November 29th, 2003 by Eshin
Wah, I just woked up from having this really strange dream. For some reason I was taking a flight and the reason is rapidly diminishing from my memory. But I do remember that it was a CX flight on a 747. What was strange was, that although I was eager to get on board the flight, the FA’s weren’t ready yet to welcome us and when they did see us, they didn’t even bother to get up. In fact, it was perhaps the quietest boarding I’ve experienced.
I was sitting in economy class but it was stangely in the forward business class area. For some reason, the FA’s in my section weren’t getting up at all and nor were any of them coming down from the back. I was waiting expectantly for that to happen, but the more I looked for them, the more they got fewer number. The ones that I did see, I recognized from other flight that I have taken. One was I believe an Indian or Sri Lankan Senior Purser. Another one was a doll of girl on my last flight that I didn’t chase after. Then for some reason, there was a FA that looked like a girl I studied with at college called Pilar. No idea why she ended up in their. She was a Portugese girl who had very fine and delicate features. She could look like a flight attendant, I reckon. There was no Napa or Louisa on board either, which was good.
Another strange things was that I was booked into a window seat which isn’t what I normally get. I explained to this German (or was it an American lady?) who was sitting next to me, whether I could swap. She agreed but not after chatting to me for some bit. Turns out she was stopped over in Amsterdam for a couple hours in the middle of the night for a connecting flight. I wasn’t really interested in what she was saying to me anyways.
I think we were flying because people started to walk around again. Again, no flight attendants to be seen anywhere. It was like that time when you take off and no-one is walking around? That was it. There was some coke-head of a teen dressed in some funny mini-skirt set up which was like a fetish salute to a pilot’s uniform walking around. I thought she worked for the airline but then I realized she had probably woken up this morning and was excited about flying, that she changed into her “special flying outfit”. How sad was that?
Then for some reason, some one in front of me, well, not really in front, but to the left of me (it was to the left of me, but felt like it was in front of me…hey, this was a dream), started to sing “Flying Without Wings”. Everyone around him was starting to pay attention to what he was doing. I believe it wasn’t a positive feeling they had to him, and they were expecting him to stop singing.
He sort of toned down his singing but I regretted that he was forced to stop…so I tried to find it on my MP3 player. I sort of know that I don’t have that particular song on my player since I don’t really listen to Westlife.
I think this started my ascent back to the waking, rational world. I stopped listening to MP3 player because I realized I had not charged it, which triggered me to think about when I had last charged it. I think this very rational question cued my brain to stop it’s chaotic sequences and to deal with a real world query.
It made one last attempt to drag me back to the surreal fantasy it had conjured up, and almost in answer to the very rationale thought, it tricked me to believe that I had given up listening to the MP3 player and to start writing a letter to someone. This was the second letter that I was writing to this particular person.
Of course, it made the mistake of making me believe I had already written a first part to the letter and that I was just joining an additional second part to it. Somewhere I knew this was wrong because as soon as I had written the words “You’ll never believe what just happened…” I started to query the first part I had written and realized that it did not exist in the real world. At this point, I surfaced back into sanity.
I don’t know why I had such a dream. Even though I am letting go of the past slowly, by diminishing the regret of losing Napa and Louisa, the pain and fear I feel of flying with CX at times when it was really bad came back to me in the dream. Maybe it’s cause its the first time I’ve had this week to go into a deep sleep which was aided by last night’s strenous massage. Flight attendants were probably playing in my head since the team that handles CX in my company were looking at some casting tapes. Maybe it was because I might be leaving soon.
November 29th, 2003 by Eshin
Met up with Hilary for dinner tonight and we went for Japanese at Nutsford Terrace. It was great ’cause I got to have Tuna Belly rice again for dinner as well as at lunch time with James. Actually, both times the wasabi they dolloped onto the tuna was extra strong so both were quite painful affairs. I’m not sure what that says about my pleasure/pain fetish.
Neither of us really wanted to go for any of the action filled evenings that our friends had planned. So we decided to try and go for a massage. We tried two places in TST. One I had been to before with people who shall remain nameless. It was one of those dodgy places where they actually asked me twice whether I really really wanted a normal “health” massage.
“You know if you want a proper massage, then the girl will be older?” says the charming, gentrified pimp.
“Yes, normal, no extra trimmings, please.” says I to aforementioned suited pimp. I think he thought I wasn’t right…apparently no-one who went to that place went just for the massage.
Well, needless to say Hilary and I didn’t go that place. We tried another one that was recommended by the hotel she parked her car in. They said it was one of the famous ones and had valet parking. Only thing is that when we pulled up on the street, two lovely choir boys approached the car to “valet” it. It also turned out that it was men only.
The thing is that Hong Kong is full of massage parlours and I, as a guy, can easily go in there and request just a regular massage. The problem was that for women, it would seem, it’s a little bit harder to rub the tensions away.
We eventually found a place recommended by Hilary’s friend that was 24 hours. Now I’ve never been to a massage place in any other country (except Thailand but that was more of spa), so I wouldn’t be able to judge on how similar it is to Hong Kong.
But what happens is that they usher you into a changing room, you strip naked and then you go and either enjoy the pool or hot tub, or the sauna or steam room or just go and shower. Once there, you go to this waiting room where there are these comfy arm chairs where you can either sit and read the newspaper, watch TV, smoke the free cigarettes, drink the free drink, eat the free food (which they order out), or read the free porno mags they provide (depending on the type of establishment). They keep you there while they arrange your room and the masseuse.
Of course, this time the pimp daddy didn’t offer me a whole menu of sexual services that were on offer but just provided me with two simple options - soft or hard. Now I’m used to hard from my previous massage experiences, so I’m thinking hard is the way to go. It’s actually the only way to do a massage in my book. I’ll soon learn to regret my decision.
I eventually go up and there’s this sour looking old woman who’s going to be massaging me tender body for the next hour or so. Anyway, she asks me whether I want her to walk on my back…which I normally don’t mind but in this case, my acceptance meant she jumped straight into massaging my back with her feet. No foreplay, no warm-up, nothing. I mean, I’m here to relax and she just starts with the back-walking trick from the get go. I really do need that foreplay to get into accepting another human being using me as their door mattress.
It’s sort of dangerous if you aren’t relaxed and they’re walking on top of you. But I mean, she just went at it like I was her estranged husband or something. Her big toes were just used to prod around my spine and to try and attempt to seperate the individual sections of it. Now, I know I should be relaxing, and she even says that to me. But you tell me how relaxed you are when she’s about to break your precious backbone and almost suffocating you in the process.
She then has the audacity to ask whether I want one or two hours. Normally, I’d say yeah, but in this case, I don’t think I could take two hours of pure pain. I settle for one hours. She spent most of that one hour sliding around my back with her feet, and I suspect the heels of her feet were used at times.
I mean, it wasn’t all bad. There were points were I was falling asleep. Or was that passing out in pain? I think I was falling asleep as a response to a stress situation like a possum does. Maybe if I pass out, she might have taken some sympathy on me? Well, just as I was sleeping, she decided to flip me over.
Now started the part where she uses her vice like grip to crush whatever little resistance I have left in me to “relax” me. It was a mixture of tickling and pressurized pain that was applied when she did me arms and legs. Good points were that she did a head massage. Bad points were that the head massage was too short and there was no foot massage either.
Almost as abruptly as she started, she finished and I’m sure if she had the chance she would have kicked me out. This place was a far cry from the places I’ve been to in Bangkok and Taipei. Hell, she didn’t even smile or acknowledge me when I left the room and said thank you.
After the massage, I think you can still use the facilities like the pool and sauna. I used the sauna for five minutes before I showered. I have to remember to take off my jewellry before I go into a sauna. Actually, it not something I can do since they have spiritual meaning for me, so I spent a good five minutes having my various silverwear being branded into me.
It turned out Hilary had gone for the two hour massage so in the mean time I helped myself to the free cigarettes and hair gel. Her’s was just as painful as mine and we were both a little fragile after that ordeal.
Assaf and James were down at 1/5 and we ended up going there to meet up with them. Except we just joined up with James and we missed Assaf by about 2 minutes who was on his way to Kee club. I think Hilary and I need a drink after the stress that we’d just been through.
November 28th, 2003 by Eshin
It’s been a day full of revelations for me.
I was listening again to Sun Yan Zi’s “Someone” and realized she’s actually talking about some guy who told her to do something “bing bang curly wurly” with her hair. She’s was a bit upset about it ’cause the next lines “I look in the mirror and say, who’s that freak”. I think that explains “bing bang curly wurly”.
Spent most the day looking at sites with some cool web design. There’s some good stuff up there which I’ll be putting up in my Links section soon. It’s good for inspiration and I’m dying to learn how to draw manga style cartoon characters so I can also do something like that on my own websites.
I also finally found at the name of that fount they use on so many website! It’s the Mini font. I tried searching for the name, but how do you begin to look for font names since they always name them so obscurely sometimes. Anyway, inspiration hit as I remembered that I actually still work in an ad agency, and a senior art director, Anita, told me what it was. She explained it’s used a lot in design work for websites because it comes out clear in the smaller points. Guess that’s why it’s called “Mini”, eh? I’m a genius…
November 28th, 2003 by Eshin
I’m going to give myself a pat on the back. I’ve succeeded in learning so much about HTML and web design in the last few weeks. Last night I managed to successfully use frames to actually complement the design I was using. I did borrow the inspiration from another website (link to follow) but it gave me the opportunity to work with frames. That in itself took some time to work out for me as I’ve never liked them being complicated and all, and the end output can be just as complex for the user. I lost a lot of initial drafts of the copy I was writing since I wasn’t entirely aware of the process that Dreamweaver used. 5am in the morning and I finally figured it all out and it’s a fuckload simpler than I expected.
I’ve also finally figured out how CSS works in Dreamweaver. I haven’t quite mastered it yet, but it’s actually great fun using them when you know how to. Your web pages look more like how you want them to rather than how the HTML dictates they should look. These two skills that I’ve learned have made a lot of the stuff I was doing earlier redundant. It also means I can tweak the designs of my sites, sitewide quicker.
Anyway, my turnaround on sites is now going quicker. It’s a shame I can’t work on this stuff at work as I don’t have access to my software and computer to be able to do the stuff that I want. That’s why it’s been late nights and working weekends this past few weeks. I’m in the zone and I’m being denied access…argh.
November 28th, 2003 by Eshin
Bought some books and VCD’s yesterday. It was a bit of an indulgence considering that I have to save at the moment. But out of the three books that I bought, two were skill learning books - “Project Management for Dummies” and “Programming in C#”. Yep, while it might be a little embarrassing to be buying a book on project management for dummies, I’ve found that the “Dummies” series tends to point out things that you can overlook. It also brings a lot of the theoretical back down to earth for the subjects it deals with. Anyway, this book will be useful if I get the account service position in Singapore or if I follow my own freelance projects.
The other book I bought was related to programming, and promised to be a primer for the aspiring programmer. From what I’ve started reading, it is very much that and I hope that learning some basics of programming will help me better to take care of the back-end administration of webdesign with things like JavaScript and PHP.
The VCD’s that I bought were indulgent but I’m thinking most of the VCD’s will be cheaper in Hong Kong than they will be in Singapore. Also I think there is more choice over here. I’m probably wrong but I’m not really planning to wait till I get to Singapore to find out. Anyway, I bought “The Audition”, “Joint Security Area” (JSA) and some Thai film which I really can’t remember the name of right now. Anyway, watched JSA yesterday, and when I get the inclination I’ll review it. I liked it so it will get a good review. The others I’m not sure about as I already have a backlog of VCD’s to watch.
