building and thus borrow more money based on my higher income then. With my reduced income now, I would have been stuck with loan repayments that I can’t afford. I think I dodged a bullet there, phew!

So yeah, my dream house? Maybe later. It can wait. In the mean time, I am going to enjoy my mother’s housekeeping and hospitality just a little bit longer.

Back when we were inexperienced boys, we watched too many romantic comedies where the guy always get the girl in the end, no matter how much the girl hated him in the beginning. We were naive enough to believe that persistence always works, and it felt good to believe in it because we hoped the next girl will be different.

I was 18 and in my second year of uni. When I first met her, the crush hit me hard. I couldn’t stop thinking about her and fantasising about being her boyfriend. It bordered on the obsessive and I was too eager to know that when she was being nice to me, she was really just being nice to me and there was nothing more to it.

To her credit, when she knew from my actions and from what she’s heard from our friends that I did have a crush on her, she wasn’t mean to me or tried to brush me off. She remained friendly to me and did not avoid me. Alas, to the fool that I was I thought that that was a positive, and there was still a chance for me yet.

So for a full two semesters of uni, I persisted. I would ask her out, she’d say no and make up excuses. But sometimes, she’d relent and we would end up having coffee. It was only ever coffee though and it was always at uni. I didn’t get to drive her anywhere, which was pretty good of her in hindsight – I could’ve wasted a lot of money.

During all this, I still see her for group outings and nights out. And when I see her flirt with other guys, pangs of jealousy would course through me and it hurt real bad. I don’t remember crying over her, but I do remember feeling rage. Though luckily for me, I never got violent with anyone.

After a whole year of yo-yo-ing between feeling elated when I’d see her and get to spend time with her, and feeling dejected and like a loser when I see her paying more attention to other guys, I suddenly woke up one day and thought that this can’t continue.

When I was together with her in a computer lab that day, chatting with other people and to each other, I looked at her and then typed,

Is it awkward whenever I ask you out?

She replied,

Yeah it does.

I wrote back,

Ok I’ll stop.

And then I felt the weight on me being lifted away. As we left together, we smiled and that was that. 16 years later we remained good friends even though we never brought it up again. Thanks Tina, for teaching me valuable lessons about women and relationships which I still hold on to till this day. And, for being the classiest girl to have rejected me.

Although, after you I did rush into having my first girlfriend because after having my ego bruised, it felt good to have someone showed an interest in me. But that, as you now know, is another story.

Photos from my final year Engineering yearbook. L to R: me circa 1992, me circa 1996. Ah, memories.