The Real Preliminaries

Think about it! She had all those cool steel pins put in. Now she can set off metal detectors totally naked!

- Carl Foutley
As Told by Ginger (yes, this was a show aimed at young teens)

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TOFU said that he waves at random people when loaded up with luggage for a departure. It makes them jealous. What a faggot.

Met up with all the Pebble Faggots over the weekend. We did lots of faggot things together. TOFU came back gushing about an American woman he got chummy with around Bangcawk. She's been backpacking all over the world for one and a half years all by herself, and still going. Naturally he was inspired enough to coerce Panzer into a Kuala Lumpur trip not long after his return to local soil. The dinner was good, guys. Lets do this again sometime. And goddamn, why do you nabs keep the interesting stuff on your own blogs?

Real studying began at the polytechnic this week. On the first day, I overslept, rushed to the bus stop without breakfast and overshot the poly by two bus stops. Thankfully, the elderly lecturer was later than I was. Less thankfully, he lectured us like a bunch of lower secondaries and below. That said, he wasn't particularly annoying, he was just subpar. Maybe it had something to do with the module, which was about creativity and used optical illusions and primary school maths toys to 'broaden our horizons'. Most of us used it to chat, but most people I knew were girls (gender barrier for the lose), and it is difficult to interrupt a clique's flow without looking like an ass (give me your gift of the gab, TOFU).

At lunch, team five stuck together (mostly) and dined at the new canteen. The place is air-conditioned and offers a lot in terms of food choice. I tried to sit down with different people this time. Made some dumb conversation. Only bit I could remember here was the part when the I told the team hottie I didn't bathe at all as a joke. Forgot that my sick ones are not for people I don't know well.

The Indian Yoga instructor after that was pretty soothing, and basically what we do is stretch our tendons and muscles, breathe the yogi way, and lie on the ground, close our eyes, and practice abdominal breathing for a couple of minutes with the lights off. Yoga is like a slackfest.

After that I went to a nearby shopping centre (the one where team five went to buy BBQ ingredients) with two other former schoolmates (that I hadn't talked to till now), but mostly it's just a shitload of maid agencies.

The next day I had Psychology, specially for media students. We had a four hours long lecture. Despite everyone's efforts (including the valiant lecturer's), it turned out to be face-rubbing boring. I have to read 25 pages of their textbook - the powerpoint slides were already full of jargon and terminology. Gheyballs.

Lunch again. This time team five ate at a canteen that was closing down in February. The DPA people will be the only freshmen this year to eat there. Glenn joined us with a bunch of papers he was studying. Had some test at 5pm but chatted with us anyway. And by us, this time I mean just the guys. The guys and the girls sat at different tables. Maybe Glenn chose the men's table because of the gender barrier as well, or because it was just another one of his attempts to get people to talk. Most of the guys didn't talk much, and I tried to make up for it.

Glenn took us to a place where we could play board games on campus. We played Taboo there; Glenn walked in behind a staff member who was shooing us out of a restricted room and asked who had played the game before (you had to be there).

Another pop psychology course was next, except this one was slightly less retarded than the one on Monday. We watched a few pointless scenes of the Matrix and played a name game, which while lame, ensured that I knew almost everyone's names there, everyone knew me as "cockster", and someone threw a football at my cawk. Ow.

We played the prisoner's dilemma. The outcome was pretty unfavourable, because nobody had a real desire to work with the other teams and the ones who did, didn't make enough of a difference (I tried, too). Despite the numerous social messups so far, when the time came to choose team members for a real, graded group project, I opted to join one where everyone in it was a stranger. In retrospect, maybe I should have attempted to expand my comfort zone without putting my grades on the line. Internet sources say my course is pretty damn competitive, with backstabbings and social politics galore. I'll need all the marks I can get.

Back to worrying about grades again. And becoming a more socially comfortable person. Right now all the guys are doing is following the girls around because they're too socially weak to go with anyone else. When the JAE students come in, team five's guys will scatter like pinballs to their old classmates. The relationship I have with the female clique here is a far cry from the sec 4 girls clique.

I had a massive group convo yesterday. JJ was feeling nostalgic (I can never work up the balls to make my friendship with her any more real and steady) and we played truth or dare, one-on-one at first, then we got Giant and Lime and a bunch of former schoolmates in and went crazy. Fun bun until 2AM, where everyone finally got tired of me bragging about DPA and repeating the ghost stories Glenn told team five.

Jiasai and Giant and my former classmates are going to be like my social safety net in poly - even when everyone I know from DPA have gone to hell, I can still hang out with them (you will let me, right? RIGHT?). I could hang out with them all the time. But I don't want to need to do that. By the time the JAE mainstream comes, I want to have other crowds or people I can run around campus with.

Today morning, the first such person coincidentally crossed my path. Spent most of the day with her, talking about our adventures in our secondary schools. Didn't see much of team five. Apparently, without Glenn to bring them anywhere, they just stayed at the canteen for the entirety of the two hours that is lunch. Too bad she's not in my course. Here's hoping that she's not going to become just a safety net.

Tomorrow I'd better start acquianting myself with the group members I gambled on. Am I serious about this? The girl I hung out with today (and she is certainly pleasant enough to stick around and work with) is in the group that I left to join this bunch of complete strangers... so yeah. After doing some blog research, it seems that Glenn was right about this year's DPA being less enthu than DPA '08. At the very very least, I'll try hard.

I have the time and resources to accomplish here what I couldn't in Delhi.



Cookies to the first person who can count the number of times I've said "team" or "group". A pancake to the one who can identify all the places where I accidentally implied romantic tension.