Holy shit this stuff is so convoluted. Apparently MySQL doesn't have good spatial/GIS support, compared to PostGIS/PostgreSQL. On top of that, nobody seems to have some sort of documentation -- there are all these tools and scripts lying around that nobody knows how to use. There's a 140+ page pdf lying around explaining some standard of representation of sorts.
I'm sure it shouldn't be this difficult. I'll try to use a library called libmygis, and if that doesn't work out, then I'm just going to switch to PostGIS, dammit..
update:
I fixed this eventually; check the solution process here: YEAH! and NO!, here: PostgreSQL & PostGIS! , here: PostGIS continued, but..., and finally fixed it here: success.