It must be love!

US Open fever is in the air and I'm infected. It has been raining for two straight days so I haven't been getting my daily dosage of tennis lately. Nonetheless, I have been checking USopen.org at every chance I get to see if any matches are going on and guess what: Nadal won his delayed third set 6-0. Rafa for the win!

I definitely watched a huge amount of tennis this year. Who would have thought, after not picking up a racket for 5 years, I would spend my summer break consuming Wimbledon as much as I can. The Federer-Roddick final was epic and I've turned into a Roddick fan. It got me all excited for the next Slam so when Khalifa started asking around about going to see it LIVE, I joined the bandwagon.

The tickets that we got were for Sept 4's evening match. Looking at the tournament schedule at the official website, we were going to watch a Men's 2nd round match and a Women's 3rd round match at the Arthur Ashe stadium. They didn't release the exact lineup until a day before the match so it was a jittery week of me guessing in anticipation. It's going to be my first live Grand Slam and the tickets weren't cheap so I didn't want a no-name for the night. In the preceding two days, I refreshed the Schedule of Play site hourly as the big names finished their 2nd round match. Federer has played, Roddick has played, Djokovich has played... running out of big seeds left to play the 2nd round here.

Lo and behold, I scored Rafael Nadal! Second round match against Nicolas Kiefer! Nadal I know and Kiefer I've heard of; it's going to be an awesome night. As a bonus, Venus plays before Nadal. I don't really keep up with the ladies' tennis so it's good to be able to watch a name that I recognize.

The roadtrip to Queens was uneventful until we reached Lincoln tunnel. Being in a car in Manhattan is definitely a different experience compared to walking around the city. I got to witness a lady ticketed for stopping in the box as an intersection and a guy in a motorized wheelchair weaving through traffic (on the road, cars and all). Vying for road space with cab drivers and truckers, I realize that the guidebooks were right in saying that the best way to move around the city is on foot. We reached the Billie Jean King Tennis Center sometime before 5pm. Since we're not allowed to go in before six we loitered outside the South Gate enviously watching people with dining passes walk straight in. There's a bit of comedy to watch too:

Ticket attendant: If you have a stamp, WALK STRAIGHT THROUGH!
Guy to attendant: Do you have the stamp with you?

People in the line were in stitches. That was when Naazer pulled out his iPhone and accessed his USopen app. Federer, Roddick and Sharapova were playing the next day! Three big ticket match and we missed it by half a day! The Canadian ladies behind us in line got into the excitement. One of them called her agent to see if they can get tickets. Naturally, the scalpers would have bought them all when the schedule came out.

When the attendants finally let us in, most of us made a straight shot to the Nike store. Khalifa and Naazer bought tonnes of stuff while Mirza, Areeb and I just stood watching. Tempted, I finally bought a t-shirt and Areeb bought a couple of wristbands, mainly because they cost twice as much on eBay.

At 7pm, we entered the just-emptied Arthur Ashe Stadium where the workers we cleaning up after the previous Murray match. Venus and Maggie started warming up a few minutes later while we broke our fast with Mirza's homemade sandwich.

Venus' match was nothing to shout about really. She was the overwhelming favorite even with her knee injury. For the fun of it, I started rooting for Rybarikova and it paid off with her giving better resistance in the second set. However, towards the end, I could not help hoping for the match to be over so we could move on to the next one.

The crowd started to swell by the time the Nadal-Kiefer match was up. Excitement was really picking up in the stands but the players didn't really reciprocate in the first set. Nadal was in his element and Kiefer didn't have a chance to play his game, resulting in a thoroughly boring 6-0 first set. Me and the crowd are having none of that so we started rooting for Kiefer. And woke up he did. After winning the first point in the second set, old Nicolas gave a roar and soaked up the crowd's approval.

Kiefer went on to exhibit some awesome serve-and-volleying, lifting the crowd of their seats on most points with his exquisite net-plays. Nadal looked a bit off in the second set but that doesn't diminish Kiefer's ability, with Kiefer going on to win the set. Looks like I might get my money's worth. Hoping for at least three hours of tennis, I change allegiance after every few points depending on who's winning haha.

There was one empty seat in our section somewhere in the interval Khalifa brought a young Brit to sit with us. Apparently, the guy had a day pass and stayed back for the evening matches. He had some really interesting stories to share but I was too engrossed with the ongoing match to really pick his brain. One thing that I did get was that he had went to all the Grand Slams this year! Yes, Australia, Roland Garros, Wimbledon and now New York. He watched the Nadal-Verdasco five-setter in Australia! I hoped I could do what he did in the future, touring all the Slams.

Without a doubt, minus the first set, the match was truly entertaining. Nadal dictated proceedings but Kiefer did not give in easily. Nadal won the next two sets but not without resistance from Kiefer. The match clock stopped at 2:59 hours; I was off by one minute in my prediction but no complains here.

We stayed back for some pictures in our seats while the stadium emptied in a flash; probably people rushing to catch their trains. We had to be ushered out by a worker who was really nice about it. All that's left is the two-hour drive to Lehigh. It's past midnight, luckily I'm not driving. A good end to the night. We even forgot about dinner.

Rise and Shine

Lately, I have been going through a major sleep overhaul. Bed at 10, if rajin sahur at 4am and stay up sampai subuh and onwards to my 8am class. Doing homework at the crack of dawn does feel good. Everything's all quiet and peaceful. Imagine that, me doing my calculus and accounting homework when normally I would be sleeping. I don't know whether this is awesome time management or the ultimate procrastination. (FYI the homework are always due on the same day I'm doing it)

But I knew it was too good to last: No more sahur this week, just subuh and straight to class with a few moments online beforehand. I have been lucky in finishing my homework so far, even with me putting sleep before work during the preceding night.

Had my first late night the day before doing math till 3 so boom missed subuh and woke up at 8. Good thing class is just 5 minutes away.

Pizza is getting old.

Apathy at its best

It is kind of sad that the only way that I am keeping up with the news back in Malaysia is through Facebook status messages. I don't devour the newspaper as much as I used to, especially when thinking back about the time in KYS where a lot of us would spend the afternoon reading newspapers at the RC couch. I am not saying that I missed Malaysian news,heck, the only stuff that were written on are the endless political drama that Malaysians got themselves stuck into. In this case, for the past week, people's status messages have been flooded with phrases like "daulat tuanku", "what happened to democracy" and "Perak is going down" etc. Curious of what's happening, I googled for those terms and found out that some Perak lawmakers defected which made the Pakatan Rakyat lose their majority in the state government.

Surprise, surprise. Apparently the Sultan of Perak had disagreed with PR's Minister to to dissolve the state assembly and call for a snap election. I am not going to dissect the event blow-by-blow, they have more qualified analysts to do that. But the gist is the debate of whether the Sultan had the power to refuse the Menteri Besar's request to dissolve the state assembly and dismiss the popular elected state government.

I am the last person who you would say is engrossed with the local politics. I always thought that it had more flair than substance, and reading the latest news in the papers is like a preview of an upcoming soap opera. During the Biro Tatanegara (BTN) program that I had to go before flying overseas, there was this exercise on figuring out your priorities. You have to list down six items on individual pieces of paper (they were politics, economics, education, social, and two other stuff that I could not recall) and rank them according to importance. The first paper that I chucked into the bin had "politics" written on it. What do you know, politics happened to be the most important item (they were trying to instill patriotism in us apathetic young-uns).

The role of the Sultan is something that I have always wondered about. I mean, they get allowances just for being symbolic figures and they do not need to work at all. What do they do, then? Somebody posed this question during BTN, and as luck would have it, we happened to have the most uncooperative speaker you could imagine, answering questions with questions:

"Apa peranan sultan dan raja dalam sistem politik zaman moden ini?"
"Awak rasa apa peranan mereka?"

Well, what do you expect from a program whose only highlight was the abseiling we did one afternoon. To the fascillitators' credit, they did give a vague answer that the Malay royalty is what differentiates our political system from the Western ones, providing checks and balances to the ruling government. I somewhat agree with that, looking at Raja Nazrin Shah as a voice of reason and the current Selangor Sultan who postponed the ratification of the 'yoga' fatwa (yes, I got that through Facebook statuses too). However, there are some bad eggs that made the whole basket look bad, but don't ask me who or why because I don't have enough info to start pointing fingers.

So, do we need the Malay royalty? Frankly, I could not care less.