Bohemia Bunny

The Funnerology Principle

Monthly Archives: June 2005

Learner driver part 2

The second part is never as fun as the first part, no? The thrill of driving has sorta worn off, piffle. I did 3 hours instead of the usual 2 because I went to the circuit to learn my Part II test – parking, 3-point turn and hill.

I hate the hill most. The rest are tricky but it’s not so hard. It’s just a set of simple procedures. The hill, however, pits me against my nemesis, the clutch. Bad, evil clutch, and now it has its sidekick the handbrake, so they can torment me in tandem.

I can never tell when it’s the right moment to release the handbrake and hit the accelerator. Honestly, to me it seems like mostly guesswork. My boyfriend says to look at the tachometer (is that what it’s called?) and I said there wasn’t one. I don’t remember there being one, cos I was looking at the speedometer most of the time I was on the highway and there was only that one dial. Grrrr…

And I got stuck in a jam on the way back. On a bit of highway that was going uphill. How very fortuitious that I get to put my hill-learning into practice so soon. Oh, and to top it all off, it was raining heavily as well. Next thing you know, I’ll get a flat tyre and be asked to change it.

Oh, and Cowboy Caleb, you are right. The Kancil is SO underpowered that you have to switch off the air-conditioning when doing the hill test, so that you’ll have enough engine power to go up and down the hill. Hmph.

My memories of childhood

Badaunt has tagged me for a meme about 5 things I miss about my childhood. I’d have posted it earlier but tBlog was being problematic yesterday. She said she didn’t know if I was old ebough to miss childhood, but if I dig deep enough I’ll uncover something.

1. Mighty Mouse and Friends
I remember this cartoon that was shown every weekday at 5.30pm on TV1. Back then we only had 3 channels, and TV1 was the cartoon channel. I’d watch Mighty Mouse vanquish his villains and rescue his girl-mouse while I ate dinner. Dinner back then was easy too, I’d just open my mouth and a spoon loaded with rice would go in. I guess it was easier for my grandma to feed me if I was distracted with cartoons.

2. Playing ‘catching’
Or what is known in the Western world as ‘tag’. Our version was called ‘ice-water’, because the person who lost the lat-tali-lat was ‘it’ and took on the role of ‘ice’. If she tagged you she’d yell ‘ice!’ and you would have to freeze. The rest of the players who weren’t tagged were ‘water’ and they could free you by touching you and declaring ‘water’. ‘Ice’ won when everyone was frozen. Sounds like a juvenile version of world domination, haha!

3. Wearing a uniform
Actually I only stopped wearing a uniform in 2003, but I do kinda miss my old school uniforms. They were comfy and had giant pockets, I could keep a water bottle in them. My junior college uniform was made of some weird synthetic material and I disliked it. Uniforms are so convenient, they take away the guesswork of what to wear every day. Oh, the shame of being caught wearing the same outfit 2 days in a row! (Even if you only had 1 class on the first day and decided to recycle your outfit.)

4. Sleeping on the bathroom floor
No, I didn’t actually sleep on the floor, ew. When I started Primary 1, I was in the morning session and had to wake up at 6 am every day. I’d stumble out of the bedroom, head for the bathroom and decide to have me a little lie-down just in front of the bathroom door. So my dad would come out onto the landing and see me lying like a corpse on the floor. Perhaps it was then that I developed an affinity for sleeping on the floor.

5. Wanting to be all grown-up
I always used to grumble when people told me “You’re too young” or stuff like that. Especially if it was about bedtime and I wanted to stay up late like Mummy and Daddy did. I used to have to go to sleep at 9.30, and miss all the cool shows on TV. Now that I’m grown-up and can sleep any time I like, the novelty’s gone out of it. Growing up isn’t all we thought it would be. I’m nearly old enough to vote, old enough to drive, old enough to quit school and get married or have a job, and it’s not that great, really. Someone should have told me when I was younger. Bah.

Ok, I have to post the URLs of those who spread the meme, and add me, and then tag some other people to pass it to. Oh dear. I don’t have any blog-friends to pass it to! Okay I have one. The rest are too busy and important for memes. Boo.

Feisty Repartee
Wired JAFA
Bad Aunt
Bohemia Bunny

and because I can only think of 1 person to tag, but I hope he’ll spread it on (please, please)… and the chosen one is
Laremy at “i have succumbed to peer pressure“. Please, be a sweetie and spread it. Thank you!

Beware! Learner Driver On The Loose!

I had my first driving lesson today. Boy was it fun! I’d never so much as started a car before, but at the end of the 2-hour lesson I’d done it several times, because the car “sei for”, Cantonese for “engine spluttering to a dead halt”.

The first thing you have to do when you get into the driver’s seat, is to adjust the seat position. It’s absolutely crucial when you are a learner driver, because you’re using a common car, shared among many other learners. For someone short like me, it’s necessary because I can’t reach the pedals otherwise. Oh, and if you fail this crucial first step during the exam, out you go.

Release the handbrake, let go of the clutch, and away we go! I never thought it was so easy. Okay, so I was crawling along in first gear at a speed of 10 kmh, so it took like, forever before we reached a T-junction. Ooh, the tricky part. Show signal (this was easy, ‘left’ and ‘right’ is actually quite intuitive), step on the clutch and the brake, no car, release the clutch and whoops. Sei for already. Apparently I released the clutch too quickly. For something with such an abrupt name, it likes to be released sloooowly while you hit the accelerator. What the. So the first take-home lesson is, go gentle on the clutch release.

There was a tricky turn that involved going uphill, and it was bad enough that I started to slide down the hill, but- yes, I let go of the clutch too quickly. Bah! I’ll never get the hang of this! I did several rounds of my neighbourhood, and I’d have been content spending the entire 2 hours just going round and round the same old houses, but the instructor believes in the “frog theory”: Put a frog in water and slowly heat the water up. Before he knows it, the frog is in boiling water. Same with me. He told me to hit the main road, and I just kept turning lefts and rights and in a little while, I found myself on a busy road. What the. I didn’t think I’d go on-the-road so quickly. I mean, there are other cars here! Lots of them! And traffic lights!

Bit by bit I made it through. I ‘die-ded’ at a traffic light, next to an open-air restaurant where I was unintentionally the lunchtime entertainment. I was pressing the accelerator so hard that the tiny Kancil was going ‘vroom vroom’ like a Ferrari wannabe. A lot of traffic lights later, we hit the highway.

Highway driving is actually plenty nice. No traffic lights, no pressing the clutch (my left leg was getting a huge workout), just staying in your lane and stepping on the accelerator. Ahh. I was behind a large yellow lorry and I was happily crawling along behind it. After a period of this, my instructor asked, “Don’t you want to overtake him?”
“No,” I answered. “There are too many cars.” Hahaha! Chicken me.
He proceeded to show me how to overtake on a 3-lane highway. Signal right, go into the lane for a bit, overtake, check rear, go back into the left lane. Taddaaaa! I was too caught up in my book learning of the 12-second rule that I totally forgot I was not doing the single-lane overtaking where you have to watch out for the vehicle coming from the front. Doh.

What’s cool about being a learner driver is that you can just go slowly and do as you like, and no one can blame you. Lots of cars overtook me, and I didn’t mind. I’d rather have them in front of me than behind anyway. It was nice of them not to sound the horn or show me rude signs. I’m just an innocent little learner driver. *bambi eyes*

Eventually I was on familiar ground again, I was on the highway near Mid Valley, my regular mall. It was a bit of a long drive home but I made it. Hurr hurr. When we were in the jam I actually felt like asking him to take over, it was just too overwhelming, but I guess it just takes practice, eh?

I never got to go very fast, the Kancil only has 4 gears and my top speed was 70 kmh. When I saw how fast I was going, I panicked a bit and slowed down. It’s my first day, let’s not get too ambitious!

The instructor chided me for being rough on the accelerator and the gearshift. I believe in brute force when shifting gears, haha. And the art of the gentle acceleration is still beyond me. It’s still a very jerky ride, especially when I begin moving from a standstill. You all seriously do not want to let me drive yet. I’m paying the instructor RM15 an hour to sit in the passenger seat and bear witness to my horrifyingly frightening driving. (I tend to list to the left and come wayyyy too close to parked vehicles. I think it’s gravitational force that’s making me do that. Har.)

Next lesson on Thursday afternoon. Pray for my instructor. And the other road users. Hahaha.

Telly-welly jelly belly

I’ve realised that Astro’s Wah Lai Toi is the source of much entertainment and mirth, most of it quite unintentional. It’s a Chinese-language channel that shows lots of Hong Kong drama serials, which I find highly amusing.

A new drama premiered today, a period piece featuring my favourite actress, Jessica Hester Hsuan. She’s HOT. Apart from being very beautiful in a polished ice-queen way, she has fantastic eyebrows. I swear, most of the time she was on-screen, I was just admiring her eyebrows. I want them. My sister informed me that there’s a Brow Bar of some sort downtown. When I go there (and I desperately need to), I must make sure the person attending to me has seen the show and knows what I mean when I say, “I want Hsuen Huen’s eyebrows!”

The show was funny in another way. It being the era when men had long hair, the men in the show had thick, long plaits. Not the Wong Fei Hung kind favoured in the Qing Dynasty, but fatter and shorter. And they secured their plaits with metal hair ornaments. Vainpots. And, as if that wasn’t enough, they tied their hair in posh styles, like the hair loop (folding the plait upon itself) and mini side-ponytails, also secured with metal hairpins. My gosh, those guys wore more hair ornaments than I owned!

Even the advertisements make me laugh. My favourite nonsensical ads so far are the Gatsby ones featuring hair products. One has a weirdly dressed guy with spiky purple hair lip-syncing to a song that mainly consists of the words “Gatsby” and “farewell”. His sartorial sense is really strange. Purple shirt, lime-green cravat and a string of pearls wrapped around his fist. I swear, he looks like such a bapok (effeminate man). The other ad has men with super-huge mohawks singing “if you’re happy and you know it clap your hair” and the mohawks split and clap. Hur.

The final ad to earn an honourable mention is an animation for VeGood Purple Carrot juice. Kids are being threatened with sickness from a mutant called Infector, and their parents call upon the VeGood carrot for help. He emerges from his burrow, and, armed with the power of Purple Carrot, blasts the Infector into oblivion. What really grabs me about this ad is that, as Infector vanishes, he says “wo hui zai lai” or the infamous line, “I’ll be back.” Hahaha!

Okay, as you can tell, I am easily amused. Give me a break, all right? I’m due to start my first driving lesson tomorrow. I’ve never so much as started a car engine, so I’m kinda wondering what it’ll be like. I promise not to step on the accelerator too much. Vrrooom!

Say It With Panache!

Ah! I have produced some interesting lines for guys to use on girls. They basically sex up the usual lines guys use on girls. I wrote them mostly for fun, meaning that they haven’t been tested in real-world conditions.

When meeting a girl: “Nice to meet you, beautiful” can be rephrased as:
‘In the old days, someone as gorgeous as you would have to be locked up for their safety.’
Something more flirtatious when you’ve been making eye contact all night long:
‘You know how Helen launched a thousand ships? Well, you must float a lot of boats!’

When she wears a new dress: “Nice dress” can be rephrased as:
‘That dress finds the fulfillment of its existence in you.’ You want to say that the dress would not look as good on anyone else as it does on her. Basically, the dress exists to adorn her.
‘On other girls, that’s just a dress. On you, it’s art.’
These lines are a bit tricky, because you have to be sure that she really likes that dress and that it’s not borrowed, because then she’ll feel sad that she doesn’t own it for real. The lines are also useful when shopping, they’ll help her make a faster decision and make the shopping trip shorter. Hurr hurr.

When she looks really hot and you want to say that without looking like a perv:
Don’t say anything. Just lick your lips, slowly and sexily. Mmmm. If anything, SHE will be the one finding you hot. Yum.

Okay, that’s all I can help you with, I can’t think of other situations to ‘fancify’.

Go see my photoblog for lovely pics of the new love in my life.