Viva Forever

This happened years ago, when I was about 16-17 years of age.

The house my family and I lived in was a two-storey house, with bedrooms upstairs and other rooms downstairs. One weekend, my parents invited family friends over. The guests were four people; a middle-aged couple and their two daughters. I was upstairs in my room when my dad called me downstairs for dinner. As I walked down the stairs, I saw an Asian man standing at the bottom of the stairs. He was middle-aged and wore a buttoned up shirt and some non-descript long pants. His expression was blank, calm, pretty unemotive actually. What was unusual was that he had a large camera hanging from a strap around his neck. It was an old-fashioned, black, bulky camera.

He was just standing there and didn’t say a word, and moved out of my way as I continued down the stairs. I had just thought he was another guest of my parents that I hadn’t met. When I arrived in the dining room, I saw that everyone was seated including the family we had invited. I asked my dad whether we were waiting for anyone else, and he said no. I asked him whether he was sure, but he said (rather impatiently) that everyone who was supposed to be here is already seated and that I should hurry up and do the same. After dinner I walked around my house but that camera man was no where in sight. I never saw him again.

I’d like to point out it couldn’t have been just some random person who walked into the house. Both our front and back doors were self-locking, that is, if the doors were closed then they locks themselves until you turn the knobs from inside the house to reopen them (or if you have the keys you can open it from outside). I was positive that the front door was closed because the stairs stopped right near the front door and I definitely noted it was closed as I was coming downstairs. The back door was too, and even if it weren’t, any stranger walking in from it would have to bypass all the people in the house who were downstairs at the time. The windows have fly screens on them and were generally closed too.

Until this day I get creeped out thinking about what had happened. When I walk around the house late at night (something I loathe to do), I worry that I might turn around and suddenly see this silent, staring camera man once again.

This is one of the reasons why I hate the dark.

Once again, I’m up early to do the assignment that’s due today. I’m thankful that international law turned out to be surprisingly easy to write about (maybe due to the hopelessness of the question, basically we were asked to draft a report suggesting how to make nations comply with international laws more frequently. That’s just… I dunno, the BIGGEST QUESTION EVA TO DO WITH INTERNATIONAL LAW) and is likely that I’d be able to give it in early.

In the couple of hours of sleep that I got last night, I had the most vividly horrible nightmare that I’ve had in some time. I dreamt that there was a huge Earth-wiping comet heading our way, and I was waiting outside my house for Tim to show up so we could spend our last moments together. Moments after he stepped out of his car, the comet hit and we were both knocked back by the tremendous explosion. After overcoming the dizziness of the impact, I found myself suffocating under the crushing layer of dust and debris, while clutching at Tim’s hands as I presumably died. You have no idea how unpleasant and realistic it felt (this is not the first time I’ve had dreams of suffocation, I sometimes wake up from them with breathing problems :( WTH). And by realistic I mean hypothetical realistic as I’ve never suffocated nor been crushed before.

Anyway, that’s not the end of the story. I found myself “waking” from that into a futuristic environment surrounded by these weird aliens. The dream was really hazy with what they looked like; sometimes they were Roswellesque aliens, sometimes they were these slimy slug-like creatures. Anyway, dream knowledge told me that they had cloned me from my DNA retrieved from my apparently fossilised body. I was ecstatic to then find out that Tim was revived too! We were kept in a cell and observed which wasn’t a big deal until we eventually realised that they weren’t going to feed us. As we slowly starved (once again, really unpleasant in-dream sensation), I saw the aliens frantically trying to figure out what’s wrong with us, and it became a dawning realisation that they couldn’t figure out that we needed to eat (apparently they didn’t) and we couldn’t get this message across. Eventually I starved to death (and presumably Tim too) and the aliens continued to revive us (apparently each clone had up to date memories) and this horrible cycle of starvation and death continued because the aliens were too fucking stupid.

Also, today’s my mum’s birthday.

Early this morning I was hauled out of bed by my parents for a trip to our dentist. I was informed by my orthodontist weeks ago that I need to wear a “night-guard” mouth thing instead of my retainers at night because of my constant teeth-grinding when I sleep, which is starting to wear away at my teeth. He also said I should also go see a psychologist to help “deal with my stress” that he thinks is causing the grinding, but fuck him, what does he know about psychology. -_-

Anyhow, the point of this entry is to talk about a freaky really old woman who’s always hanging around the dental surgery. She’s this incredibly ancient Asian woman whom I think is related to the dentist; probably his grandmother or something. She never actually helps out with anything, but is either just standing around or found slowly shambling through the corridors (kinda like the NPCs in Pokemon games).

Now, I generally have nothing against old people, for example, I have no issue with my grandmother and grandaunt who are really spry old women and are incredibly loud, energetic and have a tendency to pinch little children and myself. But this woman at the dental surgery is just creepy in a Japanese horror film kind of way. I’ve never heard her speak, she’s really small, wrinkly and balding, and has these really sallow eyes and never seems to smile. Even though she’s really small, for some reason whenever I encounter her in the corridors between rooms, I always find myself in her way, having to apologetically step around her as she continues her slow, aimless shuffle to the next room. She looks like the type of character in a horror movie, whose only role is to continually look ominously quiet before dramatically doing something different, like pointing behind you, and when you turn to look you get your face eaten off by some vengeful ghost woman/child/doll. Fuckin’ unsettling.

I also went to the library today and was able to borrow both Thud! and Going Postal. Hooray! I don’t know if I have time to read both as I have my stupid International Law assignment to start (I’m thinking about doing it on the US Iraq war, but I don’t know, might be too huge a topic), awesome games to play and cool people to hang out with.

I’ve said this on LJ already, but I’ve started playing Team Fortress 2, which is such an awesome game. If any of you guys also play it, add me!!

So I was procrastinating from work yesterday night and I was randomly flicking through my archives (note: my archives page doesn’t work properly, for some reason half my plugins are broken) and I came across this entry written in 2003. It was this really long, angry rant because some girl on the internet whom I didn’t even know, wrote about how she thought I was elitist and unoriginal. It’s pretty embarrassing, now that I think about it, particularly how indignant I felt about said accusation. *facepalm* -_-’ I sometimes wonder if I should just erase the archives, given how so much of what was said isn’t really “me” any more, but on the other hand, it’s amusing to look back to see how I was before.

But what I SHOULD be doing is either going to sleep or continue my research on online censorship (the topic I chose for my IT law essay). I think… I’ll go to sleep. *snooze*

There’s this guy in my law year that I see in my classes sometimes whom I have this unshaking correlation with being a Nazi. It’s purely an aesthetic thing too; he’s a tall, built guy with blue eyes, really short blond hair and a gigantic neck that sits below a surprisingly small head. The most puzzling thing is that I didn’t know why my first and lasting conclusion after seeing him was “wow, he looks like a Nazi”. It’s a really unjustified conclusion too, because the guy was quite nice when I had to work with him during an in-class group presentation, and he definitely knew his law stuff. Sure, he hangs around certified douchebags but that doesn’t necessarily mean he is a douchebag. Or a Nazi.

But it hit me like a shark on a chainsaw yesterday night, when I saw this icon [source]:

He looks almost exactly like Rolfe from The Sound of Music!! Except with a thicker neck, and less even features. And Rolfe was definitely a Nazi. Well I feel better now, knowing I didn’t just link some random dude to being a Nazi for no reason.

In other news, did you know that Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass are the most widely quoted children’s books in judgments? Well, I think it’s fascinating stuff. :P