If the moon and the sun were balls and aligned so that they would…

Last Saturday’s newspaper had a revelation. According to one article bearing the title, “Beware the moon for it will conflate with the sun under its iniquitous bosom,” it said that due to the lunar eclipse one should be wary. It also mentioned that the moon would be very moody (kind of like a woman, eh?) thus will rays of badness. I thought it was a load of rubbish.

That day I had an uneasy feeling. I was knackered. I had no idea why. And besides, I had already gone to the warehouse sale on books (argh! I saw a number of the books I had bought a few weeks earlier at half the freaking price!) where my mind went wild and my wallet suffered anorexia. So what could I possibly want?

Hot dogs.

Not the variant where the wiener is no longer than my pinky finger (which is long but you, um, get the idea) but the ones at the world’s biggest emporium for chairs and butt massagers, IKEA*. I had to fetch my sister from the train station and it was off we go. On the road leading to the station, I trailed this beat-up junk of a car, no faster than a speeding tortoise, with a table strapped to its boot. Now, any person with the intelligence of a six-year-old knows that you have to really strap it in lest if falls off whilst you drive. In fact, that same kid will tell you’re being a total oaf for doing such a thing. What are the chances of it coming loose? Well, if you were me on that soon-to-be horrible day then the chance will occur and it will be right in front of my face. I managed to brake in time and swerve my car a little otherwise I would have been obliged to call a carpenter to extricate pieces of wood sticking out of my car. Or worse.

Next up, as I was heading to the shopping mall, the road that I normally take has potholes and more potholes. I always manage to avoid them. That day, no such thing. Thankfully, none of my wheels came off. After having our butts jarred by the uncomfortable thumps to its soft nature, it was time to act like sharks on the hunt: finding an elusive parking spot at 3 p.m. on a Sunday afternoon. (I’ll tell you guys about Malaysian shopping habits soon.) Round and round we went, like hammerhead sharks going in circles to find their prey. Every time a spot opened itself I would put pedal to the metal only to find that another person had spotted it and duly parked their car faster than you can say Bugger. After what seemed like eternity, we decided that we should just go home. According to my sister, we didn’t need to pay for the ticket since the machine spat it out saying payment wasn’t necessary. However, when I put the ticket into the ticket-eating machine I saw the words, “Please pay the damn ticket you fool,” I knew we had been punked. It ended with me reversing the car and people stared at me as though I had brought a chicken with H5N1.

Oh, and I broke the toilet handle at a restaurant where I ate a spaghetti bolognaise which in turn burned my tongue.

Bad luck struck me like a porcupine skewering a hapless lizard that fell onto its deadly spikes. It was that bad. You see, while I may not believe in the study of numbers that should govern my life or that feng shui can predict whether or not my future wife would be a homicidal maniac with a penknife, that day left me pondering over the article’s—I say this with a straight face—“power”. Did I unleash the terror simply by glossing over the words? Or was this the Big Guy’s way of compounding my wretched week? Whatever it was, it worked.

But you know what? Those incidents were a wake up call to me to stop being all depressed and crappy. By the time I complete this post, I should have already sent more than a dozen or so applications. I shall carpe diem!

Until the next depression that is.

This is Chris, signing off.

PS: * I don’t about you guys, but I can’t spell IKEA as Ikea. I feel…odd.