unlimited

It's finally here!! Been waiting for the past couple of days, rushing to get each new copy of Rage hoping to see... me =). Finally! My 15 minutes of fame, hehe. Though my first thought was - do I really look like that?

Other than that, though, my week is taking a downturn. Yesterday, Valentine's Day, was a non-event, as usual. What with me having only about 6 months left here, I'm not too worried at least.

Today I came down with some nasty stomach virus/food poisoning or something. The worst of it was I had to miss frisbee today >_<. Also, no matter how much I sleep nowadays it seems I'm constantly tired. I hate being sick. Pfft. I can't form coherent thoughts any more. Not that they ever were very coherent, but still =).

At least I've had my 15 minutes. My life is complete! I can now die (or diarrhea at least) in peace!

Because I'm just too lazy to bother with writing a lengthy post about the rest of the OB trip, I'll just use photos. Now, behold photo spam like you've never seen on this blog before! I usually get annoyed at having lots of photos to see and scroll down on on blogs. You have my permission to skip this post if you want =). On another note, Blogger makes some funky code >_<.
Other thoughts: sleeping in a jungle really brings out primal fears. As a rule I'm not superstitious, but in the jungle at night, with solid darkness all around, and people telling ghost stories, you do wonder. Your imagination fills out the darkness with horrors. Fear grabs you by the figgins. And my response is to rationalise away the fear.

After all, superstition could be said to boil down to a fear of death, or injury, or loss, I think. There's always some essence. Why are you afraid of the ghostly horrors? Why? Will they hurt you? Will the kill you? Will they destroy your hopes for the afterlife? This one is rather unfounded besides.

I wonder too, why there aren't benevolent ghosts that go around giving you money and such. It stands to reason that if one sort of ghost exists, the other could too. Maybe a philantrophist died without giving away all his money, so he's given a chance to fulfill that generous wish. Or maybe a mother who lost her child in a car accident seeks to save people. That sort of thing.

And since we can't control random acts of ectoplasmic violence, why bother worrying? Might as well fear spontaneous human combustion. We can't live our lives in the shadow of fear, after all. We'd go mad.

Still, in a jungle at night, surrounded by pitch darkness and the incessant sounds of insects and other inhabitants, one can't help but feel a little afraid. After all, when we sleep we are so very vulnerable.

More on OB to come if I feel like it.

Day 1 - Took a bus to Lumut from Puduraya. It was long and there was a criminal in my seat. Reallly. He had handcuffs on and a couple of police officers guarding him. And he stole my seat! Tch, so I just moved back. They got off 5 minutes later at the other pickup point, but by then I realised that people don't really care about the seat numbers. The whole trip itself was long and rather boring, so I left my brain on screensaver. The interminable quiet was broken only once, wonderfully so.

I arrived too early at Lumut, so after lunch and a too-expensive cab ride to the school, I wandered about for a while, looking for the reception. Later I realised I had taken a wrong turning and was at the admin offices. The 'check-in' went okay, though not everyone had shown up. There were less people than I had expected, too - only 10 total. We were given a briefing and the keys to our dorms. The guys got Tahan - 148 steps high. The girls naturally were given a lower dorm. Tch.

Beginnings are interesting. I was a quiet, just observing the other guys chat to each other trying to get acquainted. Vernon seemed a little 'jang'. Too was simple-minded. And Liaq was silent too. And they were all younger than me... Except for Bakar, who came late. Nina was late, too. There were team games and icebreakers later to get us used to each other.

The shower was unheated and coldddd. I'm not used to that sort of thing =b. What was worse was the mosquitoes, though. 8 bites and 4 kills the first day, haha.

10 days seemed awfully long. I wasn't sure how I'd get through it.

Day 2 - The morning was cold. I only realised that was the norm towards the end. We woke up early, about 6am, and gathered for a warm up and a jog. Only time we had a jog, really. I suppose it was a way of gauging our fitness level. In the morning we had more team activities and lessons about camping - knots and fires and setting up tents. The afternoon saw us doing some climbing/belaying (the fella holding the safety rope), 1st aid, ration planning, and singing. In retrospect things got moving really, really fast. We did so much in that one day it boggles the mind.

And the meals we had were spent eating in silence, a graveyard silence that would permeate almost all the meals we had even after we got to know and were comfortable each other. There were four meals - breakfast lunch dinner and nightcap (not alcoholic, more like supper).

And I enjoyed myself on account of knowing a bit about everything already (thanks to cadets), and being something of a leader. Quiet, antisocial ol' me - a leader. Proof that my attempts at self-improvement are working, hooray!

Day 3 - Felt rather reluctant to get up, and rightly so. We played captain ball (something like netball, except with someone to catch the ball instead of a net) to warmup in lieu of jogging (yay!), and I... sprained my right ankle. Horror! Horror! After the initial pain it seemed to fade away, so I was walking about as usual, but I think carrying the 2-man kayaks out kinda aggravated it. Yes, we did kayakking today! I would rather have had a solo kayak, but since Kim was my partner, it wasn't too bad, she knew her way about it. I just set her on paddling forward and I did the steering. I think I got the better deal =b.

The afternoon's activity didn't help my ankle one bit: we jungle trekked. Having a hurt ankle was soo annoying. The pain had spiked again, so Karl wrapped it up, but it was still an ordeal... Would've been so much better if the leg was okay, but I survived, albeit a little unhappily. That might've had something to do with getting lost, though... We were supposed to find these markers with letters on them, but missed quite a few, and ultimately jumped from the 7th to the 15th letter, resulting in a long backtrack. At least Mim was with us to help, or else we might have just given up entirely.

At night we prepared... for the expedition tomorrow! We'd be hiking out and camping somewhere for a night. My ankle subtracted considerably from any anticipation. Life at OB was beginning to seem almost okay, though. Decent food, enough meals, showers that didn't seem so cold anymore, and a beautiful star-filled sky every night with the rustle of trees like rain and the low rushing of waves.

(17 mosquito frags today, btw, because of the jungle trek. I didn't bother to keep track after this.)