Shady Establishments

Karmen pwns at pool. Unfortunately, she had me on her team on my very first time at a pool parlour. A pool parlour, a place whose name I made up on the spot because I have no idea what the proper name is, is somewhere you can play pool in. Alternative names are pool hall and swimming pool.

In order to play pool, one must hit a ball with another ball into one of six holes conveniently piaked at intervals of approximately identical distance throughout the pretty, velvety, oblong table. The table is lit from directly above by three triangular yellow lamps which illuminate the faces of the players in the darkness beyond and creates sinister silhouettes of people from other tables. One can only hit a ball by poking it stylishly with an enormously long stick, most of them which come far too light on the rack in the pool parlour/pool hall/swimming pool.

In order to achieve maximum stylishness and proxor in the game, you must raise your bum into the air and strike an extremely cool pose. Your stick must poke the ball in exactly the right spot that will send the other losers flying all over the place. The ball you poke with the stick must be the white one. If you poke the other balls -- all of which are coloured -- without using the white one, it's a foul.

There are an amazing number of ways in which you can foul in the game.

If you jog a ball on the table by accident, it's a foul.

If your white ball doesn't hit anything after you poked it, it's a foul.

If your white ball first hits a coloured ball not belonging to your team (stripes or solids), it's a foul.

If your white ball goes into a hole, it's a foul.

If the black ball goes into a hole without all the colours in your team going in first, it's game over.

Such a nice, stress-free game, and the perfect thing for a first time player on the same team with a comparative l33t master just after three weeks of massive examination burnout .

If someone fouls, the next person playing in the other team gets the ball and puts it wherever he likes -- usually in the best position to pwn your ass afterwards.

As I said earlier, Karmen the pool pwner had me on her team. She was quite a good teacher, but I was so bad at it she was all but tearing her hair out.

The next day we went to play pool again, where I discovered that my game had miraculously improved overnight, but not before a shopping trip to the three-storey This Fashion outlet in Dhoby Ghaut. In this time and place, Karmen the pool pwner became Karmen the ferocious fashionista. Within five minutes she had assembled an outfit costing $36 and had whisked off to the changing room, leaving the rest of us eating our hats -- not that we had any. Cheryl, horrified and unable to withstand the torturous onslaught of flouncy frills and skirts reminiscent of exploded pudding, decided to scarper to the pool hall / swimming pool / pool parlour first.

The five-minute outfit was, of course, perfect. Then Karmen generously tried to help me make purchases, which on hindsight was a bad thing to do in This Fashion, where the selection of clothes available were sort of restricted to randy tops and skirts in candy colours. (wow, rhyming AND alliteration O_O) AND lots of lace. Therefore I was plied with a scratchy earth-toned turtleneck which would have indeed looked very nice on me were I not so disgustingly lumpy. In the end we both gave up and I started reading while Karmen bought her new $36 ensemble and Kelly followed up happily with a sleeveless shirt-thing. (Who cares what it's called.)

Kelly had originally suggested that we watch the movie The Brothers Grimm, but then it was scrapped in favour of playing pool, where I looked forward to making a complete fool of myself for the next two hours. To my pleasant surprise, this was not the case, or at least it was restricted to when I tried to break the starting lump of billard balls you start the game with for the first time. Because it was the first time, I was stressed again and regressed to my old (since yesterday, anyway) habits of gripping the stick in the wrong way, which made my shots go wide and weak.

Then we toddled over to the arcade, where Grace and Cheryl indulged in the lamest drum machine game I have ever, ever, ever seen. Kelly wandered over to play a first-person shooter game, from which I was reminded of the reason why no one should ever give Kelly a rifle for her birthday. (There'll be no one left alive among the ranks of the education system bureaucracy by the next week.) I shall not dwell on Karmen's pwnage of the Para machine, since this whole entry seems to be about Karmen and her various fields of pwnage already. If she reads this I shall expect a billard ball in the face the next time she sees me in school.

Cheryl's mother seems to think that the shady establishment of the swimming pool/pool hall/pool parlour will attract undesirable members of society to our vicinity. Fortunately we escaped alive with our wallets and things intact, alhtough in my case perhaps not my pride that first time round I visited the place. I can safely remark that by the end of that first day it was in such tatters there was hardly anything left apart from holes. Good thing for that second day, at least.

Mr Ng, our class chairperson's 超级 Amath teacher, passed the table where Kelly, Karmen, Grace and I were eating dinner at the food court. He was trailing his whole family -- his little girl, his baby, his pretty wife -- and he was wearing SHORTS. So we followed him around like the paparazzi took photos of him with an enormous camera. All that while he DIDN'T NOTICE. Hopefully this took the minds of poor Grace and Karmen off the horrible food they had ordered for dinner and were, in effect, forced to eat. (One doesn't just throw $5 away just because the fish in the fish and chips tastes like biscuit which had gotten drunk in the oven and eloped with the cream puffs. It wasn't in the least partially reminiscent of fish. I tried a piece.)

I bought 'The Curious Incident of the Dog In Night Time', and I'm still not sure if that was a very good thing to have done, because the girl at the bookshop ripped up the first page while getting it ready for purchase. Stupid girl at the bookshop. And they talk about the CUSTOMERS being the bastards when the service industry is concerned. Perhaps I should have stood up to her, but hell, I needed to rush home and didn't want a squabble, being full of 版面.

Sans Bookshop at Plaza Singapura is now on my list of Shady Establishments to avoid, at least when that obnoxious salesgirl is at the counter.

Meanwhile, I plan to stop being a greedy girl and not eat everything in sight. This I can also thank Karmen for.