Pissed off

Man, the things you face in UTP. Anybody in his or her right mind would at the very least feel annoyed. Even if you don’t wanna show it, even if you’re such an angel, I think UTP changes you.

I’m consciously fighting with myself to not use cuss words whether in my mind or on my lips.

The lecturers… EFF them. People want celebrate CNY, they all give assignments one shot. What the hell. This is what we in my family call “NO MANNERS”. This is called “BIADAP”.  ”KURANG ASAM”.

KNNCCB, as Kenny Sia says it.

KNNCCB.

I’m not going back to hometown. Now I can’t even try to come up with some sort of celebration for myself. Because I have assignments to do. MCB LA.

So much for not using cuss words. F–k.

Easier said than done

Well, in many things, if not everything, it is easier said than done.

One of those things include obeying God. Of course, obeying God can be and is a delight. But sometimes obeying God involves surrendering. It involves giving up something you like or something you enjoy.

It’s difficult, it’s painful, but it’s for the better.

So LORD lead me through the shadow of the valley of death and comfort me with Your rod. In Jesus’ name, Amen.

Always

This is the start, this is your heart
This is the day you were born
This is the sun, these are your lungs
This is the day you were born

These are the scars, deep in your heart
This is where you were born
This is the hole, where most of your soul
Comes ripping out
From the places you’ve been torn

Hallelujah I’m caving in
Hallelujah I’m in love again
Hallelujah I’m a wretched man
Hallelujah every breath is a second chance

It is always Yours
And I am always Yours

“Always” by Switchfoot from the album Hello Hurricane.

I Am Still Running

Build me a home, inside Your scars
Build me a home, inside Your song
Build me a home, inside Your open arms
The only place I ever will belong

“I Am Still Running” by Jon Foreman from the album Winter EP.

Songs

Some people like certain songs because they feel they can relate to the lyrics of the song. I guess many individuals would agree with this.

***

Face down with the LA curbside endings, with the ones and zeros
Downtown was the perfect place to hide
First star I saw last night was a headlight of a man-made sky
But man-made never made our dreams collide

Last week saw me living for nothing but deadlines, with my dead beat sky
But this town doesn’t look the same tonight
These dreams started singing to me out of nowhere
And all my life I didn’t know that I ever felt so alive

“Awakening” by Switchfoot from their album Oh! Gravity.

***

When success is equated with excess
The ambition for excess wrecks us
As the top of the line becomes the bottom line
As success is equated with excess

If your time had been nothing but money
Then I start to feel really bad for you honey
Maybe honey put your money where your mouth’s been running
If your time had been nothing but money

This ain’t my Malaysian dream
I want to live and die for bigger things
I’m tired of fighting for just me
This ain’t my Malaysian dream

(Modified) “American Dream” by Switchfoot from their album Oh! Gravity.

Air-conditioner

How to install air-conditioner in your room if you stay in Village 5 of UTP.

You just need a table fan. Put it right at your window, on the sill or on the table should be enough. Turn it on with the fan facing inside. The fan will suck in the cool air from outside and blow it inwards into your room.

I’m serious. It’s really cold at night in V5! I sit at my table and occasionally put my hand out the window just to feel the cold air. It’s kinda like sticking your hand into a fridge.

Expose

Well, I’m not in a very good mood now. Usually when this is so, I don’t talk. I wall myself up. Nobody hears a word from me. And it’s probably just a biologically impossible or incompatible thing for me to open up and tell why I’m upset/angry/sad/hurt.

Javier – upset – tell you about it – impossible.

It’s just who I am.

I am a very random person. I am very emotionally driven and emotionally motivated. Many people persecute me and criticize me for being such an emotional person. But I tell you, if I weren’t emotional, I wouldn’t be Javier. Because emotions shaped who I am. If not for my emotions, I wouldn’t be doing what I’ve been doing, or be saying what I’ve been saying.

I know that I always have a lot of thoughts and a lot of things to say. So one day, I had the idea of making my mind “transparent”. What I mean is, letting my thoughts and opinions be accessible to anyone. The concept was to allow people to look into my head, so that people will know me as I am.

To know me as I am. No hiding. All the anger, all the emotions, all the curiosity, all the questions, all the opinions, all the memories. Everything. All of it written in a blog. I had planned to write out my brain in a private blog. Why? Because along with the concept of a ‘transparent’ brain , I didn’t want people to comment or criticize me.

I’m not being like narrow-minded or what. But I’ve just had enough of people calling me all sorts of names and giving comments against who I am. It’s like, I don’t want people to tell me how I need to live. I don’t want people to tell me how I should do things. I don’t need people to tell me things about myself that I already know.

Only God can judge me.

So I did start that private blog. I wrote some really personal stuff in there – that blog probably was deeply imprinted with my essence. It’s like my soul was there. Because in that private blog, I could freely let loose my mind to say whatever I want and expect that nobody would comment or criticize.

However, how in the world would the ‘transparent’ brain concept work if I kept the blog private? So I allowed certain individuals access to it. I planned that maybe someday in my future years, I would make it public. Who knows I could compile everything and make it a book or autobiography or something.

But one day, one of those privileged individuals made a comment about something I said. To be honest, I was very hurt. I was very hurt, I was very hurt.

That very night, I deleted that private blog. Gone was my avenue; my Muse weeps eternally because now she is caged once again but this time for it is for all time. Gone was my freedom to speak my mind without fearing condemnation and criticism. There is no point for me to start another one in future, because I’ll just end up deleting it again. And the cycle repeats.

I feel so devastated just recalling about this incident.

Yet, I feel so comfortable talking about this. I don’t know why I can’t tell any of these sort of things face-to-face with a person. Not even with my closest friend. Ironically, I’m daring enough to reveal things like this in my blog.

Maybe it’s the mask and comfort of the Internet.

One night, my girlfriend said that I get upset over the littlest things, and because of that reason, she also said that I’m worse than a girl. That was probably the greatest insult that I’ve ever received. She practically castrated me.

Humiliation isn’t something I accept very well, being a proud person.

That night when she said that, I just didn’t know what to make of it. But what I do know is that from now on, I’ll just keep quiet.

I had a dream once. It was something like this. My girlfriend was nagging on me because she was unhappy with my girlish-ness, and she said, “Why can’t guys be more independent and self-motivated? Why do they get upset so easily? Why are you always so emotional?”

I just answered, “Well, if girls are so smart, why don’t women rule the world? Why was Adam born first? Why was Adam put in charge of the entire world? Why was Jesus a man but not a woman?’

And she wanted to reply, and I knew she was going to apologize for talking too much, and she would admit that she was being disrespectful.

But before she could speak, I silenced her by saying, “There, you’re still going to talk.”

I feel so angry now. It’s so crazy that I think I’m gonna need to go through a hard time repenting and re-conciliating myself to a number of people.

Room

Room in my heart.

Room in my heart.

Make room in my heart.

I feel like closing all my Vibrations notes. Sign out from Gtalk. Close my to-do notebook. Ignore my emails. Put aside my timetable. Forget about my assignments and projects. Shut down my laptop. Switch of the lights.

And just…

… turn up the music.

OD on OD

OD on OD. It’s a term my spiritual twin sister Kooky and I coined. It means “Overdose on Overdrive”.

Being a Mechanical Engineering student in UTP isn’t easy. There were some who exaggerate and said that it is comparable to being in a military school. Assignments, projects and quizzes come at you at every single possible free time, so whatever modicum of spare hours you have in a week are all eaten up.

I had just taken a shower after coming back from a very tense two-hour long Rotaract BOD meeting and supper at a mamak. I pulled my drawer out, grabbed a fistful of circular pieces of metal and went downstairs of my hostel block. I went to the tall vendor-machine and fed it RM1.40 worth of those circular pieces of metal, poked a button and amusedly observed the words displayed on the machine: “Ice-cold Coca-Cola”.

Indeed it was Coca-Cola I wanted. Another thing I share in common with Kooky – we are OD on OD experts who are fueled by caffeine.

I scrambled onto a nearby railing to sip on the Coca-Cola which was disappointingly not ice-cold. I sighed as I realized that I was going into OD on OD mode already, and it’s only the start of Week 2 of my academic weeks. And there are another 16 weeks worth of 7 projects, countless tests, quizzes, assignments and everything else in between.

Sigh. Gonna need more than caffeine. Gonna need more than Mega-ultra-super-mega OD on OD. Gonna need to…

… offer You my life.

ETP

ETP stands for Engineering Team Project. It is a compulsory ‘course’ or ’subject’ that all Third Year Engineering students in UTP must undertake. I suppose “Engineering Team Project” is pretty much self-explanatory.

What I’m gonna talk about now is actually about my supervisor who is actually a lecturer in the Civil Engineering Department: Assoc Prof Ir Arazi Idrus.

The link above is the link to his expertise profile. There is one section called the “Consultancy” section. Though I have no idea what “Consultancy” means exactly in this particular context, listed there are 20 projects. Probably he was involved in those projects as the consultant or whatever lah.

The thing is… all those projects were big-time projects involving big-bucks. The smallest value is RM250,000. Next is RM600,000.

Crazy.

The rest costed HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS each.

And he actually has 45 publications. Which is an impressive number compared to a lot of other lecturers in UTP.

I don’t know why but I feel that being under this lecturer  is bad news. I suspect that he will have high standards and expectations from my ETP group members and I.

Another thing is, none of my group members are studying Civil Engineering. Two are from Chemical, one is from Electrical & Electronic, one is from Petroleum, another is from Mechanical (and plus me, so that makes two Mechanical Engineering students actually).

So six of us. No Civil student. So how. That’s a double-edged sword. Good side is, either party is not too familiar with either’s field of study. So our project might not face much objection from our supervisor. Bad side is, we won’t know if we’re doing the right or wrong thing because our supervisor might not know what we’re actually doing.

However, since he was involved in a lot of large-scale works before, I’d like to be optimistic and hope that he would be a good-natured , knowledgeable and supportive man.