Sorry, please try again

With my brother having much more free time due to holidays and HSC, he has been hitting up the net a little harder than usual, so right now I'm capped and it is ten long painful days before I'm uncapped again.

To alleviate the pain, I tried to strike a deal with my dad. Upgrade to the next level of the plan (20gigs) for the remainder of the month and then downgrade back to the old plan next month. As a sweetener I even offered to pay the extra $30 on the bill. Didn't work. My dad was skeptical that they would allow such wanton changing to plans and observed that even with the extra gigs (8 or so) I (meaning me and my brother) would use them up anyway. He felt that the 12 gigs is enough and we should tough it out. So plan failed. The offer to help pay the extra cash to make up the difference failed. Well, shit happens and you have to deal with it.

That said, this incident brings out a few wise words out from the depths of my memory. The first thought was from a manga called Eyeshield 21. It's about a Japanese high school American Football team trying to make it to the finals. One of the characters notes that your chance of succeeding at something will be 0% only if you don't attempt it. As long as you try and have a go, your chances won't be 0%. It might not be that much higher, but you will have some chance at succeeding. That's how I consoled myself. As long as I talked to my dad and brought it up, the chance of failure was high but not guaranteed. It might have worked. The second thought that came to me after that was it's easier to ask for forgiveness than permission. Maybe I should have just upgraded the plan, profit, humbly apologise when the bill came along and then offered to pay the difference. Well, since he was rather hostile to the idea, might as well tough it out.

You know how sometimes you have these very weird yet so realistic dreams. I just had one of those. It started off with me running and gunning these bad guys ala CounterStrike, with a dash of John Woo's Hardboiled gunplay. So I'm shooting these guys down with dual pistols, doing flips and spins until I get to the last guy. He's pointing a gun at my face, which I managed to deflect yet inexplicably I fall down. The scene changes to a rooftop on a dark, rainy night. I'm lying on my back and the guy is pushing down on me trying to choke me. I'm trying to strangle him. I can't make out his face clearly, but he's grinning ferally. Rain falls onto my face. Eventually I take a deep breath and push at his chest with both my hands only to wake up with my arms outstretched and panting hard.

It was so damn real. I could feel the drops of rain splash against my face. I could feel my hands clasp and jab ineffectively at his meaty throat. And the finish push I felt my hands slam against his chest, only for me to wake up at that point. As I got back to sleep, I felt uneasy. It was a dream, right? Did I actually dream it? Dreams can disappear so quickly from your memory that you start to wonder whether you actually had that dream at all.

We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

-William Shakespeare, The Tempest