Wherein I Have a Close Encounter with Death, Or At Least Severe Discomfort

Went to Faizal's to help fix his computer, and he kindly gave me a ride home. Along the way, I mentioned to him that it was a particularly bad day for driving so fast because it was the start Ramadan. Of course, he took this to mean that speeding was a sin (which is why I brought up Ramadan), which was not what I meant at all - I just didn't want him to end up splashed across the tabloids as "Malay boy crashes at start of holy month, mother weeps, says he was a good boy" (though I think that's stretching the term "good boy" a little bit).

Because of his ultra-sensitivity and my inability to keep my mouth shut when discussing sensitive religous issues (it's difficult because most religous issues aren't sensitive to me, just hte people around me), we ended up not talking for a bit.

Then Faizal took a turn out the expressway and suddenly this other car on our left swerved into our lane without warning. Luckily Faizal's a pretty good driver (at least, more experienced than most of my other mount-the-curb friends) and managed to dodge him narrowly, tyres scraping the curb and making the most awful screeching noise. I swear the guy came within 5cm of us. Faizal later told me that the problem wasn't so much the other car crashing into us as us flipping over the curb and dying in a magnificent fireball, leaving both "good boys unrecognizable but for their teeth".

I can't believe we forgot to take down the license plate number.

I was a little buzzed on Panadol, so it didn't really hit me how close we were to dying, but Faizal started screaming like a little girl about how we almost went to heaven (or at least, him to heaven, me to aetheist hell) and how I was a freak for being so calm about it.

Logic being that because I'm an aetheist (which I'm not, I'm agnostic) I don't believe in an afterlife and thus I should fear death more than religous people who have something waiting there for them. I'd do the logic chain and find the flaw, but I'm still a little Panadol-shaky, so that's an exercise for another day.

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Been looking through some of my old photos and videos, and I realized how much I've become like my parents despite trying to hard to run away from their influence. I look at Dad and think about his limitations, and my own, and his end-of-the-rope looks remarkably like mine. I might be able to move a little higher on the social-economic scale my parents occupied, but whether I can break out of the loop of their limitations, their value-systems, their fears and loves I don't know.

It's like I'm just living the life my parents would have led had they been born 40/29 years later. Any improvement on a personal level for me was inflicted upon by my society.

For some reason that makes me feel so... meagre.