Delusional Dreams

On international students

2011-11-24T08:27:00.001+08:00

I just came across a forum post where a chinese student referred to the existence of singaporeans as safety nets during the finals. Looking at the comments posted in reaction to his statement, I can't help but feel that many singaporeans are incredibly myopic when it comes to matters like this.

Granted that remark was insensitive, inconsiderate, and above all else inadmissable for a foreigner to make of his host country, no matter how true it may be. The truth is that, when I studied in NUS I thought that way as well, that there were always the lazy ass types who would cushion my fall, if ever. It just happened to be a coincidence that many of these lazy ass types were people with whom I shared the same nationality. That said, while it may be permissible for me to say it (since I'm Singaporean I'm entitled to badmouth my own countrymen lol), it is not for him, and it just reflects how lowly this particular chinese regards Singapore and her students.

However, on the flip side of the coin, I just wonder, how well has NUS welcomed foreigners? How well has NUS succeeded in integrating foreign students into Singapore? It is weird how Singaporeans take it for granted that foreigners must be able to speak perfect English when they themselves can't even get basic grammar right. Comments such as "let's give them a paper for every module and see if they can still score or not" just reflect this double standard with regards to foreigners. I admit that English is a language which must be mastered before going overseas for anybody. Yet it is completely impossible given the circumstances in which many of these students live before going overseas. Let me ask this of any Singaporean: How well have you mastered your second language, be it Chinese or Malay or Tamil or even English? How fluently can you speak it?

In all my encounters with Singaporeans, there has been but a mere minority who can use both languages with ease. Let me throw a typical Singaporean chinese into a chinese-learning environment. Do you think he will not struggle, not have any problems adapting whatsoever?

My thoughts, of course, come from my own personal experience as a foreign student in a foreign university, immersed in a foreign language environment. Here in France, all the classes are taught in French. We are expected to argue, converse, and communicate in French. It hardly needs to be said that French is nowhere near my first nor my second language. Nor is it for many foreign students here. What warms my heart, however, is how the Direction des Etudes takes into account the difficulty foreign students have with the language, and gives us some leeway when it comes to difficult stuff such as papers. When I heard that my paper for a sociology module would be marked on a different grading scheme than that for French students, I was at once grateful and hurt at the same time. I was indignant that they "underestimate" my/our level of French, yet at the same time grateful because I know that my French sucks. Why is this not done for foreign students in NUS?

Studying here in France is a rare chance to step outside the suffocating confines of NUS to look at a bigger picture of the world. Here I use all 3 languages that I know on a daily basis, and I have made enormous progress with my Chinese and my French. I mix with Chinese whom I have found to be warm and nice, albeit sometimes closed off within their community. I have discovered a different world which, in NUS, I never bothered to find out, despite the high percentage of Chinese in the school. I now realize that I, in Singapore, was just like the French students here now where I study. I had not thought to open myself to the international crowd. I had stayed contentedly within my comfort zone, and alienated foreign students because it was simply just easier to lay all the blame on them.

Which is incredibly myopic, that I have realized now.

That said, there is no excuse for making a remark like that. However, I think it is time to start bridging this gap of mutual distrust before it all culminates in some kind of violent earth-shaking nationalist movement. Conflict happens all the time with anybody in an international setting. As Singaporeans, as citizens of a global city, where foreigners and tourists alike come to at incredibly high numbers, there is no space for intolerance and distrust. This is honestly compounded by the fact that foreign students who take up the tuition loan have a 3 year bond to serve in Singapore, so don't expect the 1/3 foreign population to disappear anytime soon.

And yeah we can all blame the government for having made the wrong decisions.

Now I know that I have completely sidestepped the original topic at hand. I have already made my stand with regards to that however. I just want to say that in Singapore we take a very dim view of foreigners who do not speak "proper" English, and we brandish that as evidence that they do not wish to integrate into our society. We do not step into their shoes and see matters from their point of view, that in fact any non-mother tongue language takes time to master. I am highly aware that I live in a contradictory country, where my countrymen have distinctly different realities from the reality of the world around them. I am conscient of the fact that our government itself implements contradictory policies from time to time, and which promotes a constructed environment of "meritocracy" which stifles other kinds of merits from surfacing. I know too that matters such as these are rarely, if ever, black and white, that there are many things to consider before making a judgment of any kind.

I know full well too that comments on facebook represent but a small minority, but who are part of the younger generation of Singapore who will make up the bulk of the working class in the near future. Who will feel the effects of the foreign policy keenly in the coming years. Whose comments however may have been made in a rare rush of recklessness, which may not truly reflect their opinions.

Let me just say that in whichever case, our tiny island is like a prison more than anything else. Take a hard look at the world around it, and perhaps more Singaporeans would realize that Singapore is actually not at the centre of the world.

Far from it, really.

X

2011-06-15T06:35:00.004+08:00

It's been a long time....

It's hard to believe that I'm here now, in France, in X. It's hard to believe that near 6 weeks have passed since I arrived. It's hard to believe that I'm actually trying to do all this math that just....doesn't seem relevant.

I'm feeling kind of lost right now. I'm looking at an impossible schedule coupled with mounting piles of homework and self-study, and a 1-month exam deadline. Not to mention a 2 week project deadline, which math I don't even know how to start doing.

Math math math....I had thought it was out of my life. Then came university, and I coped well with it. How could I not, it was so watered down. And then the fddp saturday lessons, and I thought, well I don't understand but I guess I'll have to when the time comes. And now that the time has come I realize I still don't know anything.

Everytime I go to a petite classe, coming face to face with math that seems as insurmountable as ever, I just wonder, what the hell am I doing here? If only I had the education of the classe prepa...if only I were a math major....if only....if only I had taken those math modules for real....

Even so it is supposed to be manageable, yet I cannot. I waste my time on the unimportant stuff like games and facebook, and I cannot bring myself to try to understand the math. It is incredibly difficult to move beyond my inertia. My stupidity. My head just goes, boomz everytime I try to think about the math. Isn't there a simpler way? Why is everything so mathematical.....?

I can rant and rail against the innumerable problems that keep coming my way even though I have thrown in the towel a long time ago. I stand a step back with hands raised in surrender, and yet the onslaught is relentless. How do others keep on doing it? How do they grasp the concepts so easily, and apply the calculations so effortlessly? I have problems not just with the understanding, but also with time management. So many things to do and complete and attend....

I could keep on complaining and asking why, and I know that in my mind nothing will get done. I keep trying to move myself to read something, but I just get so so so tired. Where's the relief? How do I surmount and conquer this mathematical obstacle?

From a remote viewpoint in the back of my head I can understand that all this is just routine stuff to the French. That mathematical formulae and concepts are like words to them. That for them while it isn't a walk in the park, at least they don't have to consecrate 4 hours of their nights to all this. Perhaps that is what all of them have already done, and now is just simply my turn to do so. Yet.....

Just what am I doing here? Why couldn't I have been happy to stay in singapore and maybe go to centrale for sep? Or I dunno, just elsewhere......

My head is just going to explode. This is exactly like the time in the army. And I don't know how I am going to deal with it.

I do want to emerge victorious though, I want to be able to conquer myself and turn out to be a better man compared to 4 years ago, compared to when I just let go of all responsibilities and absolved myself of all duties. I want to take charge of myself, and stop letting myself dance according to the crazy tempo like a puppet. Yet....I feel as though my resolve is weakening.....

Someone help me?

Where does the line start.

2009-03-04T22:29:00.002+08:00

Writing used to be my hobby. Blogging, at least. Somewhere where I could perhaps say what I could not in real life.

Over time I realized I've lost the interest in blogging. Or rather, I've lost the interest in introspecting.

Perhaps it's due to the effects of misguided self-help in the areas of personality, like the enneagram, or the MBTI. It's so easy to think you're this type and that type, and end up going around in circles trying to decide how you should act and behave.

For life is but an act, isn't it? Where you either act, or be fired.

It seems as if convincing myself of being type 4, and therefore sinking into deluding fantasies every now and then, I've sort of, dissociated from what I used to identify myself with. It's not a bad thing, I think. I'm more down-to-earth now, more practical and less beating about the bush inside my own head. I'm daydreaming lesser now, more focussed on how to use the time efficiently. I've stopped being self-centred and egoistic.

Although when I revisit this blog, hover over the text box wondering what to type, I can't help but feel as if I've put on a mask that betrays my own self. Have I discarded the useless fantasy self, only to assume another fantasy self? I don't know if I'm still the person I know myself to be anymore.

I've grown rather good at managing my reactions, I'd like to think. Like encouraging myself to do stuff that my reactions abhor. Like telling myself that I'm capable even though factual data tells my mind that I'm not. When people around me castigate me and I'm still trying vainly to hold on to the shred of confidence that I still have.

I feel as though, stripped of all those fantasies, I'm nothing underneath. Only a mirror which reflects others, with illusions as its substance, and ultimately nothing but a thin sheet of metal.

I'm so good at typing introspective rubbish, aren't I. Posts which reveal everything about me. That is, everything of me that is reflected out into the world that others see. But even I have no idea what's inside.

Like, I'm missing something elemental here. My soul?

Seven Pounds

2009-01-10T21:35:00.000+08:00

I've always thought Will Smith was slanting towards a deeper view on life in the movies that he's recently acting in. Rather than the action flicks or sometimes comedies. But if the Pursuit of Happyness was of any judge, I hadn't thought he did it very well. Or it could be the director's problem. I don't know.

But Seven Pounds caught me totally off guard.

Although I kind of wish the directing wasn't made this way because I'm not someone who can remember elements of a movie clearly. But I guess it got its effect.

I mean, the ending wasn't unexpected. And towards the middle, when he started to have flashbacks of what happened, one already gets a feeling of what he's intending to do, what the movie's building up towards. But the ending....

It still blew me away.

Or it could just be that I'm susceptible to these tearjerking shows.

But gosh...it all became clear in the end. And it was nice. Sad, but nice. As all these kind of shows are.

I liked the last scene. Emily was looking at Erza, at Tim's eyes inside Erza, and somehow Erza just knew who Emily was, that what had happened to him had happened to her too. And then they hugged, and cried, and well.

Well.

On a tangent, I remember from the Name of the Wind, this phrase that I didn't understand: the cutflower sound of a man waiting to die. I had thought that Kvothe was waiting for someone to find him and kill him, but now I realize the author was actually saying he's going to commit suicide.

Dunno why I didn't see that before. And I can't believe that because of that the phrase has been swimming around in my mind ever since I read that book. Which I think was during September last year? The 7-day outfield in which in the end, all we ever did was to line up along (crap i forgot the name) some axis near some reservoir, and shoot at our own forces.

Yeah well like I said, the army's fun(ny) in many ways.

Anyway, Seven Pounds was surprisingly good. The sobering knowledge that Tim is gonna die, that it's his only recourse, even though you wish it weren't so...

Well. Pretty emotional movie, I'd say. And it definitely beats the pursuit of happyness hands down.

Assistance?

2008-12-17T23:47:00.003+08:00

You know what irks? It's the sight of a tai tai waltzing in with a maid and car keys and present a Financial Assistance form to collect free uniforms, books and shoes.

Over the course of the past two weeks I've been observing families who have been granted financial assistance and one thing never fails to amaze me - more than half those granted FA don't look as if they need it.

Maybe the example above was a little exaggerated. Nonetheless it was true. What exactly defines eligibility for FA? Low income? No income? Family distresses? I don't know, but for sure if my own radar is of any judge, it seems as if it's the ability to fill out a form against one's own conscience.

I know it's a bit harsh. Yes I think I might harbour an unconscious dislike towards people with FA. That's not to say I do not sympathize with people in poverty. If that word even applies in Singapore's society. I do. I feel sympathy for people who can't afford to pay their own bills, people who have to hold two jobs and hardly make ends meet, people who have disabled/ill family members and are facing financial difficulties. What I feel, however, for people who own PSPs, who come to school in cars, who have maids, and still have FA, is just pure disgust.

Fine, call me coldhearted, if you will. I'm just saying if you can afford to hire a maid, or to pay for the (not-so-expensive now) petrol bills and car maintenances, or to buy luxury gaming devices, then you can afford to pay for stuff like uniforms and books and school fees. which, incidentally, don't even total to what one gives to a maid in a month.

That's why FA is such a turnoff for me. I've noticed, without any interference from my consciousness, that when someone with FA walks in I'd be automatically put on antipathic mode. And it does all that without my own conscious direction. Sometimes, though, when the FA need is obvious enough I'd like to think I mellow enough to treat them with better service.

Still, some demanding FA customers, when demanding for free stuff, like to be picky and complain about this and that. I mean, hello? It's free. So just take it and go away.

That said, most of the time I try to remember this advice I read from a book. It has something to do with being more able to feel pity for a homeless old woman wearing tattered rags, whose need is more readily seen, than for an otherwise normal looking person but whose need, while less obvious, may not be any less urgent. Yet it is really an arduous test of patience and self control when tai tais waltz in and start demanding for free goods like its their right.

Not to mention the whole protocol with FA is so tedious and honestly speaking I really don't know how the school approves FA. Based on a form? One can have a low salary and yet get bonuses many times their salaries. So can one conceal critical information, like being silent partners in businesses and such. There are so many ways for people to circumvent the socialist system. I think as long as there is kindness there will be thugs who try to take advantage.

Maybe I'm wrong though. I certainly hope so, although I don't think my feelings are incorrect in this. One psp alone is enough for 2 full sets of uniforms and books and shoes and maybe half a year of school fees. I mean, you can buy a psp and not pay 12 dollars a month?

Okay maybe I should stop the flaming and such. I do apologize sincerely for those who take offense at my words, or those who happen to be at the flaming end of them. Never judge a group by an individual, and I certainly don't mean to do that. Of course some really do need financial assistance. I just think some schools may be going overboard in its generosity.

Or maybe I'll be the one to understand the importance of generous FA grants next time. Just not now.

If only.

2008-12-04T00:36:00.002+08:00

If only I could turn back the tide of time...

When things are done, they're done. No point arguing with yourself, trying to justify your actions when the justification's weak and fallacious and you're justifying it to someone who already knows. Illogical, isn't it? Feelings cloud judgment, and there's no treasure greater than the cool logical mind in crises. Feelings are nothing but the haze which clouds your vision.

Maybe what you're going through is nothing. Maybe others are going through tougher stuff, more arduous struggles, so what is a little disappointment to those? A little conflict and you feel like escaping. Deal with it! Feelings only add on to the mistake, they cloud your thinking, make you procrastinate, and in hindsight you wish you'd thought it out clearly. So discard that which makes you weak.

Emotional stability is key. Let is slide. Let it roll off. Why look into so many things that are not there, or when there, don't matter a whit? There are no obstacles, only those which exist in your mind. Let it go. Let them go.

Deal with the larger wider perspective. Rationalization for feelings do not make things anymore logical, or do not justify illogical actions. Wake up! Be present to the world, instead of acting out the robotic reactions of the heart. See how your feelings programme you to act this way. Observe how you react predictably to certain situations. Suppress it! Do what is right, not just what feels right.

Think! There is no stock answer to everything. Nothing can be achieved without thinking, without struggling, without hard work. Coincidences do not happen. Luck runs out. Serendipity is elusive. And when you're down on your luck there is only the mind to rely on. The intelligence that differentiates a robot with programmed reactions and a human mind.

You think it's bad, there's worse out there. Do what you can, and leave it at that.

ORD

2008-10-31T00:05:00.003+08:00

I'd probably just pack up my bags and walk away without turning my head back.

Sure I'd miss the happy times, the xiong times, the times of boredom where it's all you can do to keep on sitting down on your bed, restraining the restless urge to jump up and find something to do. But not so much. I guess.

I dunno, maybe I'm selfish. Maybe I just want my life to go on and to forget the tender prickly experiences. Maybe camp, NS just simply doesn't hold that many fond memories for me to reminisce and to hold on to them.

The NS experience is rewarding, to be sure. It has changed me, in more ways than one, and all of them profound. I learnt that I am selfish, that most people are selfish, that some are just downright selfish. That I could give in to momentary weakness and just, give up. That someone could castigate me so thoroughly that I can feel no anger, only an encompassing fluttering sense of bewilderment and helplessness, and oh, if only the ground would open up and swallow me up, and I could escape this living hell.

If I could go back in time, would I change some of the things that I did? Perhaps. But probably not. I am selfish.

I think living in an experience where there are no sticks or carrots to goad you into accomplishing things makes you come face to face with the pure struggle of deciding whether to put effort into something which possesses not a single reward at all. Better people than I could snap their fingers and agree with a Buddha-like generosity, but I am always conflicted. Always. But then I am selfish.

I have, had 2 idols that I've met in these 2 short years. Idols not because they're charming, or competent, or whatever. Idols because, essentially, they're all that I am not. They are the bright mirrors in which are reflected the dark fathoms of my own insecurities, incompetence and selfishness. I wish I could have at least emulated them a little. Gave a bit of myself more, thought about others a bit more.

You know there's a certain pride attached to having done more than others, having gone through tougher times than others. I wish I could have said, I've done enough. I've done more. I've done more than enough. But I haven't, nor could I ever. I look up from the inferior ranks of the selfish people and wonder why I couldn't, didn't motivate myself to sacrifice more.

Because what would be the point? I don't know. Do I even want to be like that? Do I want to care so much, because contrary to idealistic beliefs not everything/everyone cares back. Because there is simply no need to care so much.

The need to be needed. It's the driving force that motivates me.

I'd like to think that my NS experience has been rather tough compared to the usual fare. Maybe, but maybe not. I don't really think it's been that bad. Maybe because it's already over. Maybe because I didn't dive headfirst into doing everything. Maybe because I didn't bother to do everything I'm supposed to. But I think objectively it really hasn't been bad. I had my freedom. I had my space. I had some pretty cool bunkmates. What are several outfields compared to the restraining life of men, the routine boredom of RPs, the extreme of commandos/guards/recce?

Looking back I think I've been fortunate. I didn't need to deal with problems some of us had. I had some guardian angels who helped me during my times of need. I had a good platoon/driver in cougar. I think the transfer was inevitable, and in the end it turned out for the better. I could hardly have asked for more.

In the end all I'm feeling is an overwhelming sense of relief. Not unlike graduation days in sec sch and jc. I think I'm just wired this way. No strings, no heartache. Mostly this jumble of memories that make me want to cringe inside and bury them in the deepest layer of my mind.

I've changed. Probably for the better. But I don't think I'd look back much. There's nothing to hold me, not much I could have done to hold me, not many friends I could absolutely say would remain in contact for the rest of my life.

For sure, ORD could not come sooner. I feel like my life has just begun, like I've come out of a dark cave blinking at the bright sunlight and seeing the leagues and leagues where my life will play itself out. I feel reborn.

Arrayed with the myriad possibilities and potentials of life, I just can't wait to get out.

passing on

2008-09-17T22:38:00.003+08:00

You know at times like these I'd think back to the short story "The old phone" and remember, there are other worlds to sing in. And then I'd like to think that she's watching over us from the other world, still a part yet not really a part, influencing our lives at a distance.

My sisters said that as she lay on her deathbed she looked really peaceful and happy. That she looked as if she's just simply sleeping, as if you could feel her every breath, and expect her to wake up all of a sudden.

It doesn't hurt so much now, in fact I don't really think it hurts much in the traditional sense, since I sort of have been expecting something like this to happen sooner or later, what with internal bleeding and intestinal lacerations and copious amounts of bleeding. A part of me even selfishly hoped that she could hold on until the RCO and I'd get to skip it. I'm not proud to have thought that, but anyway it didn't really come as a shock. It just......makes you all hollow inside and make you realize that you won't get to hear her complaints again, not feel irritated at her smoking, not be pressed into massaging her constantly aching stomach....

It's as if a whole history with her just got relegated into the past. That it's now a had been, a was, that you can get used to the ritual of greeting her when you come home, and then now when you think about it she's no longer there for you to greet, that you can get used to her following you on the car to camp, seeing as how those were the scarce occasions where she could get out of the confining spaces of the house.

I must say, though, that she had a good life. A long life. A life which one can look back and be satisfied at. I think if I were to reach the end of the road, and look back, and see my grandchildren so filial as to take shifts accompanying me during my hospital stints, or to look down the long line of children and grandchildren and greatgrandchildren, or to know that at least some people have cried at my passing, some people are missing me......

It would have been a fulfilling life.

Which is why I, and many other relatives, are outraged at the decision made (no less) by her eldest son, not to hold a proper, grand funeral. Do you honestly want to lie down on your deathbed and have your sons coldly deciding to hold a small funeral to save money and so get more money through inheritance, or have your daughter-in-law cutting corners because of some petty strife that existed before? Come on. It amazes me no-end how immature some elderly people are. She has more than 10 great-grandchildren, for goodness' sakes. How many people can hold to that claim? How many people can remain lucid for 93 years all the way to the end, and have countless people shedding tears at their passing?

But it doesn't matter so much. The (extended) family, the people, the hollowed out niches in our hearts that contains her memory, that's more important than a petty squabble over how grand a funeral is.

In retrospect I feel a slight tinge of regret at not having been able to see her face after she's left, but I think my last meeting with her just not 3 days past, where she was still awake and able to flinch and complain and argue, may be easier where vestiges of that little lovable irritable grandmother can remain in my heart.

Re:

2008-09-07T22:27:00.003+08:00

It's so weird reading through my entries from the past, scrutinizing every detail and reliving every experience as if determined to sift out the "me" from the minutiae of daily life.

Like I'm still trying to find the "me" I can agree with, the "me" that fits my fantasy self, but faced with reality, totally unable to.

Oh well I'm a Four. Nothing much to be said about that. Unless I achieve enlightenment I guess I won't really be able to escape this self-fantasizing vortex. Not that it's not good to fantasize about my self-image. Provided I come up with steps to become what I want to be, that is.

I'm so tired, physically. And I don't know why, because I've been getting 8 hours of sleep everyday and I just don't see what I'm doing that's so strenuous it makes me feel as though I've just spent 3 days outfield. Think I'll just need to sleep a bit more. Or maybe my bed at home is just too comfortable that I can't get enough of it. =P

Thoughts

2008-09-05T17:13:00.002+08:00

you know all those shows and movies about civilisation collapsing and leaving behind rubble and dilapidated abandoned skyscrapers, and lousy living conditions, and whatnot, I keep thinking, would it really come to pass? The major cities becoming cemeteries of buildings and lined with rubbish and trash? And if we really were to run out of energy sources and life-as-we-know-it were to end, then what would become of us? Revert back to instinctive feral animals?

A bleak and terrifying thought indeed.

But I can at least take comfort that it doesn't look likely at all.

Been doing nothing much for these 2 days off, or rather, recompensation for my burnt weekend @.@ except watch the 5 dvds I rented and trying to play eyes on me the ffpotion2 version.

For me, at least, it's really...... difficult. Granted it's only been 1 day, but the song by itself isn't exactly very challenging (I think) and I've already devoted much of my time and skin to the song, but I still can't play it fluently. Keep getting stuck at chord jumping parts. I guess I just need more practice, but honestly I'm getting a bit sick of practising technical skills.

On the upside I think I just need 2 more days of dedicated practising before I can play it properly, although it would take a much longer time before I can memorize the song. On another note, I'm going to look at pianos tomorrow with delphine aka star and maybe I can get one as well.

Thing is, even now I still lack the utter conviction to get a piano. I keep replaying the arguments in my head and it feels very risky, like stepping out into the unknown, to get something that's worth thousands of dollars and out of my own pocket at that. Added to my worries is my psuedo-ADD and I'm not sure how proficient I can become before I lose interest completely.

That said I'm being led by this feeling, or notion, that just compels me to just fuck it and get it. I composed this rather convincing argument in my head the other day, and if I may say so it just about sums up the why of the whole thing. I think people think it's stupid and money-wasting to get a piano at my age, with the intention to self-learn no less, when the money could be put to much better use, and that it's just on a whim that's going to die down. The thing is, it's not really a whim, it's more of a repressed urge throughout the whole of my life to be able to play something that sounds remotely whole. Now that I think of it it's as if I was always looking to imitate the piano's wholesomeness in every instrument I've learnt, but to no avail.

In fact I was intrigued by it ever since I was little and saw this toy piano at my cousin's house, and by another piano that my neighbour left at my house for temporary storage. Over time I learnt to temper the urge and since my parents disapproved I just made do with whatever I could play at that time for free. I'm not sure, though, if I've ever spoken to them about it outright, but I'm sure, even now, my father disagrees. I can't fathom why though, since he's rather supportive of getting CO instruments despite my own reluctance. Anyway, now that I have the money from the army and I feel, for once, responsible for myself and able to make my own decisions regarding my life, I'm just going ahead with it and heck my father's opinions.

A part of me still wishes that I could have started earlier. Started younger. When I still had that explosive learning ability and the interest to match and the dexterity to play. It manifests itself in sudden bouts of resentment towards my parents, but I've learnt to ignore that, and a resulting determination to really get the basics right and master it. It may be a whim of the moment, but it's rooted in the history of my life and for sure I wouldn't leave it lying around unused if I decide to get one.

Even now, I'm still a bit undecided. All I'm trusting now is the self guilt-tripping and a chance to put to life the music that runs around in my head. I wish I didn't have to pay the whole of it myself, or that the decision was more clearcut, but that's life, and I need to own up to myself as a self-responsible individual that if I don't do this for myself, certainly no one else would.

blogging

2008-09-01T11:06:00.003+08:00

While walking home today I had a sudden flash of realization. Something which I knew but never really pursued or understood. I'm a Four with balanced wings.

It's probably too lengthy to explain why, but I think it's true. I didn't want to entertain that thought because the book said it's not that common, but now that I think of it both types' dominant issues are very prevalent in my life. Also, I was averse to typing myself as type 3 since I never really liked it (image-obsessed chameleon) but that is exactly how I behave at times.

Over the course of my life in 40 I managed to accumulate 1 whole foolscap pad of journal entries. I think it's nice to have something from that time to look back on, but more importantly I find that the act of writing out my thoughts actually helped me focus myself and divert my attention away from the depressing issues. It's really interesting to look back and see how much I've changed and that the issues I was obsessed over were just simply minutiae.

I think I have ADD. It kinda sucks. I wanna write about something but the moment I start crafting the sentences I jump away to another thought and can't go back to what I was thinking about. Maybe depression helped as some kind of focus. Now that I'm not feeling that sad and angry and raging I find it hard to concentrate on anything. =(

upon inspection

2008-08-24T23:22:00.002+08:00

21km....

Can't say I'm proud to have siam-ed it. I'm not sure what drove me to deviate from the norm, from the shoulds, from the peer pressure, from what intuition is telling me. Nevertheless, I just didn't do it.

A moment of weakness? Perhaps. I don't know.

I attended an interfaith forum last saturday, for compulsory reasons. Nevertheless, since I had to go anyway I might as well pay attention and bring something back. Surprised myself even with that attitude, which is a good sign that I'm moving up the Levels of Development, but anyway, I did. To a small extent.

Can't remember much right now in my befuddled, tired mind, but I gathered something along the lines of peace starting with yourself and something about the 4 immeasurables. From Buddhism, that is. I've always felt some sort of closeness with buddhism, although I don't have the 缘分, but anyway the precepts are appealing.

Maybe I'm not really a Four. Maybe I'm something else totally. A One? Nine? Five? I don't know.

I had a dream related to Patrick Rothfuss' book Name of the Wind. I apparently had mastered the basic principles of sympathy and, in my dream, I was moving things around with my mind. I know that's not sympathy, but whatever. Anyway I was in this really grand big castle-hotel thingy with my parents and I think 1 friend. I can't remember much of it now, but what I remembered most clearly was playing a VHS tape by running with my mind, the 2 reels and shining some sort of funny light.

Anyway I can't explain it properly. It's a dream for goodness' sake. It's supposed to be incoherent anyway.

Commitments are like ropes tying you down, strapping you down to this house, this neighbourhood, this lifestyle, all the way until you die. They scare me. But aspirations of roaming the world and breaking contact with my family scare me more. They only light up in high relief my fear of leading a bound, strapped down, singular life.

What courage it must take to uproot oneself and escape the confining boundaries of one's own comfort zone.

stretching on

2008-08-23T08:33:00.002+08:00

It's so hard to summarise in a single blog post what went on in the army that made me what I am now. And I'm not going to try.

But I am glad where I am. Archer even. Maybe I'm just in an upswing mood now coz for once my vehicle is still working after coming back from a field camp, but I don't think that's it. It's this bubbling sense of optimism that you get under your skin that threatens to spill over and out anytime.

During the moments of ultra boredom in bunk, where you vaccilate between the indecision of fixing a vehicle that you know you have no skills to fix, and encroaching on others' privacy to mess around and waste time, I eventually settled on lying down on my bed and listening to my mp3 player. And I felt nothing.

But let me explain first. My selection of songs in my player is such that when I listen to them I get into a different mode and I'd feel relaxed and imaginative. Always. My mind will go into some bamboozling frenzy and start thinking about random stuff which I don't remember afterwards. Sort of like a trance. Then, though, I just felt frustrated.

I don't really know why. Maybe because of the vehicles. Maybe because I've heard the songs thousands of times. Maybe because I was sick and having difficulty breathing. But, maybe, I'm just outgrowing this depressed self-absorbed me.

There's a bit of truth there. I don't know why, but sad songs no longer kindle the same emotions within me. It's as if I've somehow lost touch with being sad. All I was focusing on was the future. What I want to do after CPT. What I want to learn. The now seems a bit irrelevant and is something I want to get it done and over with.

On an unrelated note, While messing around with paint while doing guard duty, I realized that I simply can't draw any symbolic or abstract stuff. At all. Everything has to be something. A waveform, a ship, a dragon, an eye, whatever. There are no seemingly tangled strings that somehow form a pleasing image. So I'm probably an S rather than an N. Not that it matters so much.

I have this hypothesis that being introverted doesn't really mean being a hermit. Or to cutoff all relationships. Rather, it's just that one doesn't get energized from interacting with many friends. One on one, or a small group, like, 3 persons, can be energizing and fun as well. I used to value the me-time to ruminate over my own personality and depression and whatever average Fours do, but now I just get frustrated going over the issues that no longer seem so important anymore. Now I want to go out into the world and interact, and work, and find myself.

Not that I don't like being alone. I find interacting with strangers or simply-friends excruciatingly draining. It's like an exhausting dance where I have to anticipate my partner's movements all the time and I just want to collapse. Or flee and hide elsewhere. Or change partners.

Sigh. Issues that no longer seem so important. Like I said, I'm moving on.

pride and prejudice

2008-08-20T19:04:00.002+08:00

Disclaimer: I haven't actually read the book or watched the movie, so this is in no way relevant or connected to the story.

In one of my less lucid moments drifting between dreams and waking I had this sudden thought that all the past feelings and perceptions are useless when dealing with someone in the here and now. Then I was confused, because right then I was holding a grudge against my driver and I felt rather cheated and indignant that all the past stuff that my driver had done were to be forgotten and forgiven and I was to treat him as if he had always been hardworking and had always supported me.

After that I sort of fell asleep, but that thought has been hanging over me for the past week.

Isn't it true, though? That we hold many prejudices and bias towards people, and when we deal with them we act out in ways that are unfair to what they are in the present moment? They might have changed, or be in a better mood, or whatever, and I wouldn't be doing them justice were I to nurse my old hurts and wounds and treat them unfairly.

So then what is the use of all these past interactions and impressions? Most of prejudices are unfounded, and they make living very difficult. When I tried to be aloof to my driver I felt emotionally drained and tired. I persisted for 1 day until it was clear he had no idea he had offended me, and I was so tired of being in conflict with myself, that I just gave up and forgot about the whole grudge.

I've been observing myself lately. That I have A LOT of prejudices against people, some based on hearsay (I know that's terrible), some based on a look or a glance, some based on their looks, some based on my past dealings with them, etc etc and I felt extremely bad and terrible because logically they don't deserve it, and how would I know what they're like until I actually interact with them, right? And even then it may not be conclusive, nor is it any reason to hold any prejudice against them.

And it's not just me either. Others also have a lot of preconceived notions of me and I find it weird that they don't treat with me as I am, but what they've heard/seen/thought of me. Some are good, and I don't think I live up to those impressions, and some are bad, and I find them unwarranted. So in conclusion I ought to let go of all those stupid prejudices and old hurts. They don't serve any purpose except to blind me to what others really are/could be.

Pride is another one. Perhaps linked. The stubborn refusal to forgive others lest they do not know that I've been hurt by them. It's another thing I'm seeking to remove from my system, because it blinds me, it messes up my relationships with others, and all in all I don't really think it's warranted.

It's a bit hard to explain actually. Without making it seem like a prejudice. But I guess they're both connected somehow.

Ah well. A whole lot of tosh and rubbish.

hospitalised

2008-08-10T00:53:00.002+08:00

A bunkmate of mine fainted and got admitted to NUH.

I have to admit it was much more serious than I thought it would be. It was supposed to be just high fever, but who would have thought it would lead to fainting and short term memory (or rather no-term memory) and symptoms that don't add up to high fever?

I visited him this noon. Was a bit taken aback by his unfocused demeanour and small wounds. He kept asking for the day and time and generally the same questions. I was asked what I wanted to do later like, 3 to 5 times. Within a short space of 10 minutes. Other than the apparent memory loss he looks lucid enough, I think...

From what I perceive (it's gonna get a little hypothetical here) he's still like drifting between dreaming and waking. He seems to be continually distracted by something else, and when I asked him if he can see me he glanced at me and then looked away. It's as if he couldn't focus on one single thing. Which could probably explain the STM since he didn't/couldn't pay attention to whatever I was saying.

That aside, I was struck by how.... well, caring he was despite his daze and fever. Thing is, he just had a spinal fluid extraction, and believe me it kind of hurts, much like bone marrow, I think. Further, he's just....in this continual daze that resembles a longterm lack of sleep, but he was still trying to keep awake and talking to humour me. When I run out of questions he'd pop up with his repeated questions, but it was as if not to strain the silence and to keep talking. And not once were they about himself. I could tell he was really tired, though. It's as if the lack of sleep for the past week (I believe he didn't sleep more than 2-5 hours every night) just caught up with him and he was a bit unable to deal with it.

For me if I keep awake to the limit (which is only 24 hours I think) I'd start nodding off and having hallucinations. Although I can usually tell that they're hallucinations. Perhaps that's in part what he's going through now, and hopefully with sleep and the IV drip he'll recover soon.

The thing is, I personally don't think he deserves this. Nobody should deserve something like this, much less someone who is as open minded and accepting as him. Come to think of it, he is rather tactful usually, and I find that endearing coz I'm such a weird person and I don't really think I can have a conversation without pissing off the other person in some way.

In any case there's nothing much to do for now, except to conjecture the possible causes, which I personally feel is just too much alcohol + lack of sleep which led to fever and dehydration. With hope, and time, and best wishes from all of us in the camp/company line, I'm rather sure he'd get well soon.

Makes you wonder, doesn't it. Why fate arranged such a thing to happen now.... I cannot bring myself to believe that things happen as coincidences, or it just happened because it had a chance of happening. There must be a larger plan, an overall pattern that we cannot perceive, that we cannot predict either. It may be fatalistic to blame everything on fate, but sometimes things must happen for a reason.... If his condition takes a turn for the worse...

I believe my life philosophy has changed for the better. I'm more optimistic now, so I tend to view hurdles as obstacles that make me jump higher and reach out further, yet I don't know if I can stand the sort of emotional pressure from debilitating/terminal illnesses or bereavement. It seems foolish to hope optimistically against what fate has in store for us, yet.... I'm certain if I were in his position, his condition, I would have shutdown and gone inward.

I'm not making much sense here, since I'm actually rather tired. Sigh an 8 day exercise next week. Not much fun to look forward to. =(

haiku

2008-08-03T02:51:00.003+08:00

Got inspired by the poets in the infp mailing list. So I thought I'd try one out too.

Brushes dip and dash,
Paint cascades in swirling hues.
Make but messed colours.

As you can see I'm no poet. Can't seem to get the last twist done properly, and besides I don't really have anything I feel strongly enough to put in a haiku, or a poem for that matter.

Just been thinking about this friend, is it invariable that we have to drift further apart? The easiest of friendships seem to break apart so easily. Once when we would have chatted effortlessly, now we lapse into awkward silence in each other's company. Perhaps there's no common ground. Or we just simply do not exist beyond the immediate environment. Or rather, we reject each other's perception of the world.

I've been reflecting on my perceptions, and I came finally to a conclusion that yes, I may have some really weird conceptions, but that doesn't make me any less valid. So I notice the things that are small and irrelevant, but then I've always found humour in non sequiturs. Besides, experiences don't affect me in a sensory kind of way. I probably can't describe vividly roller coaster rides, but I sure do remember how I felt during that time, and what thoughts went through my head. I don't say sharp scents feel like a jab in the ribs to me metaphorically. Rather, I am actually describing, as close as possible, what sharp scents actually do to me.

Looking back at all the conversations I've had I realized that majority of the awkwardness is a lack of connection at all. You don't get me, I don't get you. I can't relate my experiences in a sensory concrete kind of way - it sounds dull and boring because I've no idea how to present it. Rather, it is more interesting to talk about how it affects me, what I was reminded of, or what you thought about it, your opinions on the matter. Telling me something happened is fine. Just don't expect me to be able to summon a similarly presented experience to continue the conversation.

Maybe that's the S and the N difference. I have hardly met anyone who banter around ideas and are not bored to argue non-competitively. Besides, I do most of the listening in a conversation, because most of the time I can't get a word in. But that's fine, I don't really talk, because when I do it's usully something that's only not silly to me.

My thoughts jump way ahead of me, so I get disorganized and flustered trying to write them down in any coherent way. But I don't care. Hijacked this post to post something totally removed from haiku.

PS. haikus have a 5-7-5 syllables pattern, and usually there's a twist or change of direction in the last line.

I do like haikus. They have a very simply yet elegant sound to them, not to mention the japanese feel. Besides, a short poem sparks off a longer chain of associations and assorted meanings, which make them more interesting.

plan

2008-07-24T23:41:00.002+08:00

I have a plan.

That I hope to stick to after I ORD.

It seems childish or fantastic (tangent: there's no such word as fantastical, is there?) to actually think about completing it, but it's reassuring to have a plan. Or a semblance of one. Instead of snoozing away my time.

So I want to complete whatever my interests holds during this period, because I don't want to go into university ambivalent about my career. I want to develop myself as an individual with interests and skills, and because this may be the very last time in my life I can have a stretch of time (about 10 months) to myself, to spend it the way I choose to, in a way I still can, devoid of personal or family responsibilities.

So. I want to take up a course in Japanese. Spread out the driving lessons over the 10 months or so. Learn to bake cakes, to cook. Learn the piano. Learn to draw. Learn Malay. Find myself.

It's always so fantastic. It's really all in my head. I can go very detailed for each, like, I already have the site and number and course schedules for jap classes, I already have contacts to get a piano, I even already have the number for the driving instructor when I haven't even taken the BTT. I've printed a copy of the recipe for cheesecakes, I've been reading and exercising (somewhat) from Drawing on the right side of the brain, I've been trying to get books on the enneagram.

It's like, the whole plan is out there in my head. Except I'm too lazy to act on it. And I wonder why I'm so ineffective at anything.

So I'm taking a stand, these 10 months, I'll do all those. Maybe learn to extract DVDs so I can have a not-so-full quality mkv/ogm file on hand.

Problem just lies with inertia and motivations. As always.

As a sidenote, I think the enneagram really points to something true. Once you've decided your type. MBTI just seems a little....muddled together. Weird, since I've always regarded the enneagram as the one instead that's muddled up.

Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain

2008-07-24T14:20:00.003+08:00

I had a theory this morning.

I've been reading Drawing on the Right Side of Your Brain, which was recommended (again) by someone on the list. I haven't finished it, but so far it's been quite enlightening in the sense of a Right-brain mode and a Left-mode, which came to me that I actually have been using my R-mode more than I actually realized.

You know there are times when you have this melody or this song that's running around your head and totally distracts you from doing anything else? Or, thinking so deeply, so mired in your own thoughts (not in a self-talk), that suddenly if someone picks up a conversation with you you find yourself answering in trailing half-sentences and a strange inability to form words and speak them out?

Maybe it's just me, and my corpus callosum may perhaps be degenerated or underdeveloped, but to me that's tangible examples of the R-mode.

Anyway my theory is just that I somehow cannot concentrate on both the lyrics and the song at the same time. It's just, if I take note of the music, noting the accompaniment, melody, counters, whatever, I'd lose track of the lyrics and start treating the voice as another instrument in the whole thing. Which leads to my disability in identifying words in songs. On the other hand, if I were to try really hard (ie. exert myself) to identify the words in the song, I'd end up only with a poem and understanding the words only, without taking conscious notice of the song.

To me I think that's a conflict between the 2 modes of my brain, and while it's not something that's good, it's at least something that helps me point to the R-mode easier. Apparently music is so distracting to me because it shifts me away to the R-mode where I can't process any words or logical functions. Especially while in jc, where I took triple science and maths.

Anyway here's a short anecdote of the test scientists did to prove the existence of different functions of both halves. Totally cracked me up. =D

The left brain controls the right side of the body, the right brain the left. The corpus callosum mediates between the two halves so there's no conflict. However, the patients here are split-brain, meaning the corpus callosum is cut and the 2 halves cannot communicate with each other.

In one test, two different pictures were flashed for an instant on a screen, with a split-brain patient's eyes fixed on a midpoint so that scanning both images was prevented. Each hemisphere, then, received different pictures. A picture of a spoon on the left side of the screen went to the right brain; a picture of a knife on the right side of the screen went to the verbal left brain. When questioned, the patient gave different responses. If asked to name what had been flashed on the screen, the confidently articulate left hemisphere caused the patient to say, "knife". Then the patient was asked to reach behind a curtain with his left hand (right hemisphere) and pick out what had been flashed on the screen. The patient then picked out a spoon from a group of objects that included a spoon and a knife. If the experimenter asked the patient to identify what he held in his hand behind the curtain, the patient might look confused for a moment and then say, "A knife." The right hemisphere, knowing that the answer was wrong but not having sufficient words to correct the articulate left hemisphere, continued the dialogue by causing the patient to mutely shake his head. At that, the verbal left hemisphere wondered aloud, "Why am I shaking my head?"

histoire

2008-07-22T11:02:00.003+08:00

This is a story someone on my mailing list posted. I won't deny that I was really touched by it. So thought to share it online here.

THE OLD PHONE

When I was quite young, my father had one of the first telephones in our neighborhood. I remember the polished, old case fastened to the wall. The shiny receiver hung on the side of the box. I was too little to reach the telephone, but used to listen with fascination when my mother talked to it.

Then I discovered that somewhere inside the wonderful device lived an amazing person. Her name was 'Information Please' and there was nothing she did not know. Information Please could supply anyone's number and the correct time.

My personal experience with the genie-in-a-bottle came one day while my Mother was visiting a neighbor. Amusing myself at the tool bench in the basement, I whacked my finger with a hammer, the pain was terrible, but there seemed no point in crying because there was no one home to give sympathy.

I walked around the house sucking my throbbing finger, finally arriving at the stairway. The telephone! Quickly, I ran for the footstool in the Parlor and dragged it to the landing climbing up; I unhooked the receiver in the parlor and held it to my ear.

'Information, please,' I said into the mouthpiece just above my head. A click or two and a small clear voice spoke into my ear.

'Information.'

'I hurt my finger,' I wailed into the phone, the tears came readily enough now that I had an audience.

'Isn't your mother home?' came the question.

'Nobody's home but me,' I blubbered.

'Are you bleeding?' the voice asked.

'No,' I replied. 'I hit my finger with the hammer and it hurts.'

'Can you open the icebox?' she asked.

I said I could.

'Then chip off a little bit of ice and hold it to your finger,' said the voice.

After that, I called 'Information Please' for everything. I asked her for help with my geography, and she told me where Philadelphia was. She helped me with my math. She told me my pet chipmunk that I had caught in the park just the day before, would eat fruit and nuts.

Then, there was the time Petey, our pet canary, died. I called, Information Please,' and told her the sad story. She listened, and then said things grown-ups say to soothe a child. But I was not consoled. I asked her, 'Why is it that birds should sing so beautifully and bring Joy to all families, only to end up as a heap of feathers on the bottom of a cage?'

She must have sensed my deep concern, for she said quietly, ' Wayne, always remember that there are other worlds to sing in.'

Somehow I felt better.

Another day I was on the telephone, 'Information Please.'

'Information,' said in the now familiar voice.

'How do I spell fix?' I asked.

All this took place in a small town in the Pacific Northwest. When I was nine years old, we moved across the country to Boston. I missed my friend very much. 'Information Please' belonged in that old wooden box back home and I somehow never thought of trying the shiny new phone that sat on the table in the hall. As I grew into my teens, the memories of those childhood conversations never really left me.

Often, in moments of doubt and perplexity I would recall the serene sense of security I had then. I appreciated now how patient, understanding, and kind she was to have spent her time on a little boy.

A few years later, on my way west to college, my plane put down in Seattle I had about a half-hour or so between planes. I spent 15 minutes or so on the phone with my sister, who lived there now. Then without thinking what I was doing, I dialed my hometown Operator and said, 'Information Please.'

Miraculously, I heard the small, clear voice I knew so well.

'Information.'

I hadn't planned this, but I heard myself saying, 'Could you please tell me how to spell fix?'

There was a long pause. Then came the soft spoken answer, 'I guess your finger must have healed by now.'

I laughed, 'So it's really you,' I said. 'I wonder if you have any idea how much you meant to me during that time?'

I wonder,' she said, 'if you know how much your call meant to me. I never had any children and I used to look forward to your calls.'

I told her how often I had thought of her over the years and I asked if I could call her again when I came back to visit my sister.

'Please do,' she said. 'Just ask for Sally.'

Three months later I was back in Seattle a different voice answered: Information.' I asked for Sally.

'Are you a friend?' she said.

'Yes, a very old friend,' I answered.

'I'm sorry to have to tell you this,' she said. 'Sally had been working part-time the last few years because she was sick. She died five weeks ago.'

Before I could hang up she said, 'Wait a minute, did you say your name was Wayne?

'Yes.' I answered.

'Well, Sally left a message for you. She wrote it down in case you called. Let me read it to you.' The note said, 'Tell him there are other worlds to sing in. He'll know what I mean.'

I thanked her and hung up. I knew what Sally meant.

Never underestimate the impression you may make on others.

buddhism

2008-07-21T19:18:00.002+08:00

I had another epiphany some time back, but I didn't pen it down.

Anyway last sunday, I think, I was at this death anniversary thing for my uncle, and we (my cousins and I) had to attend hour-long sessions on chanting of scriptures and such. I had a book of the scriptures given to me, and was told to follow the words as the monk chanted them.

So I did. Thing is, I don't really have a solid grasp of chinese, much less traditional chinese (although it's not something alien to me) so at the speed at which the monk was chanting, or rather, slurring along, I could only catch snatches of the meaning of the scriptures.

Which led to the epiphany. I was thinking, maybe the way to study scriptures is to analyze sentence by sentence, phrase by phrase, then when one has understood the discrete parts, string up the entire scripture in a chant and allow the meanings to fuse together.

Interesting isn't it. I was only able to catch several meanings and impressions, but I was thinking how wonderful it would be if I'd known what each phrase or sentence meant. And also, if the scriptures were to have any meaning at all, why is it always read out in an unintelligible slurring chant? Was that how Buddha originally preached? Surely there must be a more profound purpose behind the chanting, and not simply reading out of scriptures.

So there's my answer. I find that my Ne impersonates Ni a lot by coming up with a lot of possible answers and then settling for the best fit one. Which perhaps is Ni itself, but I dunno.

But I wonder if there'll be real enlightenment at the end of my method. It's just that I cannot accept that chanting unintelligibly is gonna help anyone understand anything other than the almost hypnotic quality of a chant.

masque

2008-07-21T17:57:00.003+08:00

just now while eating longans and frosties I had another random thought.

Perhaps the underlying reason of my difficulty with relationships lies in that I present a mask of myself to the exterior. People who like that mask try to get closer, only to realize, as I unravel my wrappings, that I'm not really the person whom I've made myself out to be.

It probably points to the yearning of someone to accept me as who I am, not who I present myself to be. The army has been an educating experience in social norms and superficial relationships (case in point - the friendship with the POL IC to make my petrol topping up easier) but it hasn't taught me how to remove the duplicity, how to approach others on a genuine level, an authenticity that doesn't fear rejection because it is authentic.

Why is it so difficult to uncover the masks? From the MBTI I gathered, more or less, that most people have 2 faces, an introverted and extroverted face. I see it in others as well, whether you call it group dynamics or whatever. People settle into roles that society or group norms dictate, and present their extroverted self outside. Blogs are a wonderful example of the introverted face, actually. Who'd guess anybody would have so many thoughts on the inside? But then that's not how they act on the outside.

It doesn't really validate the mask, or the other face, though. To me intimacy in a relationship would be to be me in the presence of another, to act as if I would alone in another's presence. Because the face that greets the world outside is not my face; The face that covers me is only superficial; I'm like standing outside myself, watching myself interact with others in a way that is not me, does not represent what I really feel, but do it anyway because of the dratted social norm.

Well. Fe is in the opposing personality archetype for me, so I guess, yeah. But I think it's probably something deep inside me that repulses others, that makes one recoil in disgust when I let fall the walls, akin to a mummy uncoiling its bandages to reveal starkly the stench of rotting flesh and tar underneath.

That's just an exaggeration actually. But still true no less.

Much of what goes on on the exterior don't deal with the deep issues, they only provide band-aid solutions to issues that matter; What would be the use of maintaining superficial friendships in which nothing is resolved, and I'd be unchanged whether or not I met you?

Still I feel it's probably nothing to do with the outside world, but probably something within me that needs to change. Perhaps the realization that I'm alone in my journey of life is sufficient to make light of the frailties of human relationships.

blog

2008-07-21T15:16:00.002+08:00

I've known about this blog for quite some time already, but I never really thought about posting it here since nobody really reads this blog. Anyway I thought I'd include some quotes and links I've found inspiring over the course of reading up on the MBTI/enneagram.

http://infp.blogsome.com/ - this website is just phenomenal. Although I'm an INFP myself I don't really feel like I'm some psychic or empath or a crusader on the search for the meaning of life, but anyway it does resonate, perhaps only occasionally, but it's still amazing. Really food for thought.

Bluewing's INFP profile - another interesting profile typing based on cognitive functions. It's very long though, which discouraged me initially.

“There is something missing in my life, and it has to do with my need to understand what I must do, what I must know-except, of course, that a certain amount of knowledge is presupposed in every action. I need to understand my purpose in life, to see what God wants me to do, and this means that I must find a truth which is true for me, that I must find that Idea for which I can live and die. For what would it profit me if I found the so-called ‘objective truth’, if I worked through all the systems of philosophy and were able to analyze them and expose their inconsistencies; what would it profit me to develop a political theory and combine all the intricate details of politics into a complete whole, and so construct a world for the exhibition of others but in which I did not live; what would it profit me if I develop the correct interpretation of Christianity in which I resolved all the internal problems, if it had no deeper significance for me and for my life; what would it profit me if truth stood before me cold and naked; indifferent to whether I recognized her or not, creating in me paroxysms of anxiety rather than confident devotion?’’.
-Søren Kierkegaard (I'm not a christian, although it doesn't make the quote any less relevant.)

there are others, but I can't seem to remember them right now, and most of them came from the forum there or the blog. But anyway, yeah, it's all very thought-provoking. That's why I find it hard to understand how anyone can not be interested in something as deep and interesting as the human personality. =)

epiphany

2008-07-21T11:13:00.002+08:00

I had always wanted to pen it down but didn't really have the time to. Came to me when I was contemplating ORD and thinking about the separate paths each of us will be going in just 4 months time. It's strange, but thinking about it, we've come so far together in the same bunk for close to 10 months or so, and we've grown closer than say, at school or something. There's just something about knowing a person when you've spent 10 months in the same bunk, each tolerating another's habits, and respecting other's privacy, I think it's closer, albeit different, from relationships we forge at school or in the workplace.

So I was feeling kinda nostalgic, we're all gonna split apart after ORD. Like, a few threads that come together for some time, only to fray at another.

Which brought me to think that a person will be alone throughout his life. You can have friends, relatives, but they all function as others in spheres that you touch at points in your life. You can have many acquantainces at school, but they're only with you on the basis of school. Likewise, you can have many friends in the workplace, sometimes even close friends, but they're just operating on the basis of work. Nobody follows you on your own unique path through life, and there's something sad and tragic about the whole existential thing. We're alone, travelling on a lonely walkway, occasionally crossing spheres of interaction where we join with threads for a brief moment before disengaging.

I guess it's pretty obvious to many actually. Or maybe it's just something unique to me, I dun really know. At least, it had a profound effect on me, and made me obsess less over relationships with others. We may have had many experiences together as bunkmates, as company-mates, as fellow specs, but in the end we only exist on the broad basis of work/NS. Unarguably, we'd hardly have crossed paths outside of work.

Which led to another random thought about love and pain. I don't really mean love in the sexual sense, of course. Just in the sense of having a soul link, that which came from having experienced things together before, having shared emotions before. It's really true, isn't it, that it's better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all? Untangling threads may be difficult and hurtful, but ultimately we grow richer for it. I seem to dig sad stuff anyway, and what's more enthralling than the pain one feels in the heart from loss and separation?

Maybe I'm overly exaggerating. They're mostly random thoughts anyway, and I don't have the eloquence nor elegance to express my thoughts properly. It has always been like that, everything will seem clear and simple in my head, but when I try to put them into words I'll fumble and grasp for expressions which don't convey the depth nor the intended meaning properly.

Anyway I was just thinking that deep down inside I'd feel really complete if I could meet my soulmate and join with her together. Like, entwining two threads so tightly and perfectly, no knots, no frays. Which led me to think, why must it be a her? Is it possible for me to feel the same depth of completeness with another man with whom I've completely no sexual interest? And what would be so wrong, or socially unacceptable, about it? It's deeper than love, or it's another manifestation of love, but it's there all the same, and if I so chose, or came to feel that way about another man, would it be wrong? Is it still the same, despite the lack of sexual chemistry?

I've always imagined my wife to be somebody I can feel absolutely content with just holding her and sitting together. To me, that's the real connection between people - no anxieties, no masks, no social dances, no pretences. It's like a deep yearning to be able to be just me when I'm with another person who can accept me for who I am, not just tolerate.

Anyway this post doesn't really flow properly, perhaps it's because the epiphany is already several days old and I no longer have the inspiration nor the feelings that came with it, although I think it's more a lack of any literary ability than anything else. And I guess I shouldn't really make excuses for my thought patterns by trying to organize them in a logical way, but heck.

enfp/infp/intp?

2008-06-24T14:19:00.002+08:00

now i'm confused.

just for clarity's sake i went to take another test just now. and guess what. it returned INFP. strong I, moderate nfp. which is really really....

well i don't know. i seem to fit ENFP's tendency to not get things done, ie, just flitting about from experience to experience, and then I seem to fit intp's tendency to second guess myself. and the funny thing is, i don't really think i fit INFP, except for the domFi description of having an inner world that's unseen by others. which is pretty much moot coz if i'm not wrong every introvert has an inner world that's unseen by others =.="'

so i guess i'm now err.....yeah. i guess i just vaccillate between these 3 types and i suppose pretty much everything applies to me. =.="

depression

2008-05-25T05:12:00.002+08:00

sigh. starting over another training phase (of which i've gone through 2 times already) all over again.

i'm probably shortsighted and erroneous in my views here, but honestly, it's seriously idiotic to make us start over just because you want the specs to ORD with the men. you mess up like, 2 companies' worth of life and relationships, as well as making 2 companies + 20++ specs go through the training phase AGAIN, all for the sake of making them ORD together. honestly speaking, isn't it a bit, just a tad bit ridiculous?

sigh. sigh.

my new company's men aren't that nice. they're all the slightly immature and raucous boys who seem to have been stuck at the puberty period. like, loud, acting out games like streetfighter, having on respect for elders/superiors, angsty and what not. honestly it's just......

sigh.

i met ben cai at the range the other day. he said his unit would be on standby right when he got posted in all the way till he ords. which honestly sucks. you know i had a small taste of 2 months of standby and i can tell you i'm super super glad there wasn't any activation. imagine 10+ months of standby? o.O

which reminds me, kevin and lester are there too. wonder how they're taking it? if i didn't have my rank i'd have down-pesed a long long time ago.

sigh.

my future's looking a bit bleak now.

feeling very sian actually. you know there's something wrong with your life when you spend 5 days straight in a place you can't stand, doing things you hate, living in a personal hell, and coming back home, where it's supposed to be your haven, only to find it's transformed into another place where you're forced to do things you don't like. it's the same, in the army or civilian world. orders are orders, regardless of how nicely phrased it is. or whether it's couched in a question. "do you have some time? can come out and help or not?" like i have a choice?

the thing is i shouldn't feel this way. rationally, logically, whatever they're asking me to do is for a good cause. but i just don't seem to have the empathy in me to form the motivation to do it. and then i reason it out with myself and it's just....the more i tell myself i shouldn't feel this way the more rebellious i can feel myself becoming.

it's paradoxical. but i dun really know what i should do, or how i can improve. it's just....sigh. i want my time for myself. i don't want to spend time doing things i hate for 5/7 of my week, and then spend more time doing things i hate for the other 2/7 of my week. i guess i'm just selfish.

sigh.

argh. i hate my future. there's another standby in september. omg standby really honestly sucks.

so does having a rank actually. but then not having a rank also sucks. the best is just don't be in combat. combat sucks.

self discovery

2008-04-24T16:14:00.002+08:00

i was looking through my previous entries just now. it's embarassing that you've been so immature and still sought to expose that immaturity in so many posts of inane ramblings.

it was true, what i had a slight inkling of. the blog entries were all about me.

i guess now i understand a little bit of why that might be, coz i'm usually given over to self-introspection and that leaves little brain for the rest, so most of the time it ended up as self-centred ramblings.

oh well i've grown a little, i'd like to think. mostly about dealing with others, although i still can't make conversation that doesn't sputter and fall flat on its face. so yeah. but self management......it's getting better.

it's been what, 16 months in the army already. 16 months....seems long now, but i'm lucky that my path was fraught with many postings and transfers. it gives you a deadline to look forward to and a chance to create new resolutions and stick by them.

i wonder how much of me would not have been here were i to have taken another path?

right now, though, i don't feel much like doing anything. i feel like i'm waiting for something or somebody, but i don't know who nor for what. like in some stasis, where my emotions and feelings kinda run around aimlessly and i've totally no focus whatsoever. maybe it's called the doldrums. but i'd like to get out of it. start thinking?

it's amusing actually. the book that was given to me to study when i went for tuition some 5 years past actually alludes to many truths of life. in the doldrums your plan for the day would consist of one-hour periods of various synonyms of slack.

sigh. i'd like to think the army has changed me for the better. i can only hope that in the future i'd be able to find some focus and purpose to my life. it's frightening that what awaits me would be a lifetime of study and work and earning money so that i can spend it, having family so i can have children, going on short-term leisure trips so i can relax to work.

what would be the meaning in that kind of life?

i wonder if perhaps the ultimate purpose of life would be to be happy. content, actually, since i'm quite sure happiness does not last. you know, if that is so, then a Matrix Rewired would be the ultimate solution to life's problems. if you're happy, who cares if you're providing bioelectricity to run a virtual reality where you can constantly do whatever that makes you happy?

if you ask me if i'd want such a life, i think.....well i'll be at a loss for words.

hmm. consider. people usually hold on to the belief of karma. that there'll be something, somebody waiting at the end of your life to pass judgment on how you've lived your life. it's possibly true. i don't know, there's no objectve proof and it's probably up to religion to decide, but what if it isn't true?

so if i were to create a matrix rewired, would it still be wrong? wrong in terms of? the niggling feeling that living life in virtual reality is not real? but would it really matter if everything doesn't matter at the end? if there's no final judgment on all souls that pass from the world of life?

oh well it's just fantasizing. for sure i'm grounded in this world as solidly as anyone else. if enduring traditions of countless peoples uphold the notion of a final judgment, then who am i, a lone dreamer, to counter it?

but still, i'd like to know what's after life. the purpose to living here, in this planet, in this existence. what's outside the loop of reincarnation. surely there must be a higher purpose. it's hard to believe that we're existing simply because we are.

i guess i have this stupid problem of needing to know a higher purpose before i act. it probably won't be so bad to conform and adhere to basic social tenets.

i'm kinda raving mad, aren't i. sigh.

still, i'd like to believe i've grown a little. become more self-assured a little.

epiphany

2008-03-31T23:04:00.002+08:00

or sort of. i'm dealing with the men the wrong way. what shara said had a tiny bit of truth to it. why am i so angry all the time? it doesn't really make sense, but i guess it's my incompetence at handling them.

that said it's still as insurmountable as ever, and i don't really think i'll ever get around to managing it properly. i guess i've been around a different crowd my entire life and i never really learned how to deal with other people. from all walks of life, huh.

anyway i still want to complain. 5 days in a place where you don't see the point of doing what you're doing, where you can't manage the people you're supposed to, where the skills needed are irrelevant and unreasonable....it's not a place many can think of fondly. that's why the weekend is so precious. it's hard enough to endure 5 days of living depression without getting pissed off on the weekends where i'm at least at peace with myself.

that's why i'm falling into the habit of reading again. fantasy, no less. it's escapism, but heck, that's exactly what i want. i know it's a waste of time. the newer cheemer english words notwithstanding, fantasy fiction is an utter waste of time. i know that. but time is exactly what i need to kill over there.

been trying to learn jap also, but it's hard when you don't have a computer to use, don't have the internet to refer to, made doubly so when your only source of information lies in the internet. but heck, i'm taking it step by step for the moment.

i don't really know la, but it's just...... time for myself is going to be really rare, and it's only gonna get rarer when i start uni and go to work. it's depressing.

not really in the mood to blog now i guess. haiz.

i suspect work functions as a time killer as well, for if man has no work to do he'll have too much time and nothing to do.

ps. jacqueline carey is really salve for bored minds. her books really turn by itself. even if you're not interested somehow you don't feel an urge to stop.

rencontrer 2

2008-02-19T15:50:00.002+08:00

they think i'm tired. i'm not. i'm just fucking reluctant to go over. i'm not sleepy. i'm nowhere near sleepy. i'm just fucking, fucking, misunderstood. and none of them guess at what i'm feeling, because what, to them it's just something i have to do? it's like, an honour or something?

and i really really wish i could differ. if it's something i agreed to, instead of being forced to....it might be different. and i dunno, i hate it that i'm forced to it. if i'd been approached differently, or raised differently, i might have grown into it. i might have even aspired one day to do it. but alas, i have not and it doesn't matter. my heart will never be there.

and they want me to dedicate my life to it. i dunno what i'm thinking, because right now it's just every alternate weekend, but to me, where a weekend is the only few days i can use the computer or do whatever i wish, every alternate weekend is really really precious. and i cannot imagine giving up that time to do whatever it is that i don't even wish to do.

my heart feels leaden and weary. it's like a vicious cycle. i feel dread at the entire matter, but my mind keeps popping out mitigating factors which make me feel completely invalidated. there'd be returns, and the end, the journey after death, scares me. it frightens the shit out of me. i shouldn't feel so reluctant because it's something for the gods, and i can't countenance the gods, can i. i can't deny their wishes, for if i do so i'd be likewise treated. it all feels like a trap. i'm like balancing on this thin crest with sheer drops next to me, threats of impending disasters should i refuse on my left, and promises of rewards on my right, and all i can do is go forward even though there's nothing in front for me.

i want time for myself. i don't want what free time i have to go to trivial inconsequential stuff. not that the stuff to do with gods are trivial or inconsequential. but my time...... isn't it enough that i feel depressed enough in camp? isn't it enough that i can't and am unable to meet expectations of my superiors? and i have to come home to meet the demands of my mother and father and sisters and whoever not. and it's really really wearing. i want some time alone to myself, so i can figure out some stuff, or take my mind off some stuff. i don't want to be made responsible to things that are not even within my purview in the first place. does it mean that just because i'm a guy you have to leave ALL the spring cleaning to the day i come home? for goodness sakes i come home to rest! not to do spring cleaining!

maybe it's all the stress. i don't know, but it's just threatening to spill over now, and i guess they've picked up my mood, but all it does, instead of making me feel better, is to add guilt to the myriad of depressed feelings i have. guilt that i'm not an asset to my household, that i have to feel reluctant about big events like the 正月十五, that i have to outrightly refuse their demands in order to get some time alone for myself. it sucks. life sucks.

and maple sucks. it sucks that nobody understands. it sucks that i have to fucking say sorry for what i feel. it sucks that i have to apologize because she is throwing a tantrum. it sucks when i have to scrape and bow and prostrate for my every action when she doesn't. and why do i have to take her feelings into account, into consideration when she doesn't fucking take mine? am i just a temporary distraction, thrown aside and ignored in the fucking middle of the conversation? i tolerate all these, because i understand that i'm not a good conversationalist. i tolerate, because i know i do these things to. and i know she does not mean them. but she does not mean too many things which hurt, and she dares to claim victim when i am just simply being me.

then i give up. there's nothing for me in maple, not anymore. i'll just finish up the last few dollars in my account, and wash my hands of it. i'll take up japanese and guitar to pass my time, and watch step by step how to lead the rest of my life.

and about the gods, i dunno. now i'm no longer feeling the resentment. maybe it's just this period of time. it just clashed horribly with my depression.

i wish i could heal. i wish i could be a more joyful person, a happier person. but i can't when i feel restricted and misunderstood on all facets of life.

i feel like crying, but tears won't come no matter what.

and i'm denied the last escape, the escape from life itself, by my own faith. how ironic.

rencontrer

2008-02-19T15:41:00.002+08:00

because i'm feeling in such a weird mood today. thought i'd pen down some thoughts.

haven't felt this depressed in a while. disillusioned, sad, whatever. it feels like something in me has died, and all interest in others have disappeared.

guess i've never really said it out before, but since nobody reads this blog anymore......being involved in the dangki thingy, that of mediums and gods, is really tiring. tiring because it takes up so much of my time, demands so much of my attention, requires so much of my effort that it's simply draining away my life. and the thing is, if it were of my own free will, my own prerogative, i wouldn't be feeling so fatigued. it's just......

it's just useless to say it now. coz i've been thinking over it on the bus, on my way home. so what if i don't want to partake in it? it has been foisted upon me ever since i was born into this family, and people there just simply assume i'm going to give my life over to it. i'm not sure about my choice yet, but the assumptions, and their ensuing expectations, irk. so much so that i've dreaded participating in whatever events/festivals they've held or tuition classes.

been finding all sorts of excuses to avoid it. this morning, i could have come home by 9 am, but i just stayed around in camp simply coz the thought, the very idea of stepping into the house, being bombarded with demands to be there at what time, to do what, to bring what, having my fking life planned out, just fills me with dread. in the end i just slept in camp. weird huh, how camp, the very last place anyone would think of, would be such a sanctuary for convalescence.

i want to let go of this insidious rebel inside me, i want to lead my own life and dispatch demands from others without feeling cheated or frustrated. but i can't. i can't help feeling restricted, feeling like i'm.

fuck. and this is the last thing i need. to have someone to nag at me for not having be at the place i'm supposed to be. and it's not even the fucking time yet.

aftermath

2006-11-09T23:01:00.000+08:00

maths is out of my life. i feel like cleansing my system of maths. no more alluding to weird hypothesis testing when playing maplestory, or thinking of limits when playing trickster. it's amazing how much maths creep up on me when i'm playing some game. it's like some disturbing thing that makes me organize everything around my life into maths equations.

so that's that. i should be feeling happy actually. at least before the examination, and during, the main thought running thru my head was that maths is so going to be out of my life after the next few hours. but the funny thing was that i didn't feel any different after the paper ended. i think it's just mainly that i completely bombed my stats. like, the last maths paper of your life and i didn't even manage to make it end with a bang. instead it had to be all careless mistakes and stupid errors and an overall feeling of not having done my best - which damn well sucks. the feeling sucks, i mean.

oh well maths is done and over with. like the grandma-bomber said (yes i watch bomberman cartoons. so what) once something's done there's no way to make it become undone again. so like, what the hell. so what if i get a B. i'll just be sad and stuff.

and that's why i'm going to double my efforts on the last 3 subjects, because so far, i have been completely destroying any hope of getting an A on my papers, so the very least i can do is ensure that the next 50% of the marks are going to come to me, even if the other 50% is not. but well...i hardly follow through. sigh.

although i realized the best way to start studying is to get angry. being scared and panicky isn't going to help (tried and tested), so being angry would be nice for a change. it's weird isn't it. being impassioned isn't that good a thing. it's like some kind of emotional stasis and it just makes me much less of a human. like, a don't-care attitude which is like, well, removed from the real world. so for now, i'm going to heck care about staying calm and all that, and i'm just gonna get angry. i hope it helps.

irrelevance

2006-09-30T19:57:00.000+08:00

you know those stories that talk about people who are setting off on a long journey and the people talk about what they're gonna do and achieve? it always fills me with a sense of melancholy. like they're tragic heroes or something. whenever i read that kind of story, i always think of someone speaking fervently, talking to his/her lover, while the lover cries and there's this sad music playing in the background.

anyway i just read this webmaster's blog post about closing down the website. it's really sad and uplifting at the same time, while he talks about why he's closing down the site, and about what he's gonna do in the future. with real conviction, and going about a path that he knows is difficult, but is going to do it anyway. i'm not sure which affects me the most, the conviction, or the sense of knowing that he's committing his entire life to it. it's just, i feel we're all gonna do that some day. it's like a parting, except it isn't, but it feels like anyway. like all of us going about different lives, different tracks. and i really respect those who actually know - and have done lots of thinking about - what they're going to do in the future.

kk that was really irrelevant, but i thought i had to pen it down.

;oxzucvh;ais;er

2006-09-30T19:13:00.000+08:00

i think religion is a good thing. believing in a higher faith is important, because it gives u a reason to keep on living. so people who insist on not having a religion, imo, will be more susceptible to mental breakdown than most others.

simplistically, religion acts as a moral guide right. it helps u make moral decisions, as well as gives u a moral code to adhere to. people who are religion-less have no obligation to keep to a set of moral codes that they have drawn up for themselves. why should anybody not commit crimes if there is nothing holding him back from doing it?

although that's not what i wanted to talk about. i had been thinking, in times of fear or stress, one can fall back on religion much more safely than one can on logic and reasoning. why do i feel more peace when i think of protective guardians when i feel scared of ghosts than when i think that ghosts can't possibly have anything to do with me? you noe those new age christians (i call them new age because i believe most of them are youths) who quote bible sections everywhere and talk about the Lord as a part of themselves? i used to be really cynical. i thought it was just exaggeration or something. it's not that i thought God didn't exist in the past, it's just that i didn't believe the experience was so overwhelming. now i'm not so sure.

anyway, i guess it's just events that have been happening in the past few days. stuff happened to my friends which i believe i would have cracked under the strain. so it's good that she has christianity to fall back on. i read the psalm she quoted, and i thought it was really relevant. there was something uplifting there, even. it's just really encouraging to find solace in a faith or a higher being, because really, what else is there when everything else falls apart?

maybe i'm looking at things from a too pessimistic point of view. i don't know. i can't help my friend, and i dunno what to do. there's just so much more going on in the world than exams and results, and i just....don't know.

a higher faith is important. it's not so much only for having somebody with power to lean against, it's more like a spiritual guide. you can't find your way in the world alone, and material things only go so far. i remember preston burke mentioning in grey's anatomy (yes it's only a show, but) about needing to believe in a higher faith, because there's nothing else he has or something along that line. i feel like that too. when stuff happens that no one can help with....i dunno.

prelim thoughts

2006-09-30T18:46:00.000+08:00

results weren't exactly desirable. sigh.

i've been thinking this past week as the prelim results were being given out, why i hadn't given a hoot when i failed maths last year, and why i care so deeply now when i only got a B for maths. superficially i think it was coz promos matter to a lesser extent than prelims, to the future, i mean. that's not exactly true anyway. prelims don't really affect ur university application right. only scholarship applications. so what do i have to be worried about?

of course it didn't make me feel any less sad about my marks, duh. coz i think i was used to lucky scrapes in exams, and yes this prelims was one huge lucky break, but i didn't do as well as i could have done. which really woke me up, because i could have. i could have gotten 6 more marks for the differential equation question if i had bothered to remember how to find the integrating factor. i could have salvaged a few more marks for PnC if i had bothered to look at it. u noe what really hit home? it's the way a certain teacher has an impression of me. there's nothing more discouraging than a teacher implying that you can get nothing more than a B. for the sake of political correctness, the teacher can remain anonymous. not that you don't know who i'm talking about, but nvm

him: the class did really well. perhaps surprisingly.
him: i only needed one person actually. *smiles at me* (no the one person wasn't me)

am i thinking too much? maybe i'm reading into things that aren't there. but it doesn't matter. maybe he thinks i don't care about maths. that's not true. i spent the most cumulative time studying for maths than any other subject. and guess what. i studied maths INSTEAD OF chem for the first day because i wanted a shot at doing well for maths. so much for wishful thinking.

anyway, i got worse results than maths, obviously. so i was thinking, i probably feel sad because the marks matter to me. it's not just some cliched matter about marks being for my parents and whatnot. it's more personal than i realised, because i had been used to seeing acceptably good results, and all of a sudden when i don't, i feel stranded and useless.

i was feeling conflicting emotions throughout the week. i was quite sad, but i kept rationalizing to myself that it was at the very least better than what could have happened. then on friday i was high. i'm not sure if it was coz of other mitigating factors, but it was weird. i'm supposed to feel depressed, but i'm not.

so anyway, the prelims was one huge fiasco. i'm really grateful to teachers who don't put down their students, but i can't say so much for teachers who actually do. but anyway, i'm glad the prelims were here. so i can actually start studying now. in advance.

2006-09-23T18:54:00.000+08:00

i wonder when exactly that i broke off the habit of blogging. think it had a lot to do with how i wrote though. guess it only applies to me, when i read my previous posts (they're still floating around the net somewhere) i cringe and wonder how the hell i could have written such stuff. isn't it weird. how one's perspective totally changes as one grows up.

went for the rotaract workshop today. i must admit it was worth every dollar of that ten that they required for "fund raising", altho i dunno what u can do with so little money -_-"'. anyway i learnt more about the application process there than well, school, since i conveniently missed both scholarship day and NUS talks. anyway, i think it's quite worth it to hear an insider's account to the interviews and whatnot, even if the advice they give is based on their own perspective of things. some stuff were really funny too, like what the dentist said, what happens if u were asked who the dean of the faculty was, and u guessed wrongly when the dean is just right in front of u?

well anyway it was a good mind opener, or at least, it opened my eyes. just realized that my interview experiences are so insignificant compared to what really goes on out there. and i sort of decided i'll be trying for medicine anyway. because there's a very high chance that i won't be able to get in. just think, my portfolio is close to 1 mm thick, and my cca records are....well, short. and i must admit my conduct in jc hasn't been so good that my tutors would write spectacular recommendations or anything. there's a lot to be said when all that can be said about a student is that he didn't get suspended or didn't get detention or whatnot.

anyway prelims and the workshop have sort of woken me up. it's as if i'd been in some sort of hazy dream, just living day by day and all that, like having no structure in life. so i decided, for once i should study really thoroughly for a levels. make a commitment, u noe. i realized that i had never really followed through on whatever i had undertaken. and look at people, they can do backflips and somersaults when they're even younger than me. it's a sobering thought when u look back on ur life, and realized that things have just been falling apart and u don't even realize that it has.

i was just thinking, especially after this turbulent period, i'm going to be a better person. less rude, more tactful, more organised, more focussed, u noe, just generally be more likeable. because i certainly don't want to be me for the rest of my life. like, ignorance is bliss right. i've been escaping all my life from my own self, so i guess it's time to straighten myself out. how can i be ambivalent about everything all the time? and sometimes i am rude and insensitive, even though i knew perfectly well that it is rude and insensitive. so i should get more control. and talk less. -_-.

i think it's good that i'm doing this reflecting thing, although right now i'm really pressed for time. i feel less pissed at people when playing maple now, although i STILL cannot communicate to adults. it's really irritating though. i do want to talk to them, but there's just some generation gap or something. sigh.

haiz i have to go now. zzz.

asdfawersdghaety

2006-08-30T11:02:00.000+08:00

hmm i just finished season 2 of grey's anatomy which i koped from hongyue. that's one of the benefits of being a dvd copier. u get to copy stuff. anyway, it's really nice. seeing someone trying (she didn't succeed, but anyway) to make a new life out of something - it just kinds of makes u wanna turn ur life over as well. except right now's not the most convenient time coz turning into a new person now means studying all day for exams which is...less than appetising.

GP wasn't bad, seriously. i'm hoping for a 30 for essay and 30+ for compre. i've been getting rather good compre results lately, but i'm not sure how long that good luck will last. nevertheless i know my AQ didn't cut it as well as i'd hoped, but hmm, i'll settle for a B3.

currently planning my days as a 10 hour study bonanza, and the rest of the time sleeping, having meals, going to the toilet, and entertaining myself on the computer.

my priest hasn't leveled up for i dunno, 2 weeks? anyway i'm sort of losing interest right now so i guess it's okay if i just pq during the mornings. scrolled my attack glove which turned out rather lousy (7 atk) but i guess it's usable. i mean, i'm not complaining.

so much for maple. anyway i haven't adhered to my plans for quite some time now, so i'm going to try, coz if i dun try my prelims are just going down the drain. u noe the feeling u get when you go into an exam room, and u know u don't know enough of the syllabus, and when u're going to open that paper, the questions that u'll do, u'll just be testing ur luck? i sort of figured, since i've never really felt the other kind of feeling before, maybe i ought to try for now. try studying early instead of doing i dunno what. it would be nice to go into an exam room, and know that every question u do it's done correctly and there's no smoking done.

yeah and it's this kind of inspiration that sort of dies down really easily. except i'm going to shut myself at home for the time being and heck can care for that ridiculous hair requirement of not touching the collar. -_-" maybe i should cut my collar instead.

right.

losing interest....

2006-07-26T23:46:00.000+08:00

feeling quite down lately. not sure why, precisely, but it's probably from a myriad of things which i don't exactly want to think about.

now that exams are finally drawing nearer, and i've decided to buy the 2x exp card, hopefully life will settle into a more routine kind of thing, and my revision can finally get some headway.

english has been sounding weird to me lately. like i'm no longer sure of what' grammatically right and what's not any longer. it's worse than the tussle i had back in sec sch, though, but honestly i can't think of anything except to let it lie.

i've this feeling all my problems are due to me, as if i'm the one causing it. and with the exams pressing so stifingly close it's as if i've nothing to do but to shift everything aside first. not that i'm in any mood to study, and frankly i've never been in a worse mood to study, but really, i can't do anything, can i? currently i'm just trying to keep abreast of my work. which is bad.

ought to be more cheerful. and i wish that sniffling and coughing can move on and infect some other person. it's just so damn irritating.

ct results weren't a surprise, considering how much i've studied for it, but i was glad of chem, what with not having touched periodicity at all, and left the NMR qn blank, i'd thought i'd snuffed it, but lol... GP was more of a surprise, for some reason my summary has been getting quite high consistently this year, and i've no idea why that might be, but really, that's a good thing, and i guess i don't quite need to know why.

thought i'd just blog for a while, take my mind off things, and grant myself some time to chatter about mundane stuff that happens everyday.

sad

2006-07-13T17:02:00.000+08:00

really long time no post. weird huh.

lots has been happening, but i believe i've grown quite a lot in the short time span of 7 months of this year. dunno how come also, probably due to change of environment or something.

There's just no telling how others will act today -- there's a lot of uncertainty in the air, so you should be prepared for anything. Some tough-talking authority figure might throw their weight around, but resist the urge to call their bluff or question their proclamations. Doing so could backfire in a very unpleasant way. Instead, just step back from whomever or whatever pushes your buttons. Wait for things to get back on more predictable footing before you react.

weird. yes i know, we're not supposed to believe in horoscopes. but i think they seem to be uncannily true, especially the horoscope for me today. authority figure throwing their weight around (somehow it provokes an image of a pot belly banging his belly on the ground) and surprise, it came true. and sadly i didn't exactly back away....so yeah...

haiz.

common tests aren't too good. didn't go to school today so i've no idea how my maths are like, but it doesn't matter, i've never been good at maths in the first place, i'd be quite happy with a B or C.

i dunno, i don't really think i ought to talk about mundane everyday stuff. dunno what to blog about also. haiz.

feeling this urge to learn japanese all over again, but when faced with a page full of jap characters, my resolve suddenly just sort of disappeared. haiz.

oh well. there ends my pitiful attempt at reviving the blog. guess it just won't work. lol.

common tests

2006-04-07T14:40:00.000+08:00

haiz i wanted to update in the library today but somehow it doesn't allow me to get onto the website. whatever then.

anyway i got a B for maths too. that's a major improvement from promos last year. lol. so i'm quite happy myself. after all careless mistakes are really omnipresent. i mean, if u make careless mistakes everywhere doesn't it say something about u missing something? i rmb someone saying something about the best maths student is not the one who is brightest, but the one who is the most careful. haha i think it's quite true lar, though not entirely. but whatever man....

so that sums up common tests with a nice happy tone because i did loads better than promos in that respect. especially with regards to maths and bio. hehe. i think it's just afternoon exams. last year's common tests were quite okay too, but promos was like shit, and i think it was the morning/afternoon exams thingy. coz with afternoon exams you can actually sleep later whch means u have ample sleep. but for morning exams, coz of my habit, i have to sleep late, which means i feel very tired during exams. lol.

had a guild ss just now. rather last night. haiz now u actually see the difference between ppl who use the cash shop and those who don't. but whatever lar, it's not that important....

cts 2

2006-03-31T17:57:00.000+08:00

hehe i got a B for physics!

but i'm feeling damn pissed right now coz of domestic matters involving the use of the computer. but whatever. i hate having co on saturday mornings. it means i cannot sleep too late at night. and it being a friday night, she has all the more reason to want to go online. -.-"

but whatever. i'm not feeling remotely tired right now, but frankly i would very much prefer the night than the evening. but so be it.

back to physics, it was around what i hoped for, ie retain physics S. i realized just now that i probably don't really feel regret about not being able to do better because to do better, i would have had to mug definitions, print the superposition notes from the intranet, practise the tys, do past year common tests, and lol, start earlier. all of which i'm not sure i'd like very much to do. as it was, mugging that 4 hours on wednesday morning was crazy enough. i got so crazy from mugging physics that i had to destress myself every 15 minutes by walking around the school and buying kinder bueno chocolates. i'm really amazed by how well everybody else can study for physics, when i can't even concentrate for 15 minutes.

ok so that's all for physics, i thought it was pretty okay, even if it was a low B. haha i'm not some perfectionist who wants 4 As...

ms teh just informed me that my paper drove her mad marking it coz she couldn't read my handwriting. =( that probably means that she would be less amenable to less than appropriate answers.... =( i hope i can get C lar, actually. anything is okay, really...but i studied so much for bio, about 4-5 times the time spent on other subjects, so it'd be quite sad if i fail it, but sighz....

oh well. it's the weekend now. i hope my time's not going to fly away again. i'm going to make this weekend productive.

that probably means doing tutorials. whatever, i suppose......

cts

2006-03-30T19:51:00.000+08:00

was seriously tired to the core today. these few days my sleep pattern has been so irregular that it's a wonder that i can manage to think at all. so far all i've felt is a slight loss of coordination, but that's normal for someone who has been routinely sleeping for 2 hours, then 12 hours, then 2 hours, and in this abab fashion.

thankfully i didn't doze off during any lessons. lol. guess there was too much undone work.

i got my chem paper back! grins. ok i did better than i expected, so i'm quite happy, though in my tired state right now i dun exactly feel anything remotely close to euphoria. on the upside, i realized that i could finally draw something that actually resembles eyes, for i could not in the past. haha. had some fun trying out circles during maths.

k so i'm left with all the rest of the subjects. mcq wise i think both my phy and bio were average, so all i'm worried about is section b/c, as i should. well i'll see it when it happens, so no point worrying about it. as it is i have a carbonyl tutorial to do by tomorrow and i don't see any way to complete it. and what's worse chem is brought forward. sighz.

i'm terribly behind on all the lessons, and i just realized that i have no idea whatsoever what nitrogen derivatives are about, coz my notes are partly blank. sigh.

slept thru 3/4 of the physics practical-become-tutorial on tuesday. sighz. a consecutive 2-hr sleep night for 2 days guarantees a complete revitalizing sleep once u close ur eyes. lol mr seah was looking at me all the while (obtained from primary witnesses) and apparently i was rather oblivious. the thing is, i didn't even intend to sleep. i just wanted to catch 40 winks during teh short 5 min break but i ended up sleeping for half an hour, and the ppl beside me couldn't be bothered to wake me up. diao.

anyway i apologised, haha, but he said he'll overlook it coz my scores were "alright" which actually is rather good news to me more than the overlooking part coz imagine undone tutorials ever since shm till dc circuits and only a day's worth of quick mugging to recap whatever that's been taught, i thought i'd have lost my phy s paper. haha i assume alright means dun need to drop s paper ba....if need right, then it wouldn't be alright right?

ok i think i've exhausted whatever interesting bits i can squeeze out of my life. lol.

end of CTs 1 2006

2006-03-23T20:51:00.000+08:00

yay. common tests are finally over.

seems like i haven't been updating with regard to the common tests. well there's not much to say...except that my legs are getting bitten by ants and there's nothing much i can do about it short of translocating the entire desktop away.

kk anyway maths was quite terrible. i left around 15 marks blank, coz i couldn't figure out the graph in time. sighz. and i couldn't prove the volume despite spending 10 minutes on my precious time on it. turns out it was just simply using a cone or sth. i couldn't do the sine rule question either, coz my variables all went to the denominator and refused to go back up.

kk so maths was terrible, but i'm rather optimistic that i won't fail it. haha as usual there will be the slew of careless mistakes especially with regard to logarithms, but thankfully there aren't any such questions. so i'm rather happy settling for a B, and that's that. hopefully.

physics was another terrible paper, but i found it better than maths. coz i didn't leave anything blank, for once, although i couldn't do quite a lot of questions. i crapped out definitions based on my own understanding of it, and principle of superposition became something like

"the displacements of any 2 particles in phase on different waves are averaged"

or something to that effect which is totally not true at all. and my superimposed waveform was wrong as well. sighz. i came up with this ridiculous theory for the AX question, about the greatest distance in which a minimum can occur. lol. anyway i can probably lose around 20+ marks, and hopefully those that i was sure of can be correct. ah well, i'm not expecting much. can keep my phy s can le.

haha chem was today. it was easier than i expected, coz i sorta expected a paper in which >50 was A, but that didn't deter me from starting revision only this morning. -.-" turns out that i didn't study equilibria thoroughly and in the end i screwed up all the solubility questions. as well as the bond angle questions. lol. other than that the organic chem was easier than expected, although i felt cheated that step 2 in qn 1 of section C was actually composed of more than 1 reaction. stupid me assumed that each step only comprised 1 reaction. sigh. but it was only arnd 1 mark, so ya.....hehe.

hopefully i can get an A, that's being optimistic, but i think i probably can keep my s paper, if those that i answered were correct in the first place. but well...

still, common tests were quite bad, especially gp, in which i'm going to so totally fail my essay. but anyway i'd be happy with keeping my s papers and passing maths, so ya...guess i have lower expectations than everyone huh.

now that common tests are over it's time to relax! =D and catch up with whatever i've been downloading/watching/doing.

Day 2 of CTs 1

2006-03-20T19:44:00.000+08:00

sigh. u noe, i dunno why they like to put exams or tests after holidays. it means u dun get to enjoy ur hols, but instead have to mug ur head off. it's sad right? i'd rather have it before the hols so i can enjoy my hols rather than to have more time to study.

anyway bio was quite crap. it's quite difficult, though not outright....rather just like, tricky. and they like to ask obscure stuff like, calvin cycle which didn't register as a very important process in my mind. and stuff like, what precautions ought to be taken when obtaining the shoot? i mean, how the hell u answer that? and the last essay question appears to have a myriad of answers, ranging from myoglobin to anaerobic respiration to resting potential. like, can we even assume frog muscles have the same structure and composition of human cells? do frogs even maintain the resting potential in the same way?

ok that said, i ran out of time. and i bordered on explaining muscle contractions, which i don't even know. and i was at a loss as to how to explain that contractions of muscle cells require energy. i thought it was common sense, but it appears that u can't exaplain common sense very well.

because i've been concentrating on bio due to the sheer amount of content, i haven't touched any of the other topics at all. like maths. and chem. die.

think i'm going to study maths now. if i make it before like, 10 or something then maybe i'll study a bit of physics. sighz.

kk gambatte to all taking the horrendous CTs. =) and there's this stupid mosquito biting me. kk shall go off le.

CTs 1

2006-03-08T21:28:00.000+08:00

ok. i'm going to fail gp.

that said, i'm still harbouring a small little hope that somehow, by some mystical means, i can manage to pass. but then, that's unlikely to happen.

i'm suffering from dyslexia.

aside from that, i realized my real problem in gp exams. the thing is that my mind is forever so scattered during gp essays that i end up being ambivalent and contradictory.

anyway, enough about miserable gp. there's a whole load of homework to be done by tomorrow. not the least of which includes maths (integration can drive u up the wall) and chem.

and s paper, of course. how could i have forgotten that?

well, i haven't done any. nor am i really planning to....gravitation as a whole (come on, lim boon siong) is really irritating, and i can't remember all those formulae anyway....still, i shall look thru them and get a grasp of what's transpiring.

i need to get a move on with my homework, though. shall complete chem tomorrow, with the help of several people's solutions, and probably i can finish integration 2 up to volume. heard it wasn't tested. which means mrs a has no impetus to complete integration 2 very fast.

oh well....friday means err...nervous essays and structured, and 2 hours of chem.....sux sia.....carbonyl....sighz.....dunno what she's doing for gp either. i hope it'll be a slack lesson. or at least debrief us on the common test.

kk so here ends day 1 of common test. maybe i'll find some time in the future to comment on the rest of common tests.

---

2006-03-05T09:49:00.000+08:00

you know, there's this sudden proliferation of kitty display pics all over the internet. not that it's bad, but well.....weird. still, they're quite cute, and i like the sleeping ones, but hmmz....somehow i prefer dogs more.

anyway, i haven't been blogging as frequently as i would have done, perhaps because of homework (i'm still behind, though) and cca and maple and probably due to a dearth of things to blog about. it's not as if my life is damn interesting or what.

k now i'm at a loss as to what to say. well there's gp common test on wednesday. i wonder how i'm going to fare. my gp has never been good....='(

my mum and sis are abroad, meaning there's finally peace and quiet in the house. still, they've been gone for 3 weeks, so i guess blogging about it now is like, being horribly outdated. passé, if u'd like. sigh.

k i shall end the miserable short post. bb.

to date.....

2006-01-24T22:52:00.000+08:00

it takes eternity for this blog page to load. i won't be surprised if my post gets chucked into cyberwastebasket after i press the publish button.

that said, it's been so long since i last posted that perhaps the blog has decided that it wants revenge. anyway, nothing much has happened, only the dreary drag of the day every single week. with notable perks, though.

i'm glad i borrowed les choristes. it's really really nice. u noe i thought all french movies involve some form of narration from the author (heavily, i might suggest), lots of zooming around of the camera, and scene jumps all over the place. and unintelligible rapid speech, which doesn't really sound like the french we were taught. for some reason. either that or i have really really deteriorated.

still, it's not that they're bad, just the style of french movies is slightly different from those that i'm used to. but les choristes is good, especially the songs. and the whole story, in fact. i highly suggest ppl to watch it, even if u dun really understand french (understanding it doesn't help because there are only slight deviations due to different interpretations) and there are english subtitles.

and i've been keeping abreast of my homework, somehow. even though i still don't really do it. i believe i'm granted some form of invisibility in maths lessons, coz i have never been called to do questions ever since like, err, last year. but that's good. =D hope mrs a doesn't change her mind about that. =D

i need to catch up on bleach. it's really nice. but according to weichong there would be filler episodes from 64 to 69 meaning the story would be stopped for a while (horrors) which would probably make it quite boring.

and i suspect either dattebayo has lousy encoding, or my com sucks, because the sound and image quality is really horrible. a far cry from the past, really. i wonder why. it probably has something to do with some graphstring thingy which doesn't allow me to open VirtualDub. says something about the xvid codec missing (can u imagine that) when i can play xvid encoded avi files perfectly.

sigh i dunno what to do anymore. my com is running out of space. i ought to go clean out my folder. it has about 70+ gb. =(

new year.

2006-01-01T00:29:00.000+08:00

happy new year everyone!!!

that said, i dun feel happy at all. just about the worst thing happened today. marking a lousy end to 2005. sigh.

well actually it's not so serious lar, just some mishap that happened at work (imagine having to work on new year's eve while everyone else is busy countdowning the hours) which hopefully wouldn't get my pay docked, but even if it doesn't, it reveals how much they're so biased towards me, which i can guarantee does NOT feel good at all. not in the least.

and the approach of 2006 means school is finally starting, and i have to do homework, and it's a crucial year and i cannot afford to waste my time on useless stuff like games and sleeping and whatnot. though i always do, but seriously, looking at my track record i think i'd better try, for the first (or second) time in my life to study consistently. if luck would have it, i should be able to start studying next week. recap and all that.

bio homework is currently staring at my from beside my monitor. haha, no it wasn't intentional, but it does serve as a reminder that i haven't even touched a single piece of homework and i have doubts as to where they are currently.

my mind feels sluggish and i can't seem to type english properly. as in, i have to think. when u're reading this u'd probably notice that it's not very fluent. haha i dunno why either. could it be that i've been speaking chinese more these few days? doubtless it's only temporary. once school starts i'll be thinking in english again. lol.

i have been putting off downloading anime. sigh. i'll get punished with snail like paces in the future.

i still haven't done anything regarding my fitness thruout the hols, though it's in part due to my flu and lack of determination, and an overload of distractions.

my overdue library book is gonna continue to be overdue till 2006. then i can say, i borrowed a book last year and have yet to return it.

k this is quite pointless and random. gotta study.

and i need new shoes. once i get my pay, perhaps. which is quite a paltry sum, really. sigh. in case my words get turned against me, (as they always seem to) i shall refrain from saying that it's slave labour, coz it's really not, but let's just say that the pay could be a bit better. a bit. not asking for much more, just a bit.

but mine's getting docked, so ya....='(

would there be a certificate about my SATs results? i certainly hope so. i'm not paying 100 dollars just for something on a webpage which gave me my marks.

sigh. all in all it's been a fast and bad year, and i dun feel like i've matured much at all. i hope next year's better. but looking at the amount of studying that i'll need to do, i really really doubt so. but just hope it's not as bad lar.

somehow my future looks quite bleak currently. of all the work that i've done, i've managed to piss off every single boss at the end of it. sigh. i'm not cut out to work? lol, i'd like to laze around everyday and get fat. haha.

kk. new year resolutions aren't that necessary right now. maybe just study, get my cleric and bowman to at least lvl 50, try to mature more, and perhaps get 4As, 2 distinctions? not a lot, right? lol i left out napfa. as to that, i dun really want to resolve to do anything, coz i'm pretty lazy, see? so haha, ya. maybe just not fail it lor.

feels weird. first year i didn't need to buy anything to prepare for school. lol. jc sure feels great and easy.

anyway, happy new year! though it's 44 minutes too late for that. ='(

catch up

2005-12-21T12:24:00.000+08:00

hi. haven't blogged much. ironically, since i'm supposed to have the most time during the holidays. lol.

nothing much has happened, besides my relapse of flu and SATs. i don't have much to say about the flu, besides that it's really irritating to have to blow ur nose every few seconds, and the tissue is literally soaked through and u even have to clean ur hands. and my nose is feeling scorched and abrased by all that sneezing and tissue-using, and i have to continually drink water coz my mucus is apparently very watery and wastes lots of water.

and i keep getting really really really hungry. weird.

about SATs, there's nothing much to say, except i think i did quite okay, which is kinda surprising, considering the amount which i did study. i think my essay was weird. i didn't write a lot of relevant stuff, but i didn't get very low for it either. haha guess i ought to be glad for that.

maplestory is quite irritating, in that their patches take up the entire day, and it must be when i'm at home and have nothing to do. -_-"

other than that, i'm glad i started a cleric, coz it's really fun. and u become insanely rich. serious. and heal is damn fun. about the only thing i can complain is that teleport wastes lots of mp, otherwise clerics are totally perfect. =P

but anyway, there's nothing much to do now coz it's undergoing a server patch, and i predict that the patch will be faulty, and we'll need to wait a further few hours before the next patch comes up, so it should be ready by tomorrow, during which i won't be home the entire day. see how screwed up Wizet is? hugely irritating.

haha ok i shall stop complaining. it's time to do a bit of homework. but i can probably copy some answers from others, esp for bio, coz if i don't copy from others, i'll be copying from the textbook or notes, so it's the same either way. and i need to really relearn the entire j1 maths syllabus. or i'm going to be hopelessly lost next year.

i'll probably spend the christmas hols doing homework, since i dun celebrate christmas anyway. what a sad way to live, huh...

ramblings

2005-11-29T17:42:00.000+08:00

this blog feels old and creaky.

anyway another short update, hopefully. haven't been busy, precisely, but just can't find anything to blog about lately.

been studying for sats lately. it's crazy. i've roughly 3 days to study words starting from B-Z, having completed A just today. in any case, i'm kinda being driven up the wall because i just can't simply absorb. like, i forgot what attenuate means 3 times today. sigh.

then there's job shadowing, which has shrunken by 1 week due to some unknown reason, and suddenly there's a research project to do, which i don't really mind, if only because it's fun, but there's still co to think about....

maple story's going horribly. i haven't leveled up my mage in eons, and i get frustrated everytime i play my bowman, coz of immoral unthinking unreasonable bilious belligerent ksers who don't have an inkling of what consideration and respect for others mean.

anyway, i'm really really surprised at how shockingly rude the maple community is. one mage accused me of stealing his equipment when i was on the other side of the map and when i could pick it up. like, so -_-" lor. and some idiotic ice lit mage (note, ice lit) came and barged into my spot and started killing everything, including the mushroom i was working on. absolutely inconsiderate.

it's not like i'm prejudiced against mages, u know, but they dun give me any reason not to be biased. especially newbie mages, and ice lit. i can't begin to stress how idiotic some ice lit mages act.

anyway enough ranting. it's not helping anyway.

anyway i wanted to talk about job shadowing. so i went to the national cancer centre. frankly the gory pictures of fungating wounds kinda erm, put me off. and they showed a particular instance of radiotherapy where they cut up the breast and stuck a tv aerial looking thing into it, and sewed it up. it's just photos lar, so dun be thinking we saw the real thing. anyway cancer just now looks really scary. especially when it breaks out of the skin, and i dun mean just melanoma.

anyway, the doctors were all saying you shouldn't join med sch if u dun have the right personality for it (which is what anyway) but since i've never considered myself eligible i dun suppose i need to ponder over it that much. but it really seems exciting, though the surgery part is a bit uh.......disgusting. but anyway, ya lar.

ok this isn't all that short, but nvm. if at all possible i'm going to level up the final 2 levels of my bowman and voila, i can learn a mob attack! (quivers in excitement) ok nvm.

resuscitation

2005-11-24T13:49:00.000+08:00

i just realized that my blog has an air of disuse. like it hasn't been visited in quite sometime. though frankly i'm not so sure about that.

anyway, the music isn't playing. since it had been working before, i think a safe assumption would be that i've exceeded the 1gb bandwidth that angelfire granted me. so whatever lor.

haven't been doing much. SATs is in like, 9 days' time, and i haven't even so much as reached word list 5. sigh. i think i'll go back to sch tomorrow to study a bit. hopefully it'll be enough.

job shadowing starts next week. sigh. after that i'll only have about 2.5 weeks of holidays left, and there's co camp, homework, um...um....okay nothing left. but there are so many things i wanna do, but don't have the time for. i wonder what i've been doing for the past 20+ days??

i've been playing chrono cross these few days. one thing i really hate is the lagginess, though it's mostly my own com's fault, but i can't stand not running bittorrent when i'm playing for long periods of time, coz i'm currently downloading a total of 10gb and it takes bloody long when there aren't any seeds or peers. yup. so i guess i'll live with it.

anyway, chrono cross is somewhat okay lar, but have to think a lot, which reminds me of the junction system in ff8. but anyway, still, it's a bit on the easy side. i haven't so much as died once ever since i started, and i had no chance to use the revive element. but lol, i suppose easy is good. it means i dun have to spend time training, like pokemon, or maplestory. -_-

haha ok. should be a long enough post to bring the blog back to life. perhaps if i feel bored i can try to change the template to an even uglier one -_- but i doubt i'll be lar.

s papers!!!

2005-11-16T23:27:00.000+08:00

omg. i can't believe it.

anyway long time no blog. sorry abt that, but i doubt anybody reads this anyway.

so, s paper allocation. i was really really really nervous when i found out that it was out this monday. but anyway, when i went there, i got the shock of my life. can u believe it? i actually managed to qualify for 2 s papers!! =D=D=D=D

okay anyway i'm soooooo excited now coz i can't believe with my shitty grades i could qualify for 2, but anyway i reckon i might be on probation, if such a thing exists, for s papers. so if i don't do well for common tests 1, esp for maths, maybe they'll take me off. but anyway i'm so damn excited. okay nvm.

so anyway i saved a pic so in case of an error i can claim ignorance.

okay nvm. so that's about all for this blog post. so sorry.

i'm afraid i've been rather unhelpful these few days. or rather, thruout my life. it's just that i dunno what to say lar....it's just so.....ugh....seems like i rub everybody the wrong side all the time. sigh. but anyway i shall be more optimistic, because of s papers. haha. ok nvm.

ramblings.

2005-11-04T09:11:00.000+08:00

it's the end of the first week of the 8-week holidays. i'm being pessimistic, aren't i. (well technically i think "aren't i" is wrong, but i can't possibly put "am i not" while trying not to sound like a pompous english teacher, so ya)

looking back, i haven't accomplished anything. not even pw. about the only thing i've accomplished was to gain levels in maplestory. ya like that's much of an accomplishment.

k. so i borrowed a SAT book from the school library, and cut up my index cards so i can use them economically, but i haven't done anything with them. i don't even know the full format of the paper. and the exam is in like, 3 weeks time.

i haven't done pw yet, though i don't think any of my grp members have started either, but that's just a guess on my part. still, all i have to do is to memorise my speech and cut up some little legs. like what's so hard about that right....

and i'm really really in a rush for time now. i wish things wouldn't just clog up like that. why can't they spread out the stuff over my holidays, rather than to clump everything into 1 week?

i had been thinking about the people in rjc. been thinking why i ended up in rjc, or ri for that matter, in the first place. was it because i had studied a lot? (yes i know it's hard to imagine, but assume i was assiduously mugging books in pri sch) but shouldn't genetic predispositions come into play first....? it's a sobering thought when you think that you've ended up in one of the top schools (or the second, rather) by just pure mugging. it's as if u're just an empty container devoid of intelligence. sure u need to be clever to mug, but really, it's not clever, clever.

that said, through interactions with various geppers in rjc, i think the decision to combine the 2 streams is good. i'm not just talking about the academics here. as mentioned before academics need only mugging. so that's not a basis for comparison. but i think intelligence is really reflected in the way you think, and do things. and how one reacts to a situation. i've wondered myself in the past if all you needed to get into the gep stream was to be precocious and learn big words earlier, but evidently that's not the case right.

okay i'm referring to a particular genderless (for anonymity's sake) Mr A (general people are defined male according to the english language). anyway, i find it hard to keep up with this Mr A, as if he's thinking so fast that i can't even catch up. but that's not really the point. more now than ever i have this feeling that i don't usually think along the same lines as other people. and i think i'm making it difficult to explain myself, but anyway.

that said, i'm sorry for all that useless rambling which, as i would have correctly guessed, you wouldn't understand anyway, not the meaning of the paragraph per se, just how that actually fits my context.

anyway, i've been watching anime again. started a really really promising series called Black Cat. and i'm feeling the urge to learn japanese all over again. but mugging vocab is boring. really.

bleach is finally getting nice after the slump of flashbacks and recollections.

naruto has been getting boring. and though i've dled the episodes i haven't so much as looked at them. i wish the fast forward would happen soon.

tsubasa chronicle has ended. sadly. and the ending's rather crap too. not that i have anything to say about it, but ya......still i love the music. it's not even remotely boring even after hearing it like, a million times. haha ya.

so this is another long post. in case you don't know, i'm pretty much just complaining around. sigh.

holiday blues

2005-10-30T22:16:00.000+08:00

haven't been blogging much.

my cousin gave my sis 5 hamsters several days ago. or rather, a week ago. and she managed to get rid of 4 due to violent protests from my other sisters. so now one hamster is running around the house and it's dropping lice everywhere. and i mean, everywhere. i hate it when my sis lets the hamster run around the keyboard when she uses the com, it's just so unhygienic. sigh.

nothing much i can do about that. i'm strangely apathetic to animals. weird...

been playing maple story. quite fun, but it's as if the whole point of the story is to level up. sure there are quests to do, but all of which involves some manner of killing monsters and collecting items....i have a feeling i might get super bored sometime in the future.

as of the moment, i shall enjoy myself fully before the boredom sets in. and it's only Day 3 of my maple story.

nothing much to do these few days. so sian. it's like, everything i've been doing has been reading and reading, and i'm just feeling so incredibly sick of reading. okay i know this is weird and it's a bad habit, but honestly....

i foresee that the holidays will pass in a flash. i hate it when it happens. sigh.

asdfasdf

2005-10-25T23:55:00.000+08:00

pwop was rather screwed up. even if i had prepared the answer to my question, i pretty much forgot all about it.

seems as though my memory has either come back, or improved. apparently i can remember most of the english words on chinwern's yellow cards, and i still remember words from today's episode of SAT revision with hongyue and company. the thing is just that some words don't even spell the way they should. like enervate, u'd think it means to infuse with energy, but it's actually to suck up energy. i wonder who's the person who invented this word. he must have been feeling spastic or something.

nothing much else. there are still tutorials to be done, however much i'd not like to do them. perhaps i'll spend tomorrow morning doing them.

i finally went to learn katakana yesterday night, after like, a month of starting to learn japanese. okay ya i'm pretty slow, but i just couldn't be bothered learning katakana when u already know hiragana. but i got so annoyed by the frequent use of katakana that i suppose i finally caved in.

i can still pretty much remember every character despite only a few hours of looking at it, and i ~~believe~~ hope that i can still differentiate between tsu and shi, so and n.

weird thing is i can only recognize hiragana, but i can't write it. haha. sucks huh.

the irritating thing about kanji is probably the chinese influence. words which u'd never expect to have such a meaning, or not knowing how to pronounce the word when you look at it. granted, chinese is like that too, but u can guess from the radicals and whatnot. japanese is totally non-guessable. or at least i think so. which is super irritating. then i'd end up reading it with a chinese pronunciation, which is strange.

okay i'm crapping.

ter on.

2005-10-25T00:08:00.000+08:00

didn't sleep much last night. don't think i'm going to sleep much later on. guess i'll pay the price for it when my mouth gets unresponsive and i can't speak coherently during the dry run. always happens. i can't talk for nuts, even while speaking normally. which is why i'm so reticent. though i tend to get talkative when i lose control of myself. which i try not to.

anyway i happened to look in on chin wern's mugging of SAT's english words using flashcards, and i'm quite proud to say that i know roughly 50% of the words. okay fine, not so proudly lar. 50% is hardly good lor, but anyway i learnt lots of new words today, which i hope i wouldn't forget. somehow it's better using flashcards than reading dictionary.com's word of the day.

dunno if i ought to go for SATs. i can't imagine holding flashcards and memorising words, much less studying maths (it's horrible, btw) or i dunno what else. anyway it's still early, and i dun have that much money nor time to study for it.

that's pretty much the highlight of the day. sad huh, the most exciting thing that's happened is flashcards.

nothing much for co. i don't think i'll be attending every holiday cca practice due to complications.

i wish i don't have to shoulder so much responsibility because if i screw up which has been happening countless number of times this year, i may just about wreck everything. and i mean everything. and a single sorry is not going to help.

i'm worried. just when i got over the anxiety from promos too.

i guess, people just draw away when they discover u have or did something that's scary, that's undesired, that's just not the norm. it's part of life, i guess. but i wish it weren't so....

just read a fiction (or not so, since it's practically a physics textbook) book about (unbelievably) magic. mentioned autism. sigh. nvm. i wonder how i'd feel if i had a child who's autistic. and the way she described the imagery was vaguely disturbing. and i could picture it so clearly that i must have seen it somewhere before.....

okay nvm. i should try to enjoy the last week of school before plunging headlong into something which probably is more exhausting and worrying than school.

apprehension.......

2005-10-21T22:29:00.000+08:00

maths....

applying for 2 s papers, chem, phy then bio. it'll be the joke of the year if i went ahead and tried for maths.

heavily depressed, but i'm trying not to let it show. okay it's not really the depressed part. just a cursory analysis shows that i'm probably more worried than sad or anything. worried about breaking the results to my parents, i dunno..... sigh i just wanna forget everything, except i can't because it's such a burden on my mind, and i just keep remembering it no matter what.

dunno lar. just keep worrying about it, like a reminder that i shouldn't be happy and enjoying myself. i dunno who i'm kidding, myself or people around me. must tell them soon.....

okay depressing news aside, open house today was weird. it was fun and tiring at the same time. and depressing. but other than that, i'd rate it fun. i had more energy today than i ever have had in my entire life of playing any instrument. went even faster than i thought myself capable of. in the end my arm was trembling from weakness. literally shaking. but it only happens when i try to hold it still.

the performance wasn't that good. i was tired, and i admit all the prior "practising" contributed a large part to that fatigue, and in the end i either lagged or rushed, and generally brought more chaos into the thing. nothing much to be said.

i liked the dance performances. seriously. never really thought i'd like watching dances. i especially liked raffles' dance's autumn. the music was truly poignant, as the emcee puts it. reminded me strangely of something, but i couldn't remember. the dance itself was nice, but could be more coordinated. and i noticed something also, but well, better not say it here, coz i'm probably less a judge of dances than anybody else.

then spent some time helping yifang organize the library. got my hands super dusty and a stain on my pants. dunno how that came about. oh well. never knew the library consisted of so many misc scores.

i'm kinda ranting. just releasing nervous energy, from all that apprehension of telling my parents. sigh. hafta do it somehow, right.

weichong says i'll probably need to see the vp. well he's right, and i wouldn't shy away from something like that, but i just hope skeletons won't pop out of the closet at the most inconvenient minute. by some miracle.....well i'll hope.

japanese is difficult. but i probably shouldn't even be thinking about something like that anymore. life's always unfair, huh.....

another boring day

2005-10-18T23:21:00.000+08:00

my chem got an A! yay. but then 3/4 of the class did too, so i guess it's no achievement, but to me personally i think it's okay liao. haha guess i oughtn't bitch around so much huh, a few more marks wouldn't change my mark no matter what, and i'm happy the way it just is, even if i'm in the lower half of the class or something.

everyone around me has been getting 4As. okay granted we haven't known our maths yet, but considering that a large proportion (that doesn't include me) finished the paper an hour early, i highly doubt they would have much trouble. in any case, i'd probably predict a B for my maths, if i'm unlucky a C, perhaps. currently i don't quite care so much already. i dunno if i ought to shamelessly appeal for an s paper or not.

and everything has been catching up on me, from the lack of sleep to mundane stuff like holiday homework, to open house (and my fingertips are still sore) to my cca records. dismal cca records. and nothing i can do to undo it. i'm still labelled as a member in f(x). wonder why noone kicked me out.

my uncle's asking me to work again, but i don't like working, insomuch as the long working hours (okay not that long) and the idea of spending my holidays in work. the problem is i don't want to come to regret it when i look at my bank account and see deficits all over. sigh. this year has certainly not been good. even i can see that. still, it's money after all, but work isn't as easy as many make it out to be.....

if only i was smarter. sigh.

there's still PWOP, as i've come to call it. the deadline's closing in fast, and the presentation seems so short. each member has about 5 minutes to elaborate on about, 5 slides. kinda interesting.

i got into job shadowing! =D kinda surprised, really. didn't think i'll make it thru the teacher's recommendation stage. in any case i dunno what to do there. which reminds me. i need to hand in the consent form tomorrow.

hmmm. i'm planning to miss most of tomorrow's lessons. problem is whether i ought to go for bio and physics lecture or not....sigh. guess i can't not go, huh....especially with my results like that.....

i've been wondering if blogging is therapeutic or not. didn't used to believe in blogging about events, coz they're boring, but i guess superficial thinking has caught hold of me and is refusing to let go, huh. but i don't mind. i don't need to think so much this way....

stupid day. but i'll get over it.

2005-10-17T23:07:00.000+08:00

today wasn't a good day. perhaps that was an understatement.

received back both physics and bio. both died horribly, but barely made it into s paper requirements. that's really barely. but then i expected that sort of mark for bio, since i didn't do much in terms of preparation, both studying and sleeping, and i knew i couldn't so much as think during the paper itself. which led me to miss a lot of obvious stuff. like, when they were looking out for natural selection, i happily went and wrote something like how birds could have flown over the sea. but somehow i don't feel like bashing myself up over on that, because i knew i really thought thru the question that day, no matter how screwed up it became coz my thinking processes weren't working.

i failed essay. even though one can easily get 10 marks had one the time to think and organize the answer. and it's so freaking easy to get that 10 marks i wonder why i didn't try harder.

so that's all about the bio fiasco. somehow i get the feeling that not studying for bio isn't really going to work anymore.

i expected physics to be like that. nothing much.

i wonder how i'm going to squeeze out 2 s papers out from my miserable marks. i don't presume that my chem would get an A. and if i don't even appealing wouldn't help, i think. maths is a gone case.

so far about the only thing which is positive in my life as of the moment is my gp. granted i only scraped a B3, but its much better than everything i have done this year. this year has been full of Cs and Ds, and suddenly a B3 is indeed rather surprising.

weirdly my essay pulled me up this time. and for once i passed AQ. all in all i don't think it's that bad. i'm not like some people who are wringing their hair out over getting a 60 for GP, so well......

sigh chem and maths tomorrow, if my maths gets a B i'll go ahead and appeal for it. if it doesn't, then i'll just appeal for physics. either way i'll die rather horribly, with equally unsupporting teachers who probably wouldn't want to recommend me.

sigh i'm ranting, and i know it. life sucks, huh. though not many people will agree with me at this juncture. i ought to be more optimistic. after all there are people with even bleaker futures to dread, and here i am making a mountain out of my small pile of problems.

i dunno how to break the news to my parents. until the day of reckoning? i dunno..... guess it'll be better to tell them straight.

it's a weird day today. people have been speaking to me in various languages, and i'm trying to construct japanese sentences. hmm.

final fantasy

2005-10-16T09:23:00.000+08:00

been playing ff7 again. truth to tell, i wasn't really all that looking forward to it, coz levelling up materia takes a horribly long time, and horribly long is perhaps an understatement.

but then of course once i started i couldn't really stop. it's really really nice, especially the storyline, but i still can't catch most of what's going on. not that i've remotely finished the game. still only halfway thru, but most of cloud's story is done liao, but i still don't quite understand. especially the entire part about the reunion, and what exactly is cloud. oh well, i guess i could leave stuff a bit hazy, coz i don't plan to replay that entire story part.

oh well. i wonder why vincent told lucrecia that sephiroth has died, when she would have known had she just taken a look at the sky.

i don't foresee many things happening afterwards. in the game, i mean. there's just that submarine sequence to go on, and it'll be the last one where i'll get cid's final limit, which is the last limit i need to get out of all my characters. there're the ultimate weapons, too, and battling to get final attack, which is going to be a huge chore. just that omnislash was horrible. i actually fell asleep while battling to get omnislash.

oh well, it's nothing much.

i'm planning to play ff9 again, but i don't see much of what i can do, since i already know the storyline which isn't as complicated as that of ff7, and i have no inclinations whatsoever as to go and max out the stats. i mean, if u max them all out, then what's the point of having individual characters, save for them having different abilities? ff9 is good in this way, but it all comes down to who can deal 9999 damage in the shortest time and still survive to gain the exp at the end. so i dunno if i'll be replaying it or not......perhaps try to use the other thief, a-something, forgot his name....

oh well that's about all. i mean, even that roundish ball in ff9, will die after 6 turns of 9999 hits. which u can deal consistently with zidane and i-forgot-what's-his-name's frog drop. there's another character which can do 9999 damage, but atm i forgot who he/she is.

i didn't really want to spend such a long post on final fantasies, but i suppose that's about all i've been doing.

tsubasa chronicle songs are really really nice. sigh. i wish i'm not listening to it so much. i get distracted. and tomorrow shall be the final episode of tsubasa chronicle. sigh.

fruits basket.

2005-10-12T19:01:00.000+08:00

i guess i can't help it, can i....

fruits basket is nice. truly. i probably can't explain it that well. something about honda tohru just makes me think a lot, about whatever's been happening, about all that's going on.....in the past, present, whatever.....

it's truly one of the most enjoyable anime i've watched. and soul searching too. but i suppose the repetitive sad cases do get a bit difficult on the ears, huh...

went out on "mini" class outing today. really mini, 4 people, plus hongyue who didn't appear, but assured me he'll appear. hmm. anyway it was kinda fun, i learnt to ice skate! haha, as if that's of any achievement like that. i can only move around, though. which isn't saying much. fell down a few times, one of which hit the base of my spine, though i suppose the pain disappeared after a while. now i have this funny feeling in my knee, as if i had twisted it or something. guess it'll heal after a night's sleep, it always does anyway.

special thanks goes to all three of them who helped me learn skating, namely julio chrissie and puisan, though it seems as though i've gu1 fu4 all their teaching by falling down lots of times. sighz.

like i said, fruits basket does indeed relate to me in a lot of ways, though it's just an anime, and does get preachy at times........still......it's sad that it's ending soon. 4 more episodes to go.....

tsubasa chronicle is ending also. sighz.

it's true, isn't it. the onigiri just doesn't belong in the fruits basket.

speaking of which, i've to play yi xiang tian kai yet again. i wonder if i'll even remotely play a single note with my wrist like that. oh well, hope for the best, huh.

i have never admitted to myself before, but i probably was in greater stress than i let myself believe. by being full of complaints, being irritable and all that, even sleeping in class despite mr wee's sound effects......i dunno..... after a while the guilt just catches up on me, but i still don't do anything about it.......

procrastination is really the thief of time, isn't it?

and how i love the opening song of fruits basket.

end of promos. i dun want to get back my results.

2005-10-06T12:21:00.000+08:00

i ought to be feeling ecstatic that the exams are finally over.

quite the contrary. i feel like i've been weighed down with more than just the exams. of course, a big part of it is the totally-going-to-be-crap results which i'll be receiving next week.

sighz. maths was horrible. the fact that i still can't do partial fractions is testament to my lack of interest in the subject ever since like, the start of the year. i couldn't believe myself either. that question was 8 marks somemore.

of course, i conveniently forgot how to do the R-formula for trigo, which led me to lose another 7 marks.

and the smart me mixed up the cosine rule yet again, especially when i did the same thing during the common test. which led me to lose another 2-3 marks.

i can't remember the other 8 mark question which i couldn't answer. but all in all my highest hopeful result is about 65. with luck i could probably make no mistakes in other questions and let it stay at 65. but that has never ever happened to me. so i reckon about a C for maths. hmm.

that leaves me with only chem s paper. provided i can even get A for chem. so well. i guess i'm so totally screwed.

i dunno what to do with my life anymore.

on hindsight, perhaps i should have slept the night before all my exams.

bio promos. day 3

2005-10-05T11:30:00.000+08:00

whoa, bio was seriously screwed.

but i'm still glad that i didn't study much for bio unlike others who have spent hours and hours of their time, because what did come out didn't apparently need what i don't already know. well, besides the essay questions, of which none i completed. and i could only identify 1 role of the ETC. to maintain the H+ gradient. as if that could amount to 5 marks.

that said, i'm not confident to get even a C. to get C i'll need to lose 45 marks, which could just about come from anywhere, considering the amount of rubbish i actually spewed out into my paper. and my illegible handwriting after cheating a few seconds out from the clock. i'll be happy to lose only 15 marks for section C alone.

all in all bio was really really scary. i'm lucky i haven't been aiming for bio s, coz now i dun even think i'll remotely pass the paper. the feeling i got after completing it was akin to that of physics CT. like, it's all rubbish inside, and i didn't complete the paper.

haha so that's about it. all i can do about now is to hope to heaven and earth that somehow a huge amount of luck appears and converts my glaring F into a nice C.

lol, as if that could ever happen.

Day 2

2005-10-04T12:25:00.000+08:00

i'm not a conversationalist. i wonder why sometimes i feel pressurized to talk. to converse. to talk about inane things i could care less about. perhaps that's why i'm just not good at it. and i don't intend to be good at it. so whatever.

it's officially day 2 of the promos bonanza. physics was easier than i expected, or perhaps i was really so addled as to think that a physics paper could be easy. or maybe i was so tired that i couln't even begin to comprehend the extent of its difficulty. nevertheless, this time i only left about 4-8 marks worth of blanks, which is much less than the common tests which saw 2 pages blank. and luckily the paper's upon 110, which means to get a B i can afford to lose 44 marks. which is a lot. it's tantamount to not doing section B or section C.

so i suppose i can get a B for my physics. or at least i hope so. at least i don't think i'll fail. especially not after not having slept the night before to mug for it.

chem was different. ya i did have the feeling that it could have been more difficult, and i'm afraid some values are wrong, and as usual i couldn't do the energetics question, and i got a few mcq wrong, but overall i hope i can get an A, perhaps a B and i can try appealing.

it's just so lucky that equilibria came out for section C because equilibria is easier to explain than say, predicting bond angles. but the paper is upon 75, meaning i have less marks to lose to get an A. and i really really hope i'll get an A. i dunno what i'll do if i don't take chem s.

okay so that's about it. i'm going to start on my bio.

ha. i'm twitching in anticipation.

pre promos jitters

2005-10-02T23:27:00.000+08:00

the day before chem promos.

sigh i wish i had more time to study. or perhaps not have exams at all.

this time it's worse than common tests, in terms of preparation. i dun have the morning to mug, and i can't burn midnight oil lest my brain turns foggy the next day. it's damn irritating, that there's no leeway for last minute mugging.

okay whatever. i haven't memorised all those explanations regarding chem equilibria, and i need to restudy kinetics. i have no idea how to predict the reaction steps.

and i need to take a look at my common test to find out just how i managed to lose so many marks.

kk so there, shall sleep at 11:45, depending on how fast i can unearth my chem ct.

tsubasa chronicle osts

2005-09-30T19:08:00.000+08:00

i originally wanted to write a review on tsubasa chronicle ost, but that thing interrupted me. oh well, let not that deter me from writing.

anyway tsubasa chronicle ost is very very nice. okay for one the vocals are superb. okay fine there are parts where it sounds off pitch, but then i think they were singing in some weird key and the harmonising is weird, imo, so that's perhaps why it sounded off pitch. besides that, the vocals really really fitted the song well.

ost 1 alone is very err, how would i put it, the genre of the music tends towards a very church-ish style with lots of chorals and high singing, and fits the whole idea of tsubasa chronicle very well. ost 2 came mostly as a surprise, because more than half the songs were of a different err, mood, and apparently instead of vocals i realized the guitar was featured a lot also. other than that, many songs were mainly variations of those found in ost 1 so it's not that new.

but there are those jumpy kinds of songs, and there was one which sounded like some spanish flamenco dance kind, which i thought rather out of place and i couldn't remember hearing that song in the anime at all. but other than that it was quite nice.

i liked in particular the songs with people singing. singing words, that is. like you are my love, both english and jap versions, there's blaze also, which is the opening song, which i found really nice, and there's kaze no machi he, which is really really really nice. the first part of that song, that is.

overall i thought ost1 was better than ost2, but after a while ost 2 grows on you also. so the whole series was really really good. it was one of the songs that i actually listen to while i use the com, and it's not tiring like some pop songs are. but then of course hearing so much sorta destroys the feelings you ought to get while watching the anime. it's not that bad, i suppose, but i think it would have been better to watch the anime and get really moved by the music.

whatever. prepromos stress, i suppose.

2005-09-30T19:01:00.000+08:00

oh i just love being criticised. i agree perhaps a large part of it was my fault, because i just love sleeping so late at night that i get no more than 2 hours' sleep a day. but does that really justify the entire situation? please lar my promos are in like, 2-3 days' time and aren't i even spared even a little fraction of my own time to study and prepare for my own exams?

oh well. i knew something like this would have happened when i took it up. so well, whatever. let's just end it then.

i'm sick of running around everywhere and constantly worrying over exams which i don't even need to take.

2005-09-29T14:12:00.000+08:00

just returned from gp promos. true to my prediction, i actually came late. turns out i was the only one in the bloody j1 batch to be late. sigh. i was expecting somebody to accompany me, but apparently there are less late cases in rjc than in ri. hmm.

well the thing was that i went to wrong place, thinking that the sports hall was the multipurpose hall. seriously, they should give less misleading names.

well i wasn't given extra time despite being late for 15 minutes, but then i don't quite mind. my essay was rather crap, and so was my compre. i had roughly 10 minutes to think and write down my AQ, and naturally i didn't succeed very far. so well, i think i can hope for about B4 like that lor. or C. just simply not fail. though i doubt i'll fail, but i shall reserve some judgment until i get back my results.

so, i finally dragged home the 50 bucks copy of promos paper which i was instigated to buy by the class. or rather, pressurized. turns out that it might serve some purpose after all. since i've lost my phy tys, and not bought chem, it's been rather hard to study for these 2 subjects. at least now i can just practise and practise and hope that it's adequate preparation.

so there, to everyone out there who's taking this shitty promos, good luck! =D

promos chionging

2005-09-27T00:22:00.000+08:00

hmmz, i wonder where the study break has gone. monday has whizzed past and i realized i haven't so much as organized my stuff into stacks according to subject, and much less into tutorials, notes and practicals. this is crazy.

i need to get a move on. and i ought to start sleeping early because i might just so easily oversleep and miss the gp exam on thursday. and it's gonna be extremely likely if i continue sleeping at 5 am or something.

okay so i'm off to chiong crazily for the promos. good luck everyone!

luckily chem's on monday.

unluckily, all subjects are on the mornings. sigh......

Gushing Strings

2005-09-24T01:08:00.000+08:00

went for gushing strings just now. must say i'm utterly, completely impressed by yang wei. sighz. i wish i had that kind of talent.

i fell asleep during wang zhong yang's xie zou qu. sighz. it's only coz the melody was repeating itself in several guises that it became a bit boring. but he is pro. seriously. i'm impressed by him also. later on during his solo his semi quavers were like so fast and i think he had to press several notes in between, and he made it look so damn simple. that entire run of semiquavers was like, peanuts like that. sighz. but then that's okay since i dun play guzheng and i doubt i ever will, so it's not that bad.

yang wei on the other hand is rather....crazy. i wish i can reach his standard one day. though it's probably impossible.

i want to go for tomorrow's concert, but sadly i can't. sighz.

dao chui lian was played so slowly and rearranged so much that it appeared to be another song. not that it wasn't good, just a bit slow.

the concert is just nice lar. i wish yang wei had played more stuff. or that the saturday programme was the friday one instead.

judgment day.

2005-09-23T00:23:00.000+08:00

i dread each day that passes, which inches me closer and closer to the promos, knowing that i'd definitely fail.

sigh.

promos suck. i have no motivation whatsoever to study for promos. nor any to complete the gp essay in a ~~hopeless~~ attempt to prepare for gp.

if there is anything i need now, it's an insane amount of luck.

physics spa

2005-09-21T01:41:00.000+08:00

oh, physics spa. erm, i'm not sure i did it properly. but i had about 10 minutes left afterwards to fashion my wire into my name. imo, it looks nice, but the really interesting part is that if i were to insert a pivot about a certain part, the framework would be balanced. and it undergoes simple harmonic motion!

anyway here is a pic:

okay let's hope that works.

anyway that's about all for physics spa. i ought to continue mugging more.

motto, motto.

ruan xian yin xiang

2005-09-19T00:04:00.000+08:00

went to 阮咸印象 yesterday. overall quite good and impressive, but certain songs such as that played by benedict tan was weird. like, totally catch no ball, as gary lit would say. the rest were pretty good, though, and it's not really her fault that she got stuck halfway thru shan ge, coz that song, from first-hand experience, is chao4 difficult. i really wonder how much energy she has.

i liked wu ci ge a lot, despite me not remembering any of the melodies. in fact, i was thinking halfway thru the song that it's difficult to lun2 for the better part of 5 minutes. the rivery song was good also, though i thought their coordination wasn't good enough. not between the twins, but between peiqian and the twins, and i thought the tone of the piano didn't fit well with that of the zhongruan. but impressively the piano is steinway and sons. that's like, several hundred thousands sitting in front of me last night. guess they had to have the best for the esplanade huh....

the yu ge was okay...nothing much, but i liked their dong lie a lot. it was very very very nice, and very jumpy, like very energetic that kind lar. that was good, really. and jian qi was......how would i put it....nice and weird at the same time. i liked the sao3 xian2 part, it felt very jangly and sword-y, and it's just nice. from first-hand experience (again) i know that song is difficult.

studying....

2005-09-13T19:45:00.000+08:00

okay, revelation. ms teh just announced that there's 2 weeks left to promos. oh well. guess i wasn't paying attention, and time has flown away.

well, i'll see how i can manage to finish about 4 subjects of roughly a year's contents in just 2 weeks. i suppose all i can do at this juncture is to read campbell and notes, and skip directly to past year promo papers. ah well...i thought i was going to be thorough in my revision for once, but that doesn't seem to be. time must not like me, why does it go so fast?

final fantasy 7 is out for grabs currently. must catch it while it's hot. otherwise downloading will slow down to a trickle. you can probably find the torrent over at boxtorrents.com.

okay so that's about it currently. for once physics tutorials have been finished, and today's phy spa was an hour of listening to her droning (well not so bad lar) and another hour of free time. lolz, was discussing stupid stuff like jinyong novels.

must get a move on with studying. i can't wait for ff7 to finish, though. but it'll take a long time no matter what. ah well. shall start bio since it's the easiest to study. then probably chem, maths then physics. if i have the time to, that is. gp is going to die, and die like shit. but i should be able to pass, and that'll be all for s paper requirements. haha. oh wells....

at the centre of the universe

2005-09-11T18:52:00.000+08:00

hehe, i guess i have nothing to do, that's why i'm blogging right now.

been watching anime these few days, so i haven't been doing my homework, but there's time tomorrow, so i suppose it's okay.

i'm downloading some extra stuff also. hopefully they'll be nice.

i'm feeling brainless currently. like there's a lot of cotton in my head and i can't think properly. why. why.

i wanna watch anime, but i've exhausted my supplies. and downloads are going slowly.

for once the sound of typing is jarring on my ears.

i dunno, dun care, i think it's just a side effect of oversleeping. heck.

i wanna learn japanese. and to master it too. not to leave it half baked as i have with french. or chinese, for that matter.

bio

2005-09-10T17:07:00.000+08:00

blogger has been screwing around these few days, so i can't update. though it's not like anybody will read it.

just went to eat out with my sis. sighz. i'm having a bloated stomach currently, and i just consumed what seemed like huge amounts of carbohydrates. though it's to make up for my breakfast and part of dinner later anyway, so it's okay.

ah whatever lar. at least that's energy. i feel so energyless these few days.

i wonder right, if being good meant being able to answer every question. so even if i can't do like, say, the extension questions for maths tutorials that doesn't make me stupid, does it?

frankly i don't feel remotely like studying for anything. bio is perhaps studiable, but dry stuff like maths and physics are a bit.....too extreme.

i'll see how. in the meantime, i don't foresee my sept hols homework getting done, not that it's any fault of mine since i fell sick and ~~didn't~~ couldn't go for teachers' day, hence not getting the homework until yesterday. =D

i feel guilty for not taking bio tutorials seriously, though. all my essays are crap. i remember this particular sentence i wrote in a hurry for my bio essay: "hence myoglobin will only release its oxygen in dire times of need when partial pressure of oxygen is low."

well that's not so bad, really, but i have this feeling this kind of phrasing is not acceptable, though i have no idea how to emphasize that myoglobin is only used in "emergency crises".

oh well. it's not like i can't take essays seriously, it's just very much like copying and i'm too lazy to copy. come exam time i should be writing rubbishy stuff, though. sighz. there are like, 2-3 essay questions in the paper, i think.

sometimes it's just too tiring to come up with a title for everything.

2005-09-06T13:48:00.000+08:00

somehow i wish it were all a dream...then i wouldn't need to face the reality of it.

had a dream about failing gp/history and joseph wong looking at me disappointedly.

ah well, i suppose some things are just not meant to be.

i still haven't started studying despite today being tuesday.

anime downloads are going slowly.

life seems to have stopped. for some reason or the other.

japanese seems as insurmountable as ever.

it took me 30 seconds to remember what tree in french is.

oh well. so what if everything's going downhill, i suppose there'll be an uphill someday. itsuka.....

nanimo shitakunai....tada, zenbu o wasureru dake da.......

and i'm having a headache in the middle of the holidays. when i'm very obviously not being stressed out by homework or whatever since i'm not even doing anything.

sighz, i ought to concentrate on promos first. and then contemplate other things later on. lolz...what an escapist attitude.

whatever lar.

emode

2005-09-02T12:52:00.000+08:00

okay just did lots of funny tests over at tickle.com, and i must admit the results were kinda.....weird. as in, somehow they don't exactly fit me. especially where stuff like personality is concerned.

but then whatever. okay this is seriously turning into a weekly journal, so i shall make more effort to update it. assuming i even care about it anymore.

anyway it's officially the holidays, and i've spent the first 3 days whiling my time away and playing stupid games. and i haven't caught up on naruto yet. sighz. naruto is turning into some amateurish anime, and i cringe everytime special sound effects come in because they sound horrendously like kids' cartoons. like bananas in pyjamas, for eg.

okay regarding promos, i still haven't started, but i shall once i really really get into the holidays. coz these 3 days are just off days granted by the school, so sept hols hasn't started yet. i wonder how others are coming along now?

my typing has gotten slower, i see.

anyway, japanese is turning into a real headache. (hmmz, i think i've said this before) but anyway it should be fun, just that without someone (a teacher, par exemple) to ask, it's incredibly difficult to ensure that u're learning the right thing. and friends can only go so far. half strangers won't even go so far. so whatever lor. ah well, come to think of it, if someone were to pounce on me with french grammar i probably wouldn't be able to answer anyway. since my french grammar is so lousy that i can't even make a sentence without being unsure of it.

okay so there, i think i can forgo jap lessons at least for this year, so perhaps next year, if i'm not already forced to drop a subject.

week 9 is over.

2005-08-28T11:40:00.000+08:00

heh, somehow i'm turning this into a weekly journal. even though i feel like the last time i've visited this place was like a lifetime ago. seems as though blogging has lost its appeal after all....

anyway, it has been a hectic week, though not as bad as one would have thought. bio spa and chem mock spa was essentially regurgitation, so if one has paid attention during spas (as i have done :P) there isn't much to study. and i completely let go of maths and phy test. sighz. not much time to study, and truth to tell i found the maths kinda difficult. not sure if it was just coz i didn't exactly study or not, but well......

been watching anime this week, though. managed to finish shaman king. it's super nice. really. though the fighting choreography is a bit err......lacking. besides, the battles were really too short. but i like the characters. lolz. the story line is a bit lame, but nevertheless it's really enjoyable, kinda funny also.

heh, the way i say it doesn't really portray its funniness properly. whatever lar.

and japanese is getting to be a headache. i think perhaps a teacher would be the best, but deon is err....kinda busy. whatever lor. shall see what happens.

i'm going to start studying soon. for physics especially. ideal gases in particular. chemistry is turning out to be kinda handle-able, i dunno why ppl say it's difficult, and equilibria doesn't seem as difficult as what ppl say.....

okay whatever lar. co has officially stopped, which means early wednesdays! =D cool right. haha, and i've yet to catch up on naruto, and i wish bleach would just hurry up. sighz. maybe i should stop watching for a month or so, and then watch all in one go, which makes it much more enjoyable. hehe.

hiatus' hiatus

2005-08-20T23:11:00.000+08:00

listening to ronan keating's when u say nothing at all. stirs up memories of past times, particularly a movie, but i can't remember what it is currently.

anyway, recently been irritating, what with stupid pw EoM(!!!) and homework. i've been ignoring tutorials recently, especially maths. i can't see the point of doing vectors again and again, though i must admit some questions are challenging, but then again it feels like rote learning, which is definitely not something to be looked forward to.

okay, i'm finally getting around to dling naruto after several useless attempts at leeching them off someone else. who cares if it's gonna take a few days, it's about 20-30 episodes that i've missed. i'm gonna finish off naruto and all other pending animes which i haven't watched during teh extended sept holiday break, as well as get a move on with my promo studying.

but the upside of it all is that currently i'm feeling very free and devoid of anything to do, which means extra time to catch up on my interests, such as japanese, as well as brushing up on my french. it was really really weird today when i went to a website which was in french, talking about japanese. it felt really off when i switched between the japanese examples and french explanations. haha. eventually gave up and went back to the english version. lolz. and i realized i could understand english significantly faster than french, lol.

it's currently going to be week 9, and i haven't done anything with my promos. i shall start soon, especially physics which seems even more difficult than chem.

kk, so that's about it. i shudder to think about the coming phy and maths tests, especially vectors and -omg- i have no idea what's coming out for physics.

oh well, so that's that. hopefully i can prove to asha that physics won't be my weakest science. ha. especially when physics should be easy in the first place.

exams

2005-08-14T13:41:00.000+08:00

hi long time no post. due to certain reasons which i'd rather not divulge here.

hmmz. seems like everyone is going on a hiatus, and for studying (bleaghz), so i think i ought to do the same or something. currently i'm doing nothing but trying to get katakana on hand, but it hasn't been succeeding. it's hard to, btw, to learn a whole new alphabet of whose characters are so similar that the only difference between 2 of them is the direction of the stroke.

since apparently there's not much work to do currently (others seem to be infinitely busy, how come i'm not??) so i'm reading up on japanese. the whole grammar system is scary. but anyway, whatever lar.

nothing much has been happening, except that the year's coming to an end and i really think i ought to get a move on with my studies meaning sleeping early and mugging all the time. well, hopefully i can get to take 2 s papers, but i can't decide between physics chem and maths. i still think i ought to take physics s, but i want to take chem s, and den again maths s is easier. hmmz.

i'm talking as if i can already take 2 s papers, lol. oh well, nvm.

japanese's really fun, really.

about co, i haven't attended it in like, 2 weeks. i'm feeling disconnected with the co world. in any case, i've been practising deon's erhu, based on tips given by xunqi and zongjin, but really, i find it very hard to loosen my wrist, and the tui1 movement feels awkward and wrong, for some reason. there's also a whole host of other reasons why i can't play the erhu, but whatever....

okay, so shall go on a month long hiatus or something. shall continue blogging during the exams (hey, stress relief, u noe), something which i have always done and has proven to be beneficial to thinking. anyway, so there.

long time no post

2005-08-06T11:49:00.000+08:00

okay i know i haven't blogged in a long long time. dunno what happened, too, since apparently i was online every night. hmmz.

anyway, must be coz there's nothing to blog about. my phone was fixed, thankfully, and i didn't tell any of my family about the phone, so it was best that way.

there's pw meeting later on. i really hope we'll get the written report done by the time we end.

oh well. i'll have to wear sch uniform. haiz. nowadays i'm getting used to the sandals, and wearing socks + shoes just isn't exactly...... convenient.

there's nothing to do, really. either i'm usually too tired to catch up on learning anything i want, or there's just simply no more interest. sometimes i really wish i don't have to sleep so much, and my brain can remain alert longer. it's sickening when u realize u have so much time on ur hands, but u have to sleep. haiz.

a really really loooooooong day

2005-08-02T22:29:00.000+08:00

my phone broke down last night as i went to bed. sighz. i can't even on it. had to resort to borrowing iggy's phone. oh wells. but at least something good came out of that borrowing, coz i finally received the message i was waiting for.

haiz. i really have a short term memory. i fixed with kwuan boon to meet him during lunch today, but i thought today was wednesday hence our lunchtimes will coincide, when it's actually tuesday and i got mixed up! so in the end i had to hastily send a message using iggy's phone. hope he got it.....but the thing is, i told him that i'll meet him on wednesday, which by right is correct, but i forgot that i have learning journey on that day, so i'll be out of school by the time his lunchtime rolls over. o.0

i know, i'm being extremely thick here.

anyway, so i went to nokia care centre at wheelock's place. luckily it was a relatively big place with a waiting area unlike certain siemens centres. anyway, when i got there i was struck by this auntie who was furiously swearing in hokkien at the service person, something about him lying twice or sth. anyway, i just thought, doesn't that person have a single shred of understanding of what's being discreet? it's like washing dirty linens in public, shouting like that. she was like, so pissed off or something. not that her behaviour was totally to be faulted, since i think she probably had a very valid reason for being angry, but the point is that, she was shouting so much and taking up so much time that it totally impeded the queue. but i suppose her shouting was a nice distraction to the monotony of waiting.

i suppose that was about all concerning the hasty nokia visit, and if time would allow it i should be able to collect it by thursday. unless i'm struck again by some unexpected meeting which didn't manage to register itself in my memory. then again, i doubt so, coz i think i specially made arrangements coz thursday is my dad's birthday.

anyway, when i was going home from orchard mrt i met jiajing! well, he hasn't changed much, in fact, from my perspective seemingly not at all, not even with a year and half in the army. perhaps he was already tanned before he entered? anyway we didn't have much chance to talk, since i had to alight at dhoby ghaut, but i'm still astounded, even now after 5 years of the fact, that he can be so good at liuqin without a professional teacher. haiz. i wish i had that kind of talent. and looking at him now i suppose he does look like boyi. or the other way round, since jiajing obviously came first. but well......

pw is horrendous as usual. she keeps on nagging, and while i do see what she's trying to say, it just becomes inexorably weary after a while because we want to discuss our pw work and there she is reading the notes aloud. as if we couldn't read. her elaborations aren't particularly insightful either, so i dun suppose there was any point. couldn't she just let us on with our discussion?

anyway, written report is due next week, and my group hasn't done much. sighz. at this point in time i usually start chionging and faking results, but since this is group work i suppose i don't have any say in it. haiz. i'm feeling tired now, but how? i can't feel tired, i have so many things to do and screw it, i have to last all the way till 10pm tomorrow. can't believe it lor, so many things are just crashing onto me, and i don't have a bloody free afternoon to call that stupid sfi for my pw. arghz. i feel really guilty for not calling. haiz. shall call on thursday. heck about the phone bill lar.....

aujourd'hui

2005-08-01T23:04:00.000+08:00

il paraît que malgré la période de détente que je n'ai pas utilisé le francais, je ne l'ai pas oublié complètement. certainement, il y a des mots et ses traductions que j'ai oublié, mais j'étais surpris quand j'ai vu une histoire en francais, et j'ai pu la comprende. c'est une surprise, non?

de toute facon, avec des envies d'apprendre une autre langue, à savoir, le japonais (je pense toujours de nihongo) et quelquefois l'espagnol, mais malheureusement, je n'ai jamais la chance ni l'occasion de les apprendre. (peut-on me dire si je dois contracter 'de' et 'les'? même si c'est un COD?) je suis choqué que je n'ai pas déjà les confondre.

aujourd'hui quand j'étais à la queue pour acheter des chocolats, j'ai entendu un homme derrière parlant damn couramment en japonais. ma première pensée était qu'il était un élève essayant de parler japonais pour err, practiquer son japonais? mais quand je me suis tourné, l'homme était en fait le professeur de japonais. j'aime son voix, il ressemble les acteurs de voix des animes japonais, très claire et pur, mais peut-être un peu comme un garcon. j'avais pensé que son voix était comme tph, car il ressemble tph, mais j'avais tort.

haiz. whatever lar, really, i take quite long to type and think in french. that's why i can't fault those who just started learning english, who are worse off. oh wells.

Chemistry Spa

2005-08-01T22:40:00.000+08:00

today was actually chem SPA skill a. the thing is, out of all the blogs i've been reading thru during the weekend, none, and absolutely none mentioned anything about chem spa being on a monday afternoon when the whole level takes it together.

of course, so i was all geared up to rush home at 3 when pe ended. it was extremely lucky for me to have felt a craving for yoghurt at that instant, and that i met jessica who was also buying yoghurt, and that i asked her if she was going home. it was only then that jessica reminded me about the chem spa timing which apparently seemed to have slipped my mind.

so, i panicked, duh, since i haven't exactly been mugging my head off during the weekend, and to know that u're sitting for a levels in an hour's time of which u know nothing about, that's pretty scary. but thankfully it was only skill a, and we have done enough practices on that so i didn't need to study much.

in any case, spa itself was terrible. the rumour flying arnd sch before spa was that it was going to be on gas collection, so when i started the paper i was happily drawing diagrams and writing the theories, thanking whoever that i had mugged this beforehand. and coz of some stupid reason i decided to make myself legible, hence writing slowly, i didn't realize that the gas evolved would be too big to fit the gas syringe. so by the time i reached there (pre calculations) half an hour has passed, and being unwilling to chop up the given zinc sheet into tiny pieces, i decided to redo and do back titration instead.

of course, even for my standards my handwriting was completely terrible. still, i thought i did quite a good job given only half an hour and totally no preparation for back titration. unfortunately, there were several big loopholes in my expt, such as using a burette to measure 50.00 cm³. that's the whole limit of the burette. dotz lor. and i didn't have a stock solution to titrate from (no time to think) so in order to obtain consistent results one has to redo the whole thing again and again.

considering the time factor and hardly any experience of doing back titrations, i thought my pre calculations were pretty well done. i ended up with nice concentrations (1.50 and 1.00 mol dm^-3). and i didn't have to resort to chopping up the zinc sheet. oh well. just see how it is lor. hopefully i can get level 6 or 5. it's not optimistic, but well, hopefully.....

den again, we never know our spa results. or maybe i just forgot what i got previously. anyway, from now on skill a is completely out of the window and hence i don't ever need to do this stupid thing ever in my entire life. cool eh?

sick

2005-07-30T11:06:00.000+08:00

was sick yesterday. first time i've been sick since a long time. sort of forgot how bad one would feel when in fever. it's as if, u feel weak (though i'm not sure why. did all the energy go into maintaining body temp?) and in my case i'd get random sharp painful thrusts into my body at random places. quite irritating, and most times it'll make me drop something if it's in my arm. luckily i don't usually hold anything.

i still went to school, though, coz my mother psychoed me into going. oh well. but the fever subsided after a couple hours of school. apparently gp essays are therapeutic. o.0

it still didn't help me do the essay properly, though. it ended up sounding horribly like some pro-government thing. but i can't care less anyway. all the topics are horribly dry, for me, that is. and the following chem test was a real test in deciding what sort of crap i should squeeze onto a one line answer. since i didn't exactly follow the chem kinetics lectures due to certain.... distractions, i didn't have the faintest idea what the test is asking. so.

anyway i skipped napfa retest on thursday. glad i skipped, too, coz if i had gone, it'd have resulted in a worse fever on friday. anyway so i'm slotted for fitness management, which i dun really have any complaints about. nothing wrong with running around, is there....?

bio prac was completely idiotic. the question itself didn't make sense. it was as if the whole point of the prac was to prove the inverse relationship between volume and concentration. still, being a good predictable rj student, i kept the graph in a reciprocal shape and talked crap for skill c. not that it matters, though.

i shudder to think about my progress report, really. it's really bad, and hopefully my parents won't scream or something. alternatively, i can don't show them, but that's not very nice, i suppose. and being parents, they won't understand that common tests are meant to fail people. but whatever.....

time distortion

2005-07-27T23:07:00.000+08:00

tomorrow's napfa retest. not sure if i'll have enough energy to even pass pullups or not. i mean, since i'm already slotted for fitness management, might as well skip the retest and fail right. that's better than having to go for something at an unearthly hour which makes a lot of things inconvenient for me.

anyway had physics spa yesterday. somehow i keep getting assurances from people who haven't done it, that the long ruler oscillation is worse than what i've described, but until they have done it they wouldn't know just how bad the whole thing is.

firstly my disc B refused to keep itself level. which meant that i had to keep checking with the spirit level everytime, and everytime it fails to keep itself level. and the standing up squatting down routine basically caused a lot of pain in my knee. i dunno why, perhaps i have arthritis. and den i couldn't think of a fiducial point, so i hastily used a ruler as a sort of guide. not that it even helped remotely.

i wouldn't say that i completely flopped it, but i suspect i had an anomaly which i couldn't change due to a complete lack of correction tape or liquid paper. so i had to stare helplessly at the anomaly for the last few minutes deliberating over whether i ought to cancel the readings or not. in the end i didn't, coz i thought 2.5 small squares' deviation wouldn't really count as an anomaly, but i have this niggling feeling that it does. and if i don't admit an anomaly.....my level will halve itself.

well i hope it doesn't come to that. as it is, i've screwed up enough pracs.

anyway for some weird reason i kept thinking that today was thursday instead of wednesday. which resulted in a lot of weird stuff including worrying over nothing, and forgetting to bring my pe stuff home. sighz. i think my locker is going to stink like shit now.

i'm not feeling normal lately. must be the 12 hour sleep yesterday night. it distorted my sense of time, since i usually sleep 5-6 hours a day, so 12 hours must have tricked me into thinking that two days have passed. hmmz.

anyway nothing much to blog about liao lar. sometimes i think, i'm just going to school coz it's the normal thing to do at my age. i'm not even studying what i want.

anyway weichong's trying to instigate me to go for chem olympiads. as if i have the prerequisite knowledge in the first place. and needless to say chemistry is something that err....is quite difficult. and i'd have to study like shit for it. as it is i hardly know what's going on during lectures, though it's partly my own fault, so if u wanna talk about cheemer stuff......

well physics and bio olympiads are fixed now, and though the physics looks interesting, i didn't get the required A to sign up for it. so well......

chem, though, is another matter, since the percentage of As is kinda low...so a B should be able to cut it if i ask mrs chua, but looking at my dismal B, i dun really think i can. so well, i shan't be going for any olympiad. maybe i'll attend the lectures for fun. but bio seems boring, and physics apparently requires a lot of high level maths, and i'm not going to waste free time looking up taylor's series or partial differentiation. oh wells.

blabbers

2005-07-26T00:26:00.000+08:00

can't say that i've been busy, but i miss the times when i could just lie down on the bed and stare at the ceiling and fantasize. nowadays, time seems to pass so fast that about all i can do is to scrape a few hours' sleep everyday. though it's not as though i didn't have a choice, just that it feels blasphemous to attempt to sleep any earlier than 11pm.

anyway i haven't gotten around to watching much anime either, perhaps i was getting burnout from school work. miraculously i have no outstanding homework as of yet, besides a vectors tutorial which i can justifiably say that i couldn't do coz the lecturer hasn't finished her stuff yet. not that asha cares anyway. i spent so much trouble doing summation and she didn't even request to look at my paper. not that i did want her to look at it, since i skipped all the statements for the mathematical induction, but seriously, at least i managed to put in the effort....

so what have i been doing these past few days, or weeks? frankly i dunno. it's just passing by in a blur, and i dun seem to have caught on to much of it.

on the bright side i managed to figure out circular motion with the help of hongyue and his flying pigs, which brought me to full understanding how to apply the centripetal force. i haven't looked at the examples yet, but i suspect they're mostly permutations of each other, but i'm worried about having to come up with a free body diagram by myself. it's so easy to just overlook a force....

i wonder if it's the topic itself or the notes. i slept through all the chem kinetics and circular motion lectures, but i don't seem to have missed much. or at least i understood the tutorials. hopefully that'll apply to the tys also. i dun really know what the lectures are for, since apparently being there or not doesn't make a difference. oh wells.

interestingly there's a table on the science noticeboard describing profiles of the average rj chem student. strangely, even though i fell into the A and B range, i felt the O-F range described me better. in fact, the whole thing seems to contradict itself. even others i've known aren't really like what the profiles say.

ok ok i'm blabbering. shall shut up now.

the backstroke of the west

2005-07-24T13:46:00.000+08:00

got directed to a blog accidentally while searching thru bleach7.com just now. it's really hilarious, and u should check it out. click here.

it's super hilarious, and it just emphasizes luyun's speech on mistranslations of english. lolz.

inuyasha movie 4 - Crimson Hourai Island

2005-07-22T00:49:00.000+08:00

yay i finished downloading and watching liao. not that it was such an achievement anyway...

when i started watching, i realized that all the inuyasha movies have a certain pattern to them. the start would always be some kind of huge battle where they introduce everybody and the fire thingy which actually is quite stunning lar, and then the group will end with a victory which isn't a victory, at least not just yet. den they'll go along and den find out that the creature has revived and they have to defeat it/them, and then after a fierce battle the whole group ends up without even a scratch on them.

not that i'm cynical about inuyasha, but i find that it's very aimless to just go around slashing everything in sight. although i agree the visuals were rather good, not matrixy, nor were there 3D cgis, but i thought it was rather well drawn. but they modified sesshoumaru to the point where he looked very young. which err....

anyway i'm liking sesshoumaru a lot more now, coz he's just so powerful, and well, whatever. and he's a much better fighter than inuyasha, who really just depends on raw power. ok ok, whatever lar.

so inuyasha was quite nice, at least a rather inviting distraction to the boredom of completing bio tutorials.

sighz. i downloaded 1.30 gb for a day or two, only to finish it within an hour. kind of a waste. and there were several translation errors, though nothing serious. i don't mean the translation is wrong, after all i hardly know a word of japanese other than baka, but more like, the english was sort of wrong. but it hardly affects anything anyway.

soaked in mediocrity

2005-07-20T19:34:00.000+08:00

sigh. okay so whatever.

it's not like i care so absolutely, and really, sometimes i wish i could just let it go.

though that's not to be, i reckon.

whatever lar.

today's lecture on evolution was strange.... while i wasn't exactly listening, half my mind was probably registering what chan ter yue was saying. and i recall this phrase, because of the bottleneck effect, the weaker ones who survive will reproduce and propogate the weak genes, and then the species become weaker. and then i remember the Dune series, and what the Bene Gesserit women were trying to do, to breed the humans so that there'll be a strain with very strong genes, and then, i was thinking, does this go against human nature? to prevent weaker genes from propogating?

then i thought, if technology allows for gene modifications, then all of us will want to create our own version of perfection of a child, and then.....i dunno?

anyway whatever, i can't remember what else CTY was talking about, and i was more interested in the summation i was doing. in any case, i still dunno my stand about gene modification, or selective breeding.

kk. so i signed up for napfa retest next thursday. i hope i pass, though. i only need to do 3 pullups anyway. but can't be helped, i'll be sure to take lots of bananas on that day.

CTs were not what i would expect them to be, what with physics being kind of a huge disappointment and all, but i don't suppose i ought to worry so much over something as inconsequential as physics. and as expected, the question on the definition of linear momentum was screwed. i probably lost 4 marks due to definitions alone.

k lar, so that's the end of CTs, i dun wish to know my gp, since it'll suck. and i'm feeling so dead about everything now, that i can't seem to concentrate on my homework. about the only thing that interested me was summation, and now that's over. sian.

so there, another boring week in a boring person's life.

2005-07-17T10:51:00.000+08:00

okay anyway harry potter took up most of saturday night, and farewell took up the afternoon, and sleep took up the morning, so essentially my saturday was completely wasted. i was looking forward to reading harry potter thruout the night till morning, but it didn't work out coz i started at 9 pm and couldn't put it down until 4 am. but anyway, i'm just feeling cheated again coz half the weekend has flown past without me noticing and i haven't done anything.

anyway, ms hiong informed me that i didn't fail physics, which came as a mild surprise. i'm not sure if i could say that i expected not to fail, but that i left room for surprises, or the other way round, but physics is a goner whether i fail or not. but she said i didn't do well, so i expect it's around D or E, which is pretty much what i'd expect had i been marking my own paper. i still remember whatever i wrote was utter rubbish. it's like, state the principle of conservation of linear momentum. and for lack of anything to say, i wrote, linear momentum is conserved.

2 marks.

smart, eh? i dunno lar. traditionally i've never put much in store for definitions, so i don't study them, but that must have been my worst answer to date. in any case, i didn't fail a single subject except for gp which mrs chan is stoically closed mouth about. so, i think despite the harrid studying i did in the morning of tests, i suppose it turned out well in the end.

ok so i tried yun nan hui yi again. and i felt like i could play it faster. i'm approaching the req'd speed now, averaging now between 142 and 152, i think, so it's pretty okay, and i can't deny that i dun feel quite proud. i mean, this shocking part which is super difficult (or not) and i could play it within a week. but den again it's not really that difficult a thing to do, so whatever lar. i'm looking forward to tackling the other idiotic part towards the end of the song.

anyway so that's about all for CTs. a fiasco, i'd say, since both bio and chem were really really really unexpected, and haha.....

harry potter and the half blood prince

2005-07-17T10:37:00.000+08:00

i've always wondered how amazing people grow up. anyway, harry potter was...... strangely touching. i dunno, it seems as if in the half blood prince he was strangely more mature, a stark difference from the brat i think he was in the previous books. it's as if harry potter fans have somehow managed to get j k rowling to not put harry potter in such a bad light or something....

i can't even begin to review harry potter. and i dun really wish to reveal spoilers, coz i know it really ruins the whole enjoyment of reading. and that's why i didn't feel that sad when that thing happened, since my sisters told me right before i had even begun the book, but i suppose it doesn't matter...

i feel sort of melancholic when i think about harry potter. somehow the series has evolved from a magical innocent world into something dark and rather horrible. i'm not sure if i could have continued reading had i been presented with the entire series at hand. i dunno lar.....it' s so scary, isn't it? and harry potter is actually only 16 years old. our age. or one year younger, but whatever.....

like i said, it's just amazing how people grow up, and i'm not just talking in the physical sense, more like, the mental sense, u see them mature and then u wonder, when had it really happened? but in any case harry potter was, in my impression, put in a more heroic light than in the past. i'm not sure what'll happen from here on....she's just so good at leaving her series hanging in the air. exactly like the order of the phoenix, it's really quite irritating.

sadly the book is thinner than the order of the phoenix, and it's just so short i felt cheated. it averages around 600 pages, but it only took me 6-7 hours to complete (not very fast, i presume, but not enough) so in the end i thought it could have been longer. in any case i have this feeling that she's trying very hard to close this series already. and i've seen what happens to series who hang in the air far too long, so i think this is one commendable thing about harry potter. she's just such a gifted writer.....

ok ok i'm not really making sense here. it's just so alluring, to escape into another fantasy realm again.....

maths ct

2005-07-13T23:40:00.000+08:00

first practice in several months today. not too bad, but it's a bit boring going thru songs which we already know, and then them telling us that not everybody will be playing that. -_-". i wonder what's the point of practising, then?

although i wouldn't mind, except that ever since that stupid pe lesson on monday my arm hasn't been very responsive. and because i wanted to treasure my last moments with a zhongruan at home, i tried practising it yesterday night. which all resulted in a not very good performance today, but then, well, the turnout wasn't remarkable either....

these few days i haven't been making myself clear enough for people to understand me. the thing is, i don't think it's a limitation of the thing itself that i'm trying to say, it's more like, a limitation with myself that i can't manage to put what i'm thinking into words. kind of sad, really, and i lament my gp marks, but i just wish my brain can sort itself out with hopefully sufficient sleep....

i'm just growing stupider by the day. today's physics lecture was a fluster of copying and listening, and needless to say i don't quite understand what the lecturer was talking about. not that i made an effort to, but even so, i just couldn't care less, i suppose.

i got back my maths test. sighz. i didn't do as well as i hoped to do, but then again, it's sort of expected considering the amount of time i put in, but then again i try to convince myself that it's the quality that matters, not the quantity, so perhaps the marks really are a true reflection of my mathematic aptitude. i dunno lar. it's not really like i dunno how to do the questions, in fact i found the paper relatively easy, but still...

i don't really wish to discuss the paper, and it's really quite pretentious to say that all that was due to careless mistakes, coz they weren't. i suppose i had a lot of conceptual errors, which resulted in funny results. but in any case i still managed to get a B in spite of all the slacking i've done for the past year, so i suppose it's an achievement in itself? lolz. i suppose not.

sadly physics and gp has not been returned yet, but i can wave goodbye to physics because it's the one subject which i feel the most keenly that i'm going to fail. gp is.....erm. ya. nothing to say lar. so currently i have 3Bs. a rather average mark, if u ask me, and with physics and gp it'll be something like BBBFF. hmmz.

school hasn't been memorable lately. i find it harder to face people nowadays.

layout change --- again.

2005-07-13T02:33:00.000+08:00

okay i've changed layout again. not that anyone cares, really, but i do that for fun, since i virtually have nothing to do besides watch anime, which i constantly download.

anyway, i would think this layout is better, since it's so painfully simple that no one can go wrong with it. unless ur browser somehow does not support css or only partially, then i don't see how it will screw up. anyway, tell me if the font size is too small....

sighz. school work...pw.....there's virtually no time left in between for relaxation. i still wonder what the hell i'm doing with my life....

.....

2005-07-13T00:22:00.000+08:00

today was more or less depressing. aside from the occasional happy times which i assume must have happened, since i have some memory blanks, but it doesn't seem as if school itself is any enjoyable than it should. for one, i meet a lot of resistance on the bus itself. i really wonder if it's just my outward appearance? or is it some kind of mood i exude? bcoz everytime, and i mean literally every time, i sit at the centre of the last row of seats in the bus, either nobody will dare to sit beside me, or they'll stand about 3 feet in front of me. and i dunno what's the problem, i'm just so sick and tired of evaluating everything again and again.

u know this incredible feeling of sadness as u finally realize a certain part of yourself? i suppose myself is really total opposites of what i had conjured in my mind, it's as if i had allowed my body to run astray when i wasn't looking. but in any case when the time of reckoning comes, it's like, just sad. sad that this is actually me. part of me.

i dunno...... i just don't ever seem to be what i want to be. i try to change, but somehow it just keeps reverting back. i dunno what's the problem anymore, and i don't think i honestly care also. whatever lar.

anyway today's pw was surprisingly fun and productive, and we managed to complete a first draft of the EoM. weird why we're taking something considered to be a practice so seriously.

i dunno what's going on in my life anymore, and i think after a while, everything just slips out of control, and den....

thoughts on Ragnarok the Animation

2005-07-12T00:33:00.000+08:00

okay i've just finished the series on ragnarok the animation. it really pays off to not judge things by first impressions.

anyway the series started out very weak. actually, it's just coz it was such a sudden and abrupt swich from the kawaii jap anime that i'm used to watching to the western kind, much like howl's moving castle. i'm not saying it's bad, but it takes time to adjust, i suppose.

in any case, i felt the music and plot wasn't good enough at the start. and i was very irritated that it felt like it was starting in the middle of the story and i couldn't see how the characters grew. but it grew better, though. perhaps they wanted to jack up the ratings or something, but the music became more exciting and relevant after about 10 plus episodes, and the plot went really deep. of course, it's those kinds of typical plots u get for rpgs, like u're supposed to save the whole world or something, but well, still quite nice. i suppose there some of us who just don't stop subscribing to the old school kind of plots.

anyway, the story was nice, in retrospect. and i liked the RPG element in the anime, especially the magic part, coz it felt like real fighting, instead of randomly throwing spells at each other and seeing who can last longer. and in real battles speed really does matter, something which i found extremely lacking in current mainstream RPGs. it seems as if the magic element is nothing more than throwing stones at puppets who will not move nor dodge. and it's unfair how magic users are limited by MP, and physical damagers don't have any limitations. they can just go on and on.

okay anyway enough about ranting about rpgs. i'm really glad i downloaded this anime, even though it was off to a very bad start coz of whiny characters and a seemingly nonexistent plot, but towards the last 15 episodes it grew really quite nice. well, i haven't played ragnarok before, so i can't say much, but the world there is interesting, albeit a bit FFish. anyway, i'd highly recommend this to anybody, just a fair warning about the boring start.

monday

2005-07-11T18:51:00.000+08:00

two positive things happened to me today. firstly was the release of chem cts, and the second was the talk by dr william tan.

anyway, i was intercepted by mrs chua as we were on our way to the canteen, and i'm surprised she came back so early from her holiday. in any case, she said, our msg was one of the highest in the level. okay that wasn't so surprising compared to last friday when the teacher told us we only had 4 out of 28 who failed, when the expected passing rate was supposed to be 50%. or at least that's the average rate, according to rj chem's history.

anyway so i had this sinking feeling in my heart that i'm most probably one of the 4, and judging from the amount of time i actually spent studying, i do have reservations about my probability of passing. anyway, so came along chem lecture and they released the papers, and i didn't dare look at the marks, but at least i got 9/12 for mcq, so it was pretty alright. but anyway, the real shock came when i flipped over the paper and omg, it was a passing mark. i think i nearly died from relief. coz shuan hao told me he failed his j1 ct, and his record is like, average 89% ri chem, and well....

but anyway, i managed to scrape a B, just like bio. and i'm damn happy. considering i had so many factors working against me on that day (such as the screwed up calculator) and illegible handwriting, to be able to still scrape a B is truly astounding, even for my standards. anyway, of course there's this niggling feeling that i could have studied more and earned back that 8.57% from that lost mass spec question. but in any case i passed rj chem, and sure i didn't get as high as ppl like sia chinghui (nor would i ever) or woonli, but really, i think personal achievements count more lor.

anyway as ben tay puts it, i'm literally soaking in smartness when i'm in 3P. anyway, whatever lar, what happened with chem ct was really really a stroke of luck, and i think i studied really hard for it too, such as making new notes for complicated topics like energetics, even though i only spent the morning on the day of the test studying, but seriously, it was still quality work, and i see how it has paid off. though i still lament the stupid careless mistakes, but that stemmed from ignorance rather than just pure absentmindedness.

okay anyway the talk was really nice, and i'm glad i didn't pon it. coz the speaker himself is amazing. to put it mildly, he was really quite humble, though he tends to make sarcastic references to his history, but he simply said stuff like, so i got really determined and studied very hard, and in the end i topped PSLE". like, wth, imagine the sheer amount of work u have to put in to top psle. that kind of brainpower doesn't come with just hardwork, u noe.

anyway he was in many ways an amazing man, but i'm not sure if i still want to give up the freedom of not having to take over responsibility of my life. at least not now, maybe next year or something. but i suppose u can see how the kind of work he probably went thru. even for a normal person it's not easy to top psle, complete 10 marathons, and get like, 10 masters and PhDs. the remarkable thing is that he didn't look 48. he looked like 30. and he's going to try to wheel more than 452.2 km in 24 hours. non stop. that's averaging 5.2333 m/s for the entire 24 hours. imagine that....assuming a normal person can walk at 2-3 m/s, it's still not possible to walk continuously for 24 hours, much less run. i dunno how those people did it.

anyway the speaker made a lot of puns, and they were really quite funny, really, not just lame, and i suppose that's what mrs chan would call jokes with good taste. anyway there was something interesting, he said he was MAD. mad as in the acronym for Making A Difference. lolz. kind of stupid, but well....

anyway today was quite interesting a day. and i found some articles for pw's eom tomorrow. hmmz. k lar. whatever.

new layout

2005-07-10T07:32:00.000+08:00

as is immediately obvious unless u're blind, i have changed my layout from scrapped princess to bomberman. maybe i had nothing to do. but anyway yup so here's the thing.

i'm not sure how well it'll work in resolutions other than my own, which is 1280 x 1024, and 1024 x 768, which i tried. both seem alright, though i would say 1024x768 is the best resolution coz it looks really alright and i made the background pic to fit 1024x768.

anyway i have been contemplating the idea of a pulldown menu that floats down automatically when people scroll down, and it's not completely impossible to code for, since the code is floating around the internet somewhere, but i'm just too tired to search for it currently. i suppose that will wait till the next layout or something.

anyway bomberman jetterz is really quite nice, and i particularly like the music, especially this current song and another one called memories of balloons. but the series hasn't finished yet coz of erm, **** translators who don't release on time. anyway i still can't get the stupid song to loop back. can anyone tell me?

ok so shall stop ranting. i realized that everytime i create a new layout the coding takes like, 10-20 minutes, while the pictures take a couple of hours to search. -_-" maybe it's coz i'm looking for uncommon stuff like bomberman jetterz, and the only way i could get them was thru the anime, so it makes searching very very long. i'd appreciate if ppl can tell me how they source for their pics?

okay i'm feeling nauseous now. must be coz i'm hungry. shall go sleep soon. hopefully i'll wake up like 3-4 pm, instead of 6. i still have the stupid gp talk to do.....sighz.

yun nan hui yi 云南回忆

2005-07-09T20:57:00.000+08:00

okay i had this 2 hour long practise on yunnan hui yi 3rd movement today, and i felt so exhilarated. partly coz i finally got something as irritating as that down, and even if i can't play it at original speeds it still feels great to have identified every single note in the score.

and the song is so nice too. though there are some parts i'm not sure how i should play them, and it's not obvious either. so in the end i played what i felt was right, but really....

anyway there are still some parts i can't play, such as the irritatingly fast parts, and certain parts which are chock full of accidentals that i had a headache looking at them. in any case, i don't read the staff very well, and it's a great effort to play accidentals when they're all so confusing. oh wells...

so next up is probably the first movement, but judging from what i've heard the first movement sounds difficult. the worst is probably the second movement which is full of weird techniques and funny rhythms, but i think with enough perseverance it should be playable. ironically i found the second movement very nice, especially towards the end when it sounded very zhuang guan, and i thought i don't usually like slow songs. but anyway the second movement will have to wait, coz it's not exactly very easy. and i'm a rhythm idiot, so....

in any case i need to transpose the fast parts into sophage, so i can read them fast enough to play. otherwise what's the point right. and currently i can only read the staff in b flat. anything else would need several days to adapt. weird, huh, but it's only coz i started learning the staff in b flat, and i've encountered nothing else, so when i get dumped with f major, or c major (dun ask me why i can't) or d major, i just can't read. sighz.

okay weirdly enough, the fast part in the 3rd movement is significantly easier to play than the fast part in mountain song, and i dunno why, coz ynhy is speed 160, whereas mountain song is only 142. maybe it's coz the second and third strings are harder to press?

in any case i'm now stuck with a sore index finger from all that barring, and believe me the strings are horribly thin. either thin or sharp and pokey. okay whatever lar. it's really such a nice song, i ought to practise more.

co syf presentation

2005-07-08T00:46:00.000+08:00

just came back from the syf co presentation. glad i went, really, coz irritatingly both njco and hcco were before us in syf, so we didn't get to hear them. anyway, they were good, really, but njco's da mo err....i wondered how they could actually get past that....

anyway, basically i truly felt how secluded i was in secondary school. maybe it's just that i had never bothered to go for dhsco concerts, and i think i should have. coz they were really good. what really struck me was the sec 2 (according to royston) yunluo guy who played semiquavers at an unearthly speed. and it sounded so nice and it was like autoguns firing. truly amazing. which is why i said i should have gone for more concerts.

and i felt RV's costume was garish, as usual. i wonder if it's the influence of the conductor or the alien taste of just RVians in general. in any case, they were still good, but i noticed a good proportion of the rvco was girls, and in comparison to dhsco, where there was a healthy mix, it felt.....less strong. i dunno if it's some kind of synergy between opposite sexes or what, but the change atmosphere could be felt keenly. and den when nyco came out, um....

truth to tell i realized that nyco's liuqins had a lot of noise, or za yin, and i thought it really destroyed the mood of the songs, especially, and especially xing kong. i mean, with such a high pitched instrument, there's a certain responsibility to sound at least tinkling during xing kong, but because of the za yin there was no effect. i wondered if they knew it. the girls looked quite irritated, so i think they do know, but.....

in any case all of them were really good, and it's not really a surprise rico only got silver (sorry.....) if the top few are like, that.

anyway the jcs were good too, and meng die was shorter than i thought. okay i know i'm a frog at the bottom of the well, but i haven't heard meng die before and goodness knows what it sounded like. but anyway i was again struck by how nice the whole thing was, mainly just about the background instrus playing and everything. but since this is the first time, i can't say much.

njco was good too, po shui jie being neat and everything, and i can see how they can get into the presentation, but when it came to da mo, i was like, why are they playing so slowly for somethign that's clearly stated in the score as 132? i tried to understand what they were doing (felt totally alien) but still i decided the faster version was more appealing due to the way certain instruments were made to play. and precisely because of the slow speed, the players tend to rush (frankly i do that also )= ) and in the end it felt slightly unstable. but still good, though.

anyway, must thank deon and royston for helping me get tickets and for dinner. =D i feel kind of inspired to practise harder. lolz. i wonder why......

weichong wants to play ynhy next year, but i wonder how the orchestra would respond to that? currently it's being dominated by huqin, so there's a certain kind of... stigma to other sections having concertos which involve the whole orchestra. or at least i feel so lar. it might just be my imagination, though. actually it just is lar. but well, hopefully it gets thru, coz it's really really such a nice song it's really going to waste to practise it for fun.

whee i passed bio!!! =D

2005-07-05T22:54:00.000+08:00

ok i got back my bio cts. i sure was hell shocked that i didn't fail, and that alone is really good news enough. well, i suppose i don't care that i just scraped a B, (sounds impressive huh, it's the 2nd grade, after all =( ) and i don't really care so many other people got so much higher, but really, i passed bio despite only studying intensively the day before. ok i admit i had been preparing for bio several days before the cts, so hmmz, the pass should have been expected. nonetheless, i found bio hardest after physics, and even in retrospect i still do.

today's discussion of bio ct questions was met with huhs? and wths. seriously. it's that spastic a common test. even the questions were decidedly vague about things, and believe me the answer was totally contrary to what most people would have thought. but whatever, i missed out studying m&ms and enzymes, and yet i still passed, so i'm pretty glad about it overall. hey, call me stupid, but i really have personal goals to bypass, and i'm not aiming for bio olympiad anyway, i'm damn hell happy with a low B.

if i could only say that for physics. if anything the mcq was (imo) easier than structured, hence looking at my dismal marks for phy mcq i think i can forgo any hopes for a pass or even a B. but, i suppose it doesn't matter. frankly i highly doubt i'll be in the science field when i grow up so i can afford to screw up the occasional test. =(

haiz. i wish my parents were less biased and more broadminded...... it doesn't help when u're 17 and realize that teenage angst was all but a fleeting memory, and den you see ur younger siblings going thru the same thing and thinking that this is all so pointless why don't they just see the point, and u have parents (who have gone thru it 3 times) and they still respond the same way, which doesn't help matters. i get the feeling like i've really really been indulged in thru the entire teenage years, and i'm not sure i had gotten the same kind of treatment from my parents. just my hallucination?

i dunno lar. if i had kids of my own and they were to go thru this, i'm not sure what i'll do also. probably get defensive. that's how most misunderstandings come about anyway, and i'm not sure talking, especially for guys, help in any way. in fact i shouldn't be thinking about this at all.

ok so first day of school was excruciatingly torturous. i apparently seem to have lost my experiment, and had to miraculously fabricate results for the experiment. den was bio which really set my heart thumping but in the end i'm just glad, overall. den came a boring summation tutorial which was not fun despite what the lecturer asserts. and den physics with a teacher who's another newbie. i wonder what has happened to the good physics teachers around. sure she's nice, and she's friendly, but i can't help but feel that she feels defensive in the raffles environment, and i wonder how her teaching would reflect this.

den pw which was a 2 hour long discussion on whatever we have not done during the holidays. i suppose u could say it was productive, in fact it is, but it's weird how we can meet a grand total of 3 times and call it productive?

pw sucks, as usual, and i'm just irritated by it. in the end it's just nothing but a proposal which nobody is going to use. no matter how realistic we set it out to be. ya so whatever.

but i'm just struck by how cohesive our group seemed to be. like no internal strife, and even without a clear leader it functioned quite well. i suppose that can be said when u have pro people inside, and i'm like sponging off on them or something. sighz feel so guilty. especially when i don't have any relatives who can help with this, and i do feel useless, in the literal sense. what is my existence for, anyway.....