Default statement of observation: There are less than 24 hours of 2009. Shocking, I know. I myself almost slapped my palm to my cheek and dropped my jaw in surprise at the very thought of it.

This year has probably gone by more quickly than any other I can remember, though I’m quite sure I’ve said the same thing in the past. A lot has happened this year, and I’m not quite sure where to start, what to say, and where to finish. So for all those who intend on high-tailing it out of here once you have even some idea of what my year’s been like (riveting stuff), 2009 has seen me: 1) land two jobs, 2) go through a few relationships (and by a few, I mean two), 3) become progressively more misanthropic and impatient, and 4) completed another year of a sub-par arts degree. Place a “spend more than $5000 on materialistic shit” and a “injure myself even further from dancing” on top and you’ve got yourself a nice 2009 cake ready to be shoved off into the past.

I’ve seen myself change both physically, emotionally and mentally in the Oh Nine. Physically, I’ve gone from nerdesque (I know. I wanted to stab my end-of-2008-hello-2009 self too.) to… well, non-nerdesque (those who are Facebook friends of mine will be able to mark the transition through my photos!). Emotionally, I’ve worsened and bettered myself at the same time, to the point where I’m not sure how to adequately describe it (so let’s leave it, because Xuan’s tired). And mentally, I’ve disciplined myself a hell of a lot more, purely because if I hadn’t, I’d probably be in a padded cell right now, giggling my ass off at the sight of the wall.

It’s been an odd year. A share of bad experiences here, a plethora of exciting and inspiring ones there. It doesn’t feel like a year is ending – I’m sure this is the same mentality that I had last year. Waking up on Friday morning will probably be the most anticlimactic feeling ever – mainly because I have work that night. But at the same time, I can’t wait to see what 2010 has in store.

So that does it for the lovely… handful? of posts I’ve made here this year. I’m sure the gaping bits of my life that haven’t been complained/whinged about here weren’t of any more interest, so I’ll shrug. I can feel my blogging style changing as well (Hello initially unintended and later realised narcissism? Got room on your seat there?); fingers crossed it’ll bring something a little more fruitful – or complaint-ful – to the blogosphere next year. Cross everything you can, people!

And now, without further ado, I’m off. See you all in Twenty Ten. :)

I haven’t actually been to a uni class and paid attention for about four weeks now, purely because I’ve spent so much time away from the Sydney suburbs over the past few weeks. I bet somebody – anybody – is on the verge of scolding me right about… now. It feels as though all I do these days is work, go driving, or spend time up in the Blue Mountains (without study materials, evidently, ’cause I suck that much) where I might as well be freezing my ickle balls off.

Deep in my subconscious, I’m probably fully aware that this is a very bad thing, since my first exam is tomorrow and I know just about enough of the unit material to fill a teaspoon, but then again, it doesn’t feel as though I’m potentially throwing a perfectly decent grade point average off a cliff. It also explains why I feel like I have enough time on my hands to apply for a second job. Which leads me to my second point.

I will happily clean cinemas and ignore ridiculously sexual couples making out after films have finished rolling if it means I’ll be paid above $15 an hour and I can get more than one shift a week. While my current job is sufficient to get me by in terms of everyday spending, the logic behind a second job is for something to fall back on when I need to save up to move out and/or for the purchase of a car at the end of this year. Plus, since I might be transferring to another university next year – and my current job requires that I be a current student at the university I’m studying with now – I can have the second job as a back-up in case I do end up losing this one. Long story short: Monies, thanks. And lots of them.

Idealism aside… Psycholinguistics exam in t-minus 23 hours and counting… All pots of gold, green-clad midget men and rainbows will be greatly appreciated. Four-leaf clovers won’t be at all discounted either.

It’s just that time of the year again. The half-a-handful of weeks occurring twice a year wherein everybody has university assessments due for the semester and I get so stressed that I sprout grey hairs galore – then, I dye them, just ’cause I don’t want to look 49 when I’m 19. Glorious, no? It’s not unlike a Mexican wave of panic across the state, where everyone just gets up and starts panicking and leaving things until the last minute.

I’ve actually taken a hiatus from dancing just to be able to juggle work and uni, and so far it’s working…ish. Workingish. Working in the sense that I spend more time at uni and get a fraction more work done. Ish in the sense that I have a bit more spare time at home, which isn’t spent studying. Instead, I spend it sitting at my desk, staring absently at the wall while some random playlist of mine flows on in the background. This is punctuated by my going downstairs every hour or so, opening the refrigerator door, hoping something new lies inside, and returning upstairs with a bowl of noodles when there’s nothing else. And this cycle starts over every few days.

Though I like to think that I’ve done at least one uplifting thing since I last blogged… two months ago (holy potatoes, Batman!): I’ve decided to hop on the bandwagon with the rest of my friends at work and participate in the creation of a complaint-free world. So now I walk around looking a little prettier with a purple bracelet on my wrist. But that’s not all, ladies and gents…

Essentially, every time one complains, one switches the bracelet from one wrist to the other. It takes 21 days to learn a new habit, supposedly. So I predict that it’ll take me at least six months to get to a point where every second sentence coming out of my mouth isn’t a complaint of some kind. I haven’t realised until now exactly how much I complain. Sure, I’ve always acknowledged it… a little “Yeah, I complain a crapload, man…” here, and a  little “I’m fully aware that I’m the Queen of complaining. Not King. Queen!” there.

So It’s seemed that I am the car, and complaining is the petrol. But now I’m actively trying to curb my complaining enthusiasm. And it’s going to take a while… Wish me luck!

Example: My job interview was in the afternoon on Wednesday. An informal, chatty session underpinned by questions not unlike “What do you think customer service means?” and “What do you think your strengths are?”. Now don’t get me wrong – I answered the questions just fine, but it wasn’t until afterwards that I started getting a little paranoid, thinking things like “Damnit, I should have mentioned knowing the target market and tailoring information to suit a particular customer!” or “Was it really necessary to stress the fact that I like harbouring a keenness to learn and adapt to new situations… five times in the course of the interview?”.

So, the moral of this story, folks? Go into job interviews prepared, and don’t watch your own hand like a hawk when reaching for that cup of water they’ve so courteously supplied for you – you might see yourself shaking slightly with nervousness… this will only cause said nervousness to reach explosive proportions. Also, wear a belt if need be. And by “if need be”, I mean “because it completes the ensemble, and your pants will feel naked and vulnerable without one”.

Applicants for the position will be notified by next week, so I’m keeping my phone with me at all times possible – I’d rather answer the call directly than let it go to voicemail. Paranoid yuppie that I am. In the meantime, though, I’ll be travelling to the Central Coast with a few friends soon, then returning to Sydney in the evening on Monday… only to go with two of said friends to one of their houses for a day or two of horror movies, fast food and general vegging out. So perhaps that will suffice in distracting me until the results for the semester that just passed are released on Tuesday… (Hello slight sense of panic and dread!)

Just a couple of notes for you to remember for the next time you decide to wake up at 6:50am on a Saturday after spending a good two weeks sleeping in until… well, the afternoon:

1. When reversing the car, look behind you. Go slowly, so that next time you don’t brake suddenly as a white sedan cruises slowly along behind you in your rear view mirror. After you calm your heart rate down a little, don’t forget to avoid stalling the car.
2. Your father never wakes up before 10:30am. Never attempt to wake him up before this time, or else he’ll roar and brandish a fist in your face, two inches from your nose. Literally.
3. White espresso coffees from McDonalds are, by default, shit. Never order one again, unless you have nowhere else to get a hot source of caffeine.
4. At least try to save your money, so that you don’t find yourself unable to scrounge the $9.20 required to travel to your job interview and back this coming Wednesday. This means no binging on horror DVDs, or seasons of Will and Grace/Gilmore Girls/Black Books/Veronica Mars, as you seem to be doing lately. If you’re a good nineteen-year-old young man, you’ll get the job and earn a lofty $20 an hour at least. Cross your fingers. But don’t cross your toes, that’s much too painful.
5. Driving along main roads at 7:00am is best, especially when you’ve only done 15 hours of driving and there’s little actual traffic, so you don’t panic as much and end up stalling the car. Twice. Cue barrage of horns honking.
6. Hurry your ass up and finish this blog entry so you leave the house again… this time, wearing enough layers so that you don’t almost freeze your own balls off.

Also, a final note: Try and remember how to code. Because Lord knows this default layout looks a little too clinical… it’s beginning to make baby Jesus cry.

Yours sincerely (and with that extra bit of gayness),

Xuan.

You heard it right, ladies and gents: this Asian is on the road. And in my Aunt’s manual car, no less. Forget taking the easy way out and driving an automatic car! Forget only having to worry about using one foot! Forget about the lack of a clutch! Stalling the car 986986 times is totally in, people. As is forgetting to change into first gear before doing a U-turn (hence narrowly missing jumping up past the edge of the curb and onto the pavement). And let’s not forget being so cautious that you steady yourself at an average speed of 20km/hr along a quiet, straight road, to the point where someone could probably outstroll you.

This will all, of course, probably be worth it in the long run. I’m driving an hour every day these holidays, so I’ll probably get a good thirty or forty hours under my belt by the time next semester rolls in. As long as I don’t panic about driving along one day and somehow running over a toddler who unknowingly shuffles across the road to its death, I should be fine. The only really comical thing in this entire situation is that I made a New Year’s Resolution at the beginning of last year (and blogged about it, too, for those who might remember) to start driving. And by golly, it only took a whole year and a half to get this point. I don’t know whether to giggle at myself or slap myself on the hand.

Apart from the fact that I am now able to endanger the lives of everybody else out there on suburban Sydney roads, I’m still partially in university mode. Yes, I cringed when I wrote that too. I’ve been organising my timetable for next semester and looking up the textbooks I’ll need (they’ll be raping my bank account again, as usual), and feeling surprisingly motivated to study. Now if only this had materialised, oh, say… fourteen weeks ago, then I’d be a bit of a happier camper.

…or, maybe, I’d just be slightly camper… Either way.

In any other context, she doesn’t talk to me half in Vietnamese and half in English (it’s usually either one or the other), or ask me whether or not I consider myself as having a soul, or talk to me about God. And in other contexts, I usually don’t find myself cupping my hand close to my mouth and blowing warm, carbon-dioxide filled air into the area between them to avoid dying of everyday frostbite. What a bizarre situation to find myself in, then.

But what I found more enlightening on the drive home tonight wasn’t the fact that I’d be able to start learning how to drive without having to pay anybody extortionate amounts or a finger or two (although I’ll have to learn manual, which sounds and looks like a complete bitch). Au contraire (oui oui, there is French here, dear readers). What I found more enlightening was the fact that in the almost nine years since my mother’s death, I’ve forgotten all but the basic elements of the Vietnamese language (it’s no longer spoken in this household), and communication between myself and my own Aunt is, therefore, made exponentially difficult by my own brain.

My own. damn. stupid. brain. Betcha didn’t see that one coming, didja?

I find myself yearning for the days when I was actually bilingual – to the point where I rummage through years and years of primary school memories to find the Vietnamese textbooks from the language lessons I attended back then… and in the process, I drag up six solid years of crappy memories and once they’re absorbed, I resign myself to being psychologically full of fail. This all comes back to the point that I suck for letting myself almost entirely forget something that was once extremely vital to my everyday lifestyle. *cue emo sigh*

I’ve gotten to the point where I immerse myself in Vietnamese-ish surroundings as much as possible, so avoid losing every little bit of my native tongue. Things like (in the daytime, I must say) frequenting the suburbs in Sydney where Vietnamese people seem to crawl around in the thousands upon thousands, not in the least bit aware that I just likened the lot of them to a bunch of creepy crawly bugs…

I speak in Vietnamese wherever possible, despite the fact that half my tones are wrong most of the time and I could very well be asking “How much for a pig?” when I intended to ask “The pork and salad roll, how much is it?”. Oh, and I sit with my nose in a Vietnamese-to-English dictionary on some nights, copying out random words and stringing them into sentences with the grammar that I’ve only partially retained.

…it all sounds a bit sad, doesn’t it? Damn.

So that was, essentially, my train of thought on the way home tonight. Followed shortly by a certain train of thought, not at all unlike “I’m going to fucking blog about this when I get home…”, running laps in my head.

Oh, and the ickle God thing? My Aunt finished off the drive by telling me to murmur “God, save me, and save my soul, if I have a soul” before I go to sleep tonight. Yes, that’s right, folks… if I have a soul. I didn’t know whether to nod in an appeasing manner or burst out laughing… so I did both. The former while I was in the car, and then the latter when I was safely in my room. I wonder when she’ll realise I’m an atheist…

P.S. A new theme will be up after 12 June, as that’s the day I finish my exams and go on a big shopping spree with one of my best friends as a bit of self-reward. So hang on tight until then, folks!