hakuna matata

haha.. this is so funny.. came home from midweek service and found a dog at the lift.. it was actually quite scary, huge eyes and rather thin with black floppy ears.. mom's conjecture was that it was our neighbour's dog so she called "gypsy!" and it wagged its tail somemore and looked at up her.. didn't know if it was our neighbour's dog or if it was a stray.. i mean, if it had been a stray i wouldn't want to be touching it, nor would i want it to come anywhere near me.

so rang the neighbour's doorbell, neighbour opened the door and said oops! she didn't realise the dog escaped outside.. must have run out when they came back from swimming. most hilarious.. can misplace a dog and not realise. so my bro said, maybe cos the dog does its own thing (haha sounds like randy jackson) in the house quietly so they don't know when it's in the house or not.

haha darn, i was just going to say if anyone doesn't know what to get me for bday present i want a josh groban cd but now i realise i won't even be here for my bday. how depressing.

hmm. i had the queerest dream.. i think i must watched too many action movies lately. i vaguely remember escaping from somewhere or other and this nifty little vehicle that could fly. okay there's no use describing it, i realise. it's an image in my mind. it's really cute and small and can take off and stop quite fast.

and i can't decide whether i should get a laptop or not! since i'm going to get a desktop. nyam.

oh i finally went back to sch to get cert today.. heh raphael n shaun haven't gotten their certs yet. anyway, so coincidental, met mr chan ty and sara ho. pleasant surprises!

hmm mr and mrs smith was quite cool haha. but ending is anticlimatic. i like the way angelina jolie's more pro than brad pitt.. girl power! 312 pple vs 50/60 pple; "are u ready?" "yeah" she yanks the driving wheel, the car swerves, he goes off balance n she does all the shooting. and when he's trying to get the hostage to talk and she uses the phone to hit him n he talks straight away. haha. very action-packed. in fact, mainly action. with a plot like having 2 assasins who're in fact a couple, it's rather to be expected. but anyway it was quite fun/funny:)

journeys are good for thinking/sleeping. even though they're vastly different activities.

my favourite part of carly fiorina's commencement address to North Carolina Agricultural & Technical State University this year:
"Never sell your soul - because no one can ever pay you back.What I mean by not selling your soul is don't be someone you're not, don't be less than you are, don't give up what you believe, because whatever the consequences that may seem scary or bad -- whatever the consequences of staying true to yourself are -- they are much better than the consequences of selling your soul.
What you are today is God's gift to you. What you make of yourself is your gift to God."

actually i like her whole speech, saw it on xuwen's blog, but it's actually on the businessweek online website too.
anyway, although the selling your soul part sounds super idealistic (that's probably why it appeals to me haha) maybe it is idealism that earns satisfaction.

wow was really so tired last night. but it felt good! at least i can sleep in peace. from 11.30pm to 9.30am haha and then i fell asleep again from 11am to 1pm . clar has returned to being the queen of sleep. yeahh.. haha. oops.

oh and serene said my reading taste is very british. i.e. i read all the british authors' books while she reads american. i guess that's kind of true. i like brit humour! haha. like oscar wilde.

i think i had more to say but it's slipped my mind. hmm. another time then

a walk down memory lane. went ghim moh w mom n bro to eat lunch today.. drove past old rj. it broke my heart to see "NUS High School" there. okay i'm being melodramatic but i wish rj was still there. remembered all the trips to school in the car, worrying about whether i could remember my stuff for prelims/a's, the saturdays i had to drag myself out of bed to go for choir, the saturday afternoons we walked to ghim moh for lunch (and i'll terrorise poor candice by walking nxt to the drain so she'd keep worrying i'll fall in and try to drag me away but i'll obstinately walk even closer to the edge of the drain just to annoy her:p), the food at ghim moh, and then choir pracs, ...

okay i don't know why these reminiscences revolve around choir so much, i guess it made a very big part of jc life for me. guess it's the same for everyone who spent so much time with their cca-mates. and it reminds me of how my parents thought i needed to spend more time studying and not going for choir/joining choir wasn't a good choice. but i'm glad i joined anyway:) i think there is something in what ting said about how one would tend to regret things one didn't do more than those one did. but even then there probably was a purpose for choosing not to do the things one didn't do.

i'm kind of tired. it was a good meet-up though:) i haven't laughed so much in a long while.. i miss my laughing fits. which earned me one of my nicknames. happily, a semblance of my fits returned today, which is quite rare nowadays. wonder why. forgotten how to laugh? forgotten how to be silly and not care and just enjoy it? i'll miss them loads in sept and in the months to come.. it's easier to be jaded than to be happy. haha oh dear i realised how bad that sounds. reminds me of the sloth at the biodome.. fungus grows on it cos it moves so slowly. i think it's just my current mood. i certainly hope so, if not there is a huge problem.

Favourite quotes from Oscar Wilde

Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.

I always pass on good advice. It is the only thing to do with it. It is never of any use to oneself.

I have the simplest tastes. I am always satisfied with the best.

If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.

Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead.

Of course I have played outdoor games. I once played dominoes in an open air cafe in Paris.

Fashion is merely a form of ugliness so unbearable that we are compelled to alter it every six months.
Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.

Society produces rogues, and education makes one rogue cleverer than another.

I never put off till tomorrow what I can do the day after.

Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.

Ordinary riches can be stolen, real riches cannot. In your soul are infinitely precious things that cannot be taken from you.

alright, so i'm not going to get my visa done just yet.. have to wait till it's 90 days before 26 sept. so crappy. oh well. means i'll have to do it nxt nxt week.

haiyah i have to go and look for a job again. hence starts the ranting once again. wat job? ugh. and i don't know if pple will employ me for less than 3 months unless i lie to them haha. or unless i do relief teaching. bah.

and i have lots of pple to meet up with! shall see lyd chris n hopefully kahli tonight, ser sometime nxt week, pam sometime on a friday night when i'm finally free.. lijia n joon n peiying sometime soon too. i really think i havent' seen peiying since dance night. and even then we didn't even eat together. and lijia too. okay my memory is quite bad but well. oh yes i'm also supposed to meet aud when she comes back. can get jiahui along too! lala. at least pple will start being jobless and more free now heh.

if anyone has any bright ideas on my next job please tell me:)

wow, this is the first time in many many days i've slept so much:) very satisfied, albeit a little woozy. fell asleep at 8pm yest, woke up at 6+, went back to sleep till 10. yay!:p

and i have discovered the quotes from the first month of j1.. they're hilarious! here's my all-time favourite..
context:
Ms Eva Hor was lecturing us on water, and giving an example of how water is incompressible (and therefore able to support large aquatic animals) "The whale is the largest mammal and it lives in water."
Raphael (who had obviously taken a dislike to her) "She wins the whale because she lives on land and she's the largest mammal"

I think it's the way he said it that's so funny.. "she wins the whale" I really think all his future patients will love going to him..

anyway church camp.. the girls rather surprised me a little. as in, they had a lot to say about other people. and i helped with the children's class! haha. some of them have perfected the ability to drive pple mad.. guys who don't stop talking (esp at the top of their voices), girls who are petty and don't stop complaining.. but there're nice cute kids too of course.

i'm quite glad i went, except for the fact that i got cornered by the visiting preacher.. who so coincidentally happens to be based in california. i got introduced to him because pple found out i'm going stanford so i'm quite obliged to go to that congregation unless he miraculously forgets about me. dunno whether that's good or bad also.. it takes like 1.5h to get there from stanford. i guess we'll see what happens.. luckily the girls rescued me the second time i got cornered cos they wanted to take photos. haha.

yeah! finished all my forms! woohoo~ haha i was quite high after that. anyway i still haven't finished packing oops. nevermind.. off i go.. first time to msia (hahaha yes i noe i'm the champion) be back on thurs afternoon.. hope i don't forget to pack anyth!

haha. lunch at this restaurant near my old house was funny. the waitress brought the bill, my dad was holding his credit card, getting ready to look at the bill and then place it in the black thingy (whatever it's called). and then the waitress (old lady) just took the card and the bill away before my dad looked at the bill. i've never seen pple do things like that.

and just now i took a nap (had to, given the 3 hours in the morning. and i finally fell asleep and had quite a gd nap!) and my mom woke me up at 7. i opened my eyes, looked at the time, couldn't figure out whether it was night/morning (it was semi-dark), started panicking because my first thought was that it was morning and i was supposed to go for camp and i hadn't finished my forms. "is it morning or night?" mom was very amused "night" clar heaves a huge sigh of relief. k i don't know why i immediately thought it was morning. maybe cos it felt like a gd long sleep. but it was sufficiently alarming to wake me up.

yay i shall get this done fast so i can sleep more later haha

sigh. so I slept at 3am and woke up at 6.20am. and was unable to return to dreamland. someone tell me I won't fall asleep in church later.. I think I'm going to be a walking zombie.

augh. there is something severely wrong with me. i'm tired yet i can't sleep. okay i managed to after quite a long while, but still. so i ended up sleeping frm 3 - 9.30am then 3 - 8pm. really really weird huh.. it so does not help that i have 14 forms to fill online by tmr (sorry to those i've been whining to) and being as indecisive as I am, you get the idea. Plus I've to write one essay to get into the dorm I want to stay in, and another one so that they can assign me a nice roommate. and answer the advisor's questionnaire which has questions like "please write a brief statement telling us how/when/under what circumstances you feel you came of age, intellectually." now isn't that fantastic?

i'm halfway through the dorm essay, hardly started the roommate/advisor ones and i have to finish all this stuff by tomorrow plus i have to pack for church camp. ugh. i think my holiday wasn't at a very good timing? or maybe i've just been wasting too much time as usual.. feeling very impatient at the moment grr.

oh my whole family has been sleeping at weird times. yesterday they all fell asleep by 9pm and I was the only one awake until ~3am then they all woke up and I went to sleep. crazy huh. okay brother has woken up haha it's time for dinner.

touched down at 5.30am.. i think i slept maybe 3 hours at most haha. watched 6 shows. okay watched 2 of them halfway cos i didn't like them.. robots is actually quite good! bigweld is so cute and round haha. and the express train is crazy.. throwing the passengers all over the place. but the whole concept is quite cool. watched million dollar baby which was quite tragic.. didn't really expect the ending. but can see why it's an oscar winner, even though i hated hilary swank's accent. and i didn't really like hitch/wedding date, their plots are rather unbelievable and undevelopped.

right. oh i visited yale n princeton! so i've seen all the powerhouse unis haha. anyway, i think princeton is really pretty! a lot of greenery and it's separate from the city/town area unlike yale/mit/harvard. but it has some ugly buildings too. yale has an old-world charm. the architecture. i must go find out which period the architecture was from.

i can't remember what else i wanted to say. oh i came back n slept 7 hours, not enough. i must go fill up my numerous forms. can you believe i have to write 2 more essays.. okay the roommate one isn't really but still. and find 7 photos! argh.

hijacked my bro's comp while he's off delivering presents/cards. hmm. imagine living in spore for 18 years, pulling up your roots (not totally, but in a sense) going to usa for 4 years (and putting down new roots) and then plucking them out again to return to spore. a little unsettling maybe? i have no idea. and lousy dbs has just sent me their rejection email after dunno how long.. totally wu liao.

i think i'm going mad. while i was in j1/j2 i couldn't see myself attending college anywhere but in US, and now that i'm going i don't want to go anymore. this is like reverse psychology. and my bro told me i'd better learn to embrace everything different (cos i said i didn't like mexican food/eating sandwiches for lunch all the time). okay this is really disjointed. random thoughts. it must be because i haven't fillen out those approaching stanford forms and will have to immediately get down to it when i get back. fedex package! argh.

anyway we're watching a boston pops concert tonight! should be good:) the weather is quite hot now.. albeit kinda windy esp towards evening. it's practically singapore temperature thanks to the sun.. (and no clouds)

somehow i don't think i'm enjoying this holiday as much as i should be. kinda weird. maybe it's cos i know i'm leaving in sept so i want to make the most of the time at home. maybe it's cos we didn't really plan for this hol so it's rather aimless sometimes. yet i don't think i'm going to enjoy going back to work haha:p or searching for work, for that matter. church camp should be fun though.. nonsense-talking time:)

all sorts of mixed feelings.

am leaving for lake george/saratoga in a few minutes i think. haha. anyway, i'm so sad! i checked the cirque du soleil website the night before leaving and still didnt realise corteo was showing here.. it's their newest show. i guess cos i intended to watch it in san francisco in nov or dec.. ah well. so didn't get to watch it here. tragic:(

weather's improving! yay. there was this little girl who tried to shoot me with a balloon-gun.. was quite funny. and another one was holding her little dog out of the window so its head stuck out at all the pple who walked by.

right i think i'm supposed to go eat breakfast

haha i'm finally here in my bro's room. it's a rather queer shape. and he has 2 huge dogs! so cute:) but he's going to throw them away:( tragic. so i took a photo of them first heh. anyway, flight was alright, was attempting to "sleep" for around 6 hours. watched 4 movies - coach carter, racing stripes, spanglish, monsters inc, didn't finish the last one i watched which was some french show. the plane is really quite spacious, wish all flights could be like that. but somehow i still can't sleep. what to do. unfortunately the kris world entertainment kept having problems, was really quite annoying, esp when it's SIA. tsktsk. oh met my buddy at airport cos he ponned sch to study there haha wat a coincidence;)

right it's like 2am n i should probably go sleep.. took like 4 hours to drive here frm newark airport. and we stopped at the same mcdonalds as the last time we came to visit my bro! funky.

okay.. 8 hours to flying off.. non-stop flight! haha. i hope i don't get bored. which is why i'm still awake at this unearthly hour: the plane seats had better be more comfortable than average.. and i still haven't figured out which broadway show to watch. shall go there and see what happens:p

i watched the american idol finals just now! wonder who'll win. i like carrie though. partly cos she's sort of the underdog. n of cos she's a girl:) and it was nice not having commercials for once:p

right i think i need to finish packing my bag.. the luggage is done i think. wow i can't believe my brother is actually coming back.. 4 years have seemingly passed so quickly yet so slowly at the same time. wait i'm not even sure if that makes sense.. and i'll be gone for the same period of time. like lydia says, not much time to spend with bro (in her case, sis).

whoever didn't see me online.. i'm off to US frm 26th may to 8th june.. coming back in the wee hours of the morning or something like that. if i have the time/connection i may blog! haha. or go online. it depends on availability. and also the cost.. so, people whom i haven't seen in a loong while (e.g. peiying), meet up when i get back!

ah. i am trying to upload photos. anyway, i was most absent-minded today. paused at the door, thought i'd brought everyth along, happily went off to bus stop, boarded the bus. fiddling around with phone when i realised i'd forgotten something! ahh. so annoyed. and ended up late:( well the sequence didn't really go that way but it was an indirect consequence i think? duno. anyway, i stopped at the fire station and saw a monkey!! it really reminded me of the one i saw at the zoo. by the name of cargo. albeit a leaner version, but looked like the same breed.

at first i spotted it on the lower part of the overhead bridge. then it jumped into one of the trees nearby, and after a rustling of the branches, reappeared on the grassy floor (okay this is a terrible description but my brain isn't functioning very well after typing so many quotes and having so many more to go) and started eating a mango! so fascinating. i wish i had a camera with me. come to think of it i need a digicam. which can store lots of videos. time to go shopping again.. haha:p

just watched chocolat. i love the music! and johnny depp! haha. my all-time favourite actor. actually more like the only one. anyway, the town reminded me of italy! the basilica and the statue outside. i can see loreto in my mind. was that the townsquare? ah just checked the postcard. it's called virgin square. why, i can't imagine. but i remember me n candice sitting at the fountain eating pizza:) although it started getting kind of cold in the evening. ohhh i totally remember freezing on the first night we went to perform! (and falling asleep in the basilica thanks to jet lag) rofl. ahh. where are all my choirmates? suddenly miss them. okay i think i'm very capricious sometimes.

anyway the town reminded me of italy. because of the ancient architecture and what not. and then also of french/france. i wish it had been in french though haha. i'm so so rusty it's terrible. and my chinese is in a worse state i think. esp cos i haven't written in chinese for so long. ugh. i keep intending to go read some book to stem the decline but haven't gotten round to it. as usual.

and today i saw caneles! at bakerzin. (as lyd says, what a poseurish name) anyway, reminded me of immersion too. i think cheukka agrees with me that it's horrible:p although it's supposed to be an acquired taste. which i evidently have not acquired. oh it's a bordeaux speciality. ohh ser if you read this, do you remember the almond-shaped thing monsieur yong let us try? i think it was almond paste with some marzipan/icing on top. so yummy. i forgot the name though:(

alright. very reminiscient-ish time tonight. okay and i also need to go sleep soon
one of my other favourite quotes:
Voici mon secret. Il est très simple : on ne voit bien qu'avec le coeur. L'essentiel est invisible pour les yeux.
(It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; What is essential is invisible to the eye.)
I prefer the french version. anyway, it's by Antoine de St. Exupery. from The Little Prince.

suddenly, i'm very scared. after talking to one of my seniors just now about courses and rooming and blah, the enormity of it has just dawned on me. and it's overwhelming. i'll definitely have a roommate. not that it's a bad thing exactly but it's just different. like i was telling serene it's so different from everything we've gone through so far.. it's like everything has been planned out, just follow the system without thinking - the "default" path (like they said during my med interview)

and then now i have to plan 4 years' worth of courses (which don't even stay constant, which makes it even harder) and i have no friends going with me. actually, i suppose most people don't, but still.. i like solitude sometimes but it still seems rather daunting to be alone to face so much new stuff. i know seniors who're already there and some of the people who'll be matriculating this year but.. okay i have a lot of "buts" today. fitting in alone may or may not be easier. and how americans are all so confident. (and loud). stereotypically.

and then arranging with my bro to get some of his stuff n etc.. i'll probably have to go and buy a bike if not i'll never get to classes on time. and make sure it doesn't get stolen haha.

i guess it's just a very huge transition. luckily i leave later than most people.. still have time heh.

well well well.. looks like the decision has been made for me anyway. rather relieved in a sense although there's this sneaking feeling of laziness. i mean, if they'd accepted me i probably wouldn't have stayed, but i would still have to spend a little more time deliberating. so, stanford here i come! haha. woohoo~ finally i can concentrate.

anyway star wars was quite cool.. although i really cannot remember what the first episode was about (it was the only one i watched, way back in sec 1 or sth.. with yingling n chris i think?) and it's so tragic that anakin became so ugly (as darth vader). totally gross.

i wonder if my parents/brother are unhappy with what happened. oh well.

ah, i suddenly remembered i forgot to talk about class outing haha. saw pple i haven't seen in quite some time.. and mrs kwan came! yay. i was telling her how we missed her in jc cos there was nobody to care about us haha. she doesn't look any different actually. oh yes agree with chris that the calamari rings were v nice. so was the ice cream haha. audry horrified at shiqin's green fingernails and berating jiahui for her taste in food was funny.

and i'm so tired. oh wait something lijia said is so true, when you stay at home all day you feel even more lethargic. day is filled with eating and sleeping. haha. and i kinda wish i didn't buy the quidam dvd cos now i don't think i want to spend extra $$ watching it live but still!! aahh.

yesterday my brother told me i ought to be thinking about the nus-stanford thing every day, and i was like "wat?? do you want me to go mad?" and he said "no you won't.. and you need to uless you're going to make the decision in a day". which is true i suppose. but of course if i don't get in here there's nothing to think about haha. anyway, that's why my description has been changed to "currently very confused clar". alliteration!

i think i'm a little out of sorts today.

right i never posted about my last day. oh well. i spent the afternoon+evening reading gerald durrell bks in the library:p didn't manage to finish the last one though! (i.e. i only finished one and half of the other one) wat to do, couldn't read fast enough .haha.
played taboo with b10, one of them was like "satay is ___" and another one said "fried". i was trying to mark this essay which was handed up late and choked when i heard that.

oh and i met one of my students at cine today! haha. fiona was v amused. and said i'm shorter than them -grr- not my fault lah.. aiyah. anyway usually they're sitting down and i'm standing up so there..

oh yes i bought a v nice shirt yesterday at a gd price so i'm v happy:) think heartlands are better for shopping.. and i have a new pair of shoes! they feel a bit funny though somehow.. even though they're nice and comfortable. hmm.

tomorrow i have nothing to do. mom wants me to find a job until next thurs.. how possible is that? aiyah. i don't know what i want to do also. everything has its gd n bad points.

so tired. heh today was last lesson with arts class.. one of them asked "will you miss us?" and i said "of course" and another one said "she's lying". anyhow, i'll miss the nonsense the front row ppl spouted.. they're so funny.. and at least they talked during lessons, made my life easier in a way. very likeable crowd in any case. although i don't think they learnt very much from me somehow.

and i realised i still have essays to mark. oops. i think i get very distracted sometimes. it's really painful reading the not-so-good ones sometimes, i can't even figure out whether they answered the question or not. or maybe that's cos i read too many essays. dunno lah, and those i have left are mostly tmr's 1st class.. means i have to finish them fast! aah!

i wonder if what i read defines me, or i define what i read. okay that probably doesn't make sense. cos i was reading stuff about my zodiac (somehow i find it quite fun) and i agree with some things but not others. right i don't think i'm making much sense, should probably get off and go sleep/mark essays if possible:

augh. i'm feeling so guilty. there're supposed to be 2 sm2 scholars in one of my gp classes and i kept forgetting to go and ask the cts why they didn't turn up. and now it's like 2 more weeks and the teacher is coming back.. die.. but aiyah this is jc after all shouldn't they be responsible for themselves.. okay i'm just pushing the blame to them. ugh.

haha it's the last 2 days of school and i already don't feel like going. and why do they have to leave tmr as thurs timetable?? i planned for the original monday timetable lah!! ahh. now i have no idea how to entertain my arts class for 1h40. groan.

ow. i hope i don't get bruises tomorrow. anyway, today, in the morning, i had a huge shock when someone called "clarissa" while i was walking to class. first reaction: hmm, i don't think any of my students remember my name. anyway, turned around to see HOD. right, so what could he possibly have to say to me? the teacher whom i'm replacing is coming back this sat! (okay either i wasn't thinking straight or his phrasing was really weird cos i was quite puzzled at first)

and i wonder when he was going to tell me if he hadn't met me in the corridor today. hmm. anyway, i'm glad i don't have to plan somemore lessons, but of course i'll be stoning around for the nxt 1.5 weeks. (without pay). haha. i'll be glad not to wake up at 7+ though.. out of habit i actually did that on saturday.. was so annoyed with myself!:(

anyway today was a 1/3 day! haha. reward for gd syf results. ended at 11.40 but lyd came over to get something frm me so i ended up staying till 3.30 to mark/plan lessons. it was really gd to see lyd anyhow, she's so cute n amusing heh. whined about how long it took to walk to nj main gate (i totally empathise) and then later complained that the ice kachang didn't have enough red beans. and took forever to decide what to eat.. and came into the staffroom and laughed at my students' essays. that's one thing i'll kind of miss, actually. while marking is rather tedious sometimes there are the highlights of the day.

latest quote from student's essay (i must add that i was quite, quite aghast): A television has a hidden function which is quite similar to the general function of a vacuum cleaner, except that vacuum cleaners suck up the dirty stuffs while televisions "suck" out the "soul and spirit" of many people, changing them into couch potatoes. (at this point, i wrote "they have no soul/spirit?? oh dear")

haha this is SO funny i had to blog it.. quote from my student's essay:
"there were incidents whereby young children, misguided by the idea of supernaturality, jumped off buildings in an attempt to fly like their childhood heroes, to eventually end up with a death worse than that of most birds that fly in the Birdpark"
(of course i corrected all the grammar and etc already)

so i wrote at the side "do they die a very horrible death most of the time?"

hahaha. i wonder what she was thinking.. maybe that the birds get chopped up and sent to the zoo for food. although it's probably just the association with flying things.

from the far side:
cow-seeking-advice consults cow guru, who dispenses the following advice: "And, as you travel life's highway, don't forget to stop and eat the roses."
haha. i like deadpan humour.

anyway, mom was showing me stuff me/my bro wrote last time.. which just proves my point that guys are more amusing than girls mostly. i remember all the stories i wrote were about fairies/goblins/horses/dogs etc.. the fairytale wonderland. i think i must've read too much enid blyton. or maybe fairies just appealed to me because of their perfection. and of course my stories always had the requisite happy endings. i realised watever i wrote about reflected my idea of a happy life i.e. one horse and one dog per person and having a huge field to keep the animals in and playing with them every day.

i just remembered something i thought about last year. how i'm afraid i'll forget how to see things from a child's point of view. as it is as a teacher i've forgotten how it's like to be a student. until junming reminded me. that was for when i was teaching phys at rj but still..
i'm also afraid i'll lose my sense of humour (if i had much of it to begin with) and grow pokey and stiff and prim and proper as i get older. it's not such a unprobable scenario when you think about it. we've already lost so much innocence/candour so far and it's only been like two decades..

okay now for amusement, here's a gem that i dug up from secondary school days.

context: along the road outside rgs there are (or were?) two signboards, on either side of the main gate. parents' cars are not allowed to enter the school, students are supposed to alight either before the 1st signboard or after the 2nd. prefects stand at these signboards making sure everyone alights in the accepted zone.
so, one day my mom stopped her car - part of it was in front of the 2nd signboard and part of it was behind. so i alighted, in front of the 2nd signboard, and promptly got booked.
a booking entitles you to a visit to the RTC. unfortunately, its full name has slipped my mind. ah, chris has just enlightened me - Responsible Thinking Classroom. i totally forgot! anyway, at the RTC, one is supposed to design a plan to avoid committing the same offence.

here is my plan. (and no, i didn't submit this, it was just something done for fun at home, with the help of my brother, mostly. i can't remember if my parents contributed suggestions)

1. Next time I’ll crawl to the front seat and get out
2. I’ll make the space between the front seat wider so that it’ll be easier to crawl through. Or better still, I’ll hack down the whole front seat! Then I can just walk through
3. I’ll sit on the bonnet
4. Revamp the car so that the driver’s seat is behind
   -- Changing the car will take around 2 to 3 years so you will have to wait
5. Stretch my leg as far as possible so that it reaches the sign and step out.
   -- Getting my legs to be long enough will take around 5 years and by that time I’ll be out of RGS
6. I’ll train to run fast like Carl Lewis, then I’ll stop in between the 2 signs and sprint to school so that the SLs and PITs and Prefects cannot catch me. It will also train me for my 2.4 km run, so that I will not have to keep re-running till I get a c.
7. Open the door before the sign, say ‘oops’ to the prefects, then drive on and get out
8. Crawl to the front seat, get out, go to the back seat, and get bag out
9. If my car were smaller then I would have gotten out before the sign. Unfortunately, big cars are needed to contain more people so I am afraid it is not my fault.
10. My father says that only traffic police can put up signs on the road because it is the main road
11. My whole family thinks that I should just throw the slip away and not go for RTC
12. Next time, I’ll stop there, and my mother will come out and push the sign back so that I can alight
13. When I alight there, I’ll make sure no one is looking

time to complain abt med interview! man, just wanted to think "screw them, i'm going stanford". okay that isn't a very nice way of putting it but they really pissed me off. i think i get worked up too easily. i mean, the 1st interview started late (5-10mins) cos they just came back frm lunch break. and then there was one caucasian guy, one chinese lady, one indian guy. the first two were really annoying. the lady kept grimacing at me, and the guy kept raising an eyebrow at me (maybe there was something wrong with his facial muscles but i doubt it). like looking totally cynical at whatever i said.. i'm like, if you can't even bother to look polite don't come and interview pple.. but again i hear the psc pple sleep, which is even worse/just as bad.

whatever it is i still think it's basic courtesy to accord some respect to the interviewee.

oh and this takes the cake. upon looking thru my resume again the indian guy asked "do you have time to play?" and i'm wondering "play?" and the chinese lady went "yeah, play, don't you know the meaning of the word 'play'?"
lyd said it was amusing but really, when i was in there it wasn't. it was rather rude the way she was so sarcastic. i told them i was rather puzzled by there being zero context.. anyway pple don't normally phrase it in such a weird way. whatever it is, i regret not telling them off. mom reminded me about how i could use sarcasm.. darn. i'm too rusty.. my so-called "caustic wit" (if i had any to start with) has flown! augh.

anyway, i've realised it is definitely not a good idea to write unconventional things in personal statements for spore unis cos they immediately jump on it and attack you. so much for singapore being open and embracing creativity and whatever other crap.. okay i think i'm probably not being very rational at the moment.. it is the job of interviewers to put you in a spot.

watever, i shall go do something else and unwind.. haha.

haha, i was just marking one of my students' essays and the topic was "Travel is an education in itself. Comment." quote from his essay "... Thus, it can clearly be said that travel is an education in itself. (next paragraph) Why so, you ask? What knowledge of any sort can possibly be garnered from travels? If you are guilty of asking these queries, then it is obvious what your idea of education is." so I showed it to jieying and asked her opinion. and she said something along the lines of how it would be a gd idea not to piss off the examiners.. haha.

yay! today's last (okay, 2nd and last) lesson is cancelled cos the j1s are off to visit ocs.. i desperately need the time to prep for interview, methinks.

hahaha.. i just had a very amusing time. jieying showed me one of her students' essays.. which consisted of 10 hypothetical characters.. (the topic was: in what ways can lying be justified) and he even named most of them! and then later willa was telling us one of her students tried to define "television" in his essay.. we couldn't stop laughing.. man.. i didn't think such things happen in JC. oh a quote from one of the essays "james' pocket money was running very quickly". i'm sure it could have won an olympic sprint!

ow. feeling battered. anyway, i just realised i met 2 guys who answered, upon my asking how old they were, "how old do you think i look?" i thought it was only girls who did that, but apparently not. maybe it is really a singaporean/asian thing to look younger than one's age, like m. kalife said.

and my interview's on friday! i really hate interviews la. ugh. esp preparing for them. and of cos the real thing too. and the aftermath. okay that's like everything about them. and i still have to figure out to make sure my gp lessons are vaguely interesting. which seems like impossible. or else a lot of work.

not much to say today. and i actually suddenly thought of the phrase "i've been waiting for you all my life" on the way home.. dunno why, just remembered it from a song/book. but have decided to remove it as a blog title bcos dearest ser says it sounds like i'm attached. blah. anyway, yes i shall get off soon.. yay i like my new blog template:) even though it's koped. haha.

"I like hearing myself talk. It is one of my greatest pleasures. I often have long conversations all by myself and I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying." - Oscar Wilde

I love that quote. haha. no, let me correct myself, i love oscar wilde.. he has such sardonic wit. i hope that's the correct adjective. somehow i'm sure there's a better way to describe it.. excellence use of irony? i wonder if there's such thing as ironic wit. anyway, this is why i like "the importance of being earnest" haha. among the rest.

i'm in a happier mood today yay:)

lunch w pam n joon was nice:) i should've eaten dessert though.. oh well. must get used to feeling poor. it's always lovely to meet up:) however, there're always awkward silences. it's kind of like, whatever we've shared is in the past, and now everyone's doing different stuff.. or maybe it's just me. i know a lot of people have been reflecting on what friendships are built on. it is nice to find out what everyone else is/has been doing.. okay i'm going off track, can think about that another time - i gotta plan lessons! ahh.

oh dear. i wanted to say something but forgot. anyway, i got back maybe 1/2hr ago. so tired! but it was quite a gd dinner.. surprisingly didn't feel that full, i must be getting fat: anyway, i coincidentally met lijia at topshop! while i was trying to get the tag removed from my shirt.. my dad ah.. haha i asked him to get me a shirt frm las vegas and the guy in the shop didn't remove the tag! and dad didn't realise.. oh well. he's trying to remove the tag now haha.

for the record, my dad bought me 2 bags frm vegas:D his taste is actually quite good, and it also saves me the trouble of buying my own bags:p i think i take forever to buy stuff.

anyway, yeah, then chris arrived.. and lyd.. and we waited like 10mins (luckily it wasn't the predicted 1/2hr) and got table.. then puee came along.. i haven't seen puee in ages! gd thing chris asked her to come:) and we heard a number of stories abt rgs.. i miss rg.. drove past the sch a few times in the past week and was just reliving those days in my mind. and puee seems to be the only one enjoying the time-btwn-end-of-jc-and-uni so much so that she doesn't want to go back to sch.. while the rest of us all prefer it. i guess there're pros and cons.

shall branch off for a moment. what i like abt now: no homework! (haha well, sort of. that's a huge plus) i just feel more free to do whatever i want.. well of course there's the problem of earning my keep, but besides that.. everything's my choice.

what i don't like abt now: end up doing mostly brainless stuff/having to find something meaningful... as in compared to in sch, everything's set out for you, just follow the system. go do your ccas, study for tests/exams, ace them, ... don't have to think about getting a job/what job to get/etc

yeah anyway, later jane came along.. her law interview questions were hilarious.. actually on 2nd thoughts it's the way that she recounted them that was so amusing..

and we met the interact club pple! so cool, were sitting at starbucks outside (my main complaint: a LOT of cigarette smoke, which i simply can't stand) and i was idly staring at the glass pane and saw dearest fiona! haha. so called her, they came out to talk to us.. hwying stayed on to talk.. i also haven't met her in a long time. not that i was close to her to start with.. but well, it's always nice to meet fellow-geppers.

so, ended up talking until 11.45 when mom called and i realised that oh no, there's no bus/mrt left! sharks. so much for spore with a bustling nightlife.. rather contemptuous of it. okay that's a rather strong word.. but i don't know how to say it.. ahh. my lack of vocab is very disturbing.

okay i'm really tired.. shall give up. and somehow, when me n chris got to city hall, the only trains left were going to kranji/pasir ris. so weird.

ah. upon rummaging through the newspapers for friday i have discovered the author of my "in our no-nonsense approach..." quote. his name is peh shing huei. okay the complete quote: "In our no-nonsense approach to life, we lost that bit of idealism, romance and passion. We sacrificed on brilliance, flair and creativity. We denied ourselves geniuses and great men."

and there's another part that i find is so true "Instead of pursuing our passions, Singaporeans are conditioned by the need to survive and to have a safety net. Often, we don't do things because we like it. We do it because it is practical." this is exactly why i didn't want to do things like apply for 10 over scholarships (not faulting those who did, i'm feeling the consequences now), cos I know I'd end up applying to places I'd never want to work in. But again since I still don't know what I want to do in future maybe I'm a little off-centre. And maybe it's better to be pragmatic than face the kind of situation I'm facing now.

The long phone conversation last night was an eye-opener, though most of the time my mom was the one talking to my brother. and I really felt quite lousy after that. Unfortunately everything was true. although i think if i push myself i probably can do whatever i want to.. i have to want to push myself first. sigh.

i also realised the part about feeling demoralised there would materialise VERY soon, when i find that everyone else is/seems a whole lot better than me in all sorts of things. that's something i didn't really think about. something like what serene said about how intelligent the people there will be. well for her case it's mit but i guess it's mostly the same in the top few unis.
i think being away from school has made me forgot what it's like to feel absolutely dumb with pple like changmou/yaozong/miaoyue/etc around.. esp during chem s. haha.

anyway, i also just realised last night that if i do medicine, after 8 years i'm only qualified to be a GP and i'll have to spend more time studying to specialise. doesn't sound that fantastic huh. but since i don't like working maybe studying is better.

i'm so glad i'll get to see the rest later.. haven't talked to them in ages:) and there'll be nice food too! the only problem is that i'm going to feel very poor.. i already have no $$ left in my wallet. well. and another thing, going on parents' money equals extra pressure to do well/spend less.

whatever it is, for now i shall focus on planning next week's classes (ahh!) and preparing for med interview (if i don't get in i'll have no choice, which is not necessarily a good thing)

ugh. mom is confusing me by telling me all sorts of conflicting things. "u can never earn back 400k u noe" "if u go there u'll become more extroverted" "400k is a lot for education" "now u still don't know what you want to do anyway"

when i'm in a bad mood, rock music makes me feel better. maybe the extra noise + beats drown out anything else in my head..

I pray to God to show me the way

Excerpt from Moya Brennan's "Show Me":
Show me the way, where I belong
Please show me the way to find you
Show me the way to hear your song

anyway am talking to weiying now yay.. miss her lots. haha. i guess like she said, i should be choosing between the careers not the school. though right now it's stanford vs doctor (not so much nus, cos i somehow don't like them haha)

My Favorite Things

Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens
Bright copper kettles and warm woollen mittens
Brown paper packages tied up with strings
These are a few of my favorite things

Cream-coloured ponies and crisp apple strudels
Doorbells and sleigh bells and schnitzel with noodles
Wild geese that fly with the moon on their wings
These are a few of my favorite things

Girls in white dresses with blue satin sashes
Snowflakes that stay on my nose and eyelashes
Silver-white winters that melt into springs
These are a few of my favorite things

When the dog bites
When the bee stings
When I'm feeling sad
I simply remember my favorite things
And then I don't feel so bad

(repeat)

gretl: why don't I feel any better?
that lil girl is so cute..

anyway, i guess i feel a bit better.. shall just wait for med interview first and see what happens (my really favourite phrase) this is a cycle though, i remember yesterday i felt just as despondent in the morning before going to school.

unfortunately, rational thoughts reign for the day after a night's rest. and listening to my dad has just reminded me of how impractical it is to attempt to earn $330 000. i should go be a us citizen.. so, maybe i'll resign myself to becoming a doctor instead of draining my dad's money. it's not an easy choice to make, but like fiona says, i have to consider practicality too. maybe i should've applied for more scholarships, but being idealistic as I am, i didn't want to apply to places where i wouldn't want to spend 6 years working. as it was i wasn't even sure I wanted to work at those places i applied to. heh. okay i'm probably not making sense anymore.

for the past 2 years i've been hoping to escape but i guess that probably isn't going to happen and i'll have to face up to everything i've wanted to run away from.

oh and i realised something, i forgot to clarify about the law interview.. apparently if i get offered med i won't get an offer from law, so actually i sort of already made my decision when i put ecl as 2nd choice

right, i finally decided to call dbs and nobody answered the phone, so i emailed and:
Dear Clarissa

Thank you for your mail. After the psychometric tests, we have further short listed candidates for interview. Due to keen competition, we regret to inform you that we are unable to place you on our interview short list. However, we may contact you if there is an interview opportunity for you in due course.

We wish you all the best in your endeavors.

Regards,
Kui Ngee
fine.. don't want me right.. i'll show you i can make it on my own.. there's a word to describe that attitude but i can't remember.. reverse psychology? dunno. but of course, it remains to be seen how I'm going to achieve that. hmm.

anyway, law interview was total crap. i suppose i can't blame them fully cos i didn't really prepare for it either. but really, to assume that I'll get into med and therefore not bother about questioning me properly for law is going a bit far. the lawyer guy was quite nice though, told me about his nj reservist fren who said his 2 yrs there were most boring. and that family law is depressing. the economics woman said it was disturbing that i didn't think economics would help people as much as law/med would. i'm tempted to be racist here but shan't, given that she wasn't too bad besides that.

mom said I should've told them off for not doing the interview properly aft hearing I'm applying for medicine. yeah, missed opportunity:( but they were quite nice lah, and I also didn't prepare that well, so guess it wouldn't be too appropriate. whatever.. nus admissions is full of rubbish.

although, if i'd told them off, I'm quite sure I wouldn't have to bother going for the test tomorrow, as it is I'm just going for fun already. though I possibly could be doing better things. but nevermind.

aiyah i wanted to say something but forgot. maybe it was how one of the guys in the class-i-walked-out-on said "ms lin, why u sit there, now i cannot tell you jokes" in an effort to cheer me up or something.. so cute.
oh yes, and i know how to get them to appreciate me, just tell them the name of their gp teacher for the next 2 terms and they'll groan.. because of her reputation as a disciplinarian. haha. very well-known reputation apparently. anyway, so today i told one of the classes, and one of the girls was like "miss lin.. can you stay?? please??" haha. and they asked me why i was laughing at them when they were groaning. yes, i admit i am sadistic.

crap.. my vocab is really terrible.. i took like 5 minutes thinking of the word to describe "delighting in others' misfortunes" and still couldn't remember and had to ask my mom. there is really something wrong, i must read more books. well it's not that i'm delighting in their future misfortunes, but it's just like.. haha.. good luck to you guys.. now keep slacking in my class right, next term onwards you all die..

right, i must go and source for my funds now

a quote from one of the commentaries in straits times today.. i forgot who wrote it though haha oops. but it's about how singapore has no world-class heroes, musicians, ...
"In our no-nonsense approach to life, we lost that bit of idealism, romance and passion. We sacrificed brilliance, flair and creativity."
just caught my fancy, probably cos i'm the idealistic one wishing for a perfect world and not wanting to work to get $$..

besides waiting for next class, am waiting for my law interview.. I think it's going to be a horrible 15mins, let's just hope I can think on my feet well.

sigh i'm so tired. and not physically, although i'm aching a bit heh. well this sounds familiar. i think i dream too much. the idealist. the perfectionist. whatever. one thing my mom pointed out, i think i expect too much from my students. they are j1s after all..

was talking to jieying and shuying today. haha so cool! their names end with -ying. shuying wanted to own a farm too! haha:p anyway, yeah, now i realise how hard it was to teach my class (rj class). it really sucks when nobody wants to say anything, or when only the same people keep talking (although now i'm glad that at least -some- of them talk)

yeah and my head hurts. maybe cos i didn't fall properly. nevermind. i don't want to see the class tmr. how i wish i could retreat somewhere. far from the maddening crowd. when i don't have to worry about anything. of course that's just the easy way out. okay i'm just exaggerating as usual, nothing is bad as it seems.. media player current song: when you believe by mariah carey + whitney houston. i need a lot of miracles right now.

crap, the more people ask me abt why i walked out, the worse i feel/the more tired i feel. and it just serves to remind me of my incompetence. or laziness to go tackle problems. whatever. so so tired. at least meeting nice people makes my day. but i'm still tired. and my worsening eyesight is no help.

well, guess what. today i totally lost it and walked out of class. it was almost the end of the block though, luckily. and of all classes it was my arts class, which I thought was the easiest to teach cos they'd be more talkative n discuss more. evidently not. maybe they think i'm a lousy teacher so don't bother to do stuff properly. anyway i think i shall be prudent and not say much more here, will tell you more if you ask me personally. some things are better left unsaid. or said to less people.

time to write law statement. suddenly i feel a teeny bit blue. light shade of azure. oh on the bus back frm sch i was absent-mindedly gazing at the rgps girls (and nygh girls) and thinking about rg days. kind of miss wearing the pinafore and all.. nostalgia. but had my fair share of problems/annoyances/what not there. i think i will go back there on 16th may. nj holiday due to college day on 14th. at least i think it is.

i'm SO glad it's a long weekend this week.. but first i have to get through friday though, haven't even prepped for interview:( groan. let alone prepared my lessons! crap. i mean i have an idea of what i want to do but to prepare the stuff for it is another thing. i'll do it tomorrow while waiting for the afternoon block.. i really wanted to give up this morning, thankfully my other 2 classes were rather more cooperative. really don't think i'm cut out for this.

ah. clar is feeling very bitter. actually not that i didn't expect it.. just got rejection letter from gic. but again i wasn't very sure i wanted to spend my life looking at numbers. *shrug* but still, so much for "oh u got into stanford, scholarships will be that much easier now". haha. evidently i'm not very suitable anyhow. the way "nobody has heard of me before". okay i don't think i'm making sense. besides that, i should probably go analyse my performances. but how'd i know what's the ideal situation? hmm. i'll think about that tmr maybe.

so, i wanted a scholarship to sponsor me overseas, to give me a job, to give me an allowance thruout the 4 years. i didn't want one cos i'm not sure of my career plans. yeah okay that is certainly not balanced. but of course that one reason for not wanting it may outweigh the rest? don't know!

anyway, i'm glad they were prompt in sending the email. at least now i kind of know what to do. or what i have to do. oh yes i don't think i complained about how weird my interview was. i.e. only one interviewer and in e middle of the interview her phone rang and she said something cropped up and had to rush off for a while.

besides that, i'm glad for today. it's always fun, albeit painful: it kinda gives me a reason to stay here. but actually i'll probably be too busy to continue. dunno lah. to give up stanford for nus? but of course i have to get into nus first. and i also know jiahui will kill me for not going to her dream school. i think this will end up the way i thought about doing a level french. i.e. i'll somehow fund myself there. so i'm not asking for sympathy or comfort, this is just to complain for the sake of it/think about stuff.

on last thoughts, i think i don't have enough passion for anything. i mean, when i look at serene and her ardour for mit (thus leading to everything she knows about it), i'm like wow. while i just sit back and relax. it's actually quite bad. and probably cost me a lot.

and to add to my despair, i'm not even sure i can discuss the gp essay questions properly with my class! groan. okay i should stop digging the pit deeper for myself. shall go and eat a cookie. haha.

mm. feel a sense of calm. peace. don't know how come. maybe cos gic interview is over (and wasn't particularly fantastic, but let's just hope for the best).

ahh. and i just read some stuff on law/med interviews, totally freaked out again. yay. oh speaking of today's med test.. i didn't like the essay topic.. and didn't really write properly either oh well. and then talking to siewjin just reminded me.. they're unbelievably stupid lah.. okay that's a bit too abusive.. they're very inefficient.. i mean, common sense would tell you to give out the answer sheet with the psychometric test booklet to save time, esp when there're 600+ candidates. and then the index numbers were put in such a way that the pple had to walk up one column and then go back down and start from the front (whether collecting or giving out test booklets). even then, one could just take the booklets from the number at the end and give out instead of walking up and down. okay i hope i haven't turned incoherent at this point.

and then the hall was divided into two sections.. there's a table in the middle (for the 2nd section) and at one end (for the 1st section). the test papers were ALL on the end table, so some of the invigilators had to carry the papers for the 2nd section to the middle table. like, why can't you just put it there before everything starts and stop wasting our time..

haha okay i finished ranting. but really, their idiocy astounds me. or maybe i'm being overly critical.. as usual.. anyway i was mouthing complaints at candice:p she was one column away from me in the same row.. yaozong too! on the other side.. and monmon was in the nxt column one seat behind.. and kumar a few seats in front of mon.. quite cool:D

i forgot if i blogged this.. but just remembered one of my students said he wanted to eat roasted zebra on thurs.. and decided that he thought zebra should taste quite nice, if not lions wouldn't chase them. so cute. so one of the girls was like.. luckily u weren't noah or there'll be no animals left. i was thinking pile of bones left when the flood subsides.. haha.

i really think i'm going a bit mad. first i wasn't happy. then i got high on hakuna matata or something. and now i miss french immersion (and all the nonsense that yunlei/kai/cheukka were spouting). talking to cheukkie abt the trip now.. so many funny memories. i'm so glad i got to know her.. funny gal:) and i was just complaining to her sometimes i suddenly feel so indescribably lonely. and she's like "orh.. i also.. so get a bf lo" rofl. like so easy to get like that. by mail order. okay that's not really something to joke about, given that it actually exists as a serious thing.

right i'm supposed to be writing my personal statement, don't know why i ended up here unburdening myself. my philosophy is that if i don't unburden myself i can't write! haha. convenient excuses.

oh! i can't remember if i posted the funny things i saw on simpsons (quite a long time ago)..
the simpsons' house suddenly sank into the ground. and some guy frm a building company came to check with a spirit level. he placed it on top of one of the walls, and it immediately slid down the wall and crashed. homer "did you see the bubble?"

english teacher "are you ready to take your make-up english test?" (the first time he missed it cos he feigned a stomachace)
bart, doubling over in pain, "oww.. my ovaries.."

i think i should watch more episodes to amuse myself. but they aren't always funny. somehow the ones i watch with my brother are always hilarious. miss him lots too. i guess like lyd said (she's in the same situation with her sis graduating this year) it's not so good to go away when your elder sibling comes back. sigh. what a mess. i only wish i knew what to do.

i hate interviews. really. and i can never say the right things. or rather, i can learn from saying the wrong things, but end up saying even more wrong things. it doesn't seem like i'll ever exhaust them all and it also doesn't seem like i'll end up at stanford. so much for getting in!

anyway i need to complain somemore, i'm only 18, how am i supposed to know what my career aspirations are? don't people change? i've heard of so many people who go to uni and totally switch majors. and even if i do get called back by gic, do i want to spend 6 years staring at numbers all the time? but i'm sure they look at other things besides numbers right.

i should just go and buy a farm. but again i don't like cleaning up either haha. talk about fussy. anyway, even if i go to uni w/o a scholarship, i'll have to go for job interviews after that. and sell myself again. oh, i'm such a wonderful person therefore you should hire me. interminable. i wonder what it's like to be an author.

on another note, i think bond (their music) makes me feel better when i'm not happy.

it's finally friday.. hardly realised it. must be cos of the wednesday-holiday. such a horrible day. week? i don't know. very mood-swingy this week i think. awful. and i have an interview lined up for each friday for the next two weeks. don't know about dbs. and two personal statements to write. okay i think i've said all that before.

i think it's my classes which keep me sane. at least i have something to look forward to.
speaking of which i need to try and be a better teacher.

it really never ends does it. always better, better, better. i'm very tired now really. and i don't mean physically.

upon glancing thru this again i realised how melancholic it sounds. but it's true. it's so much easier to ignore anything that matters and just go on every day but one day (or night) it just comes and stares you in the face and you want to scream. okay that last sentence i quoted from one of the anne books. childhood book, but there're little quotes which mean something. they mean something to me at any rate.

right i think i sound totally convoluted. ramble ramble ramble. but what else is a blog for, if not to vent frustrations? moo. feeling ambivalent.

right i'm totally stressed out (thanks to myself, i don't know what's wrong with me nowadays) and if i don't type something i'm going to explode soon.

so, i got my rejection letter frm sia yesterday, which kind of leaves me with 2 scholarships left.. and my gic interview is tmr and i haven't really prepped. and my mom was telling me i haven't been putting in enough effort. which i suppose is true to an extent. so, given that i only have 2 "lifelines" left (unless loke cheng kim miraculously calls me up, and i manage to convince them) i'm a wee bit desperate at the moment, given my tendency to screw up interviews.

in any case, i still don't know what exactly i want to do for a career. so, even as i'm feeling very lucky that i got shortlisted for both med n law, i have 2 more essays to write. and interviews and tests and blah. that's not so much of a problem.

the last concern being that i'm a terrible relief teacher. i feel like i'm short-changing my students. esp after today's staff meeting. i'm like. gape. how in the world did they manage to do so many things? and i also realised i have to start my students on essays soon and i have to MARK them and there're still people who owe me compres, which i have yet to finish marking as well. and it's not like nj's gp is like that of rj.. frankly i don't think mrs lim did very much teaching, mostly discussion. anyway yeah, rj, they just throw stuff at you, and somehow you manage to swim. at least for our class i think we managed okay in the end.

and now, i'm like. right. i haven't planned my lessons properly and i still have all these random application things to worry about. i just don't know.. my students don't seem to want to do stuff i tell them to do, or else they take a super long time to do stuff, and then i get so sian watching them being so sian too. i'm not even sure i can mark their paragraphs/introductions/essays (when they finally write one) properly.

feel like i've bitten off more than i can chew. and as usual, everything is undeniably my fault. poor time management, watever.

wah. i'm feeling so drained. spent 15mins trying to reason with my grandma.. she kept insisting on giving me money to go and perm my hair, cos apparently my hair is very messy and unkempt when i let it down, and if i don't perm, my students will think i'm very poor and my hair'll look terrible. really so tiring.. and she has a very very strong grip, was trying to force the money into my hands, and kept repeating herself even though i explained to her umpteen times that i was working, ... ... aiyoh. and threatened me with like "if i fall down (while trying to force money on me) how?" "if you dont' take the money i won't sleep!"

and the last time it was "i'm giving you money so that you won't have to scrimp and save on food, so you won't have to keep going to your friend's house to eat cos it's not very good to impose on them".

luckily i managed to persuade her to keep her money.

and my eyesight is really really terrible:( maybe it would've been better to stay at the zoo sigh. but actually no that's quite impossible i wouldn't survive the weeks esp if i have to do double duty.

i wonder if there're people who can never look angry.

Heh. one day when I was watching discovery channel or something, it was on Australia's native animals (I think). wombat! haha it's so cute. anyway the part I watched was on koalas. The commentary "the koala's greatest passion is sleeping". -beams-

and today.. my funny class.. actually it's just that I can hear all the things that the people in the front row say. I gave them the current affairs quiz.

qn: list the 5 cities (remaining contenders) which are interested in hosting the 2012 Olympics.
guy: Bethlehem. cos it's a holy city.

nxt qn was about the nepali twins ganga and jamuna. the qn was something like : operation was performed on ___ twins, ____ and ____, for the purpose for ____ them.
they didn't know the nationality, so the guy was like "siamese"
and didn't know the names either. suggestions included "maria and sutti", "momo and jojo", "fatimah and aminah"
and just to be ridiculous, guy said it was for the purpose of dissecting them.

qn: with effect from nxt yr, graduates who want to be teachers have to _______
gal: learn home econs
me: cook for their students right

okay there're somemore but I'm tired, shall go mark a few compres. not that that's particularly relaxing but well. my eyesight is really terrible now:( help me.. argh.

right. i'm very very tired. and i haven't read up on current affairs! aahh. and i actually saw my nj student at the concert -horror of horrors-. she happily said "See u tmr!" ahhhh. not looking forward to this. it was like, zero breath control and shaky voice does not add up to an excellent performance! haha. oops. anyway it was fun to perform again though, albeit a bit scary.

and i was checking out one of the stanford acapella grp websites.. their recordings.. the one of beautiful stranger is really scary lah, it sounds like the original song not an acapella version.. haha really super zai. but i think dischordant's perfect day arrangement is nicer than theirs. but they have better blending. or maybe its the way they recorded.. dunno la..

k i'm really too tired to write anymore, maybe tmr.. zzzz

heh.. yesterday my class was so funny.. they're the arts class i think? jieying says they're mixed combi. dunno lah. anyway, there're 3 of them running for council (that's why they talk quite a lot and amuse me in the process haha:p) and they all sit in the front row.

anyway, besides that, when i walked into class there were only 2 guys (and a few bags). guys "are we doing essay again today?"
me "no, compre"
looks of horror immediately appear
guy 1 "we must have lunch before 4 o'clock!" (it was 3.50pm)
another guy walks in and asks what's happening
Upon hearing that it's a ... -scary music- comprehension... "oh teacher I have a talk at 3.45"

Another very popular suggestion in my classes "Miss Lin, let's have GP in the canteen"
so I was like, so wat, talk about health food issit?

Yet another attempt to get out of class
guy : Teacher there's a girl crossing the road when the traffic light is red, I must go and save her
girl : really? why?
guy : pretty girl wat
girl : ohhh.. (explanation accepted).
guy elaborates : pretty girl, whether in danger or not, must save
girl : what if not so pretty?
guy : save only if she's in danger
girl : then what about very very ugly girl?
guy : let other people save

hahahaha. okay that isn't a very accurate transcript cos i can't remember exactly what they said.. but it's as close as it gets cos i wrote it down while trying not to laugh

half the class was late coming from geog lesson. girl "can I go and look for them?" guy adds "with our bags?"

2 of the girls "can we go to the toilet?"
me, suspiciously, "you all better come back ah!"
class laughs (i don't know why it was funny actually but nevermind)
girl "there only (points outside) you can come and stand outside the door to make sure we come back"
me "don't be ridiculous.. go go go"
I go back to writing the extra compre question on the board
guy "can I go and make sure they come back?"

girl "can write like in secondary school? The reasons are 1. ... 2. ... "
guy "cannot"
girl "but my secondary school teacher always said must be like that! we asked her.. sure? and she said yes!"
guy, unsympathetically, "no, your teacher bluff you one lah"
okay maybe unsympathetic isn't the adverb but I can't recall the word at the moment:( My vocab is terrible.. it's quite funny actually, I know the feeling of the word but I can't articulate it. I guess that happens after long periods of not-reading-good-books.

yeah. and today, i had a grand total of 6 students in the morning class cos half of them went to watch dance syf or sth. augh. before the other 5 came in, the 1st guy comforted me on the absence of the rest of the class "nevermind la teacher.. take this time to relax"

anyway I shall go shopping later:D time to feel poorer:

owww. i really think i'm fragile. there's some inflammation on my back which is so so painful :( don't even know how it happened. owch. i hope it heals fast. it's quite scary, suddenly feel a knob there and a patch of red.

and i think i'm a very boring teacher!:( augh. and a very lazy one, for that matter. i don't know.. in general it seems like i don't have enough determination to carry out whatever i think of. :( like I'll think okay, this is a good plan, i'll do it later. and i never get round to it. talk about procrastinating! i have a lot of inertia: but when i actually start, and it's "set in stone", i'm fine. i guess that goes for most pple. unless one has a tendency to give up. which i don't, i hope.

which reminded me of that c-vat test i did.. problems with time management. okay, more like problems with realising that time has limits. or realising that i can't do things at my own time (which is almost never, if not given a push, which is bad, cos i'll crumble in uni)

okay. i need to spend more time looking at far distances if not my eyesight will get worse and worse even though i hoped that wouldn't happen. working is bad for the eyesight:(

ah talking to eunice about school reminded me of something today. i got SO annoyed. okay, apparently on wednesdays they dont' open the gate till 3pm. why? so students can't run off from civics. so everyone who wants to leave before 3 has to walk out from the main gate. which is freaking far away.. not to mention it was so hot today. i feel like using a host of expletives but that is unbecoming so i shan't. anyway, so, there i was, at 2.35pm, at the bus-stop gate of nj, trying to argue with the guard to let ME out of the front gate cos i'm a relief teacher. which didn't work, so i tried calling the office. no go either.

walked to other car gate, unfortunately not open either. now, what did i expect? heh. i was contemplating climbing over but remembered jieying's stories about the barbed wire that surrounds the entire school.. so. not particularly viable. stared at the lock and decided i should get my dad to teach me how to pick locks so i don't have to contend with stupid school managements.

absolutely refused to walk all the way across the track, up to the canteen, up to the general office and out of the main gate, esp in the hot sun. (plus after exiting from the main gate, there's still a slope to go down, and another road to walk out, and then walk to the bus stop)

so, i went back to the bus-stop gate and joined the few prc scholars waiting there. absolutely inane. but that wasn't the worse. anyway, while waiting i was complaining to ser. and also staring over jealously at nygh because their gate is right next to the nj gate and it was OPEN. if I'd done pole-vaulting as a cca i would have vaulted myself over (bag, file and all). and one of the scholars suggested to her friends that they should climb the tree to avoid the barbed wire. the only problem being that the branches didn't really extend to the outside of the wall.

wait wait wait. more students appear. guard has to keep explaining that gate doesn't open till 3, and he doesn't have the keys so can't do anything. wait somemore. even more students appear. oh speaking of which, there were students on the outside of the gate who were trying to get in too, and the guard told them to walk by the main gate. so, it was kind of like the berlin wall, pple waiting on both sides to go to the other side.

at intervals i was ruminating on the absurdity of the situation. a bunch of people waiting. which just grows by the minute, while nothing else happens. like hi, it IS possible that those students want to go home and study, isn't that more productive than staying around waiting for the stupid gate to open.. whatever..

in case you think i'm still really angry, no, i'm not, this is just to let off steam. but really, at that time i felt like blowing the school up:p quite violent eh. one wouldn't expect it of little dino clar huh. i guess i get rather fiery sometimes. should learn to tone down. i don't think i used to be that hot-tempered. sigh. anyway, in their defence, the bus-stop gate does usually open at 1pm. and i suppose it's somewhat like rj's old policy of back-gate only opening at 12.30. but again the main gate wasn't that far from the back gate so that wasn't so bad. and i miss the old campus:(

oh dear. i feel a twinge of conscience at posting excerpts (albeit very short ones) of my students' essays. there aren't actually that many funny quotes but well.. my favourite: "teaching doesn't suit me because I'll die trying to manage keeping discipline alive in class." haha. another one wants to own a duck farm next time. it's a most unusual and unique ambition.. and my other favourite: "my favourite food is any food that can be eaten". last one.. "I hate lizards. These four-legged insects never fail to freak me out." I hope she doesn't take bio. haha.

okay. i'm feeling rather battered today.. going shopping for a while later! :D I think it gets tiring feeling thankful for everything sometimes. overdose of gratitude. everything needs to be in balance. at an equilibrium. such a delicate system. I'm rambling.

random thought: was looking at stars on sunday night.. and a thought popped into my mind. I read from somewhere (forgot which book/magazine/was it my own imagination?) that stars are the souls of those who have passed on. comforting to look up and know that they're still watching over you? it depends on the individual I guess. am in no position to judge.

anyway I shall enjoy my few hours at home before I disappear out again. and I'm going to update my bankbook and make sure RJ has paid me. haha.

right. now I shall try to recreate yesterday's post, since I switched on the comp to print some stuff for GP.. yeah I know everyone's going to fall out of his/her seat upon hearing that I'm teaching GP. at NJ. thanks to leeting's recommendation. well, all I can say is.. It's a challenge. haha. and I really need to plan my lessons! aahh.

anyway, I hope my students never find my blog cos I'm going to post some funny things they said/wrote.
When I gave them that terrible current affairs quiz (honestly, I don't think I could have remembered anything.. even though I'd read the papers I forgot almost everything:).. the row of people in front were discussing how many pple lined up to see the pope's body
girl 1: it's 210788!
girl 2: really ah? okay.. -writes it down dilligently-
girl 3: no lah.. that's her birthday
girl 4: eh my birthday starts with 0 how?
guy 1: write my postal code la! -proceeds to tell her his postal code-

and then one question in the quiz was "a sum of ________ was set aside for orchard road's makeover". one person put money. (howinsightful). another one put $11 billion. (yeah, I'm sure you like shopping, but there is a limit to funds available..)

oh yes and then another question about what superbug infected sgh patients.
answers " mega bug no.5" "mega superbug no. 5" (i don't know what the obsession is with 5)
and the funniest: corrupted nurses. hahahaha.

that's about all I can remember at the moment.
I'm sitting at the table of this teacher who has gone on maternity leave. On her desk, there was this postcard with a real walnut with eyes stuck on. and the poem on the back runs as follows:

LOOK at Me!
I am common-looking with a rough, hard exterior
Not particularly attractive but I don't feel inferior
I have no value in dollars and cents
I am so small I don't take offence
When remarks are made about my size
By people who are really quite surprised
When they break me open to have a look
Every space is filled, every cranny and nook
I had no say in my size, shape or the rest
I just grew and grew to my fullest best
Never saw my limitations as blocks
Achieved my potential in spite of hard knocks
Maximize whatever you have,in any small way
Make that bit of difference - start today
And take heart even if your talents are few
If a nut can do it - so can YOU!

-Willy the Walnut-

hehe. I was very amused by it.

went to watch sound of music today. the children are so cute:) well most of the girls are anyway. esp the youngest one! so so so cute! haha. bet every audience loves her.

and in 2 weeks I've had 3 relatives of my friends/church pple pass away. I don't know what to say/do, really. besides belief that God has prepared a better place. and even then. It's at times like these when one learns to treasure whatever one has.

right I was trying to look at a senior's photos frm USA and horrible shutterfly refused to work properly. anyway i think i need sleep. so tired.

augh typed a whole long blog entry yesterday which disappeared cos blogger happily decided not to load. very very angry. grr. and i can't remember most of it. so i shan't bother trying. i know i had some funny quotes from my students though. which i'll put up later.

YES!!! i got into stanford! woohoo~~~ words cannot express how happy i am.. i was just telling ser that i wouldn't scream at getting admitted into unis.. i proved myself wrong in the morning. okay i didn't scream, but i squealed. haha. actually, i woke up, realised it was 9 (and therefore i was late for choir alumni prac) and switched on my phone.. msgs came in.. then i read serene's msg "beh n me got into stanford" and i was like, sigh, these super zai pple..

so, asked my mom to switch on the comp while i went toilet. decided to skip the brushing teeth first. came here, check mail.. i was frantically scanning the "from" column and thinking: crap, i see no "stanford college admissions", don't tell me i've been rejected again. then i scanned "subject" column and saw the first email was "stanford admission decision" and hurriedly clicked... and then when i saw congratulations... ahhhh!!! squeal squeal squeal, squeal at mom "i got in!!" mom also can't believe it. haha.

then i just as hurriedly went to call ser up and tell her i got in!! i think she didn't believe it either. right? haha. anyway i also dunno how i got in.. then msged all the tchers to thank them:) sooo happy.. i don't care if wat changmou said last night was correct - after being happy u realise there isn't much basis and then u become unhappy again.. i shall just enjoy my day! haha.. yeah..

oh then after i finished brushing teeth came back to find missed call from my buddy. called him back.. so noisy.. couldn't hear anything.. silly darryl.. don't even think he knows where stanford is but nevermind..
oh yes and i forwarded the email to my brother.. i'm so glad i didn't disappoint him. as it was, yesterday he said he was soo sad i didn't get penn. so well. yay! haha.

so finally went off for choir prac.. heh. i'm very out of touch with singing.. quite terrible. sigh. anyway, i'm still on a high. plus got nice dinner later. :D but my euphoria is wearing off soon. and i can't really really believe it until i get the package. oh and i still need a scholarship to go. so we shall see.

right i think i finished rambling.. really thank God for his blessings:) yesterday i felt terrible.. today i'm at the top of the world. hope everyone got into everywhere they wanted!

well, just now i thought it was a really really awful day cos nothing was going right. at least things improved. anyway i shall give a short summary of my sucky day and then it'll be over.

1. didn't get a gd sleep, guess why
2. woke up expecting to find 3 emails (i.e. 3 decisions) in my mailbox, ended up with only one (which was rather expected), had to refresh the other decisions page practically 10 times before i got rejected (which was not so expected) and wait for the last one which still hasn't arrived
3. no more today newspaper at the stand, very bored on train trip
4. go to work.. lots of cheques and dunno wat stuff to write. and the boss treats me like an idiot cos i did something stupid (somewhat like mistaking a high f for a high a on the music score:p)
5. lunchtime, end up buying something which didn't turn out to be the way i thought it would
6. get dumped with stuff that i totally do not understand (i.e. stuff to do with accounting, which no one else knows either cos there's hardly any staff around)
7. leave work and somehow end up missing the 6.02pm bus.. so hafta wait 18mins for the next bus
8. bus is stuck in a huge jam, making it virtually impossible for me to reach home in time
9. phone totally dies on me after calling mom to tell her i can't reach in time
10. end up stopping earlier and walking to mrt station, where i somehow contrive to miss the train again? i think.
11. finally get to jurong east.. joy! the train to bkt batok pulls out of the station just as my train doors open. well done!

i think that's about all i can remember. and i don't care anymore anyway. i have a nice dinner tomorrow!! yeah!!! i don't think i've ever been that excited about a meal.. it must be my week-long deprivation of good food (and dinner on a few days) that has caused it. i have a very strong craving for gd food like sashimi and restaurant-style chinese dishes. yumyumyum. haha. i'm terrible.

anyway i don't think i could stomach another day of going to ubi.. shall see what happens

ah. new accounting job. man. i really HATE waiting for buses. esp one annoying shuttle bus which just refuses to come. maybe i need a more interesting book with me to absorb my boredom.

and i also realised i don't like working in ulu places. now do i appreciate the lovely location of my first working place. really! sigh. was just telling my mom the grass is always greener on the other side. this ubi place is so out of the way.. and the building's so ugly.. okay prepare for lots of ranting..

the company's so small.. there's practically no one in the office. okay today there wasn't. i guess that can be good and bad, but it's so quiet. and boring. and i feel very very cooped up. here i can't even go anywhere to walk around.

yeah and there's no nice food (this, like i told candice in january, is of utmost importance since lunch is the highlight of the day - though of late i haven't been thinking much of food) and no shopping! ahh. tragic. as shopping not as in clothes but no bookstores or anything. :(

right. oh and the company's so small they don't have their own toilet, hafta go out and use the common one. and the office is at the end of the very long corridor. what are the chances..

k now that i finished whining.. at least now i know about accounts! haha. although i must admit i was rather sleepy today and i just hope i remember everything i have to tomorrow. and it's back to excel spreadsheets. but it was quite funny at the end of the day after tallying accounts there was like $9 left and my boss was like !!

i get to issue cheques! -feels rich- *until i see the balance left at the end of the day* hoho. but still. feel the power!! whee~ and i'm doing salary tmr. feel like paying myself immediately rofl. not that there's a lot to pay, given that i only started today. oh well.

oh something i forgot: i don't particularly like spending almost 2 hrs travelling though, factoring in waiting time for the stupid shuttle bus. bah.

countdown to friday.. augh. i haven't been sleeping properly la. last night i dreamt we were back in rg - some huge gep 02 gathering. that would be nice wouldn't it? just that the uni stuff came intruding and then it wasn't nice anymore.

and i felt like sleeping again today around 3+. actually i think my eyes were glazed thru'out the day but really felt like conking out at 3 plus. hoho automatic shutdown.

on the way home i was thinking that i must have some artistic element in my job next time or i'll just hate it. but maybe it just seems attractive because i don't really know what it entails.

yay we won 2nd prize! it was really surreal. like i was wondering "oh okay they're just announcing finalist names now" cos i thought we were in category A. then after that, somewhere btwn going up there and getting back to our seat, i realised that we were the runners-up. which is so cool! lalala:D besides, we get more $$ of cos. rofl.

and i was so dazed i didn't hear who was the winner for our category. but actually like ting says i think they gave it to us cos we're the youngest (and i'm also of the opinion that they were impressed by her saying she'd been thinking about it since sec 3) and so it'll be like encouragement for current students.. i.e. we'll become role models. haha. and she said the chairman told her they (judges) had a huge discussion on us. i think it was a really good idea to make the mooncakes! though poor ting had to do all the hard work cos of our procrastination:s oops. bad clar.

yeah anyway.. the jap association is quite cool! nice n new n all. the only problem with today was the abundance of speeches and poor speakers. i mean, most of the speakers were japanese so it's a bit hard to make out their english sometimes. and most of them weren't really talking to us, more like reading out from their scripts. or.. i don't know how to describe it. when u're speaking to people u should sound like u're interested in wat u're talking about, or at least sound like u're addressing them. or maybe i'm just being idealistic as usual.

also, the content wasn't very interesting. i mean, like trade and industries and all that. i must be one of those apathetic youngsters that the ministers always talk about. haha. but i remember what lynette's colleagues said to her (ok i hope i remembered correctly and it was lynette not yl/glad) about how she has the rest of her life to get used to working at raffles place, why coop herself up there now? but there, it's probably more correct to say that oh, we should care about international trade and what not, since we're the next generation of leaders/business pple/whoever else.

the haach ceo is so pretty. quite lah. i guess she'd have to look good, seeing her line of business. and her hair is so long. and she looked so different from last week haha. she sounded a bit weird while speaking though. and she has a most interesting name! ms ponz goo. well.

dr vivian balakrishnan is very impressive. okay lah i thought he'd be a bit taller and be more forceful while speaking but that doesn't really matter cos:
1. he speaks very well i.e. actually sounds like he's talking to you - mom said of cos, that's what a debater's for!)
2. he makes a lot of sense (of cos, i mite have been just mesmerised but i hope i was being objective)
3. when he was answering q&a, drew on all the others' speeches - this i find really amazing because i wouldn't even remember what they said, let alone link it to answering the questions. okay maybe he was more interested in their speeches cos he didn't have to listen to the ones by the jetro & jap chamber of commerce pple.

whatever it is, i still think he's really good! haha. ting said she was impressed at how sharp our ministers are. i can imagine audry being one of them next time. sometimes i think it's just this aura around pple that empowers them. like exuding common sense or sth. or maybe it's cos u hear so much about them u're awed before you even meet them and that counts for quite a bit? okay i don't think i'm making sense anymore.

oh he said something about how if pple in the IT line have to design a webpage which appeals to pple, the prerequisite wouldn't be being able to write HTML in yr sleep, but to know about psychology/art too.

anyway, lunch was good, except that the plate was so heavy (ting complained her biceps were aching) and we didn't have anywhere to sit n the tables were like waist-high. but sushi! and tempura! haha. :D

right. maybe next week i'll actually be able to make it for alumni prac. though it'll only be like a few pracs away from concert! well. will see.

right. i spent around $88 yesterday. -feels poor-. luckily i got paid for my tuition services so that kind of makes up for it. anyway thanks to jane i have landed myself the accounting job. though now i have a problem with the science centre thing. well well. forever getting myself into fixes. and haven't thought of anything exciting to do.

ah. yes. last night i dreamt i got rejected by all my unis. it was a rather weird setting. like we were lining up waiting to get these slips with the admission status of all e unis we applied to. and chris was behind me i think.
the stress is getting too much for me. augh. and yesterday i was at both borders n kino and they had countdown to release of harry potter VI: 17 weeks. and i'm like ... i can't even wait till next week when my admission results are out and u're counting down 17 weeks? crazy pple man.. talk about marketing.. really large scale here. (and very overdone, in my opinion)

and i spent today watching dvds. rather unproductive. i think i should take changmou's advice and go and read something on econs. i think i shouldn't think abt anyth scholarship or uni-related. it's too depressing.

oh i just remembered something i said on saturday. demonstrating pure laziness. we were tramping around botanic gardens and trying to find my way out to the bus stop. and i was v tired (being on heels, as usual, unfortunately) and told ting i wished i had wings so i could fly (instead of walking) and then on reflecting i decided "but then my arms will get tired also" so same thing lah. and she was so amused. and i just told my mom and she was amused too. but it's true wat!

ah. long day today. i fell asleep at 10+ last night and woke up at 3 sth and couldn't go back to sleep and then finally fell asleep again and then had to wake up to go to gic. but i can't get over how beautiful their office is:p it's fantastic lar.. spanking new and clean and blah. and somehow these scholarship things are always so draining. okay i think i'm going to repeat what i said in my last post so i shall stop before i do that.

oh yes let me complain i feel so cheated. AND the logic was so hard.. don't know how joon long can finish it way before everyone else and sit there with folded arms waiting for deon to come in. i bet changmou enjoyed it though. i would have actually found it quite fun if not for the time limit.. and that 400+ qn personality test again! augh. i don't think it was the same as psc though? dunno. talk about mentally exhausting.

anyway so i called pple up and met anna + lynette + yl for lunch. let me quote anna on yl "she underestimated her lateness by 11minutes" (arrived at 1.21pm instead of 1.10 i assume) haven't seen anna in ages! pity kahli wasn't there though.. oh well.

oh wait before that let me complain about how i attempted to walk to far east sq frm capital tower.. so, i looked at the map, figured i'd see something familiar if i walked down robinson road, and commenced my walk. reached lau pa sat, felt totally lost cos i wasn't sure which direction raffles place was, decided to walk back to tanjong pagar mrt to go to raffles place. how sad is that. so i walked a whole round, and ended up dropping my phone (for the like 3rd time since last dec, which is -really- pathetic)

anyway yeah.. met sya at her usa ice cream stall.. talked to her for a while after finding that lijia wasn't v free today cos her colleague was on leave. and pam, as usual, never seems to eat lunch. that girl.. she'll be a bamboo soon if she's not careful. not that she isn't already. haha. i still wonder if i should've applied to france. oh well.

hmm yup after talking to sya, went shopping.. saw the nice pineapple tarts ms tan had at her house so i bought some home! yay:D didn't buy too many though, already have gelato at home. fat clar. and bought nice earrings from minou:) i would've bought more, but well. oh i wanted to go artiris too! but my feet were too tired. i like little shops. i mean. those push-cart kind? aiyah don't know what they're called. just find them more interesting cos e products there are less likely to be mass produced. or so it seems.

took a bus to orchard, was looking for books at kino until i got a headache frm flipping thru too many so went down to taka to shop. for what, i don't know. i'm still trying to find comfy not-too-high heels which look decent and don't cost too much but that seems to be too much to ask. should go to the "heartland" shops to find. they're actually quite good leh. and then i suddenly had a craving for cookies n cream milkshake (jan was most unhelpful in telling me to go to bluemoo) luckily the cafe in the library had:D and it was quite nice! although i ended up freezing for quite a while. and am kind of full (and fat) now.

i think orchard's one of the most boring places to shop at. i shall find new places to go. no actually most shopping malls are very boring cos the shops are all the same. sometime ago there was this article in the papers which suggested a shoe mall.. awesome idea! just go there and all the shoe shops are there.. yeah.. the convenience!

right. so i'm still trying to think of a new job.. ideas anyone?

i still haven't figured out what i wanna do. oh well. anyway, went out w fiona n ser today. haha and dearest fiona was later than both of us altho i went for this job-thingy before meeting them. watched in good company.. quite a gd show la. the wedding date looks quite funny.. and then we went to play pool. that place was super hot! and didn't have the stick. whatever its proper name is. i think it's worth paying a little more to get proper facilities. ser quite pro today eh:p won dunno how many games!

tomorrow i'm going for the gic test thingy in the morning. better get a gd sleep tonight if not i can't demonstrate my mental ability tmr haha. and i also realised their interview is going to be really hard cos they're bound to ask about current affairs and investing, both of which i know next to nothing. ahh.

i don't like the working world. okay that's kind of on a side note cos i was just thinking (more like worrying, actually) about scholarship stuff and how i don't like all those interviews and watever cos it has to do with the working world. which is mostly, in my opinion, rather unpleasant. but of course i'm being pessimistic and wanting to always stay small. (fine i am small, let's rephrase that to "stay young")

and i am also very worried about my uni apps, i know my sleep last night was very much disrupted by uni-related things but i can't remember any details. haha. i suppose it's better i don't remember anyway. wondering if i was being too idealistic by applying to only unis within the top 5 (excepting berkeley). probably so. not that i can do anything now, besides worry that i'll get rejected by everyone? haha. actually i don't even know what i really want either. praying for something good to happen.

i think that personality test thingy was right. i dream too much.

ah. went to safra mt faber on sat night to eat. it's quite a cool place.. the outside anyway. and while i was looking at the facade and wishing all buildings looked as nice i realised that wouldn't be very practical. i think it would cease to look good the moment every other building looks the same. i.e. ugly things are needed as a standard for beauty.

and spent most of yesterday sleeping. and didn't want to wake up today cos i'll have to think of what job to get next. okay not like it's so easy to get a job but well. maybe i need to join more organisations so i know what's going on and all. oh dear i just forgot what i was intending to do: oh yes update resume.

hum. i miss my old computer:( with all my lovely pics and songs! aah. the demise of my other comp triggered off a longing for my own laptop (preferably apple, my bro n ting have influenced me too much methinks) but i realised there'll be a problem with the internet connection. well. actually i guess i can just bring it outside to connect whenever. but again i also think my bro's supposed to pass me his laptop when he comes back. sigh. and actually i also don't like the apple laptops cos the screen display font is super small.. microscopic.. and it's not like my eyesight isn't already bad enough

oh! let me proudly announce the presence of a tub of venezia gelato in my fridge:D i'm hooked on it. lala:p it makes up for my missing swensen's last fri:) -beams- dark chocolate and mango sorbet! (or is it sherbert? i have no idea) aahh.

well my mom has just admonished me for being such a pig, to put it directly. lazing around and not wanting to go find classes to attend. yeah i admit i have a lot of inertia to overcome.