Baileys and Love

"What matters to you, doesn't matter, matter to me
What matters to me, doesn't matter, matter to you
What matters to you, doesn't matter, matter to them
What matters to them, doesn't change anything."

First Train Home (2009) by Imogen Heap

In retrospect, it wasn't the smartest thing to do - traveling up to Mudtown to pick up Phoebster and bringing her down to Malacca - especially since on the following Monday, I have a midterm Surgery paper to slay. But on the other hand, I haven't seen Phoebs since March. I won't say I missed her, but that's only because it's so damn clichéd. I annoy myself every time I say it. I was hoping that she already knew how much I wanted to see her anyway. My crossing the state line four times in 4 days ought to have clued her in.

I brought Phoebs to a family dinner, but that's because Phoebs was here and I thought that it's only proper to introduce her. Normally, you can't corral me to one without either a gun or copious quantities of rohypnol. Family situations are my kryptonite.

This was the first time I brought a my girlfriend to meet the family.

Anyhoo, I can't report whether the meet was a success or not. I was listening to a Slashfilm podcast I recorded on my mp3 player the entire time and was laughing into my soup by myself at wholly inappropriate moments. "We can all hear you snort in laughter, you know," Phoebs whispered repeatedly to me, quite aghast.

We had all of 3 days together, which was the maximum number of days Phoebs mom was comfortable with leaving her daughter with me without any supervision whatsoever and it certainly didn't help that I have lecture classes to attend the entire time she was here. Phoebs barely got to visit half the places I wanted to bring her to - not to mention all the awesome Malaccan nosh that she didn't have time to sample.

She was quite determined not to like Malaccan food though, because I kept telling her how much KL food sucks compared to the culinary masterpieces we eat daily down here. Also, she pouted over the fact that I've brought my ex to most of the eating places in town before - you know how girls are about wanting to be the first person to do anything with their boyfriends, right? A stupid sentiment if you ask me; my ex was like that about my other ex too. I promptly pointed out to Phoebs that my previous girlfriend also breathed air, drank water and liked that girlie-man Wang Lee Hom, and that she should give all those up too. What's the right response to give your girlfriend when she's all pissy about silly stuff like this anyway?

In the end, Phoebs decided that she likes every single restaurant I took her to after all. I remember her sneering at the idea of Malacca's awesome baba cendol before coming to visit, saying that she ate cendol in KL before and that she won't want any in Malacca - but I made her eat it anyway. A day after she got back to KL, she started pining for it. She's still pining for it now.

Phoebs in a small little alleyway off Jonker Street leading to some teahouse. Some hairdresser mangled her fringe so she had it pinned up. I do not like her fringe pinned up. And I hate her Crocs.

Now even though it was just 3 days, it was a really exhausting 3 days. It comes from wanting to do too many things in much too short a time frame. By the end of it, I wasn't even sure I could survive the long night drive back up to KL to return Phoebs to her mom - but evidently, I did. Then, after spending a night there, I came back down the next night with the prospect of a big Surgery paper glowering down at me from its Monday perch. I didn't even have time to recuperate. With only Sunday left, I couldn't possibly bone up enough on surgical factoids to do very well, if I could even pass at all. I guess I should have spent more time with my Bailey and Love's Short Practice of Surgery textbook instead of sipping glasses of Baileys and making out. Haha, bet you thought I was going to say "making love", didn't you? *ba-dum-tush!*

Yesterday was Phoebe's birthday, the second one which I didn't get to celebrate with her ever since we got together - she had to return to India last Sunday. It always seem to me that the biggest enemy of our relationship isn't the distance but rather the beastly timing of everything.

Still, I made sure that Phoebe wouldn't leave without her birthday present,

I know that the quality of this picture is unreasonably iffy - blame Phoebs' camera-phone!

It's an external hard disk drive I picked up at the recent PC Fair! Filled with movies, songs, TV shows, comics, mangas, PDF novels and other assorted goodies! There's got to be about a whole year's worth of entertainment in there if you go through all of them one by one without sleep. It took me about a week to amass the lot from my own hard drive, my friends' media collections, and the hostel's sharing network - and it's just about the only gift I have ever given anyone with such a high degree of surety that the person receiving it would love it (and I was right, naturally). Phoebs' college internet connection has an Orwellian screening system which completely blocks any site that's fun and through the entire previous semester, I had to squeeze songs to her through her minuscule bandwidth one measly MP3 file at a time using MSN Messenger. Half the time, the sending process will fail midway. I'm sure if hell exists, one of its punishment would be doing this for eternity - sending MP3 files to the folks in heaven because as we all know, hell gets all the best musicians. Heaven only has Elgar and Liszt.

I wrote the words (yes, they are) on the bottom side of the drive using a silver metallic-ink marker, and unfortunately, I did it in a bit of a rush so it didn't look as good as planned. I was worried that the writings would melt when the thing heats up but so far, they are holding up pretty good.

I have an external hard disk drive which is the twin of Phoebs', sans the silver scribbles. Now, I'm not going to say that it's a like a couple T-shirts or matching rings sort of thing because it's so damn corny and schmaltzy. I mean, I couldn't stop myself from bursting in laughter when I practiced saying. "Mine is exactly like yours - we are sharing the exact same memories" in front of a mirror. And no, I absolutely did not consider any juvenile lines about plugging hard drives into USP's - I mean, USB's - either.

Happy 22, babe. You're positively elderly now.



The boyfriend,
k0k s3n w4i