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The TOEFL Test, A Cinderella Story, and The Bourne Identity

September 4th, 2004. Published under Daily Journal, Movies. No Comments.

Today I had a TOEFL test with Shirley W. at EF Delta Plaza Surabaya at around 9 AM. I needed to take the test as a requirement for the ADS scholarship I am applying. But I was so sleepy I sent her a message that I would be late. Just before I left my house at 9.30 AM, my grannie told me that she had run out of money and inquired if my dad had sent her some. My mom did say to me that she had transfer the fund to my bank account but I needed to withdraw it from an ATM. So I went to the nearest ATM, got the money, and gave it to my grannie. Damn another delay. I arrived at EF at about 10.15 AM. I saw a girl seating in front of the building. I thought I had met her before but I couldn’t remember who she was. The heck, I was so in hurry I passed her. Shirley had begun the test the moment I entered the office. Fortunately I was allowed to catch up.

I entered the test room. A small room containing about ten Hewlett-Packards computers. I sat beside Shirley and the officer allowed me to begin my test. The first part was a writing test, but the officer told me to skip it and went throgh the second. It was a listening test. I put my headset on and started listening. Damn I was so screwed. I forgot that was an English test. I neither take it seriously nor listen carefully the first conversation. I didn’t understand even a sentence. I really needed a luck for that.

Okay forget it, let’s go to the second conversation. I listened very very carefully to the next questions and I could do them well enough. Although the discussions mostly took place in a classroom or a college, they varied and the topics were pretty entertaining: literary, physics, astronomy, math, the roman history, and the regular campus life. After about ten or more conversations, the second section was ended.

The third section was my favorite, the structure. I didn’t need to listen to any lengthy conversation nor read multi-paragraphs passages. I only read the sentences one by one and picked the right answer for each question. Gosh, I thought it was easy. But my last English class was well four years ago. Some uncommon structures forced me to think pretty hard and wasted my time. Screw me, the time ran out but I hadn’t finish all the third section’s questions yet.

I continued to the last section: Reading. It was boring since I had to read through some passages before I could answer any question. Anyway, it ain’t a big deal since I could finished the whole test in about an hour. I even finished much earlier than Shierly did although she started the test before me. I even got a slightly higher mark. My final mark was 223, higher than the minimum requirement for the scholarship (170). Thanks God. But Shirley seemed to be a bit upset with her score when he finally came out of the test room. Soon, the girl I saw earlier outside EF came in and asked Shirley’s result. I eventually remembered. She was Cimot (can’t remember her real name), a friend of Shirley. She accompanied Shirley there.

After the test, the three of us had our lunch at Mc. Donald’s. We chatted a bit while we were eating. Some times later, Cimot saw her boyfriend passing by and she went to him. After a while she returned to our table. After finishing our lunch, I headed back to the parking lot while Shirley and Cimot went to Cimot’s boyfriend’s mobile phone shop. I stopped by Flash Disc to rent some VCDs and DVDs. No interesting new titles were available. But I got A Cinderella Story and The Bourne Identity.

Hilary Duff is Cinderella

A Cinderella Story was another modern version of the classic Cinderella story. Hilary Duff once leaved only with her Dad. Her dad was her bestfriend and vice versa. Her dad ran a successful eating place. Things were good until her dad married a woman with two daughters. She got a new stepmother and two older sisters. Anyway she was happy for her daddy. Until a tragic earthquake killed her dad.

Then things changed drastically. Her stepmother took all her dad’s belongings and started to treat Hilary as a mere servant. She must now serve her stepmother as well as her two annoying stepsisters. I won’t tell the rest of the story since it is very easy to guess. It closely resemble the classic Cinderella only without the magical things. Simple plots, average actors’ performances, and great soundtracks performed by Hilary Duff herself. I only rent this movie because she is currently one of my favorite celebrities. She’s hot and she has a sweet angel voice. One of the soundtracks is familiar to me. It’s “Come Clean” performed by Hilary Duff.

The Bourne Identity

The story began with some sailors in a fishing ship. One day, they found a human body floating in the sea. They picked him up and he was still alive. Unfortunately, the man couldn’t remember who he was, what he was doing, where he was heading, and what was happening to him. He got amnesia. The only clue was a bullet burried under his skin that contained a Swiss bank account number. Soon after landing, he headed to Swiss. One night when he was sleeping at a park bench, two guards asked him to leave. He was upset and beat them up. He was surprised knowing that he had the martial art skill.

Upon arriving at the bank, the officer let him access his storage consisting a large amount of money, a gun, and many passports with his picture on it. He had the US passport with the name Jason Bourne along with other nations’ passports. French, Brazil, Italy, and UEA to name some of them. He got even more confused. He took all the money and the passports with him but he left the gun. And Jason Bourne’s journey to find his true identity was started. The movie was packed with some cool actions of CIA agents trying to eliminate Jason Bourne. Matt Damon performed well as Jason Bourne. I like the story as well as the actions. By the way, it had a sequel already on theaters, The Bourne Supremacy. Hopefully I can watch it soon.

Seafood at Pandaan

September 3rd, 2004. Published under Daily Journal. No Comments.

Vebby told me that she would have a dinner in Pandaan. She asked me to come along. I thought it was a good idea to eat at places outside Surabaya sometimes so I accepted her offer. About 5.30 PM, we headed there. There were Bambang, Yustina, Vebby and her boyfriend’s sister, and Enyo driving. The traffic was so well jammed we moved pretty slowly. My stomach couldn’t compromise and started to beg for food. I tried to get some sleep but I couldn’t.

Finally we arrived at the toll gate. But an unexpected thing happened. Enyo took the wrong gate. We supposed to take the Waru-Gempol gate but she took the Waru-Surabaya gate. All of us were so surprised knowing this. Vebby and Yustina blamed Bambang because he sat at the front chair but didn’t remind Enyo. Of course they only teased him. I wanted to tease him too but I kept it for later. At that moment I pretended to sleep soundly. I guessed they didn’t realize that I was awake. Once we reached the Gayungsari toll gate, at the Mastrip street, I “woke up” and asked them where we were. They tried to hide the truth from me and I played along. I acted like I didn’t know anything until I saw a big drugstore’s board sign showing we were at the Mastrip street. I pointed that out and asked why we were still at Surabaya. They explained to me and I blamed Bambang for that thing. Hehehe, sorry pal, just kidding. Okay I did pretend I was sleeping but for goodness sake, I was really starving. Thanks to Vebby, she had some breads for us to eat.

Eventually, we arrived at Pandaan. After taking Vebby’s boyfriend’s sister home, we headed to the eating place. We ordered two large portions of Crabs and four small portions of squids and prawns. Since I was so damn starving, everything looked, smelt, and tasted good to me. Okay not everything. There was a portion of inked squids. I didn’t even want to touch it. Enyo took some pictures of me while I was eating like there’s no tomorrow. I didn’t a give a damn though as my stomach had the top priority at that moment. Anyway, it was a good dinner. In the future, however, I will think twice if someone will ever ask me to go eating at a rather far place. I couldn’t stand hunger.

The Badminton Practice Review

August 28th, 2004. Published under Daily Journal, Sports. No Comments.

Yosep was on the phone this morning asking me if I was gonna to have a badminton practice. Definitely I would go. He called around 10.30 PM and told me he was just going to pick up Sudarwan and would be at the gym at around 11.30 PM. I was still on the bed so I got up quickly, bathed, and ate my breakfast. I arrived there at 11.30 PM more or less. Yosep had not arrived yet. It ain’t a surprise however, since Yosep is always late. The traffic he used to say. Fortunately Eddy, Sigit and his friend (I can’t remember the name, let’s just call him Al) was there already so we could start a double game. Al and I versus Edy and Sigit.

We beat Eddy and Sigit in a 30-points game easily. Eddy complained that his hand was injured so he couldn’t play well. Not more than an excuse to me since Eddy ain’t really good at double games. He is good in single games though as he has the speed and stamina. But power, self-positioning, teamwork, and ball placement talks much more in double games. In my opinion, Eddy considerably lacked those points. Sigit is powerful and a good finisher but he could hardly do anything in the game because he didn’t have enough assists from Eddy. Al is good at ball placement but he often overuses his abilities that leads to blunders. Yosep is pacey and he has almost unlimited stamina that he won most single games. In double games, he can use her pace very well to cover his partner’s holes. In this case he was almost always the MVP of double games. Sudarwan has a big fat body, much bigger than me so he doesn’t have Yosep’s or Eddy’s pace. But he has a considerable power and he is good at ball placement. This makes him a good double games player. The bad news is he is such an egoist that he always blames his partner when things get bad. He always makes an excuse if something is clearly his fault. Since Yosep is the most patient person among us, he partners with Sudarwan almost everytime.

What about me? In my humble opinion, I have the power, a pretty good ball placement, and self-positioning. I lack the aspect of speed and stamina. Therefore I like to finish every game as quickly as possible. I also lack the determination. Sometimes I played so damn well that I could devastate my opponents with a very big points difference. But some other times I played a very bad game that my opponents could see me as a joke.

Teamwork? I can do well with the pacey type such as Yosep. In such composition, Yosep do much as the defender and I act as the attacker. But we rotated the partners often, with the exception of Sudarwan and Yosep since Sudarwan can’t go along so well with the others. With Eddy, I can’t do much because I can’t expect a good assist from him. He always gives the perfect ball for the enemies to smash it at us. Usually, I gave everything I got like there’s no tomorrow. That way we could lead the points from the very first time. Then, if our opponents were nervous enough to catch up we could win the game. But if they could catch up, I usually ran out of stamina and they would easily beat us.

I can’t play well with Sigit since we are pretty much the same type. Two attackers without defenders means that we usually scored as much points as the opponents. The games usually tied but since there should always be a side that win a game, our probability of winning is about 50-50. I should be able to do well with Al as we play differently. I play explosively while he plays softly. But since both of us tend to make a lot of blunders, the result is very unpredictable.

Everytime I played with Sudarwan is a nightmare. We share the same type so it should be like me and Sigit. The bad news is that Sudarwan is so bossy. But I can’t just let him put all the blames on me. Never. So we can’t help each other in a game. We play as we like egoistically. In a game, both of Sudarwan and me fight against three enemies. In my case, I fight my two opponents plus Sudarwan. I think you can pretty well predict the result. We lost almost all the time. I can continue this review, but I think it will be very boring. By the way, put Yosep and Al together to create the most boring team since both of them tend to play defensively.

Friend or Foe

After the badminton practice, Eddy told me about his recent project. He was working on a Karaoke computer program. He needed to create a software equalizer and found a great difficulty programming the sound card. I then suggested him to use DirectSound. He didn’t really understand it so I explained a bit to him. He also didn’t have the DirectX SDK to create a DirectSound application so he followed me home to get a copy.

After his leaving, my grandma asked me about him and my other friends. She asked why my friends seem to come often only when they needed something from me. I didn’t say a word to her although I knew the answers. A friend in need is a friend indeed, isn’t it? Most of my friends are from the same kind of people. People who need my knowledge, my stuffs, or my money. People who are close to me when they need something from me and just disappear when they have got what they need. Of course, some are sincere but they ain’t that close to me :(.