saigoheiki.com

Happiness is watching the Penang Lorong Selamat char kuey teow uncle behind my house slowly and deliberately preparing the dish, with utmost gentleness and care like he was caring for his own young, and smiled widely as he passed his masterpiece to me in a red plastic bag.

Happiness is seeing young Laotian kids squealing “SABAIDEE!” to us each time they see a foreign face. It’s when watching a favourite movie, listening to a favourite song, playing a favourite game. It’s being able to understand smatterings of Chinese and Japanese; it’s in a small mamak session. It is an abstract thing – something that lifts you out of gloomy grey clouds, something that pounces on you in small, little incidents, something that extends into satisfaction and contentment.

Happiness is intimate memories of the people I love, that flutter around on a chained existence. When we were sitting in that restaurant with the evil golden arches. When we were holidaying together in Langkawi. When we were talking. When you talked.

Happiness is a restrained drug I try to inject myself with – sometimes no matter how artificial it may seemed like, it’s the potion that keeps me going.

---

The last day of Chinese New Year was on Thursday, and my friends found it prudent to celebrate its end by.. gambling in my room.

Sarah’s back!

Playing the usual Blackjack.

The smaller the gambling group is, the more obvious you’d see that the money you lose will eventually come back to you.

Andy laughing so happily.

Holding some money~

Playing chor dai di.. Sarah had to help me since I suck in it completely.

We also played some Blackjack-clone game which Andy taught.

We went to Melur USJ17 and Ding belanja-ed us ‘cause we were all saying that he won most of our money. Padahal he won only RM6 and the bill came up to be RM12 LOL.

Come Friday, the 5 of us (from the gambling session of the night before) went in Kai Tzin’s car to Summit at about 12 noon to watch Vantage Point. I liked it – unconventional in its style (I love movies that are creative in its own way), and the storytelling was pure aces.. although some of us didn’t like its direction.

And at night around 11pm, the four of us (minus Sarah) were out again to Tanjung for a mamak session – I think I’ve said it countless of times in the past, but small mamak sessions sometimes work very well than its larger counterparts because they seem to be more close-knitted and intimate, at least to me. At the end of it at nearly 2am, I felt satisfied as if I’ve done something productive wtf.

Oh and I just commenced my Reading Chinese Newspaper Preparatory class – what a mouthful – earlier this week. It’s so freaking tough and demoralising – looking at a single page of Nanyang Siang Pau or Sin Chew Daily or China Press filled with Chinese characters and in amazingly small print, I could probably understand less than 10% of what the hell the Chinese journalists have written.

But as they always say, no pain no gain.