I'm home

home coming me / resuming homelife / my life is governed by the past

It took only two days at home to make me feel as if I hadn't been gone for the past two years.
It took Hakim's remarks on my obsession with the laundry to make me realize the above.
It took the drive home from the airport plus my dad's pep talk on getting a job a.s.a.p. to make me want to jump on the next plane headed for Brisbane (or anywhere else for that matter!).
It took exactly one week before I earned my first deadly serious glare from my dad. It took me half an hour to realize that he was giving me one. I take this as a positive sign that I'd been gone too long.

I'm still failing at going through one whole day without upsetting my mom (either intentionally or unintentionally. especially intentionally).
(while i was typing this, my dad came over to show me something which he'd just came over to show me about ten minutes ago. that was scary.)
I'm still failing at redirecting my continously-chewing-jaws to healthier dietary options besides left-over-kuih-raya and bananas. (neither one of which seem to be running out, mysteriously enough).
I am still failing in reducing the pile of junk I'd left behind two years ago. I usually manage to empty a box or two after hours of rumaging but I'm really just shuffling and redistributing them into different boxes. (I've considered dumping all the boxes since I've been able to survive the past two years without needing any of them but anyone who's ever owned anything in their lives would know that sentimentality makes that action virtually impossible so I might as well forget it).

I have, however, made it home safely, thanx be to God so, that makes everything look rosy from my end of the tunnel. life is sweet indeed.

Sun

Sun

I caught the sun rising today. It said hi to me so I waved back with as much optimism as I can muster. The day promises to be beautiful so I breathed easy and sipped my tea. Contemplating the hows of packing never got me anywhere, so I might just start randomly dumping all my stuff into boxes and label them with ingenous tags like "stationery and sorts" or "software + some other hard stuff" so I'd have something to smile about while unpacking them a year from now. If there ever was a plus side to saying goodbye, albeit a temporary one, it'd be the food and caffein. I've had more farewell luches and coffee meets that I can count on my hands. The pain of never seeing them again ( for the next year, more or less) is somewhat soothed by whatever caffeine-enhanced-beverage I chose for the day. Come to think of it, saying goodbye has been a lot of fun. The only friend I might worry about being honest when she said she'd miss me was my Turkish classmate. She relied quite heavily on my assistance for some of her major design assignments. I do hope I wasn't her last resort.
I brag rather sheepishly (try that expression in the mirror, you'll laugh yourself silly) to my friends that I've been packed and ready to go since last week. Strangely though, there's still a lot of stuff I feel I haven't touched. Up till last week I'd set my mind to not seeing my family and friends back home for at least two more years. Now that I'd decided to return, extending my stay for even another day seemed unbearable. I find myself worrying that something might go wrong at the airport and I'd have to get a summer job here instead, which would drive me further into unadulterated caffeine consumption, no doubt.

I'm anxious about going home too. Something tells me there are some ghosts from my past ready to jump out and give me a nice scare. If only I could clearly list down all the hanky panky I'd been up to before coming here. Then I could properly prepare an alibi should any of them ever surface.

There's some people I'm dying to see. Two years without eye contact can either do some serious damage or bring us closer. I'll leave that one up to God. I just hope I can be more honest with myself this time around. If there's one thing I'd like to do when I return, it's that I'll try not lie to myself too much. Nevermind everyone else. I think being honest to myself is most important in growing up. I really do want to grow up and resonate more maturity in my actions. I think it's about time.

Maybe a bit more time in the sun will help jump start my growth spurt. So sun, here I come!

red

Going out to meet dear Feyza

(in the midst of throwing stuff into my oversized purse filling my water bottle)

Red flowered pinnafore and a red T
Red scarf and a red mp3 player
Red-striped bag and brownish-red loafers.

Wonder what Feyza's gonna be wearing today.

Identity theft

Identity Theft

It started innocently enough. A pm from an anonymous id claiming to be a long-time friend. I thought it was too, until I saw his picture and realized this was no one I've ever met and stopped replying to the repeated pms asking to be friends. By then it was too late. He'd already gotten hold of my password and started taking extensive liberties with my yahoo id. Immagine the nerves on that guy.

Explaining what he set out to do next would take up too much of my precious time, as this is one mental case that's gone far beyond repair with not a shred of hope for recovery. As the process of remedying this dire situation has taken up more than a day while I'm still trying to finish my research paper with time that is getting more and more limited with each letter I type in this here blog, I am not keen on letting that go on for much longer.

Suffice it to say that from this day forth I will forever be suspicious of anonymous pms starting a conversation that seems to have dropped off somewhere and therefor does not warrant any introduction as to why the window pops up with 'aduh, lama betul tak online. Ingat nak suruh comment pasal my pics kat sabah...' Boy did I fall for that one.

And I will forever, from this day forth, get a mini-heart attact everytime the internet acts up and I get signed out of ym for no apparent reason, as that is how this whole caboozle of an identity theft came to my attention.

This humble blog of mine doesn't receive too many visitors, I admit, but I'm still so overwhelmed by the notion of someone taking liberties with my id, at my expanse nonetheless, that I'm inclined to post yet another tell-all of this tale so that the odd acquaintance who happens to stumble upon this page might know that as of 4.30pm on November 5th 2006, the id 'sage_blossom' no longer belongs to yours truly but to some sanity-deprived individual who has thus far displayed a comforting level of unintelligence. I have reason to believe that this individual has access to my email as well, therefor please disregard anything and everything coming from the email add sage_blossom@yahoo.com. If in doubt, simply converse with him in English and you'll find him stuttering and painfully making excuses without actually giving a response. No offense to non-english speakers, this is just an obvious trait I noticed within the short time I communicated with him. Oh and by the way, he is IT savvy to a frightening degree, at least for an internet-for-dummies reader like myself.

This is to caution you on what this internet predator (getting too emotional? I think NOT!!) might stoop to, so please be careful. And if all else fails to instill at least a morsel of fear/caution in you, think of this...IT COULD HAPPEN TO YOU!!

I'm inclined to state his yahoo id here so anyone with enough guts might venture in my shoes for a while and see what that does to your cyber exitence, but then again, I'm not going to be responsible for this guy's success in securing his next victim for whatever purpose.

With that said, I'm going back to my unwavering pile of assignments.

Raya ke-3

raya ketiga

I woke up this morning to a muted sunrise. I sat up in bed with my eyes shut and felt the rays on my eyelids. It was cool so I pulled the covers up to my chin and sat like that for a while. I wanted to savor that moment because it was something I'd lost and might never get back.

The soft breeze that was blowing into the room, the thin curtains that was transforming the light, and the smell of food as Kak N heated them up on the kitchen stove.

All that brought me back to when I was about nine or ten years old in my grandmother's bed on the waning days of raya. There'd be the clang of cutlery being used, my mom, my grandmother and my aunts' contstant chatter pulling me out of bed and onto the cool wooden floor. I'd sit on the 'bendul' in the kitchen along with my cousins, waiting for our turn to shower. My mom would be sitting at the dining table with her cup of 'teh susu', on the chair right next to the window where the 'pokok cermai' constantly peaks through. I'd lean against the wall and drift in and out of sleep until I hear my grandmother hurrying me into the bathroom. She'd be talking about some distant relative or another that we just had to go and visit that day because there was no better time to go than now.

I love that time. It was simple, it was safe and I was happy although I didn't realize at the time that I was. Happy. Nothing more and nothing less and that was that.

And somehow this morning, aeons away from what that was, I caught a glimpse of it and managed to hold on and for a brief moment I was, again, happy like that.