California Travel Logs: 12/19/2010 Sunday 00:58 AM

Currently in Santa Cruz. Arrived in San Fran earlier on Saturday in the late morning. Luggage didn’t arrive on the flight, was on a later flight that arrived at 11.20. Jon and Drew went down to the city to get the cars, arrived too late; rental counter was closed. Meanwhile, negotiations with Hertz at the airport. Nice Hertz employee helped us get our reservations for a reasonable price. Waited long time for Jon and Drew to return to airport; their train stopped and they had to catch another. Finally left airport after 1, with Toyota Camrys. Ate at Chinatown, drove down to Santa Cruz. Checked in at Bay Front Inn, poor internet connection. Walked around town, ate Mexican for late dinner. Went back to hotel. Over.

Missing you

Because I can totally empathise.

And there I was, thinking that I was losing my humanity...

...and becoming more and more emotionless. Yet here I am, brooding. Late nights do me no  good at all.

Is it better to feel highs and lows or just feel nothing at all?

Possibly a better solution would be a compromise between the two choices. But for better or for worse, I tend to be a person who thinks in extremes. It's black, or it's white. I can't seem to comprehend the thought of grey areas. I suppose it's more of a failing of my personality.

Reminds me of this Calvin and Hobbes comic:

Calvin: "What do you think is the best way to get what you want? Is it better to hold fast and never back down or to compromise?"
Hobbes: "I supposed it's best to hold fast when you can and compromise when you need to."
Calvin: "That's a lot more mature than I care to be."


Or maybe insomnia just doesn't do good to my sanity. If only I could get some sleep.

Patience

The best things often come not from the path of instant gratification, but from that of patience. And sometimes, the best thing is the wait itself, where one gains a part of himself for the better. I just need to remember that.

Could everything just slow right down for me, please? =)

Sometimes, I feel that everything's moving way too fast for me. People, my life; it's like they're all just passing me by. If I had my way, everything would just slow right down and give me enough time to enjoy my life. But as it stands, everyone's drifting apart again. And I'm starting to slip again, as I feel my support base moving further away. Maybe I should finally learn how to stand on my own. But I can't. I need others. I'm not that strong.

Not a doodle.

I look, I observe. And I wonder what moulded you into who you are today. Into your past I would like to travel, if only to understand you better. For the past presents a good reasoning for whatever that goes on in the present. And I like knowing the reasonings behind.

The dreamer

And the dreamer dreams, dreaming a dream that he has dreamt many times before. Because dreamers will always be dreamers. And so he dreams.

Dream a little dream of me

I dreamt that I was in a zombie apocalypse. But then you were with me, so it was alright.

Waiting

Because I care a lot more than I'd like to admit...

Fly

Cold turkey

?

Lack of updates

I would like to apologise for the lack of updates, I've been quite busy the past few days, having just arrived here and such. Will try to resume drawing as soon as possible. Do bear with me.

Closer

The Changi Musings

Sitting here at the airport in Singapore, and you what's going on through my mind? It's the fact that this world is really really small. To begin with, I already saw 5 familiar faces on the same flight out of KLIA to Singapore, one of which being Alexis Chuah, of with whom I encountered a somewhat exciting situation, of which I shall elaborate on further. It brought made me think back to the time when I was in Chicago about to fly home to Malaysia a few months earlier, where I met a school friend of mine, Su Yin. It was somewhat odd yet refreshing at the same time to see a familiar face in a faraway land. And it just so happened we had the same flights to Singapore via Hong Kong. And to add to the coincidences, I sat with the same group of Singaporean girls on the flights to Hong Kong and Singapore. Being on the same flight might not seem like so big a coincidence, but the fact that I was allocated seats next to them was. Just made me realise how small this world really is. Ok, fine, the relation between coincidence and small world might be a bit vague, but it makes sense in my mind.

Back to Alexis. If you may have noticed my facebook wall post, yes, I did run through a terminal, Terminal 1 of Changi to be exact. Her flight was to depart at 5.45am, and so at 5am, we left the comfy chairs in Terminal 3 to make our way to Terminal 1. As we got down from the train connecting the terminals, we noticed that her flight status was saying "Final Call", which was somewhat of a surprise for us, since we hadn't expected that specific status to be showing at 5.10. So we ran through the terminal. And the gate was at the other end of the terminal. But all's good, to cut the story short, she made it in on time, and the gate was still open even when I walked back to the other end of the terminal.

And it also amused me that I know Changi well enough to give a tour around it. It's like my fifth time transiting for a period of 7 hours here. So now I have a routine whenever I get here (if I'm alone).

1) Go to Terminal 3.
2) Get WiFi.
3) Use laptop.
4) If hungry, go upstairs to 24 hour eatery and buy food.
5) Repeat (3) until tired.
6) Go to the comfy chairs in the rest areas and nap.
7) Board flight. Fly wherever I'm flying to.

There is also process "*", an extremely important process, but not necessary all the time.
*) Check-in. Not necessary if allowed to check in at a different airport. Check-in time varies in accordance to when the check-in counter opens.

Well, that'll be all for now. And I'm serious need of some sleep. Hopefully I can fulfil that need on the aircraft. Long journey ahead of me.

Toodles.


-yoongjie-

Flight plans, for those bored enough to track me

*All flight times are in the local times of the airport location.

19 Aug 2010
MH 609
KUL (22.45) - SIN (23.40)

20 Aug 2010
UA 804
SIN (7.10) - NRT (15.05)

UA 882
NRT (16.55) - ORD (14.21)


KUL - Kuala Lumpur International Airport
SIN - Changi International Airport
NRT - Narita
ORD - O'Hare International Airport

Someone you love

Falling apart

Smile...

...and let the world think that you're really smiling.

I think I'm losing my sanity here

Sleepless nights, one too many. It's driving me nuts, the fact that I can't fall asleep. I just keep on thinking and thinking and thinking. I get annoyed, I want to fall asleep. Then I get angry, because I can't. And then I get Thoughts. And the cycle continues. It's a vicious cycle, it just gets worse and worse the longer I stay in it. I need to break out.

Rain

Doodle

Distance

Airplanes

Doodlebook FTW! Thanks Jiam =)

Push

Hello world

Clinging on to Hope

Hope

I just hope that somewhere out there, I'll be able to find someone who'll be able to accept all my idiosyncrasies, my weird habits, my emotional instability; someone who'll be able to bear with me.

A light in the darkness

Looking in

More random thoughts, no drawings

I just hope I know what I'm doing.

Please don't let me enter that spiral of self-destruction again.

Why do I break everything I touch?

Holding back

Demons

What I do when bored: Rockstar

Note: I'm not actually a left-handed guitarist, I just drew it and realised that I drew the guitar wrongly. >.<

Dare I?

Inspired by "Part of a fool" by Juwita Suwito. I've been listening to too much music. =P

Stars

Guest strip: Meet Puiyin

Today's guest strip comes courtesy of Andrew Chu of purple notoriety.

I don't wanna miss a thing

Snow

Comments and opinions are welcome. I don't think this sketch turned out that well.

A sobering thought

I just came across something that made me think, I have things so easy. If I were in that other person's shoes, would I be able carry myself the way that person did? My thoughts go to him and his family.

And the raindrops keep falling into my heart,

and i just can't deny what feels so right.

Do i let myself go and feel the rain,

or should i play with caution and refrain?

Whatever i do, when it comes to you,

I know sometimes love plays the part of a fool.

-Part of a fool, Juwita Suwito-

Short word post. This song suddenly came up in my playlist, and I felt that more people should know about this song. Juwita Suwito is awesome.

Rejection

Need you now

Good morning!

Coffee overdose

Fondle?!

This took about an hour and a half to draw and colour. And I text mostly with my right hand by the way. I needed to be able to sketch my hand, that's why my left hand is holding the phone. Based on a true text.

Ever had...

Wondering...

Meet...

How Evil Overlord Rayna came to be:

rayna says:
you should get bored more often then! (; ban you from all forms of entertainment
lol
(:

Yoong Jie Pang says:
EVIL!

rayna says:
(:
i'm doing it for mankind
haha

Yoong Jie Pang says:
i should draw something about the evil overlord rayna!

rayna says:
hahaha
flattered
lol

Whaddya think?

When bored...

...draw.

Single

Holding on

Based on a song: Another Perfect Day by American Hi Fi

And they were all..

Meet...

Smile...

Meet...

All for one

All for love

Experimentals

Big Enough

If I could have one wish tonight
I'd wish upon a satellite
To bring me back to you
We spend our whole lives searching for
All the things we think we want
And never really knowing what we have

-The Night that the Lights Went Out in NYC, The Ataris

Emo Paint Art, I call this! Or EPA for short. =D

Toodles!

Helplessness

Wanting to do something yet knowing that you can't.

Snippets of thoughts

Start transmission:

Have you ever heard of the kid who tried so hard yet got nowhere?

~*~

It is a world of instant gratification after all, and so patience runs thin when there don't seem to be any returns after a certain period of time. Overly caught up in the ways of the world I suppose.

~*~

There is no better time than the present to take matters into one's own hands. Seize the day, leave no thought for the morrow.

~*~

In God we trust. May God be with us all.

End transmission. Goodnight.

The airport

In a matter of a few more hours, I'll be making another trip down there again to send my older sister off. Once again I'm reminded that my holiday is coming to a close soon. =(

Imagine a world...

Emotionless

After feeling somewhat emotionless (relatively) for about a year it does feel kind of odd having the emotions flood back in.

Some nights

There are just some nights where you stay up, unable to fall asleep, and at the same time not wanting to sleep. I suppose that this is another one of those nights, where the thoughts just keep running through my head. It's a rather odd feeling really, when lying down on my bed, I desire so much to just fall asleep yet I don't want to, knowing that if I fall asleep, the thoughts that are haunting my mind might just disappear upon waking the next morning. In a way I'll be none the worse if that happens, but I just can't put it beyond myself to attempt to put my mind to rest and just fall asleep. In a way it does feel like a kind of self-inflicted torture, masochism if you must.

It has always been a desire for me to be able to openly express these thoughts running through my mind, but often times it has been way too personal to express on a blog just like that, or to another person for that matter. I still feel wary of trusting people, to tell the truth. (But the irony is that I trust people way too easily. Paradoxical, no? Well it makes sense in my mind, if that's any consolation.) I worry about revealing too much about myself to another person; I worry that one day people may discover how shallow and fickle I really am, if they haven't already realised so. But inside, I just really feel like telling everyone how exactly I feel. A lot of my blog posts have started off with that intention in mind, but perhaps all of the time, I end up saying that some thoughts are way too personal to share.

It's hard to write when one has no idea where he should begin. And the thoughts are starting to fade fast. Should I just let these thoughts go, and attempt to go to sleep, now that part of my mind has been sort of put to rest, or should I forge on with this blog post, retaining these thoughts for longer, and perhaps not being able to sleep? Sleep is always a welcome choice I suppose. And maybe what is haunting my mind at the moment will disappear in the morning and I'll once again be a happy person.

Come to think about it, I haven't felt this down in a while. I've been too busy to be depressed. Maybe busy isn't such a good word, I think distracted would be a better one. In fact, I get the impression that I've been way too distracted to feel any proper form of emotion; depression or love. I've been going through a narrower emotion range when studying there in the states, thinking about it. Well to put this into perspective, here's a graph:

You see, what I have over here is an emotion-time graph, the red line being the emotion level during studies, which is, for this case, a randomly generated line for the purpose of this demonstration. We have an arbitrary value of "a", which denotes a point in the positive emotion, and "-a", which denotes a point in the negative emotion. Above the point "a", one is able to feel love, and below the point "-a", the depressive emotion can be felt. What my studies has done is essentially introduce a limiting emotion range of "-a" to "a", meaning that i can still feel positive emotion, as well as negative ones, such as happiness and sadness, but they are of not that great a magnitude. In other words, my studies, which are a major distraction to me, is the limiting variable. Once you take away the limiting factor, you can get this:

Now we observe the blue line in comparison the the red line. We can see that the blue line is allowed to go past the values of "a" and "-a". The blue lines show what happen if the limiting factor is taken away. Which means that I can once again feel love, as well as depression. This means I have a wider range of emotions available to me. My emotions may also be capable of doing this: (observe the green line this time.)

Infinite happiness! (Infinite depression could be possible as well, but lets not talk about it.)

Ok fine, there are probably other limiting factors, but I'm just simplifying things and assuming that the only limiting factor I have here is distraction because of my studies.

Or was I?

I can't remember what I wanted to say at the beginning actually. I suppose it's better that way.

Bottom-line is, infinite happiness is obtainable. (and I've been reading way too much xkcd for my own good)

Toodles!