[43]

Happy CNY!

This year I got sick of walking around visiting people and of all the sweet food after one day.
Actually, I'm sick of eating too. Three reunion-dinner-ish meals with a lot a lot a lot a lot of food is way too much food for my eyes and brain to digest.

No more red dress this year either. Currently, my favourite thing about CNY is the longish weekend.

Unfortunately it's cut a tad shorter by certain stuff which I need to do. In other words, I need to return to school to do some... stuff.

Oh well.

[42]

I am going to turn into a season 1 finale Peter Petrelli if I don't get this out of my system.
Actually, even if I get this out of my system, I can't promise that I won't become a s1fPP.

Some systems are really dumb. Some people do things in really dumb ways. Some people think up really dumb ideas.

Some dumb things I really, really, REALLY disagree with. (But cannot do anything about. Which explains why I'm ranting.)

The crux of the problem is, there's a communication problem. Stuff never gets finalized. Settled details always change by the next meeting. Stuff are only started way close to the deadline.

I can't say that I can do a better job, but when it... okay I probably shouldn't say more.

Maybe I should do something about this situation.

[41]

The days seem to pass slower... and sloooower... and slooooooooooooower.
Seriously.

Everytime it feels like Thursday, I look at the calendar and realize it's only Tuesday. I swear, it's not because I keep hoping the weekend will arrive sooner.

My hypothesis is that because of the (kinda) immense workload, it feels like I've done many days' worth of stuff when only one day has passed. (Efficient huh!)

Or it could be because school's really boring and time crawls by.

Either way, one more day to my long, long CNY weekend.

[40]

Ever heard of this song?

Que Sera, Sera

When I was just a little girl,
I asked my mother, "What will I be?
Will I be pretty? Will I be rich?"
Here's what she said to me.

"Que Sera, Sera,
Whatever will be, will be.
The future's not ours to see.
Que Sera, Sera.
What will be, will be."

When I was just a kid in school,
I asked my teacher, "What will I be?
Will I be teaching? Will I be rich?"
Here's what she said to me.

"Que Sera, Sera,
Whatever will be, will be.
The future's not ours to see.
Que Sera, Sera.
What will be, will be."

The kid, the mom, and the teacher all have strange mentalities.

The kid seems to be obsessed with being pretty and rich. Did no one ever tell her that beauty is skin-deep, and that she should care more about her exam results than how she looks?
Okay, maybe looks will get her places. If she wants to be a model or an artiste. But she wants to be a teacher! So she what, intends to charm the students into listening to her with her beauty? Or perhaps looking pretty will make her students pay attention, especially the male students.

And the two adults sound so typically submissive. "Whatever will be, will be"? What happened to taking things into our own hands? What happened to working hard to get what you want?

'Tis a screwed-up world.

Okay, I'm just ranting rubbish. Don't mind me. Hahah.

[39]

Semester 2 has started.
I've completely lost the ability to wake up early. Thank goodness I have no lectures at 0800h.
Unfortunately, most of my days end at 1800h. I.e. peak hour, which means shoving and pushing and trying to get on the bus so that I can have dinner before I starve.

Not all my modules are first-choice ones for me, but I think they'll be fun. Especially the one titled "Are we alone?". Hahah. Science fiction and all stuff related is love.

This spider keeps crawling onto my laptop. Strange.

Time to mugmugmugmugmug again.

[38]

My brother introduced me to this website, and I found some cute stuff there.

"A stranger stabs you in the front.
A friend stabs you in the back.
A boyfriend stabs you in the heart,
But best friends just poke each other with straws."
-Meghan Sherwood

"Someday your prince charming will come. Mine just took a wrong turn, got lost, and is too stubborn to ask for directions."

"What is the difference between facebooked and bookfaced?
Those who are bookfaced are not on Facebook."
-Oleg Vishnepolsky

"People have the right to be stupid. Some people abuse that privilege."

"I'm never wrong. I once thought I was wrong. Turns out, I was mistaken."

"No one will win the battle of the sexes; there's too much flirting with the enemy."
-Henry Kissinger

"Forgive your enemies, but never, never forget their names."
-John F. Kennedy

[37]

What the alumni choir does after a very very filling barbecue dinner with a lot of meat. (You have to admit, it's a pretty picture.)


Altos '07: Reunion dinner on 02012009, sadly missing Andrea.

What a feast. Sid and Chorks joined us, so it was the usual altos+2basses thing.

The card games were fun, and so was the version of Murderer Mel tried to teach us. We're really not very good at making small talk and playing psychological games at the same time. Except for Yan. Yan's the sneaky one, hahah.

It's true that psychological games are tough to play with people you've known for ages, 'cause it gets a bit scary that people whom you trust might be the murderer/accomplice. Only a game, but mind games do stuff to your mind.

Worse still, playing with people you know really well means that it's hard to lie and convince each other that someone is/isn't the murderer.

Happy, happy, happy night.

[36]

HAPPY 2009!

[35]

This is a record month of barbecues. I've had two, skipped one, and there's one coming up really soon. At the rate I'm ingesting carcinogens... Bad news.

Barbecue #1: Germaine's.
Pearl and I hung out at her house the entire afternoon watching The Dark Knight. One single movie. Whatever happened to our movie marathon/Supernatural fest?! Next time we've got to be more efficient.
That said, it was rather relaxing. No stress, no hurry, nothing to do except laze on the couch. I really need more of this.
Come to think of it, we forgot to take a photo together.

Barbecue #2: Alumni barbecue.
It was quite fun, especially the Pictionary and sparklers part.
And this part is really short 'cause I don't know what to say. There were some nice sparklers pictures, so I'll share them when they appear on Facebook. Hahah.

Today was a day of miracles, because Donald replied my email and Ernest added me on Facebook. Amazing.

[34]

Batch of 2007's christmas gathering/dinner.


The compulsory group photo.

It was really nice to see people I haven't seen in ages and ages. Though only about half the batch was there, it was pretty successful. Goodness knows how much effort the planners (Jerome, Reuben, Bong, and Brendan, if I'm not wrong) have put in for this. Thank you all!

Everything's kind of different, but still the same. No doubt it's (ahem) wilder than christmas parties from college days. Amazingly we didn't sing... Okay, we tried to. The "Huh carols again?!" sentiment was far too strong so we gave up. Not that I was complaining, hahah.

All of us have changed, at least a little. Army and university lives do affect people somewhat. BUT. There're still lots of little things that I've been seeing since we were still in college that I appreciate a lot more after being to university and NOT seeing this kind of considerate acts there.

Easy camaraderie doesn't come by that often. That night, just sitting to the side, watching friends talk and camwhore and catch up on lives and simply enjoying each other's company was enough to make people feel content.

[33]

Sonnets by Edmund Spenser: (30) from Amoretti

My love is like to ice, and I to fire:
How comes it then that this her cold so great
Is not dissolved through my so hot desire,
But harder grows the more I her entreat?

Or how comes it that my exceeding heat
Is not allayed by her heart-frozen cold,
But that I burn much more in boiling sweat,
And feel my flames augmented manifold?

What more miraculous thing may be told,
That fire, which all things melt, should harden ice,
And ice, which is congeal's with senseless cold,
Should kindle fire by wonderful device?

Such is the power of love in gentle mind,
That it can alter all the course of kind.

And, this just goes to show that love is full of oxymorons, ironies, and what-nots.

[32]

Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night by Dylan Thomas

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Villanelles are simply amazing. And incredibly difficult to write.

[31]

I am so glad the exams are over. After a week or two of intensive studying, your brain's not really your own anymore, y'know. It kind of belongs to the mugging-alien-spirit realm... which is not a good thing when you're still expected to talk to people and stay coherent, not spout stuff related to opportunity costs/stagflation/mammals/DIBAH/other reagents/bell curve/standard deviation etc.

Final paper: lit. And I lugged all my four texts to school. On the way back I went to the library to stock up on teen-lit-ish "trashy" books, so I was carrying twelve books on the bus. Heavy, but satisfying. I had no idea what to borrow when I stepped into the library. Comes from four months of not borrowing anything other than textbooks. Ugh.

After rehearsal we had this looooong lunch-and-coffee-after thing, and it was totally relaxing. This is what an afternoon with friends ought to feel like; such a nice way to end exam week.

[30]

mug /mahg/ n [C] 1 a large cup with straight sides used for drinking tea, coffee etc. 2 a large glass with straight sides and a handle, used especially for drinking beer: rugby players swilling mugs of beer at the bar 3 also mugful a mug and the liquid inside it: Two mugs of tea, please. 4 BrE spoken someone who is stupid and easy to deceive: I expect they'll find some poor mug to buy their car. 5 spoken a face: What an ugly mug! 6 a mug's game BrE spoken something that is not likely to be successful or profitable: Gambling is a mug's game, Jonah.

mug v mugged, mugging 1 [T] to attack someone and rob them in a public place: A lot of people won't go out alone at night for fear of being mugged. 2 [I] AmE informal to make silly expressions with your face or behave in a silly way, especially in a photograph or a play: Scotty's always mugging for the camera.
mug up phr v [I, T] BrE informal to study something very hard, especially when preparing for an exam: mug sth up He's got to mug up some facts about pollution [+ on] She's mugging up on Racine for her French paper.

mug.ger /'mahgger/ n [C] someone who attacks people and robs them in a public place

mug.ging /'mahgging/ n [C, U] an attack on someone in which they are robbed in a public place: There has been an increase in muggings at the park.

mug.gins /'mahgginz/ n [singular] spoken BrE used jokingly to mean yourself, when you know you have been stupid and let other people treat you unfairly: Everyone disappeared after supper, leaving muggins here to do the washing-up.

mug.gy /'mahggie/ adj muggier, muggiest informal muggy weather is unpleasantly warm and the air seems wet: The air was muggy and damp, threatening a storm later. --mugginess n [U]

Definitions courtesy of Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English.

And here's the definition from an alternative dictionary.

mug v mugged, mugging 1 [T] to study very hard: Students love to mug in the school library. 2 [T] SgpE student colloquial to cram all information from notes and textbooks into one's brains in the hope that they turn out relevant during exams

mug.ger /'mahgger/ n [C] someone who is very diligent and mugs a lot, often staying up entire nights to study

closet mugger /'.. ,../ n [C] someone who mugs a lot but does so in the privacy of his own room so that other people will not find out the extent of his mugging

mug.ging /'mahgging/ n [C, U] a group activity in which muggers gather at a public place, usually a library, to study together: There has been an increase in mugging sessions ever since exam season started.

Mugging sessions are classified into two types: productive and non-productive. They usually start out non-productive, but evolve to become productive as the exam season nears. Non-productive mugging sessions are usually accompanied with relatively high noise levels and a lot of laughter, while hair-clutching and frantic scribbling or highlighting are observed during productive sessions. Productivity has a positive correlation with stress levels, as recent studies have shown, but causative effects have yet to be proven.

[29]

I'll save the definition of mugging for the next entry. Procrastination is bad but I really can't help it; mugging has to come first or I'll die for the final exams.

The revision is going nowhere, by the way. I've been sleeping a lot (i.e. not studying) for the past three days 'cause my stomach hurts. Hopefully it gets better soon 'cause exams are in less than a week's time.

Time to hit the books again...

[28]

The semester is over! Now for the exams. Yay.

I'm really glad that the last day of semester 1 was a good day. Lit. tutorial in the morning was pretty fruitful, even if I didn't quite understand every single thing during the class. (To tell the truth, I didn't understand any of the questions in the tutorial, but oh well.) It helps that my tutor is a nice person. And an excellent tutor. (Unfortunate for him that this lousy lit. student is in his class. Very unfortunate.)

Then I had lunch with Yuekai and Johan at the engineering canteen. Nice food. (I wouldn't be able to stomach science canteen food 'cause I absolutely insist that my last meal in school for this semester must be a nice one.)
The mix of company is rather weird, I know. A girl from the school of business in my lit. class and a guy from my OG. And the guy can be rather weird, to boot.
It was a good lunch 'cause the food was YUM. Everyone should try the Indonesian grilled food stall in the engineering canteen.

Johan is amazing at exploiting people's friendships. I can't reveal the reasons yet... except for one: he calls up friends to serve as lunch company when he's alone in school. Staying in a hall has its downsides huh.

After that I had my last lesson for the semester. Thank goodness it was a fun one. Hahah. Final lesson, final practical: a trip to the zoo! Everyone who can should take the biodiversity module too. LSM1103; go check it out. Heh.

The zoo is a great place to spend the entire afternoon in, but having great company makes it even better. A4 is a funny group. (Maybe 'cause we're named after the standard paper size. HAHAH.)

Okay um, credits to Wes and his brother's camera for the photos. (I plucked them off Facebook.)

Animal species 1. Our lab group's unofficial rep who was forced upon the job. He does a good job of emailing everyone and telling them to wear the science faculty tee though. He calls himself the monitor lizard. ('Cause class monitor/lab group monitor. Get it? Sorry eh, this isn't very funny. Bio students' joke.)

Camwhoring on the bus. See how well we're camouflaged against the blue backdrop of the bus? Biodiversity lessons come in handy.


Our group with the nice lecturer aka Otterman. (He studies otters hahah.)

Too bad our TA had something on, so he couldn't come. We had an Andrew-Seow-lookalike substitute TA who was very nice to us too.

Animal species 2. Wes in a raincoat that makes him look like he's going trick-or-treating. Halloween's over, my boy.

It was raining very heavily on our way there, and we were all going "OH NO" on the bus. Thankfully after we reached, it slowed to a drizzle, but not after Ricky spent $15 on an umbrella. (More about the brolly later.)

I'm pretending that this act of blogging is a way to consolidate the stuff I've learnt, so humour me. Here goes the more interesting parts. (Gosh I'm actually reading my practical schedule as I type this.)

The tapirs have interesting disruptive colouration. My notes say that they resemble brown watermelons. Hmm.

Each tapir is brown with a white middle section. To me they look like jigsaw puzzles with straight lines; that's how stark the difference in colour is.

It's really a pity we can't see the white tigers 'cause some suicidal guy jumped into the enclosure, got attacked by the tigers, and died. He should have stuck to cleaning the monkey enclosures.

We saw jaguars, leopards and lions though. Big cats are seriously sexy. Especially those sleek lines. Mmmm.

Anyway, tigers are the biggest cats (i.e. the heaviest), followed by lions, jaguars, and leopards. These large cats are slender 'cause of their short alimentary canals (aka digestive tract: mouth, oesophagus/gullet, stomach, intestines etc., you get the idea). Unlike herbivores which need a relatively more complicated digestive system to digest all those cellulose, carnivores don't need so much stuff in their bellies.

One way to remain slim and sexy is to only eat meat huh. HAHAH. (I'm kidding. Don't take my word for it.)

Don't you just love bio terms. Heh. Jargon, jargon.

This just occured to me: Toothpaste is a white tiger!

If you don't know what Toothpaste is, it shows that you haven't been visiting facebook often enough. Check out my (fluff)pet.

Jaguars' coats are patterened with rosettes, with a spot in the centre. Leopards' coats have no spots in the centre of the rosettes but they're really sexy too.

Black panthers are black 'cause of the extra melamine they produce. And black is a sexy colour.

Crap, the zoo trip screwed up my sexual orientation.

Ohhh. Pumas can purr but can't roar, unlike the other big cats. Silent and deadly.

Now about lions. Apparently the darker the mane, the more melamine is produced, the more testosterone the lion has. So lionesses prefer brunette lions to blond lions. (And our TA waited till all the tourists were gone from the little air-conditioned hut before he said this. Hahah.)

The pygmy hippotamus undergoes progenesis, i.e. they develop sexual maturity precociously, so there's no need for them to grow any bigger. Thus they remain small.

Kangaroos are so cute. I love their paws.

There's this whole section on animals found in Australia, which I thought was rather cool. There's also a placard that's dedicated to Steve Irwin. Sweet.

The primates (monkeys/baboons etc.) didn't impress me much, so I won't talk about them. Severe bias. Hahah.

We saw two manatees kissing when we went by their enclosure, and this group of Japanese tourists were going "KAWAII!" and "SO SWEET!".

It was interesting to watch. They were using their tongues... Hmm it should be highly unlikely that they were feeding each other or something. SHOULD BE.

Dugongs have forked tails while manatees have spooned tails. No pun/joke/whatever intended.

Apparently penguins do not only exist at the poles. (I can't remember where else they're found, but they ARE found in tropical areas too.) So there was one open-air area and one air-conditioned area just beside it, and we were like, "Eh why is there an air-conditioned area here?"

Hmm maybe the air-conditioned enclosure is for the richer penguins.

One of the penguins was semi-bald 'cause its feathers fell out, I think. Poor thing.

Otters are cute. And social. And so pretty to watch when they're swimming. Streamlined body shape.

Zebras are black-and-white 'cause their main predator, the lion, is colour blind. And they're striped to mimic their natural habitat, the grassland.

Giraffes are sexy too 'cause they have impossibly long legs with tight skin, such that they look like they're wearing tights. The tight skin on the legs is to prevent excessive blood flow to their limbs (constriction). Their hearts can weigh as much as 20kg, 'cause they need really strong hearts to pump blood all the way up to their heads. Um, their eyes are extremely pretty as they have the thickest and longest eyelashes.

My sentences are badly linked now 'cause it's... 0147h. Oh no, so disjointed.

Two rhinoceros(es?) were fighting when we dropped by their enclosure. They were chasing each other to and fro, and were surprisingly fast. They have thick hides, so predators are not very fond of hunting them. Their butts are huge and saggy. Hahah.

For some reason the rhino reminded me of Jensen Ackles. I'm sure the physical appearances had nothing to do with it.

The orang utan enclosure was closed, but we saw some of them hanging out in the trees. They started swinging on the vines from tree to tree but one was left napping on the platform. And then Wes shouted up to it, "Eh exams are coming!"

In other words, time to get up and study. Wahahah we've become mugging mammals, to use Wes' words.

We saw some bats hanging upside down on branches. Apparently they have to flap and right themselves when they uh, defecate, or their excrement will flow all over their bodies/faces. Ugh.

Alex "Irwin" Goh with a group of croc enthusiasts.

The group went nuts posing with the bronze statues of animals around the entrance/exit. Alex has this series of photos which should be put in an album titled "Alex's dangerous adventures at the zoo". Okay I can't find any of those photos. Basically he was just posing with the statues and taking photos with his foot in their open mouths. He wanted to put his head in but crouching down was a tad too unglam. Hahah.

OHH I forgot about Ricky's umbrella! Anyway after we walked for a while, he started talking about how he wasted $15, and immediately after he said that, it started pouring.

Better still, we were approaching this rainforest open enclosure thing that kinda looked like an aviary, and there was this bridge that we were supposed to walk on. AND, Ricky asked whether we'll see dinosaurs. (Think Jurassic Park.)

I told him, "No. You'd better not say anything in case it really comes true."

Dinner was fun. We ate at KFC, and decided to send a message to our original TA to congratulate him on getting a teaching award. So being the group that we are, we composed identical messages and sent them at the same time. It was like a dictation session HAHAH. One person composed and read it out for everyone to type. Hilarious. People like us with nothing better to do than to annoy others with little pranks... annoying right.

Alex "Irwin" chilling out with a bowl of ice-cream after wrestling with the (fake) croc.

Hahah we shared a Ben and Jerry's ice-cream. Yum yum yum.
We saw this cute caucasian girl with huge eyes and everyone couldn't stop ogling at her. We saw her again at the bus-stop on the way home and the ogling started again. Gosh we're turning into paedophiles!
Maybe the wanting to visit the water playground had something to do with our paedophilic tendencies. Oh my.

I want to visit the zoo again. And the night safari, and the bird park.
Tickets are kind of expensive, but they cost as much as tickets to a concert. Plus you can spend the whole day there, so I guess it's kind of more worth it?

The bus ride and train ride home was hilarious. We've all gone mad with mugging. Normal curve, ellipse, regression line, halophiles, nucleophiles, double-blind randomized control test etc. were terms heard throughout the day. On the other hand, I guess you could say that we were doing some cross-module application. Hahah.

It got so bad that while we were waiting for the train from Choa Chu Kang to Jurong East, while discussing which carriage was more crowded, we hypothesized that the level of crowdedness follows a normal curve (congested in the middle, sparse at the ends). Anyway we found out that that wasn't the case. I can't really draw the curve here, so. Just know that it doesn't follow the normal curve. Don't even ask about the standard deviation and average, which was what Wes did.

I'm tired, and I'm not making sense anymore.
Next entry, I shall explore the definition of mugging. Whee. Do remind me if I get too caught up in mugging and forget all about it.

[27]

I just finished watching the econs webcast. It's kinda fun, but gosh, the time spent being distracted and rewinding-'cause-I-didn't-hear-clearly makes the whole process really loooooong. I'd rather go for class.

Anyway, here's a funny Supernatural video (again) to save us all from the Monday gloom. It's about this wishing well that actually grants wishes, so there's a life-sized teddy bear running around. The Winchester guys went to check it out, and... you can watch the rest for yourself.

[26]

I'm feeling irritable.

It doesn't help that people think I'm freaking free when in fact, I spend most of my time not at home.

It doesn't help that people think university students don't need to make much of an effort at good grades, presumably after they see a few students who are so blinking smart, they don't need to study to score straight A's.

It doesn't help that exams are in two weeks' time. Two weeks. One fortnight. Fourteen days. FOURTEEN FREAKING DAYS!

It doesn't help that I have many many chapters of revision to go before I even feel a teeny bit prepared.

It doesn't help that semester 1 just whizzed past like that.

ARGH.

Sorry, I wasn't supposed to be ranting. Hahah.

Yesterday I discovered that my dialect skills ain't too bad, 'cause I could carry on a conversation with an old lady for two hours. Granted, we weren't talking about current affairs/the deteriorating economy/the US elections/big big issues, so my simplistic vocab was enough. Thank goodness. House-visit-cum-interaction-s get awkward when it's just silence.

Oh, on a brighter note, even though it's two weeks to exams, it's three weeks to the holidays! Four weeks to the advent concert! Five weeks to caroling!

Um... whee!

Now I have to watch the webcast for the econs lecture I missed two weeks ago. Crap, it's severely overdue.

[25]

I'm in Stats lecture, I'm not really listening, I'm supposed to be finishing up my lit. essay which has to be handed in in 3.5 hours' time, and I'm blogging. This is bad.
And I really feel like sleeping, 'cause I didn't sleep last night. (Yawn.)

Okay actually what I'm doing is testing the comments link 'cause funnily enough, the previous post has no link. Must be Jensen's strange video's fault.

[24]

This is really funny.



I miss Supernatural. When will Ghost Whisperer end?!