Aidilfitri, Finals & Halloween
Are you in search of spirituality and inner harmony? Why do you need a spiritual teacher?, asked a little flyer I saw on a message board at Uni the other day, right before it said: Find the answers at our seminar - only $18 !!!
Who would’ve thought inner harmony could be bought at $18?
Pardon my lengthy absence from this blog; lots of work to be done in the last weeks and days leading up to semester finals, especially since I’ve spent the most part of the semester loafing and moping, procrastinating and contemplating the nothingness of things along with trying to remember the last time I had a shower. Staying up for a full 36 hours straight to finish a film production budget for my Business of Film & TV class and a 6000-word communications audit report for Communications in Organizations class made me feel as if I tumbled into some terrible alternate dimension where I was working as an accountant. I also had a 30 page-film pitch document to complete which was mostly made up of lines such as “Sharp! Witty! Fast-Paced! Edgy! Thrilling! Powerful!” written over and over again to either hypnotize or bore all those who lay their eyes upon it into funding the film project.
I’ve also been feeling just generally down lately. I’m not sure if it has anything to do with spending my first Aidilfitri away from home without any traditional festive cookies to binge my miseries away with or pesky relatives to blame my miseries upon. To make myself feel better, I cooked some nasi lemak and chicken rendang for my two housemates and Specimen A, the honorary housemate (long story) and we had an Aidilfitri dinner thing. I had my kebaya top on and I requested that everyone come to dinner in their traditional/national outfits or proper evening attire. Specimen A showed up in shorts, a wife beater and flip flops claiming that it was indeed the Australian national costume. The dinner went well, my rendang was successful but I still felt a grey cloud looming over me….
Which I thought a night out at a Halloween party would fix. I had not properly partied since the end of winter holidays and Z reckoned it was living a life of hermitude that was dragging my spirits down. So I pulled on my most flattering pair of jeans and slipped on my brand new fuck-me shoes – peep-toe, sleek, shiny hot-red patent leather with sharp, 4-inch heel. I even allowed Z to do my hair – “sexy, tousled chic” was the idea, I think – and curl my lashes. When people asked what I was dressed as for Halloween, I should have said, “Effort”. Instead, my lousy mood made me reply “Z’s friend”. Yes, I was dressed as somebody’s friend.
There was a girl at the party in a pink wig who either said she was on holiday from
M wasn’t the only guy that came dressed with a twist. J.A., came dressed in a long dark green robe with a hood that seemed to be fastened together by a Scouts Merit Badge for Ancient Rituals. When asked who he was supposed to be, J.A. first replied, “An Aztec Pope!” but was only met with looks of utter what-the-fucks? He then changed it to, “The priest person from the Da Vinci Code movie” only to have people disagree. Three layers of white, theatrical makeup and lashings of black eyeliner later; he had become “Death with a Twist.”
“What’s the twist? People get to live?” I asked. J.A. has the honor of being the first person I snogged in the Gold Coast, all those months ago and I forever have the dishonor of being yet another victim of the local uni campus’ international player/ kissing bandit. Hey, what can I say – it happened during one of my first nights out in town and I was suffering from too much endorphin-release and enthusiasm to have very sound judgment. In our following encounter, all at parties, I’ve managed to over-compensate my embarrassment with what I’d like to think as light-hearted, witty banter.
“So, how come the only time we bump into eachother is at parties at night, where everyone’s intoxicated?” he mentioned.
This time though I found myself distracted from making a witty comeback by what the host of the Halloween pre-party, an outrageous French MBA student called ‘P’, had to show me. P was one of the first fellow uni-mate Z and I met when we arrived on the Gold Coast, while house-hunting. P was then identified by the inappropriately short length of his khaki shorts which gave him an obvious wedgie and made the tall Frenchman look like a giant schoolboy who had outgrown his school uniform. For Halloween, P’s costume wasn’t any less disturbing. He was dressed as Alex, from Stanley Kubrick’s film version of A Clockwork
My conversation with J.A took place while we were sitting on the balcony of P’s penthouse apartment with the gorgeous views of the Surfer’s
P claimed that his face-mask/ jock shield “was ‘andmade, if you know what I mean, custom made to fit, zat’s why eet ees so beeg and girls cannot stop looking at eet. But I tell zem, what can I do? ‘Zees eez all I ‘ave to offer, no?” Later in the night, I overheard him telling yet another girl in lingerie to take a picture with him because “my mother thinks I’m gay!”
The actual Halloween party was at a tourist-y bar filled with drunken Canadians, one of whom was dressed as a giant joint. Even that failed to take the blues away, so Z and I made an early exit, back to our home in Labrador, otherwise known in a charming rhyme as “Lock-Yer-Door Labrador” where I resumed feeling sorry for myself, bemoaning not only the fact that I don’t seem to enjoy the things I used to as much, but also the lack of perceived overall magic and meaning in the things I do with my day-to-day life.
Today, as I was sorting through junk mail, I found a flyer which ominously declared “The End of False Religion is Near!” complete with a background image of fearsome dark clouds and lightning.
On the back, the flyer promised that all shall find the True Path if we purchased their special booklet for $5.
For amusement’s sake, I decided to stick the flyer on the fridge.
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P.S. I also recently watched the film, Natural Born Killers on DVD and I'm starting to think that Oliver Stone is a genius director. Or at least, was. Who knows what went wrong with Alexander? Maybe the sight of Colin Farrell straddling a horse in a miniskirt was too much to handle.. I highly recommend it if you're looking for a movie to watch.
