Clouded in mist

With under two weeks left before I have to surrender myself to the local concentration camp report for enlistment, I took the the task of shopping for the necessities.

I’m a geek, and the only bag I own which carries anything worthwhile is my Targus laptop backpack, and that wouldn’t do. I settled on one of those side-carried sports utility bags, much like those which terrorists in fiction love to carry around their arms and bombs in. Next were a few miscellaneous items like clothes hangers, washing powder (can’t wait to sing “Laundry Day” while doing my own laundry) and a pair of swimming goggles which somewhat matched my eyesight but not really at the same time. I’m sure I’ll bump into something with it on.

I’ve been advised to get a pair of cheap plastic spectacles but I can’t be bothered to. With my eyesight, there’s no such thing as “cheap” spectacles. And frankly, a pair of huge, thick and black plastic spectacles would just make me look plain dumb.

After going countless years without a watch, I treated myself to one. I carried one that had its wrist bands broken in my pocket throughout secondary school, and after that I relied on my mobile phone as a time keeper. I’m allowed to bring in a mobile phone, but not carry around with me all the time, so I’ve no choice but to settle for a cheap digital watch.

On the topic of mobile phones, although my Sony Ericsson W950i should be allowed in without problem since it’s not a camera phone and it does not have any removable memory sticks (4 GB internal flash ftw), I decided not to take the risk of either having it confiscated or stolen, and downgrade to an old school phone like every other fellow NS-men. In my case, it was a Nokia 6100 which was handed down to me by my dad. I’ll be able to make calls from time to time, although I’m not sure who I would call. There isn’t many people that I talk on the phone to.

Left: W950i. Right: 6100

The remaining items, which are not pictured are the stuff which I have but can’t pack yet, due to obvious reasons, such as toiletries, underwear, nail clipper and slippers.

Aside from all the above, I bought a pack of mixed vegetables and a dozen more eggs to supplement the grind of my egg cooking skills (omelet, half-boiled, hard-boiled, scrambled, regular fried). I’m not sure what I’ll use the mixed vegetables for at this point. I’ve survived on a week of my own cooking so far (because my mom started work), but I’m rapidly running out of ideas on what to make that’s within my reach.

For internet addicts like me that gets deprived of a life in the event of the network going down, my ISP, Starhub, has a nice new service - the option to have them send you a SMS the moment the connection is restored. I found that out today after calling them up when the reassuring “online” LED on my cable mode, which serves as an indicator that there is indeed life outside my room, went out for more than a minute.

How it works is that you call their hotline, get redirected through layers of menus until you eventually get to this part where an automated recording tells you that “you might be experiencing some service disruption and we’re aware of the issue” (at least they’re honest), and finally after two minutes into the whole call, you get an option to leave your number.

So instead of hawking over and staring at the array of blinking lights until the right LED lights up, I get to lie back and read while anxiously waiting for a beep on my cellphone.

On a side note, connectivity has been restored now (hence my ability to post), but that text message never came. Maybe their SMS notification system is down too, and they ought to put another system inplace to notify me when their notification system gets restored.

Edit: I was too quick to comment, it did arrive six minutes after this got posted.

My grandfather and aunt, who usually resides in Indonesia, and recently just toured Europe, decided to drop by and pay us a visit before heading back home to Indonesia. They’re planning to stay here until the end of the week, or early next week. Either way, I don’t like that very much.

Their presence is a huge disruption to my daily life. I live in a house with my parents which is just sufficient for the three of us, and having extra people over means that we need to surrender a room over to them. Due to a lack of foresight when my parents first purchased this house, there’s only two bedrooms instead of the supposed three. Therefore, after surrendering one room to them, that results with me sharing a room with my parents, an arrangement which I do not fancy.

An issue I find rude about my relatives is that they often request my presence when everyone else in the family is involved in a conversation, but they refuse to speak in a language that I can comprehend. Instead of conversing in English or Mandarin, which most of them are capable of one or both, they elect to speak in Indonesian. So there I am, not being able to participate in a conversation that I’m not allowed to leave either. Indonesian might be their must fluent language, but in any form of communication, the polite, and only logical protocol is to fallback to a language than everyone can understand, or just tear down and not have the exchange at all. Cross platform software or different versions of software are designed to do that in order to preserve compatibility. I would think as humans, we’re capable of that also, but that logic escapes my relatives.

I look forward to spending as much of my time out of my house as possible during this period of time.