Some people never learn

im picking up writing again after a long hiatus to vent about my current situation. read on, read on.

see, i recently moved to swansea for education purposes and it is here where i met an old friend from my cardiff days. lets refer to him as X for the purpose of the rant. unfortunately for him, when he arrived he did not have a place to stay; so the right thing would be to offer him my room till he finds a place.

chronologically speaking, X would fall in the 'old' friends category. but the truth hides a completely different picture. one with sinister winds and stormy clouds and a wooden house perched on the jagged cliff facing the sea; and at the corner of this picture, a solitary lemming marches up ready to take a deathly leap into the sea. intense.

?????

okay! so in our cardiff days, we basically hung out in different circles. i recall speaking to a chinese national in mandarin and as a passing remark i mentioned that i am chinese (malaysian). X standing at the corner, followed this statement by muttering aloud in chinese, "he speaks chinese, but is he chinese?"

fastforward this to the present, we are all here new to the city and the course, i thought i might aswell wipe the slate clean and offer to help the guy out.

big mistake.

so there we are in the kitchen playing some chess, and X was fondling a pawn stroking it left and right. me not wanting a repeat of such foreplay, i told him to conform with the basic chess etiquettes and move whichever piece that he touches in the next move. he reluctantly agreed and briefly mentioned that back in his competition days, "touch one and move another" is a legal move.

yar okay.

so he played an aggressive game, in which up to the middle game, he had the upper hand by taking my knights, a bishop and couple of pawns. with a series of counterattacks by the blacks, voila, i won this friendly match (combination of the rook and the queen).

now my old friend moves from the table and went straight to the window for a fag. i obviously praised him as he played a good game, and went on to give my shebby singh post match thoughts of the game. i mentioned that he lost focus when he tried to finish me off fast and upon finishing that sentence, X said seethingly,

"jeremy, you're too serious when you play games. kenneth, kien lun and i agree that you take things too seriously, in football, risk et cetera et cetera."

"if you want to succeed in this world, you cannot behave this way"

my god what a sore loser. talk liddat... my father isit? the cheek to say all of that when he is staying at my place! X went on to justify the loss by saying in competitions, participants are only given fifteen minutes to finish the game and because i did not adhere to the competition rules, he lost focus!

come on. this is a social gamela brudder. did u see a timer with a buzzer next to us?

anyway, in most games of risk, minor arguments are bound to crop up; and in football, the player has to be both physical in shielding and getting the ball. heck, when one wants to do well in something, some seriousness is needed! what kind of argument is this?! this fatboy has definitely lost his proverbial marbles. or maybe, he hasnt played any to bother.

with the way he was behaving i most definitely want to kick his snoring face out of the room last night. but i suppose i will never learn, and X was quick (and smart) enough to leave the place this morning before it gets even more heated.


jeremy.

p.s:- as for X's "he speaks chinese, but is he really chinese" comment, i would like to say X has probably one of the thickest brit accent amongst the malaysians in the UK. whitewash much?