Rant about the Old Man.

Today was not a good day. I dread coming home, especially since my mom isn’t around to distract my dad. *Mak is in England (the b***h) trudging around in the cold with her brother and his wife. Yes, I would like to trudge in the cold too because it’s London. I know one cyber community I’m still in it that calls anime enthusiast as japfags (Japanese-faggots) so I guess I’m an engfag. Hell, half my blog’s name is from a flowering English weed.

But she’s just playing 3rd-world tourist since she’s got money and not metaphorically spitting in my eye so I won’t anonymous flame her in Blogspot. It’s more about my father, aka Ayah.

Let me give you a long winding story. Get a Coke, or suck on something while you read if you like because the best way I can get you to sympathize with me instead of with a mature adult is starting with my older brother.

*Arsenal played around a lot during his studies in USA. Coming home from overseas empty-handed is something *Ayah couldn’t stomach, more so because he had supported his younger brother overseas. *POot came home without a degree, something Ayah reminded his children over a hundred times a year for the last over 30 years.

I’ll be lying if I said I didn’t think my brother’s university education disaster had an effect on me. If anything, maybe it made me more a loner. Arsenal had tried to escape the family and live on his own because of this. I didn’t know if the plan formed while he still was in USA or when he got off the airport. This was to get you an idea about the wrath of Ayah.

Just to be strictly fair, Ayah is a good man. One of the best I’ve ever met. The only time he didn’t care what the general public thought about him was when he sang karaoke. Every other time, yes, reputation matters. Money and reputation.

Ayah grew up during Malaysia’s emergency rule at one of those ‘black areas’. ‘Black area’ is one of those places where there’s a high communist concentration. Expect bombs and food rations. Shop owners open your can of beans right at the store so they’ll go bad if you try to hoard food for the jungle-sneaking communists.

After the emergency, Ayah worked hard. Country boy got his tops in one of the best car dealers in the nation. He was flying business class to Germany every 2 weeks before he retired. He told us about how the Chinese have a saying that wealth survives 3 generations; first to earn, second to spend and third with only the name.

If that wasn’t a paternal threat, the Petronas Towers is made of beans.

You can’t fault a father for nagging high maintenance. Especially when he’s retired, unemployed and over 50 years young. I still remember how he used to beat me for having low grades. They hurt. Not a month goes by without at least for one day, thinking what I might have to do to just keep him neutral. Just because he doesn’t beat his kids anymore doesn’t mean he couldn’t and every possibility that he would still do it.

I do to Ayah to what I always do to things I worry about. Sleep it off. Well, my father didn’t have a deadline (he does actually, but as he’s a healthy guy, let’s not go there) and I don’t have to send in assignment reports. I don’t even show him my grades anymore, just told them to him and he thinks I’m telling the truth.

Two months ago, I did tell the truth, that I failed one subject. He didn’t blow like Mt. St Helen. I think it was due to me playing the guilty person. I can cry out tears and drain out snot like a faucet when I’m sad. More disgusting than embarrassing really (I stopped thinking what I look to people years ago) bit I did it in hope that Ayah to minimize his angry man output.

He was definitely angry all right but I think the teary-snot thing did the trick. We just had a very long chat which I phased out most of the time and he walk out of my room. For the next few days I played it neutral, just in case he might use my failure against me in something. He might not, but just knowing somebody got that kind of power over me still merits a hi-bye-only level of communication. He does brought it up from time to time, especially now that the semester’s drawing to a close.

In fact, I may have to brush this act up next month. I have every chance I might fail my thesis paper because I didn’t bother meeting my supervisor. I said before that I’m immensely private but mostly I just didn’t bother too. I had bad experience with teachers during primary school so I usually avoid them whenever I can avoid them. Or any other person who has authority over my future, for that matter.

It’s not my supervisor’s fault. Nothing about my failing grade is her fault. I just don’t want to see her and I don’t know what to ask her (slept it off, in fact). To cap it, the head of faculty had been informed about my misdemeanor. Head hadn’t answered yet. Great. If I’m not approved for presentation, auto-F. It doesn’t matter that I’ve already did the project and submitted the final draft in time. My supervisor is not going to defend me. Who would, I mean come one, after all the non-trouble I’ve caused her.

Maybe when I get the F, my father will blow his top. I know he’s been saving it. More so since money for the school is running out. My brother, Arsenal, had already been through it. And I’ve tried the running away method before (came back on my own will after over 12 hours). But pretty now is the sit-and-wait time.

Maybe if I sleep it off, maybe a new, bigger problem would arise, so I can have an excuse to cavil. Like meningitis or something.

First Bloom...

Hello and welcome to my blog.

This isn’t my first blog. My old one fell into discontent ages ago, mainly I think due to immaturity. I was young and I pretty much joined the blog bandwagon along with hundreds of others in a cyber community for teenagers. During those days, I strayed a lot from my own way of thinking, writing so that people would read. Maybe add a comment.

The old one pretty much bumped out as time went by. The contents, the accessories, the groups it was in, the whole blog grew into something that just wasn’t me. Not the real me. It became a... well not so much a façade. More a farce. I had to stop before I don’t recognize me anymore.

So I’m making a new start on online journals. I never really had a need for blogs. Or journals, for that matter. I didn’t want to because I’m very much a private person. Immensely. If you ask my own parents 20 questions of what they think they know about me, they’ll get wrong two thirds of it.

My... uh, privacy, is a side effect of my childhood. Of course.

I had a super terrific childhood. I was spoiled, the third child with three siblings and hard-working parents. I like to cry and joke a lot. I took nothing serious and, as Ayah always tells me, I took much of my life for granted. I know I do, but I just can’t seem to change it.

I got used to being what I do, being in the system of sleeping off worries instead of tackling the problems that caused then, then shouting quietly in private. In the end, nothing gets done and resources had been wasted. At my age, I’m institutionalized. If I were to fill out a confession after being injected with truth serum, I would put ‘Occupation: Extremely lazy addict.”

Don’t get too much emphasis on it. The imagination is a good thing (I’ll even pat God on the back for giving it to mankind) but I’m not stupid. If I ever get broke, I know how to get work. A work with no future maybe, no offense to anyone who ever had been broke, I do apologize. But my needs are simple.

Work, eat and sleep. If it’s available, take it. If it’s not, screw it. And if you have to do something illegal to get it, do it quietly and leave no trace. Okay, if I ever had to resort to that, maybe I am stupid. Smart or stupid, I never really know what category I’m in. Not even during primary school. I got switched back and forth between the ‘smart students’ and ‘stupid students’ class. Attention disorder maybe.

Those were the little schooldays. I’m still at school, though the tertiary level. I should have graduated ages ago. In fact, I’m not sure if I’ll ever graduate. There’s a six-year limit I think, to how long you can stay as a student. I’m not sure. Again, attention disorder.

Not good for me. Even worse bad for my family, parents particularly. My folks don’t have a lot of kids. Just one boy, then a girl then me and then a genius (yes, male).

It might sound a good lot of kids (if you’re, heh, a Japanese maybe) but it’s pretty average if you count all my family members on my maternal side. The first two have already begun producing money and babies. Well, my sister is. My brother (an Arsenal fanatic I might say) is sort of living with my sister’s family until he made more money or married a rich girl, whichever comes first.

That’s my family. I will refer them from father to mother to brother to sister to younger brother as Ayah, Mak, Arsenal, MySis and Genius because I’m that kind of person. I may not care what people think of me but I’m pretty sure my peeps don’t want to get my dirt near them by crying out their real names. Besides, this blog is all about my thoughts and I have to get to call them whatever I like.

What’s with the name? If I were a guy, this would probably count as gay. Just for that, I’m not. Neither guy nor gay that is. But sexual orientation aside, the name is partially my love for fantasy genre, partially because I’m fascinated with English society and mostly because ‘shadowflower’ had already been taken by some pink-crazed German girl who hadn’t updated her blog since she signed in 2005.

I used the word ‘shadow’ in many abstracts and contexts. Corrupted by the Fantasy and Sci-Fi sections in bookstores, I have this imaginary world in my head as big as any MMORPG (massive-multiplayer-online-role-playing-games, if there are some of you who have yet to learn big acronyms. And welcome to English) and in that imaginary world, ‘shadow’ is a type of magic the imaginary people use to hide their spells’ technically. That’s another story however. Remind me to tell it to you someday.

Pimpernel is a type of flower that grows in England. A weed actually. Other weeds in England are Asians and Arabs (Indians, however, are no longer a weed since they taste so good when boiled in soups). I don’t necessary like the plant since I’ve never seen it outside the Internet but I choose it because I liked a short novella that’s older than Jane Austen called The Scarlet Pimpernel.

So by changing the first word, Shadow Pimpernel has almost the same scheme as the book, save it’s for my thoughts instead of suppressed French people. Whenever my thoughts or ideas get close to getting cut off, I save them in here, away from the real world. I just need a safe place for them, to think freely and let unbiased people see them get expressed.

If you don’t like what you’re reading, then ahead to another browser. If you think I’m a loner who needs a butt-**ck badly, leave a comment and maybe I’ll mention you in my next post. If you think it’s pitiful for me to exist since I’m writing miserable things about the people in my life, do leave a comment too.

In fact, leave all kinds of comment and maybe you’ll destroy my account’s bandwidth because I’m keeping my anonymity to protect my thoughts, my freedom of the individual mind. I’ll add some details from time to time, but the day I close this is the day the day I might actually hurt someone I care about with this blog.

So if you think I’ve hurt your feelings, go take a butt-***ck. You don’t know the feeling that’s blooming in me to finally get the s**t out for being totally honest.