The Silent Room

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Small Talk:
I need to get back on my gym routine. I really miss it.

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I want to get out of this house.

Oh, don’t be alarmed. My family is fine, we all love each other very dearly. No broken furniture, no bruises, no spilt milk. No, my family is perfectly functional, far from broken and I am nowhere near that pathetic state we have come to know as ‘emo‘. Why then, you ask, does Fazri want to get out of his house?

Let’s start with my room.

It is definitely one of the oddest-shaped bedrooms you will ever find yourself walking into. Most rooms are usually square in shape – at the very least, rectangular. My room is L-shaped. Yes, L-shaped. Imagine a simple rectangular room – that’s what the room used to be. Now, imagine a perpendicular extension that is half the length of the room. This extension is the result of a brilliant renovation plan. It was so long ago, I forgot who first came up with it and thought it was a brilliant idea.

Allow me to say this about the result: It’s. Fucking. Retarded.

Arranging furniture is a bitch. Moving around is a bitch. Hosting friends overnight is a bitch. Utilising any floorspace to work on is a bitch. I want to get out of this room and get at least a rectangular shaped room like everyone else. I’m fucking tired of making three turns from my PC table just to get the fucking door. I want a rectangular room, and there’s none available left in this house.

Then, there’s the residents of this house.

Whenever I am home, most of the time, everyone is at work. When I get home after a day out, everyone is asleep. I mind my own business, they mind theirs. What I don’t fancy is when people come looking for me when I’m tired and asleep – and ask me to take out the trash. If they’re not happy with something, I get a lecture (which is fine, I deserve it most of the time anyway) and I shut up – until they get tired of giving lectures and shut up themselves.

People tell me I should reason and defend my case if my parents say weird shit to me but I don’t do it. I just hate talking back to my parents – if I start talking it stats to feel like I’m stabbing them in the face. With a big-ass flaming fork. While laughing like a raving lunatic. So then I’d stop right there. Besides, it won’t turn into an argument if its just one person talking, right?

The only problem I have with the residents of this house is that I’m not too fond of pretending to be a good boy. Because I’m not. (Heh. I’m just going to let you figure out that one.)

Another reason is that I like to be outdoors.

People think geeks like myself prefer to stay indoors. True, but not quite. Well, it’s a common stereotype but often enough that’s not the case. Especially after photography has developed into such an affordable hobby for geeks. It doesn’t take long for a geek to raise, say, RM1500 and get himself a decent dSLR kit. Give a geek a camera and he’ll turn it inside out, and then you’ll start seeing them outdoors a lot. Being perverts. Noble perverts, that is – we don’t go snooping for upskirt shots like those dumb japanese camera geeks.

Seriously though, I love going out. Not just for photography, by the way. I go out on drives, look for a nice place to chill. If I’m lucky enough I find a nice tau fu fah stand or a cendol stall or a dilapidated coffee shop with crappy, rickety wooden furniture and yellowed fans that look like they could drop from the ceiling any minute. I’d stop by, have a sip or two and while the evening away with a good book and some good music. Other than that, I’d be out spending time with friends and talking shit like most youngers my age do. Ha.

So some of these activities inevitably end very late at night. It’s not like I go clubbing and get exaggeratedly drunk that I could only drive back home late. It’s just that some mamak sessions are just too much fun that we just don’t feel like going back. It’s not like I’m sitting there watching football either, but well, those of us who mamak a lot would get what I mean, of course. So yeah. I love going out the whole day, and come home late.

Other residents of this house, on the other hand, don’t really appreciate the idea – for obvious reasons. When I walked through that front door at 2am, I brace myself for one of those ear-burning sessions. Then I go to sleep. I’d like to come home after a long, fun day, and not burn off my ears at the end of it.

Finally, there’s the privacy issue.

I don’t like it when people peek into my room to see what I’m doing – especially if I’m watching por-, err, *clears throat*, por,… ah- portraiture photography tutorials. Yeah. Tutorials. That’s right. I just don’t like it when people watch me, or spy on me. When I’m doing tutorials. And stuff.

Also, I don’t like it when I sleep and I hear angry bangs on the door and asked to move my car because my car is parked behind theirs and they can’t get out. I hate it when I’m sleeping and I hear angrier bangs on the door because I ignored them and went back to sleep.

Also, I have a wonderful set of 5.1 surround speakers. I use it to watch videos that have 5.1 audio (stop groaning, I know it’s obvious) because 5.1 audio is fucking awesome (case in point: Solid State Society, Sniper vs Sniper scene). When you have quality speakers that you spent good money on, you want to blast it and feel the vibrations in your bones. In this house, if I want to vibrate my bones, I’ll end up vibrating the skeletal frames of everyone in this house because the Altec Lansing subwoofer is simply too damn awesome.

Right now, everyone in this house is simply tolerating me, in the same way that I tolerate them. Tolerating people sucks because it means you have to suck it up and bear with whatever shit that comes your way – and this applies to them as well. I told you, I’m not a good boy, and I bring out a lot of shit around this household – we just don’t talk about it very often.

For the sake of mutual happiness, I want to leave this house – but they won’t let me. Well, at first they dangled the promise like it was a carrot and I was as gullible as a goddamn donkey. Two weeks later, I realised I got suckered into it all and just stayed here. I was already looking for houses and places to stay but all that was for nothing because I’m fucking stuck here until I graduate, find a job and pay my fucking way out.

And that concludes tonight’s bitchfest. Class dismissed, now go fuck yourself.