The Green Laser Pointer and Other Short Stories

It has been a real busy week. Let's begin on Tuesday, shall we? Tuesday was the day my 19-year-old cousin Miriam, born and raised in Australia, came to visit. To introduce her to some Malaysianity, we, the Chans, the Tans, and the Dragons(The Loongs. If you still don't get it, nevermind. You don't have to.) took her to the hawker place in... Where was it again? Next to a futsal and sports center. Taman Megah, maybe.

Anyways, when we started going off to pick our dinners, Yee Hao gave me an offer I couldn't refuse.

"Come here, little Chan. I'll buy you a super-spicy sausage. If you can finish it, I'll pay you RM10. Okay?"

Ten bucks to eat a sausage. Pretty good deal, wasn't it? I mean, how bad could it be? That's what went through my head at the time. So I went with him over to the stall with the sign TAIWANESE SAUSAGES hanging overhead.

I looked at the menu. Among the many different flavors of sausages, three caught my eye. There was the Normal, Original-Spicy, and Super-Spicy.

"Can I have one Super-Spicy, please?"

Yee Hao turned to me.

"Last time I came here, I got my friend to try one. He bit into it and died-"

At this moment, the sausage-man tapped him on the shoulder.

"Here's your Super-Spicy sausage. Please enjoy."

So we went back to the table. When everyone got back to the table, and my Ice-Blended Mango arrived, the dare began. I took the sausage out of the wrapper, and looked at it apprehensively. It seemed alright. Slowly, I took a bite.

The result was instantaneous. When my brain touched the sausage, it burned straight away. My eyes were screaming, my tongue was immediately welled with tears, and I vaguely noticed Yee Juinn taking out his camera phone and pointing it at me.

One bite over. Five more to go.

I finished the sausage, but the pain wasn't over. My tongue was still on the verge of tears. It hurt like hell. It took one Ice-Blended Mango, two Iced Milo's and more than twenty minutes before I managed to resume eating my nasi lemak.

Afterwards, Yee Hao slid a ten-ringgit note across the table. "Congratulations, Shern. You have just experienced baptism by fire."

* * *

Wednesday was Petaling Street Night. Reasons for venture:

1. Good food around the corner from Petaling Street and
2. Buy the marvelous green laser as seen previously in possesion of cousin Jun Kit and the telescope man from Coco Night and
3. Introduce Miriam to the Malaysian black market. Well, not so much black market as fake market. But still...

Anyways, we went to eat the good food around the corner first. Yes, it was good. But that's not really anything to talk about. So we skip to the laser quest.

The first stall we met the laser in was owned by a stingy old man who wouldn't sell it below a hundred. Thankfully, I knew someone who had got his for RM70 in Melaka, so I wouldn't settle for anything too far from that.

We quickly learned that all the laser sellers there sold the lasers with a starting price of around RM170. So we met one guy, who seemed a little more reasonable, and we decided that we would take 3 for RM235. So it would be 2 for RM80 and 1 for RM75. Whoa. Expensive, but worth it. Seriously. Just look.


More pictures will be coming later in the post. Hold your horses.

* * *

Thursday night was Harry Potter night. We(Mum, Dad, Jamin, Miriam, Me. Others were busy) took the Hogwarts Express to Tropicana City, and caught the movie with nice seats. Opening night, too. Not bad, eh?

The movie itself wasn't really bad, but I wouldn't really go around shouting about it. It wasn't that good, either, so yeah. Nothing much to say. But the Ron and Lavender bits were pretty funny.

* * *

Friday? Concert night. And laser party night. Mum and I went to TGI's at the Curve after school for lunch, met up with Juinn, Miriam and Jamin(who skipped school). I also ran into Shanice, Sarah and Yi Wei there, in Metrojaya.

Nothing much happened at the Curve, except that we realized that Petaling without the I is Petal Ng. Let's move on to the concert.

I guess I won't say much about Friday's concert, cos it wasn't as fun as Saturday's concert, and nothing much happened. I don't have the pictures, either. So you guys'll have to look into Chen Yang's blog for that. At the moment, he hasn't posted them yet. So I don't know. Maybe they'll appear on Facebook. I wouldn't know, my Facebook doesn't work.

Hey, I've just realized that I haven't posted anything about concert practice. At all. Okay, here's the quick brief-through:

I'm in Tinta Dewa. Yes, the dance with the best music, best costume and best dancers. So yeah, it's hard to be modest when we're THAT good. Haha! Just kidding. During practice, we play alot of Hutan, we excessively sing songs like Viva La Vida, Lao Shu Ai Da Mi, No Boundaries, and we do stupid things. We enjoy dancing the girls' part more than the guys' part, and... Yeah, that's about it.

Ugh, this is a long post. I'm tired. Okay, let's talk about AFTER the concert.

I left school at about 10pm, got home at about 10:30pm. Then I got ready to go to Yee Juinn's house. For our promised farewell party to Miriam, who'll leave on Saturday afternoon.

Upon arrival, we each took out our lasers. There were four of us, but only 3 lasers. Jamin didn't buy one. However, that worked fine, because somebody had to work the camera. So work it Juinn did, while the other three of us shined pretty green lights all over the room.

Me holding two green lasers, pointing single beams at the ceiling. The extra lines all over the place are result of slow shutter speeds and the reflections of the beams all over the room.

Same effect, but with three of us holding the lasers.

Here's to a real crystal glass and once again, slow shutter speeds.

The magical crystal glass, complete with star-maker settings on the laser.

I call it: The Explo-Shern. Explosion. Jun Shern. Get it? HAHAHA. Yeah, I love this one. I was lying down behind the crystal glass, so that the glass would seemingly explode on me.

The green lights shot straight at a cup of guava juice. Makes for a beautiful rainbow effect.

The Pianist.

More pictures of Jamin's hand, illuminated by the Glazor.

My personal favorite. The cup of guava juice, from a different angle. Looks like a sunset.

At about 12:30 am, Yee Hou got home. He had spent the day at his Colleague's house. You know, the female one. Anyways, by this time our lasers were running out of power, so we asked him to drive us out to the nearby 7/11 to get new batteries. He agreed.

After paying for the batteries, Yee Hou decided to take us out for a joy ride around Desa Parkcity. He said: "Let's go kacau some people with those green lasers." So we all got back into the car and drove about the neighbourhood, shining our lasers out the windows, trying to hit all the apartment buildings that existed high in the sky.

Soon, we reached the lake of the residential area. Being his usual retarded self, Yee Hou parked his car right on the sidewalk, and we got down. We flashed our lasers all over the place, hitting the Waterfront building across the lake. Suddenly, we heard a whistle and a shout:

"Pweeeeett! Hoi! Hoi! Oi! Kamu!"

Shit, it was a guard. We weren't sure what to do. He was on the other side of the lake, but we couldn't see him properly. We stood there, like school children waiting to be punished by their teacher. Unfortunately for the guard, we were rebellious school children. We rushed back to the car under Yee Hou's instructions, and he shouted quickly to Juinn in Cantonese. Something about a flashlight.

I watched in amazement as Juinn pulled out a big floodlight looking device from the glove compartment. He plugged the light's cable into the cigarrette lighter-thing. CLICK. He turned on the light, and he shined it powerfully across the lake. It was... POWERFUL. We could immediately see the building on the other side, and we scanned for any sign of the guard. Then Yee Hou said: "Now let's see if we can find our friend and shine his eyes with both green lasers and white blinding lights."

Unfortunately, we couldn't find him anywhere about. So we took off, heading to the other part of Desa Parkcity. The houses up on the hill. We drove up there in a luminous green car, lighting the path wherever we went. Finally, we reached a nice spot where we could laser point at the entire city of Kuala Lumpur in peace. We got out of the car, but before we could start glazoring(green-laser-ing) the whole place, the unmistakeable sound of motorbikes drove up, complete with the unmistakeable sight of trouble.

It was more guards. Two of them. They came up and spoke to us about us not being able to "makan apa-apa angin di sini", so Yee Hou argued that it was public property, and seeing as we weren't committing any written crimes, they had no right to send us off. And even if it WAS closed to public, we were residents and bought the right to these ventures along with the house. But they said that it was by order of the Management, so they had to get us away no matter what. Sigh.

So we up and left the place, not wanting to give them such a hard time. I mean, they were doing their jobs, so it's not them that we should have a problem with. Afterwards, we rode home with windows wide open, blasting slow, opera-styled music at the neighbours.

At home, Juinn was like "Hey, guys! We haven't eaten any of the chips we bought! We haven't earned the right to sleep yet."

And so it was that we finished an entire bag of new Wang-Wang biscuits. What time did we sleep? Oh, some time around 3:30 am.

It was a pretty good night.

* * *

Saturday morning began at 8 am, when we went to see if the Desa Parkcity Clubhouse was ready for entry. We walked there, as Yee Hou was still sleeping and nobody else could drive us there.

It wasn't. So we walked to the Waterfront building which our friend the guard was the previous night. We walked towards the Kluang Station, deciding to get some breakfast.

"Hold on, guys. How much money do we have? We don't want to over order and end up not having enough to pay for it."

"I have RM6 only. What about you, Shern?"

"I have RM23. You two?"

The girls didn't bring their wallets. So with my RM23 plus Juinn's RM6, we had exactly RM29. That seemed more than enough.

So we ordered. Three roti canai's, one nasi lemak, one iced Milo and one Coffee float. Total: RM28.90. We had RM30. Seemed perfect. Enough to pay, and we could tip the waiter 10 cents.

So we ate happily. Then, I went over to pay at the counter. The man said:

"Okay, that'll be RM31.80."

I choked. "Sorry?"

"Thirty-one ringgit eighty cents."

"I'm sorry, there must be something wrong. Can we see the bill, please?"


I glanced at Juinn. "Oh, shit."

Juinn turned to the man at the counter. "Tunggu sekejap, yea? Saya lari balik ke rumah ambil duit."

* * *

I'm not going to post about the concert. For one thing, I've been typing for so long. Next, I don't really have much to say about it, and without pictures it would be a boring post. So I'll do that next week. Maybe. If I do get the pictures.

Jun Shern out.

*Static*