hakuna matata

it's been a slack week.. i'm glad i settled my classes faster than last quarter. i guess i learn from these things, which is good. anyway i was so tempted to go snowboarding today (subsidized rental!) and i don't think i'll get to go any other time. but then i decided i couldn't square with myself if i went snowboarding instead of going to church. so i went w ruixiong n daryl n jon to church.. it was good though, and it was such a coincidence that i went when pastor paul came back from his sabbatical.. that was cool. his message is really powerful. i mean, i was quite sleepy (yup, my fault, should've gone to bed earlier), but his humour and everything woke me up. made me wonder if I should stay in campbell (haha sean is going to have something to say about this i bet). while i like their music, i'm not very comfortable with that as a worship style.

i also decided that God had a message for me in today's sermon and glen's prayer on wed. that there're things that I can't do on my own. even though while writing my spring break journal i recognised that i didn't like relying on people too much and everything.. i guess it took their telling me as well, to realise that i need help. it's so easy to forget God when one's busy. humans have this ability to not think about unpleasant things/forget them pretty fast. at first i thought it might be just me but on second thoughts, i think everyone does it. anyway, hopefully i get to talk to glen and sort out some stuff. i need to thank ser though, without her i wouldn't have realised many things.

anyway, my mom just called and wow, apparently my dad wanted me to graduate in 3 years with a masters and a bachelors! that is not even possible.. some problems never go away. my mom thinks 4 years is better cos that gives me one more year to play (instead of starting work).. am thankful for that. but then she said my dad wants me to finish (cos i'm spending his $$). and where do i want to work? should i go and apply for a psc scholarship? ladida.. more examples of things i prefer not to think about.

maybe that's why i like music/dance/artforms so much. you listen/move/look at it, you enjoy it for what it is, you're happy. pure and simple. but, like algernon in oscar wilde's importance of being earnest said, truth is rarely pure and never simple. disregarding my attempts being literary, it's so nice to lose myself in my favourite songs and forget about everything. at least, i still felt the same joy when listening to the drumbeat in "be prepared" by lion king.

this has been a really weird post but after taking all the time to type it i'm just going to publish it anyway.

quote of the day.. was feeling bored and asked daryl to entertain me.. then i decided to ask him about what happens during psych 1 section (he took it in fall quarter)

Daryl:

Psych Section?

Well, you get to play around with a brain.

And Spinal Cord.

Section zhuo bo.

then he decided to give more details after i informed him that "playing around with a brain, spinal cord and zhuo bo-ing" sounded hilarious:

Well, one of the sections you get to attach the brain back onto the spinal cord using just a couple of synapses. Then they bring you out to the Main Quad, and form a line with your section mates, you hold the spinal cord on one end with the brain attached on the other end, and start swinging,then the TA will give the signal, and you release, and see how far you can fling the brain across the Quad

hope everyone laughs as much as I did.. really classic

man i haven't even really started econ51 and already i'm sort of regretting taking it. the prof is really crazy (and in my opinion, spoonfeeding us). to ensure that we do our readings, he assigns us questions to complete before class. to make sure we go for class (and listen, and review) we have mini-essays due after class. beginning to wonder if i made the correct decision after all! and dayoung won't be taking it with me somemore:|

i think i need to sleep. shall finish this another time haha. really need to finish my spring break journal too hm

ah. i'm holding off thinking about classes cos as usual, it's driving me nuts. actually it's not so bad this quarter cos i know last quarter i spent the entire week getting a headache (and no sleep) so this quarter i've learnt from that. haha. but still, have to make a choice. hope God helps me to make the correct decision.

i just watched the MIT (and other colleges) ABSK Christian Fellowship (aka Songfest, I believe) for last year! i.e. my brother was in it. haha. seng passed the dvd to chuansheng to bring back for me:) anyhow it was so entertaining.. but then I ended up missing my bro n all of them. sigh. always mixed feelings. and the Christian messages were good.. I also finally got down to reading some pamphlet about "does human suffering disprove the existence of a benevolent God?" which I koped from airport coc but hadn't made time to read. it kind of complements the sunday class series by nick last quarter at campbell coc. realized I should really have more discipline.

and chuansheng brought over the snacks tt ser passed to him yay! haha. and somehow i think i ended up talking to him for like 2hours. really interesting. it was mostly about my class-choosing woes. and how my mom was just talking to me and asking me why i didn't plan properly, why i didn't talk to seniors about double majors and coterms, ... cos i told her it was nigh impossible to graduate in 3 years with a double degree. and was trying to pacify her saying that i'll talk to sean after he comes back. but then cs alerted me to the fact that math n philo have fewer units than econ n psych. sigh.

sometimes it isn't easier not being on a scholarship. i don't know. there're just things which make me very depressed when i think about them. when i know it is my fault that they're this way, really, but it's easier to let them be and not think about them. goes for everything mildly disturbing really: (not in order of importance) work-wise, personality-wise, religion-wise, ... for me anyway.

alright it's 1:42am, i don't know why i've been depriving myself of sleep unnecessarily. at least i'm seeing my advisor tmr, can figure out some stuff.. although i can already see him agape with horror at the thought of two bachelors in three years (which is scarcely possible, really). oh yeah and my mom was like, of cos it's different for americans, they're not paying for sch.. which is true too i guess. cos i was telling her tt sporeans are known for being crazy and doing max 20 units all the time. and she's like, u noe how much each class costs! ... which reminds me of why i'm here in the first place, i was supposed to change, but i don't really think that's happening.

anyhow. yeah. so i need to go fix an appointment at CDC, and i also think i need to go find a counselor for my welfare. rofl. since they're paid (or maybe volunteer?) to listen to people's problems. haha. actually i think i wanted to do that fall quarter but i conveniently pushed it aside. we shall see.

i felt that i had to blog about my afternoon/evening. i went to tea with my RA (resident assistant, she's the 2nd floor one i.e. in charge of the 2nd floor pple, sort of) and her sis and her mom. so this happens cos i'm super bored (and there's no food on campus today, pretty much) and yesterday i asked her if she was doing anything fun today (she lives in palo alto) after calling up wenqi n emily n finding that they were both busy. and when she first told me going to tea i thought it was just, you know, an afternoon meal or something of that sort.

and then she gives me this website today, www.lisastea.com, and it's like a fairytale straight out of a storybook! okay possibly not fairytale but storybook, at least. i looked at the website and my jaw dropped. really sounds like something out of enid blyton. a step further, even. anyhow, i wanted to take pics but it didn't seem very right somehow so here're pics from the website.

the first pic i saw when i went to the website


i solemnly promise that this is exactly what the place looks like when you enter


another angle of the entrance (i.e. from inside); the place where i sat was behind the wall with the black shelves on the right


exactly where i sat! the decor on the walls was kind of different, but still.


it was rather enchanting, esp when this woman and a little girl (i'm not sure if she was her daughter/ward/wat) came in and sat behind us.. you know its like when u're a little girl and u play at having tea parties and stuff.. this little girl was having her dream realized on the spot. i had this queer feeling when i saw the girl (who was dressed in the same patterned material as her doll) envious maybe? i dunno. more like wow, she's living her dream. whereas, for me it's like more than a decade after imagining this stuff then i get to see the real thing. not that i imagined tea parties that often, and not exactly in this style, but i certainly read about some of them.

so anyway, i don't know if it was my lack of social skills, but it was rather awkward meeting my RA's mom n sis. right maybe i'll continue this tmr cos i feel like i'm somehow preventing my roommate from falling asleep or sth, she keeps making so much noise. (and yes! she got back at 3pm today yay not so lonely anymore, but weirdly enough when she's around i end up doing my own stuff.) to be continued

alright. daylight saving hours are on. back to my lack of social skills. so when i got there, i shook hands with her sister (she didn't seem very predisposed to do so but since she's younger than me i introduced myself anyway) and then her mom just said "i'm tammie" and didn't seem particularly welcoming or anything. but there, why'm i complaining, she gave me a treat! that was really nice of her heh especially when considering how expensive (in my opinion anyway) the tea was. it was just the first impression which was so odd. i suppose it was some sort of a first-meeting-awkwardness.

so, the only other time i had tea poured into my cup with a strainer and everything was when i had my princeton interview at shangri-la hotel back in spore. luckily it wasn't so foreign yesterday haha. and the teapot had a tea cosy! so quaint. yeah, quaint is the word (that actually came to me last night just before i fell asleep). and then our food (tea sandwiches and things of that sort) came, in this many-storeyed-wooden thingy. don't even know what it's called, i'm sure it has a name though.

i ordered a "duchess' delight" which is apparently afternoon tea in england. it was very yummy! actually it's just normal egg salad & cucumber sandwiches. and a spinach quiche (it was originally broccoli cheese and potato pot pie, which sounds better, but i guess they ran out or sth) and a devonshire scone. i know i always wondered what a scone was after reading storybooks when i was a kid, and i always imagined something that looked like a bigger version of a fortune cookie. dunno. just the sound of the word i guess.

oh. and dessert! yay. had a brown sugar berry pie. i love desserts! but oh so fat. anyhow. oh!! there were these purple-sugar-coated violet petals in a little basket. SO cute. but my RA's sister said it made her tea taste weird the last time she tried. so when you put these sugar-covered petals in the tea, the sugar dissolves off (with vigorous stirring) and you're left with a violet petal! super cool. haha.

now to finish my spring break journal. sigh. i used to be more assiduous in bringing a book while on holiday and writing every night but now i think typing is faster and less tiring. haha. oh well.

i forgot to add some of daryl's quotes:

yesterday, when i told him i was watching triple x to cheer myself up:

Daryl Yap says:? (9:28:42 PM)
What movie?

clar:] says:? (9:35:35 PM)
wat! oh. xXx

Daryl Yap says:? (9:48:00 PM)
Sounds kinky.

Daryl Yap says:? (9:48:08 PM)
You're underaged.


Today:

clar:] says:? (10:35:29 AM)
wah how come u got so much time to come online one ah

Daryl Yap says:? (10:44:24 AM)
Cuz I'm on holiday.

Daryl Yap says:? (10:44:29 AM)
Isn't it?

clar:] says:? (10:45:52 AM)
haha.. u not on holiday also online anyways..

Daryl Yap says:? (10:47:36 AM)
Online is way of life. You don't stop eating when you're on holiday. Similarly, you don't stop chatting just cuz you're on holiday either.

Daryl Yap says:? (10:48:14 AM)
The logic is irrational. But the analogy is perfect.


and then every time he talks to me it happens to be meal time so i'm like i hafta go find food! so he scolded me for eating so much. haha.

a couple more quotes, (not from daryl)

driving back from SF on wed night, serene says "the speed limit is 55" and laughs. cos guoming's going at 70. so he says "plus minus 10miles/h. and then got human error somemore" (not exact words cos i forgot, but well)

and later he's telling us about his memorable 110miles/h drive. on 280 when there weren't any cars.
guoming "that was my top speed not average speed.. i don't go around bends at 110!"
jianlong "yeah, at 120 right"

will post these first

watched triple x last night.. pretty cool!! haha. and the funniest thing was that there was this secret agent in the show who was in charge of making gagdets and was complaining he served six years in the force yet didn't get promoted to doing the big stuff. and the guy was like " i have a degree.. i have a degree from mit!" rofl. we really should've watched that instead of sin city yesterday.. i think it had more of a plot. or at any rate, less complicated one. although not exactly very original. and vin diesel snowboarding down crazily steep mountains after causing a huge avalanche.. man.. that was awesome. i wanna go snowboarding but nobody to drive!:( boohoo. maybe i'll call pearline later. but then nobody much else is around leh.

anyhow. got up around 10, lazed around. started uploading photos/labelling them. labelled ones are on shutterfly/facebook. shutterfly: http://share.shutterfly.com/action/welcome?sid=8AZtXDdk0buHKQ¬ag=1
non-labelled photos and videos are on www.stanford.edu/~clar
there's one hilarious one of ser playing with my bday bear whom she christened "puffy" (not even very apt, i feel)

returned dvds from yesterday, got another one. i think the book was better. oh it was pride n prejudice. even though keira knightley is pretty. the guy playing darcy didn't look that great. haha. i waant to watch korean movies! but they don't have here:( and downloading takes forever.

yeah. had an acute attack of loneliness in the evening. it is weird hanging around with 6 people for 5 days and then suddenly ending up alone. yeah there're some people around in the dorm but they, like me, hole themselves up in their rooms/play comp games/sth. so when these 6 pple suddenly disappear from ur life after having been there for practically all the time for the past 5 days it's kinda strange. and especially so because nobody much else is around. i kind of actually wished sch had already started again so i wouldn't feel like that.

but anyway i met dolly for dinner, which was cool. although it was SO COLD. grr. rained again. very miserable. the weather is probably compounding this whole sad business. cos if it weren't so cold/rainy i'd bike over to frosoco to visit tu. whom i haven't talked to in ages!

arrh. got waitlisted #5 for introsem, probably have to find another class. oh and praise god, got an A- for ihum even with that terribly lousy last paper. i really should have worked harder and gotten an A but well. some things just have to be accepted and i hafta learn from them. breaks are so much pleasanter, don't have to think about the academic/job-related future (unless you're serene and worrying about amgen internships constantly), just enjoy the present. although that definitely isn't the smartest thing to do since the bible says we must always be prepared. sigh.

um. yeah. will probably go write my spring break journal which probably is going to take a really long time. nowadays i'm too lazy to write in a book anymore, tsk. and then figure out my classes/summer/...

sigh this is so awfully depressing. just back from sending ser n co off at the airport and i'm so lonely/already missing them. i could go over to frosoco but it's raining. boohoo. i guess i'll watch the other dvd we loaned out from green heh. luckily i borrowed dvds the saturday they came if not i'll be so clueless haha.

ended up reading pple's blogs. better go and find something useful to do. like watching movies. haha. and their plane should have taken off. i wish it wouldn't keep raining sigh. it's supposed to be spring! ooh on a random note i just remembered my dormmate saying that on 80% of the flights he's taken, he's been drunk. cos it's the only way to fall asleep. quite random. but anyway. time to watch movie haha.

just got back from yosemite. okay not just, but well. anyway i'm glad i stayed after all, though it was rather depressing on saturday when no one else was around and i ended up doing laundry/cleaning my room/watching dvds. and i wasn't feeling too well, but i drank lots n lots n lots of water and on the way back from borrowing dvds decided to get jamba juice, thankfully the next day i was feeling better.

oh so yeah, i'm glad i stayed cos i got to meet different people. instead of hanging out with people i already know (ie stanford sporeans or sth). although i could've gone w dayoung to miami or to UK to visit pple or sth, it was (is) good to talk to ser again since i didn't get to talk to her properly in dec/online/... and it's really interesting to see their group dynamics (jianlong, kah keng, kah seng n ser). ooh. alphabetical order. anyway. uh. yeah. and it's also been a really long time since i've heard conversations sprinkled with so many sexual innuendos. i'm tempted to believe this is ser's fault, but that might be a hasty conclusion. i must admit it was rather shocking at first cos it's been so long since i've heard things like that.. now i remember how she always traumatised poor dasheng about his legs.. it really has been quite some time. more than a year. hm.

anyhow. yosemite was cool, although somehow i think what i heard from people about how beautiful it is made me imagine something out of the world. i mean the mountains + waterfalls were breathtaking but it wasn't like it was that unbelievably pretty or anything. ohhhh but the stars at night were absolutely fabulous! i've never seen SO many stars.. now that was unbelievable. like ser said, it seemed a little too artificial to be true. like something you see in the omnimax theatre. haha. am still wondering how real it was. but that was really awesome.

and i also didn't realise how much walking it entailed (or hiking/trekking as they call it), luckily i went walking around the dish on friday haha. although the dish was definitely less tiring, maybe cos i was in shorts/it wasn't so steep or rocky/we were really taking our time (or i was taking my time and therefore wang ning didn't get much of a workout). but at least i've gone on these let's-go-look-for-waterfall thingies with my family before so it wasn't so shocking as it might have been.

ooh. couple of quotes from the trip. i realised if i don't write them down, i really won't remember. so. scribbled a couple down:

ser: what song is this?
seng/jianlong/keng: yeah
ser: what?
they repeat. she still doesn't get it
conclusion: ser has no ears
later on ser wants dried mangoes, but they don't want to pass her the bag. but seng has two pieces and asks her to take one.
ser whines (she didn't realise/see tt seng had 2 pieces) until seng points it out
me, amused: wah.. no ears AND no eyes..
seng: only got mouth
jianlong (driving) agrees
ser wails (as usual)

k i'm too lazy to type the rest now so some photos. most of them are on the twins' camera though, i couldn't be bothered to take so many plus my memory card is tiny heh

leah, ser, me


guoming, jianlong, seng, keng (angle's a bit weird i realised, hm.. too bad)

blah. this has to be the most awful set of finals i've ever had. okay given that this is just the second set, i guess i can't say that. esp when math was so disastrous last quarter. ahh. i felt so awful i decided i would go eat more ice cream to make myself happier. haha. but it was sorbet so hopefully not so fattening eh.

so econ. there were things i knew i ought to have known but didn't know/wasn't sure of. and i don't really want to know what i got wrong at the moment. and then my ihum paper. so so disastrous. i could make excuses and say that i didn't like the prompts. but that would be what it is, an excuse. and 3 pgs! i don't know. i felt like i ended up describing a lot. and didn't really link stuff very well. and it was like sort of an hour late. just awful awful awful. pwr was late, ihum also late. and i was just telling sean on sunday that i didn't really think about handing in stuff late. this is so bad. normally when i'm late it's like maybe 15mins plus.

and this was supposed to be my slack quarter so if i don't do well it'll be even worse:| crap. and i realized last night that if i change my msn nickname my mom can see it too and she'll start asking me. anyway. the only thing that makes me slightly happier is lion king's be prepared! it's such a nice song. actually i just like the drumbeats that come in at 2:52. i think i like drumbeats in general, esp the african-jungle-watever other description type. interesting. i think after rj chorale/acappella/listening to mingze talk about it i'm more aware of harmonies and bass notes/rhythms/watever.

okay my roomie just got back from math 51 final and she was on the phone w her dad going "it was HORRIBLE.. some of the questions were okay but the rest, there was so much nonsense u couldn't even make any sense of the nonsense.. i literally just made up an answer.. i was like, jesus, help me." and she went on to describe how she (in her desperation) just manipulated her equation (multiplied it by 3) to get the equation she was supposed to have. rofl. i couldn't help laughing cos she sounded so hilarious. but i definitely feel her pain, last quarter's memories are more than enough. makes me feel a bit better about pwr anyhow, math was definitely worse than that.

sigh i'm so sad, i handed in my pwr paper 1.5 hrs late (part of that was, i maintain, cos he made us go for extra pwr class cos not everyone finished presenting last week and we didn't do the evaluations) and it wasn't very well done either. like i was writing and getting very desperate so the last few paragraphs were getting shorter and shorter. although i don't know what i should have done about it. i just took a really long time to get started on revising my paper cos i didn't know what to do about it. maybe that's just a convenient excuse though. i don't know what i spent my last week doing hm. i just hope he doesn't give me a b:(

and it also doesn't help that i'm rather zoned out cos of the 3-hr ihum final. i've never written so much nonsense in my life, although i think i seem to have said that before at some time or other hm. and i forgot a couple of things. i don't know if i should have just taken it on thursday like most other people are, but i probably wouldn't get to eat dinner cos econ's frm 3:30 to 6:30 and i'll probably need all the time, i think. i'm glad that's over though, hope it went alright.

i need to sleep. oh! but i shall post the picture of the event that sort of made my day yesterday haha. at five-ish i looked out of my window and was idly glancing around when lo and behold, i discerned a girl in one of the trees outside my dorm! hmm. haha. it was rather intriguing. i think i stood there in amazement for quite a while watching her and thinking to myself, what a rather curious occurrence. like alice and the white rabbit, you know? and then i decided it was picture worthy and got my camera from my drawer. unfortunately, by the time i took one photo and looked at it to see how it turned out, the girl was climbing down so i couldn't take another one. so here it is, the one and only photo of the most memorable event yesterday:

ooh. i really think i slacked off a lot this quarter. instead of doing my work i went for jammix! haha. and spent much more time there than i expected to. although that was partly cos i wasn't dancing the whole time. must maximize time hmm. anyway. irish polka kerry sets are fun fun fun! very energetic actually heh.. and to riverdance music! awesome.. and i met pearline there which was cool.. and wenzheng.. who has a 24hr final due tmr at 5 but he couldn't do the 1st 3 questions n decided he needed motivation. haha.

anyway happy feet! sooo cute.



too bad it only comes out in november. the trailer sounds quite funny.. i think its the spanish accented english. sounds like it's imitated. which is always amusing. man i feel so movie-deprived here. definitely as compared to back home, when any weekend/weekday afternoon or night or watever one can just hop on a bus and go down to orchard/wherever to catch a show.

oh and yesterday (i was about to say thursday, but realized today is (was) friday) when i came back from office hours, i saw my dormmates out in the grassy patch whacking pinatas! look! haha.



so garish. and i didn't expect them to be four-legged (supposedly) donkeys. cos normally the ones i've seen in books or something are turtles or something or other. and chuan sheng was doing finger painting today! haha. reminds me of kindergarten. i think so anyway. ahh. i wish i were a kid again. so fun.

much as my roommate really annoys me sometimes (with regard to sleep, or lack of it) i'm still really glad we are roommates. heh. she's definitely taught me a lot of things. black culture is so different. and they're so expressive. musically anyway. and just her in general. she's so funny she can get so distracted sometimes, and my dormmate was like "other pple gesture when they talk, tomi sings". haha. or something like that.

oh! which reminds me, we had our own IHUM section on thurs cos our TF is in puerto rico or sth.. funky stuff. anyway so one of my section mates was wondering if she should listen to our IHUM professor's lecture on itunes.. yeah they record it cos he talks so fast, so its for pple who either don't go for lecture [a large majority of pple, whom i doubt bother listening but i mite be wrong] or go for lecture but can't write down everyth he says fast enough. and we were like, no, we don't think so. and another section mate was saying, "can you imagine? friend "what're you listening to (on your ipod)?" you "professor berman's lectures!"" this was all said complete with the section mate pretending to groove to the "music" and pretending to look cool. rofl. and we were grumbling about this prof's penchant for creating words that nobody has ever heard of. it was so funny.

500th post! -celebration-

haha. just happened to notice my counter. anyway it's really interesting to read back entries of blogs (although thankfully i haven't been doing that lately, it'll mean that i'm really procrastinating). like darryl said. the process of growing up huh.

anyway. i decided to get my ihum file out and look for literary terms (there're gonna be 25 of them on the final! !!! i only came up with 5 on tuesday!) but i guess it includes things like german-specific terms or watever. anyway. so the first lecture, my lecture notes read as such "Russell Berman. blah blah blah. talking about picture. sigh. the amount of crap he just spouted is phenomenal" (he was waxing lyrical on this painting by Caspar David Friedrich; the picture is used as the symbol for our IHUM)

oh.. sunday was so funny. sean's pri sch classmate kenneth was here.. so he and jon phua came to church with us on sunday.. and while deciding where to go to for lunch sean decided that jon should decide where to go cos he doesn't eat off campus that often. but jon didn't really say anything so sean (ever the opportunist) jumped in and suggested korean house! man, you could see his face light up immediately. rofl. so funny.
oh and my favourite quote from sunday lunch:
me : when're you leaving? (for their self-declared 2 week spring break)
sean : saturday
kenneth : really? me too!
sean has a =look= on his face. words fail to describe it. (kenneth is leaving this sat, sean next sat). he claims that every sunday someone says something that inspires the look. (the someone usually being daryl; but i said daryl is a different case la haha) anyway it was hilarious

uh. okay. anyway. and tonight at chi alpha kenneth was saying i'm so slack! (what basis he has for that i also dunno, just cos i was early to help set up lights, hmph) and then when i decided it was time to go back he was like "good! go and study!"
well i suppose i am slack but grr. i think the sense of urgency this quarter is less cos it's two papers and two finals. hm. i was telling joel that i'm not feeling stressed, which is not necessarily a good thing cos it just means i am going to procrastinate (which i'm achieving quite well at present, i feel)

oh! my writing center appointment.. somehow they mixed up the appointment schedule cos i ended up talking to a tutor i'd talked to before (i try to try someone new just to see how effective/not pple are). but it was cool cos she's really nice and encouraging. i think one of my problems is that i tend to be guarded about strongly expressing my views. like i always try to temper it. maybe that's the libra thing. balance. but well balance can be achieved even if i feel strongly about something. and she really focuses on thesis statements, tying paragraphs back to it and etc.

today my pwr teacher supplied lunch for us. falafels, pitas, some sort of vegetable (not lettuce/spinach, i forgot wat it's called) and some other stuff. he told us "my friend jennifer is giving her class pizza and coke, be thankful that you've something healthy" (i think i actually prefer coke and pizza. it probably would have been less trouble for him too. but oh well.)

for french we were watching this classic movie.. it's so hilarious. and it's so french. or anyway i think it's only the french who're capable of such crazy things, which shows up in most of their movies. i mean i guess it's kind of slapstick, but either i'm biased or somehow it's just not as bad as how some american movies can get. it's called the adventures of rabbi jacob! the lead actor is really talented at making crazy faces/animal noises. good study break, sort of. my french teacher said it's like a family favourite, pple sit around and watch it on sunday afternoons. anyway this bigoted guy called pivert somehow embroils himself in this plot involving assassins and an arab rebel leader (called slimane, who's infatuated with redheads) and they get into all sorts of adventures, culminating in them impersonating two famous rabbis (and pivert hates jews somemore). augh the story is too long to tell and i better do my work. kenneth is nagging me using sean's msn somemore. -shakes head-

back from laserquest! haha that was quite fun:) although it was quite a workout, something I didn't expect. and the packs were rather heavy. wished we could have more games, i'm rather lousy at shooting pple/hiding as for now. i bet all those guys perfected their skills through playing computer games.

anyway i've been feeling so lackadaisical about doing work this weekend. i really haven't accomplished much. i think i spent most of my time sleeping. it was so weird cos i woke up at 5pm today (fell asleep at 3 or so) and i was like wait. i think i was supposed to do something in the course of the afternoon. but actually i didn't. oh well. so disoriented. i wonder why hm. interesting.

and so i feel out of sorts again. i think it's cos i feel like i have a lot of stuff to figure out and therefore i'm even less motivated to even start. i have to think about spring break, about spring courses (actually i think this should come before the break hm), what i'm gonna do during the summer and then my work due for this quarter. come to think of it i think my priorities are all mixed up (seeing from the order my list is in). man. why do we have to plan for anyth? i hate planning! let me rephrase that. day to day planning is fine, but long term isn't. that's going to get me into trouble one day though augh.

alright, am not in a terribly good mood evidently. but as for classes, when i see how other pple have to do homework during spring break (HAHA) i'm very thankful for quarter systems:) (and we get to take more classes)

man. i need good food. just now i was craving yesterday's oasis burgers. they were really good though.. aahh. maybe i'm experiencing snack withdrawal symptom haha. cos i have all my snacks but i'm determined not too eat so many (esp since i have an ulcer, grr)

yay! i decided i had to blog before my happy mood runs away. let's see.. for the first time this quarter, i slept at 3am. very bad idea. but anyway, i wanted to finish reading ihum (not that it did much good since i didn't say much during section hm)

anyway, had to force my poor sleepy self out of bed.. yay for dance! haha. cha cha is fun but mambo is more fun! although sometimes i have some misgivings about latin dances hm. ihum wasn't exactly very fun but i didn't fall asleep! and i didn't fall asleep during econ either! although that was like a repetition of econ 1 about monopoly, dunno why i was copying stuff down in the end. darn after doing econ pset not so happy liao.

we ended early so i got to go back for lunch! yippee. and ate a cream puff and brownie (oh dear. fat!) and then voice class.. i think i still sound a bit weird, maybe i need to practise. haha. notice there's no "more" cos i haven't been doing so, oops.

and ihum section.. was normal. my tf makes very crazy comments. we were talking about society in effi briest. and there was this thing about how going on a vacation requires a lot of procedures, esp if u're middle-class. and he was like "never go on a cruise! you'll be on a ship with 50 other people who're just like you! may as well jump off the ship". rofl. and he was remarking on how his prompts never get chosen for papers. haha he's quite cool la. just that our sections aren't exactly the most interesting things. okay maybe i'm just biased cos he gave me good marks for my ihum paper! the one due the day after snowboarding! oohh. really praise God:) although i have to admit that wasn't the first thing that came to mind, something i have to work on there. anyway, yeah, it kinda justifies my going snowboarding, so i was telling chuansheng. yippee~

came back from econ office hours and it was raining:( and i had no raincoat:( oh well. time to peer review PWR papers!

ladida. i seriously think i'm too slack this quarter for my own good, am going to have a terrible time next quarter, with ihum psych1 cs106a and (undecided) and maybe golf. hm. and it's time for rushing too. hope i survive hm. i think i'm actually glad for the quarter system, i already get bored of my classes halfway thru the quarter, wonder how i'd cope with a 14 week semester haha.

i guess God did plan it for me. or maybe i'm appreciating what i have. like. the weather. if i'd ended up on east coast i think i'd be really quite miserable. unless i get to go snowboarding more often haha but that also costs $$. and then the quarter vs semester system. oh well. it's good anyhow. and zhihui was telling me the other day when i was talking to her about rg, that chicago is more like bi4 men2 zao4 che1 while here pple go out and do things.. so i should take advantage of that. hopefully something works out later on cos i don't feel like i'm doing anything much right now hm. although i probably should start.

ooh. i just spent like 45mins sitting in my dormmate's room talking to her. i should do that more often. but it was so funny cos it felt like i was in a psychologist's chair (and she is a psych major). so interesting. i didn't know she went to german school in DC. anyway.

ohh i got killed for assassins just now, ahaha. i sort of had the idea that either ryan or devin would be after me before long but i couldn't be bothered to bring my gun along when i went to get water. so well. oh. assassins = game played in the dorm with water guns. you get assigned a target, whom you're supposed to kill within 24 hours. kill the target by squirting a water gun at him/her. targets can't get killed in their own room/in the toilets/in the servery. uh. and dormmates can't see you shooting ur target. i think that was about it. oh after 24 hrs u're in danger of termination by the staff (they come after you with buckets of water/super soakers and take you out of the game). i was in danger of termination on friday and today. hehe. but i don't think the staff really cared cos they wanted pple to stay in the game. and half the pple were killed already.

one day my PHE sent us this video of kittens in this mini world.. and so i dropped over by her room and she showed me the website and we were just squealing at the screen together.
cute pic!:) i now have this guinea pig on my wall.. ahaha. so cute and fat and furry. cuteoverload.com



ah i just remembered something else. daryl bought $14 worth of pocky from ranch99 today. and we got vip cards for savings purposes in future. anyway, the looks on sean's n joel's faces were priceless when they saw the amount of pocky daryl had in his hands. so hilarious. but again daryl never fails to amaze when he buys stuff from ranch99. and i was rather upset they didn't have the big hello pandas! not that i really wanted it but i think my roomie could've done with it, she has a LOT of work to do this week. oh well. we got to eat mochi courtesy of our two fav housemates. i think the guy who invented that is up there with the guy who invented beds (and pillows and bolsters) now i feel like eating tangyuan. boo.

i love the quote on sharon's blog. okay, ex-blog? haha.

dance
as though no one is watching you,

love
as though you have never
been hurt before,

sing
as though no one can hear you,

live
as though heaven is on earth.

actually i think i've seen it before. also in amy's room.

anyway. i just remembered something my dormmate and my roommate were discussing the other day. that i'm only mean (i.e. insulting) to pple i like. which is, really, when you think about it, rather odd. anyway i guess it's true. sadly or otherwise. and then they started to wonder if i'm only nice to pple i don't like. hmmm. i think if i don't know you very well i would. i mean, one doesn't go round diaoing ppl they hardly know right. actually i don't think i'm that weird after all, i'm quite sure most people do that.

ooh! it seems like jackie read my blog cos she sent me roti prata pics last night yay:) totally made my (rainy and miserable) day. i must really go and find out what happened to our instant noodle pics hm.



man i think the photos i take are better than those jackie takes. haha. anyway.

the grad students are really crazy la last night one of them sent an email asking if anyone wanted to go skiing this weekend (and there's one planned for next weekend!) i was telling my roomie and she decided that it wasn't fair tt grad students are so free. haha.

oh! i just remembered sth. so i went to airport church of christ on sunday (near SFO). since sean was happily off in vegas. ahem. anyway. then i realized the importance of hospitality. so at home i'm the one who's been in the church since forever, and i'm wondering why visitors would want random pple to go up and say hi to them. but then when i come here and i'm the visitor, i see why. esp since i ended up hanging around for potluck lunch (yum). the weirdest thing was that the couple who fetched me here.. the wife didn't talk to me at all. actually nobody talked during the ride there. maybe cos they were all listening to the gospel recording, but still. i talked to the guy cos he came down on saturday to figure out where to fetch me from. but that's all.

and God really provided, before class started i was thinking about how i was going to do my work (this couple stays in SF the entire day on sunday!) until 6 and then i remembered joel would be fetching daryl from the airport! my saviour.. haha. yeah. it was such a coincidence cos i did call joel on saturday to tell him i'd have to spend the day there and he mentioned he was going to pick daryl up and somehow it didn't make a connection there. but on sunday morning it did. interesting huh.

then joel was saying that he actually has a lot of work to do, contrary to what i may think. but they must give us hope. i'm like wat hope?? so he said bible says faith, hope and love right. love cannot give so give hope lor. rofl. that was singularly one of the most hilarious things i've heard. man. what are we going to do without them next year.. and now ruixiong's going off to princeton too. very tragic.

oh! yessterday kiat didn't wanna go back to frosoco for dinner in case it rained again. so he came over and got dexian to eat dinner too and i met ruixiong in the dining hall and got him to come over too! mini-sporean gathering haha. quite cool. and it was so uncanny cos wenkai was here to visit jennifer. another sort of even more mini-sporean gathering.

today i had one of the most useless pwr classes ever. we sat around reading boothe prize essays and analyzing how their intro/conclusion worked. i'm like okay, i guess it might be helpful, but we have better things to do like writing that 12-15pg draft which is due on monday! at least he let us off early so for once i got to eat lunch. haha. and i was so annoyed on monday, he gave us back the contextual analysis and had quite a number of problems with my paper, most of which were present in the draft, which he didn't think to tell me about earlier! seriously, if you're going to make us hand up drafts, i would appreciate it if you gave us constructive feedback. instead of "oh, it's fine" "you write very well" and etc. and for the first two papers he only gave A-'s A's and A+'s, so that does explain a lot.

just back from a rather full day, although i think i did have a slight intention of getting a nap in the afternoon. anyhow. yay! i finally borrowed scores from music library. and was trying to play chopin's ballade and totally dying. this is why that is LRSM level i think. and boah asked if i wanted to go stanford shopping center with her so i did.. ended up spending the rest of the day out (and sleep deprived, sadly)

rhythms was pretty cool.. actually i wouldn't have gone, except for the fact that my roommate was performing and my dormmate too.. and talisman was singing (they should've sung more songs augh!) but then it turned out pretty good.. i really wasn't expecting to like indian dance/etc but i think i changed my mind. basmati raas n bhangra n hindi film dance were SO energetic. well not all of them, but still. quite amazing. something in common with yesterday's olympic finals. you can tell when someone's enjoying wat he/she's doing. for performance anyway.. they look really really happy.

and i wish they would stop going on and on about the "diversity in stanford" thing. i mean some things aren't meant to be said.. the more you talk about them the more obvious/forced and less natural it becomes. like, it's well and fine that it's so diverse around here but you don't have to keep calling attention to it. i feel like the fact that the show got sold out is a pretty good indication that diversity is appreciated. (of cos, there is the added incentive that westflo's tickets were heavily subsidized, but pple could've still chosen to not go).

decided i never post photos (besides those of sean's n joel's fridge) so here are some.

my roomie, emphasizing her height (i think she's like 30cm taller than me or sth)


monday's ski trip! yay~ as usual i'm the youngest. ok i guess it's not so "as usual", since all the american freshmen are one year younger than me. but well.

i decided i need to take more interesting photos. ohh! i must chase jackie for our roti prata cooking photos.

hmm. i really do think i'm going crazy. i just spent 4 hours sitting in my dorm lounge watching olympics women's figure skating (with some snowboarding and some freestyle skiing thrown in). and pple just started gathering until there were like 10+ pple sitting around. quite cool. maybe i say that cos i hardly go and hang around in the lounge hm.

anyway today was a gd day! somehow i couldn't sleep much, woke up at 7 and at 15min intervals thanks to my roommate's alarm. i guess i don't get so mad nowadays when i get woken up. more tolerance maybe? anyway the other day my ihum tf was saying freud's philosophy is basically that everything wrong with you can be blamed on ur parents. haha. so i think my original wrath at being woken up before it's time to do so comes from how my mom used to wake me up. although actually that isn't really "before it's time to wake up", i just didn't want to get up.

ok digressed. so, went for dance, and was rather lost at first cos they started club two-step on tues (which i didn't go for cos 1. i was finishing my ihum paper and 2. i figured i had enough fun on monday so better do my work 3. i was aching quite a bit). and i thought he'd spend quite some time reviewing steps and wat not, but that didn't happen. so i kinda figured it out along the way, thanks to the poor partners who had to suffer with my cluelessness. anyhow once i got the hang of it it was pretty fun! lalala. very relaxed and comfortable dance. one's partner makes such a difference sometimes.

so i was quite happy after that. didn't really want to go back to doing waltz, but oh well. for other pple to review for viennese ball tmr. then i had ihum, presented by two TFs. the first one was alright, the second one made more sense and was more organized. and then econ, where i got so bored and i wasn't listening properly. bit restless today also. oh i thought maybe it was the iced latte yesterday (first time i decided to try it i think, and i am never drinking coffee again). but i guess since i still don't want to sleep now although i really ought to, there has got to be something else.

uh. lunch w jackie. food wasn't great, they ran out of salmon grr. then voice class! ooh. was pretty satisfied today, i thought i heard some vibrato while i was singing my piece.. so that was pretty good. tcher was quite happy too (although sometimes i don't think she has v high standards since this is just a beginning class) and given that i actually don't actually practise the song, which i really should, but i know the tune and everything anyway. n she decided i could think about trying the cadenza at the end and i'm like . right. i don't really think i could do a high b flat. but we shall see. maybe if i sing properly i can. hehe.

didn't want to go for ihum section, but well. spent 1/2h watching lohengrin so that was more interesting than usual discussion.
was late to see my pwr teacher. i think he's really biased la, he keeps telling me my writing is v good and gave me an A for my rhetorical analysis which i don't even think i concluded properly -- he even wrote "why are the (last few) paragraphs so short?" (well i would think it's a bit obvious i ran out of time and couldn't finish properly right haha oops). -shrug- or maybe chuansheng's right, just high standards. anyhow i'm not complaining. so i was asking him if he got more sleep (esp since we had long weekend). and he said he went clubbing. and i'm like . right. so much for complaining u dont' get enough sleep. n he said when u're having fun it's different.. and he thinks SF clubs should open until at least 6am instead of 2am. -shakes head-

that was quite amusing. then i went for econ office hours. and was, at first, rather appalled that my TA walked in. cos the last time i tried going for his office hours i walked out after 15mins. but it all worked out and i finished my work. came back, had dinner, sat at the table listening to 2 of my dormmates and one of their friends (all black) discuss the black community in US/at stanford. interesting. i think these identity things only surface for minority races or something, like whites wouldn't be sitting around discussing wat other pple think of them or anyth.

alright. really really should sleep. -shakes head-. i think i'll take a nap tmr. or a few naps. haha.

ohh.. this weekend is parents' weekend. it's kinda cool seeing my dormmates' parents come in.. kinda wish my parents could come too. i think they would want to too. weather's been improving

ah. finally i have some time to slack. i'm sure there're somemore things i need to do (ie econ problem set) but i think that's about it yay! haha. i ended up slightly late for library workshop for pwr today cos i was finishing my paper. and i think my draft research proposal was really nonsensical but heck.. luckily i know enough about singlish to be able to crap my way through pretty fast. ahaha. and i also ended up crashing into someone while on my mad rush to green library. oops. but seriously, it's not my fault he was going so slowly. maybe i'm just making excuses. but anyway.

just came back from meeting psc officers. that was such a weird experience, one of the pple is a psc scholar who graduated frm uni in 2001. and i was trying to imagine other psc pple in his place, telling pple abt psc scholarship and etc, and i just couldn't. anyway i think i asked some slightly awkward questions. they were kind of sheepish when i asked how they got our emails, and asked if they should apologize. come to think of it, this is kind of like zuo4 zei2 xin1 xu1 right.. i mean if you got it in a proper way you wouldn't be feeling like you ought to apologize. ah. that's a gd point. haha. self-declared.

and i don't think i made a very good impression by telling them it wasn't fair to not back-pay and still have a bond of 6 years. haha. oops. but seriously, it's kind of a principle. even though he said it isn't like finaid, nothing to do with proportion, more about how 6 years is optimal to assess the ministry/let them assess you. or something like that. i suppose it depends how you look at it.

anyhow come to think of it, it's just interesting to think of friends/classmates as working in their respective fields. like the medicine people will end up doctors and etc.

anyway. monday! haha that was so awesome, definitely don't regret going. although at one point or other i was contemplating staying and just going for crossing the line at night. according to kiat they asked very personal questions abt race/religion/... but i think there weren't that many pple frm my dorm who went so just as well:p if it hadn't been up to expectations i'd just have been sad/annoyed.

and it really reminded me of gilroy trip; leaving at unearthly hours (4am, okay 4:15 since wenzheng overslept haha) before the sun rises and coming back after the sun sets (reached around 11:10pm). gilroy was like 5am to 8pm. but that's nearer and that's shopping. so quite different.

kirkwood was pretty different from squaw.. i guess since squaw was the site of winter olympics dunno how long ago, their stuff is sort of more centralized; there's a huge carpark in front of the resort. but the runs are so nice and huge. i guess it was less crowded cos it's a monday. and they have awesome college deals, it was that much cheaper.

and i was the only freshman (and probably the most inexperienced and therefore the slowest) so everyone had to wait for me. but they were so nice about it. sean was like my instructor for toe turns, which i'm still quite lousy at actually, but nvm. i bet it's the phobia of very bruised knees from the first time i snowboarded. haha. n when i got stuck on flat ground sean n wenzheng offered to pull me along haha. oh and i also realized how unfit i am (not that i was very fit to begin with la), after a couple of runs i was quite tired liao. yay for lunch:p

and weirdly enough i wasn't very hungry the entire day. maybe the granola bars are that good. haha. anyway by the time it was 4:30 and all the lifts had closed, i unclipped the snowboard and could hardly hobble downhill haha. sad case man. oh and i don't like their step-in snowboard, so difficult to step! anyway. i think every part of me which could ache was aching. as a rule i don't really mind aching, but when it's on this sort of scale it's not very fun. oh well.. am glad i got to go with them:)

i need LOADS of sleep tonight. not that i've been that sleep deprived since i made sure i got at least 7 hours the past two nights. but still. chionging papers and all. am so glad it's done. oh i had an extra french class just now cos there's no class nxt friday, ended up talking to her for an hour instead of 1/2hr. i think my brain stopped thinking in french after a while cos i just kept forgetting all the french words and she had to think instead of me:p to help translate. it's really interesting how sometimes i can just sort of "slip" into the french mode and speak more fluently than normal. unfortunately those times don't happen as often as i'd like them to.

shall watch figure skating finals tmr! at least, i think they're tmr hm. shall go and read the article chuansheng found on loving your job. i definitely need to read that. haha.

oh!! yesterday my RA decided to look for my house on google maps. and i actually found it! after quite some time though, haha. oops. anyway then he labelled it as "Where Clarissa lives (Baby Dinosaur Land)" grr. i was so indignant that i was the only one with weird labels (the others were like "maggie's house" "amparo's house".

ow. am feeling rather battered. just back from snowboarding! that was so fun.. albeit my super-aches now. actually sometimes i like aches cos it means i've been using muscles but well, if it's overdone, definitely not a good thing. i wonder how i'm going to get out of bed tmr. maybe like daryl after his two days at heavenly; "i had to roll out of bed". rofl. just that the bed height isn't very good for rolling. anyway. IHUM!! aahh. will talk abt today later.

just got back from talking to zhihui about rgs.. she's doing some project on good schools and decided to focus on RG! so rg pple reading this i'm probably gonna ask you guys to help fill up this questionnaire thingy haha. anyway. it was a rather strange journey. back to 4 - 8 years ago. and when she asked me what was my most hated lesson.. i was like ok i need to list my classes to remember.. so while listing.. i came to "math" under lower sec and sharon lee popped up in my mind. strangely enough I can't remember what exactly it was that made her hate us/us hate her. need to go home and read my diary again if i didn't throw it away hm. although i guess some things are best forgotten anyway.

and i realized i'd forgotten so much. it's all become a huge jumble, i can't differentiate between what happened in rg/rj, ... or like what camps we had for class/cca/psl/sec1/... rather melancholic to think that i'll probably forget even more as i get older. in fact i think before coming i already had a sense of that. how you meet pple in different stages of your life but you move on and so do they and sometimes you never meet again.

wow okay i'm like pushing myself deeper into "the abyss of my mind" (frm ihum section yesterday). but it's such a gloomy day anyhow. i was utterly miserable cycling to wilbur in the rain and then wang ning and the rest of the guys decided i needed more and waved today's stanford daily at me. 5.75% hike in tuition fees for nxt year, yay! well done.. i better suck up to those two pple coming on wed, like wang ning suggested. blah.

i hate cold rainy days. and i want to eat something now but i can't cos we're going out for dinner at cheesecake factory. ahh. i also need a thesis statement for ihum. boo. feeling very lethargic. not that i'm rarely otherwise. hah. haven't been sleeping properly lately, i dunno why. like i'll wake up at weird times and readjust my comforter. or i can't fall asleep. boohoo.

i am so nonplussed. i just went for my pwr conference with my teacher and expected to get scolded for
1. lousy texts: we were supposed to choose 2 main texts to analyze and 5 supporting texts, and these 5 texts I kind of found like the day before the draft was due, and all from the internet (which he expressly talked about in class on wed, saying that he would have to talk to some of us cos some pple used solely internet texts, in which my guilty conscience immediately decided I was going to be in trouble

2. sloppy work: i did the rhetorical analysis part in chunks first cos i had no idea what a contextual analysis involving rhetorical analysis was supposed to be. so on wednesday night i had 3 pages worth of that. and was still searching for the other 5 texts, I might add. even though I had a vague idea of what to use. so thursday night I spent doing.. and friday.. at intervals chuansheng would be asking whether i'd finished yet and of cos not.. and i was so aghast when one of my peer review grpmates sent us her draft at like 11am on friday. (the deadline was 5pm) and at 5 i was just at my last paragraph. man. that was so nightmarish.

and then the first thing he says is "yr paper is so gd i have nothing to say". and i'm like. erps. "i don't believe that" and he laughed and said ok let's look at your texts (ie the biblio). so i was like, ooh, first scolding (although actually he's not very gd at scolding in real life, which is gd i guess). but apparently he thought they were alright so -shrug-

so we get to my paper. and he's like, really, I don't have much to say about it, you write very well (or something to that effect). and i'm like i didn't think it was a very gd draft and he asks why. in which i inform him of my total (almost anyway) cluelessness of what a contextual analysis is supposed to be. and he laughs his head off and after having finished laughing, asks if i read his outline on the assignment. grr. of cos i did but it's not my fault if even though the outline is helpful, it still doesn't tell me what a contextual analysis does! anyway... i don't know why everyone laughs at things i say. my roomie (and other dormmates) are often very amused at me. i suppose ignorance is bliss.

oh.. here's another picture of sean's and joel's fridge. (since sean asked me if it was going to make it onto the blog). but i told him even pictures of very filled fridges (i came back from ihum section to marvel at the prodigious amount that the two of them eat) get boring. so. time to await more exciting pics!



and i need to get back to my french presentation on "la fete de la musique". it's a really cool topic though. and i think God planned it so i really wouldn't die this week.. if i had contextual analysis due tmr i'll be dead. not that i'm glad my pwr tcher was sick but well.. anyhow this weekend I have to work hard!

i think i had a far slacker weekend than it should have been. question mark there though. yesterday i skipped melody, figured i could use the extra couple of hours. but then i ended up going to sean's n joel's hse for dinner.. it was so interesting watching joel cook. and it was quite hilarious cos i took so long to do things tt joel decided he'd better do them if not we'd never get any dinner. reminds me of my zoo days. anyhow i did the dishes (so many plates/saucepans/pots! guess why? so much food!!) and they decided tt upped my cool quotient (although i'm sure suaning them didn't help haha)

anyway the amount of food totally reminded me of french immersion. start with soup/appetizer, main course, cheese, dessert, ... ... and my host family was wondering why i didn't eat much. good old days, when cheukka swept cookie crumbs under her bed and decided they didn't exist anymore since they were out of sight. and i actually agree with her about old hands now! but i don't think either she/kai-lyn/yun lei will be reading this sigh. dry hands look old! eek.

and then i had screw ur roommate at night.. kind of a pity tt the original guy my roommate set me up with couldn't make it. he's taking the pwr that i wanted! and it would've been interesting. but anyway it was still fun~ i haven't bowled in ages.. and the ball just got heavier and heavier throughout the night haha. disco bowling. dim lights and disco ball. and the music was so terrible.. off-pitch pple yelling into the mics.. man. i thought i'd end up deaf. and with a sore throat cos i had to shout to be heard over the music. apparently no one else has that problem, probably cos they're all so loud to begin with anyway. it's true!

so when i came back i immediately set about downing a gallon of water. which ended up in me visiting the bathroom at 5am or sth. wat to do. and i still sounded a little weird in the morning. but oh well. oh! my cool story of the night: first throw (or watever u call it), 9 pins down. left 1. and while i was going to do my 2nd shot, atiqah called. so i was like talking to her while bowling and somehow, very miraculously, the last pin fell! ahahaha. should've videoed it.

anyhow. and yes today is a momentous day because we managed to get to church before the first song! i think we've done it once before but i can't remember when. but anyway. landmark occasion.
sadly i had to rush back for IHUM mozart performance (for that 1% extra credit) so no lunch. i so wanted jap food! oh well. next week. :)

ohhh yes i finally closed my suitcase. but that horrible dormmate insists that i still look like i just have to pop a toothbrush in and then i'm ready to go, just grab the suitcase and leave. i contend that it's under the bed, nobody's going to see that.

i feel so cheated about my pwr peer review letters. first of all it's so silly cos none of us really know what a contextual analysis is supposed to be like, so how to critique other pple's work?? and then while i'm struggling to fit my letters into one page, my grp members have just like 3/4 page (and without changing the margins) i am very bitter. like here i am spending time analysing your work and you're not being very helpful with mine. but again since we're all not sure how it's supposed to be like it's also kind of hard to suggest stuff.. ah watever.

must mug econ

thursday night:
hmm. i am rather amused. my roomie has just informed me that last night when one of our dormmates came running to our room and yelling about something or other i sat up and glared at her like i was going to kill her. quote her "i was really scared of you" (or something to that effect). hmm. and i don't remember doing that actually. just goes to show how incensed i can be when unfairly awoken. ahaha. or maybe my subconscious taking over since i'm not overtly emotional in real life. even though i must admit there were times when my roomie's alarm clock would go off multiple times (and for at least 3mins each time) and i felt like screaming at her.

i'm so thankful for lovely singaporean upperclassmen. last quarter when i blogged about how awful i was feeling shineik'd talk to me about it.. yesterday i realized how unprepared i was for the next week (and for tmr; 6-8 page pwr paper of which i had 1 paragraph written and no idea how to go about writing the rest of it) and was rather despondent so sean was trying to cheer me up. and then i was telling ruixiong about how my econ 50 prof is new so we don't have practice midterms (okay we have one from last year but that's it) and he offered to lend me his notes and when i came back from a very long day (8:45 to 6) i found a whole stack of notes under my door and before realizing it was his notes i was wondering why someone dumped so much stuff there. hehe. and tonight [friday night] sean and joel were out and got krispy kreme for us. well even though i didn't get to eat cos i didn't pick up my phone cos i was in mixed co (acappella) concert it was still really nice of them:) wow my sentences seem to be really long today, must be the last-minute chionging of a 6 page paper.

and anyway i had ihum section reunion dinner so that equals good food and gelato! although i still think venezia gelato is better.. -shrugs- maybe cos that's the first gelato i ate. hm. yeah. and theirs isn't so creamy.. maybe i'm just deceived by their 99% non fat or watever the sign is haha.

now i need to decide on what to present on with regard to french culture. and decide if i should go for the mozart concert on sunday and get 1% extra credit for ihum or go for lunch. haha. i can already hear it "are you a true sporean or not?" (which is what jackie asked me when we were still eating at 8 and bon bon ball swing class started: dance or food? heh) but actually sporeans are also kiasu wat.. besides being great food lovers. bah.

right. since i've slacked since 5:30 till now (10:30) i should go something productive.

i'm bored and i don't feel like doing my work. even though i know jolly well i ought to be doing my work now so i don't die next week. ahh. and if i manage to finish fast i might even be able to go snowboarding (if they do go). ahh! sigh. i figured yesterday was cos i was pretty much trying to do work from 2.30pm to 12.30. or something like that. haha. trying is the word though.

and if i sit at my desk i'm just tempted to eat. and eat. and eat. :(
today's dance was fun though, sth to do with viennese ball or something.

okay well i didn't finish that yesterday so. i am SO pissed off at cingular. the past however many times i've called them to ask sth about my bill, it was just fine. and today, this guy decides that oh, since i don't have an ssn, i need a password before they can access my account and answer my questions. i.e., i'm supposed to go down to a cingular store and get one. how stupid is that? and they've been taxing me for some spastic thing which i don't even know; the last time i asked, the guy was like, oh, it's govt taxes, we don't know anything about it. maybe i just shouldn't bother so much and just pay it. freaking annoying though.

just read val's blog. she always sounds so happy it's really amazing.. maybe cos i only blog when i'm not particularly happy haha. come to think of it it's probably true that when i'm happy i won't be blogging. oh well.

under sean's persuasion i ended up in glen's house watching the 2nd and 3rd quarters of superbowl. it was certainly interesting though, given i'd only watched the big game since i've gotten here. it's really different watching top teams play. at least there's more action. and more skill. haha. and lisa fetched me back! oh and joel fetched me there! yay for them.. oh lunch at korean house was quite hilarious, with various stories of microwaving/cooking attempts.

my mom has a tendency to remind me of things i'd rather not think about. so i'm supposed to come here and become a totally different person. how possible is that anyway? maybe i'm supposed to develop two identities or something. although she's right, one doesn't spend $300 k to come here and do the same stuff one could do back at home. it's so easy to slip back into old ways though. in every aspect.

oh a few more amusing things: one of the spore-stanford exchange students who went to church today thought i was sean's sister cos "i look so young". rofl. i don't think sean was very flattered. but i told him he's almost my bro's age anyway. haha. even though that wasn't the point.
last night my mom called and my bro talked to me for a bit. told me "papa has two new pets, he's busy playing with them now".
me, mystified, "what pets?"
bro "two crabs"
clar is rather amused. normally my dad likes buying electronic gadgets of sorts so i thought it was some other new toy but i suppose that couldn't be a pet. though for a moment my mind conjured up an image of tortoises or something, i dunno why.
me "how's he playing with them?"
bro/mom in the background "he puts some water (in the bucket) and prods them so they move"
rofl. and they're gonna eat them tonight.
reminds me of my dormmate telling me how my roomie held a hello panda, exclaimed "so cute!" and happily popped it into her mouth.

just back from church (and lunch at korean house) today. haha we arrived at the 6th song, sadly. woke up at 7:30 originally but i decided a couple more minutes in my nice warm bed would be good, but it ended up half an hour. and coincidentally enough sean just woke up too. oh well. so much for our resolve to get there for the first song. haha.

friday was a really nice day. i actually decided to carry out my intention of exercising (well, sort of anyway) and go visit the athletic center(s). the buildings look really nice. maybe i'll go climb the rockwall next week heh. and i visited the barn! cos it was such a nice sunny day. it's pretty far away.. past frosoco and the tennis courts. but it's really pretty. and i haven't seen horses in so long. saw jane there but unfortunately she'd finished riding for the day. oh well. another time!

saturday. i don't think i got that much work done. was trying to nap but wasn't particularly successful hmm. anyway, jackie insisted that i go over to her place and cook roti prata (surprise surprise) and rice and lap cheong (not that i like this very much but well). before that we went to get cheesecake (yum!!!) and were trying to find eggs so she could have her omelette and me my half-boiled egg but they only sold it in dozens so too bad. no way am i going to cook multiple times over the next week. ahaha. our cooking adventure was really interesting/fun though. the crazy light in the kitchennette kept going off so while we were frying the prata it'd suddenly get dark and we had to jump around to get the light to switch on again.. but the prata was really good. only thing: no sugar/curry (sigh).

rice also turned out pretty well, considering that i haven't steamed rice in more than like 4 years since our last home econs class in rg. ahaha. nor have i hung out in the kitchen to watch my mom cook (actually come to think of it she doesn't cook very often anyway).

bon bon ball was interesting. very crowded though. and i wish we learnt more dances/steps. but well, it's only been four weeks, guess it won't do to be too demanding. i want to learn so many things i'll despair of ever graduating if i take all the classes here. heh. all the languages and the instruments and the dances. okay i just realized they're all artsy.

man i think daryl's right. i may have to skip dinner. ah but i know i won't.. i shall just have to make sure i eat less. these buffet things.. i must develop more self control. of course, it doesn't help that i have an open pack of m&m's on my table and i keep popping some into my mouth.

i'm in such a weird mood tonight. wonder why. i think i got affected by my roomie or sth. hmm. well anyway like i was telling dayoung just now, i like my french conversation course cos it allows me to learn stuff without being tested on it. i mean, i like finding out stuff (about France and in general) and reading on my own but i think i wouldn't like it as much if i had to mug it and do exams. maybe i just need to read on my own but no discipline there haha.

yay i just called adeline on an impulse. the lag was kinda bad but it was fun:) okay i'm sure i had more to say but i forgot so it shall have to wait until i remember.

oh i remembered. i often feel very battered by the end of the day. actually, more like by somewhere btwn dinner time and bedtime. must sleep to recharge and get up feeling optimistic/better. kinda queer hmm.

i had such an eventful weekend. heh. hardly got any work done. yay for me huh.. luckily this week i don't have anything due so YAY!! haha. though i have to start preparing for hell week (for me anyway) aka week of 13 to 17 feb. i hope my pwr paper is really decent sigh.. i tried.

okay i was just starting to type abt friday and i realized i described that already. but suddenly i don't feel like blogging anymore so i guess i shall stop. haha. oh wait i just remembered wat it was that i had to say. change of mind again.

saturday was cny dinner at hotpot city with sporeans.. milpitas rocks! haha. not that i like steamboat very much. but that place has a lot of gd food. and also ranch 99, our favourite supermarket:) ladida. so the grad students went there too.. was cool.. saw sean and kevin again.. they're always so funny. and met dayoung's friend emily! actually i thought she was a grad student or sth haha. oops. but she's pretty.. and quite tall.. and on the ballroom dance team! funky.. and very sociable.

so anyway. wesley drove us back and somewhere on the way decided to stop for krispy kreme (yeahhh:) and treated us! ahaha. ok i'm jumping ahead. so while we were on the way back.. we finally realized why wesley has a reputation for reckless driving -ahem-. it was raining and the turning off rengstroff ave was pretty sharp and he was driving at full speed la.. so of cos we went off the road. but luckily didn't get into accident. it was definitely scary enough though.

the conversations that ensued were very interesting. different group dynamics i guess. and two upperclassmen i've hardly talked to. so that was really interesting. wesley and jon phua and jon aow and chuan sheng. they were talking about financial markets/singapore/how gep is rigged with a control group/cs/army/many many things. and when we went to visit jon at his row house after that there was this discussion abt how pple at stanford are good at everyth and excellent in something. i've yet to discover what i'm excellent in, hmm. i should really go ask the admission office why they admitted me. but anyway, tales of expert hackers/swimmers/dunno who else.

and they're pretty competitive i think. talking about gpas/courses/... and the way they were talking about it.. woah. nothing but excellence/high standards. i think i slacked off quite a bit this quarter, i bet this is sean's fault/influence. rofl. that's right, clar, blame it on other pple. ah i'll figure it out.

okay oh.. having gotten less than 5 hours of sleep on sat night, i decided to take a nap just now. so i woke up, saw it was 4pm, and was thinking i must've slept really deeply to be not woken up by my alarm/sean's call. i was under the impression i'd slept from 2.45am to 4pm and hadn't gone to church, even though i'd been to church AND lunch AND grocery(snack) shopping and came back. then i realized otherwise. really interesting man.. i must've been reorganizing my mind or something while asleep.

started typing this last night but was too lazy to finish writing:

just got back from going with the grad students/seniors to wish ailin happy birthday. they're such a hilarious bunch.. guess it's cos of all the shared experiences.. and they're really nice people too. i always laugh a lot when with them. or maybe it's just sean and joel cos they're so ridiculous. hmm. sunday lunches. heh. i wonder where we're going tmr. the whole group has such a nice chemistry. my impression anyway.

so yesterday.. bulk of it was spent revising my pwr paper. i think it was really quite bad in the end actually. sigh. maybe i should have foregone more sleep. somehow i feel like this quarter i'm becoming more slack. which is like, woah, even worse. must be the influence of =some= pple.. this is not gd. i mean, come on, i wrote the last page of my paper in like five minutes.. really terrible. cos it was already after 5pm. blah. hopefully i can pull it up with the rest of the stuff, augh.

dinner w roomie and dormmates at lag. they had malaysian food. hmm. i don't really think it was that authentic but it was alright.. and went with them to black auction (where pple go up and put on a show/act and let pple bid to date them. something like that anyway.. proceeds go to some charity or other). that was certainly interesting.

then i was thinking of taking marguerite to wilbur to see joel displaying his legendary skill at table tennis. unfortunately, no bus in sight for like 10 mins so i decided to walk. which ended up a gd idea:D although i didn't know it at that time. so i watched them for a bit then went to visit dayoung across the road. she was really hospitable, offering me their guest chair and biscuits (yum!) and orange juice. and then joel called to say they were going to wish ailin happy bday so okay! let's go!

it was so funny cos the surprise was ruined inadvertently. kevin wanted to go to the toilet and it -just- so happened that ailin went at the same time (sigh) and saw all of us. really hilarious.. she was telling us she saw kevin and a bunch of pple and was thinking "don't i know those people?" rofl.

lisa was saying how unsubtle we were in arriving at ailin's lab.. all the cars zoom in with headlights and park next to each other.. i can't remember if it was sean/joel/kevin who said that it's like those gangster scenes with the cars.. rofl. and that when they drove to escondido turnaround to fetch pple they also all pulled in like -zoom-.. it's just the image.. i was so bewildered as to what was happening cos i didn't know who was driving and joel was like "just get into any car!" so i went w kevin. and after that wenzheng fetched me n ruixiong back.

on a side note, after ihum section one day i realised i have an interesting way of needing to classify pple under two categories (whether i like them or not) and then deciding my attitude towards them. hmm. it's not exactly a very gd idea cos first impressions aren't always all that accurate. and even then. well. okay time to listen to mr brown (zhng my car!) and do econ haha.

i can't figure out why i'm so restless today.. i haven't felt like doing work the entire day, and it's not like i got that much stuff done. and i kept procrastinating and wanting to watch my show (which is finally downloaded but the subtitles don't work! bah). anyway boah and dayoung came for church today, which was cool. but we were very very late. -shakes head-

yeah, i was (am) definitely in a really weird mood today. can't seem to get anything much done. except pwr peer reviews (yeah..) which are done yay! i was just telling my roommate i think i prefer pwr to ihum papers. i guess they're both analysis but of a different sort. i have a LOT of trouble coming up with thesis statements for ihum somehow. or maybe that's cos i'm not sure what a pwr paper is really supposed to be like, having only done a draft. anyway so as usual i have no thesis statement for a pwr paper which is due on tuesday at 10. sigh.

i really have no idea if i can find something good to do during summer. i hate all these thinking-about-jobs/careers things. i've had the wildest imaginations sometimes, which definitely aren't going to be practical. but that isn't going to help. and i also have to think about how i'm going to earn back S$300k. sometimes i still can't believe i'm a uni student. and that i'm older than most of the other freshmen and even some of the sophomores. but who am i to talk anyway, what about the finished-ns guys. oh well.

i'm really glad my mondays aren't so sucky as in fall quarter. i think fall quarter i had ihum on mon wed so that was really bad haha. hum. anyway, so sometimes i still can't believe i'm here and this is college. very weird. i'm sure there's a word to describe this in psychological terms or something but watever.

oh i went out with the pple on my floor for dinner on friday! yay. that was cool. although the group was so huge.. hmm. and i was in this car with two couples, which was kinda weird. and saturday it was so miserable cos it was drizzly and COLD. okay, people like chris who laughed at jane for wearing a scarf are going to laugh at me too, but -boo- i wasn't attired properly okay. today was a beautiful day though:)

oh. i remembered something from winter break. lyd said i used to laugh more. and i think the same goes for her. but then i also remember reading this article which says that pple always look back on the past and say things used to be better then. i think it's true that everything on retrospect has a much rosier glow than when you're in the situation.

anyway. i think i might actually like pwr better than ihum. or maybe i'm already predisposed to hating ihum. esp writing papers. they are the bane of my life cos i can never think of a satisfactory thesis statement. i seem to have a complex about ihum. i hate the prof's constant use of literary words which are incomprehensible. but at least i'm not the only one who finds him fast.

i have very violent tendencies when awakened by my roommate's alarm, i find. last week she was really good at getting up. these few days... i really felt like killing her. i can't remember which day was the worst but today her alarm was set for 6.30 and she didn't want to get up. at least it didn't ring like 8 times or something, but i was in constant fear that it was going to be.

so. i shall take a nap. i sometimes regret doing social dance, 8.45am class is really unearthly even though it's fun (to an extent, depending on the partner and my clarity of mind). i think God didn't let me get my 9am pwr class for a reason. i probably would have killed myself by now if i had to wake up at 8 everyday.

oh! and chris and her cornell friends (yingyi huangyu zhi ern and i'm not sure how to spell the last guy's name) came down yesterday! i'm glad the weather was quite alright haha. although it rained at night. i also don't think i was a very good guide, oops. oh well. and it was so funny when chris decidedly told me that cornell squirrels were fatter. cos it's too cold. anyway, they're a nice bunch and i got to see chris;) sigh i don't want to grow up.

i fully intended to blog before the end of last week. oh well. circumstances weren't favourable. and i forgot what i was going to talk about. so well. oh one thing interested about mid-year convocation for freshmen: they got people (juniors and seniors) to talk about what they went through in freshman year. and then it was all about flunking tests really badly and stuff, and not spending enough time studying. it's so ironic cos if we were to have the same type of thing in singapore, it would be more like "don't spend all your time studying, go and do other stuff" or something like that. or maybe it's just cos this is uni and ccas are really up-to-you.

back from ski trip this morning! the journeying was awful; i could have taken a flight to korea in the time that we took to get to tahoe on saturday. but i'm so thankful that i didn't choose to buy half day ski ticket on saturday cos we got there at like 9pm. and the conditions were terrible, according to those who went. and sunday was so beautiful. i'm also very glad i got to hang out with those paloma pple.. pretty cool. and i wouldn't have thought about going down the mountain run (which is like intermediate) if i hadn't gone with them. actually i think it was ken's idea. anyway, it was crazily steep at some points (and my toe-turn still isn't very good but well) but i think i managed pretty well on the whole!:) esp since it's just my second time snowboarding (the last time was in 01). interesting how i seem to balance better when i stuff my hands into my pocket. maybe that restricts my hands from flailing around or something. but well, keeps me warm too so i'm not complaining.

was also kind of amazing how people go skiing/snowboarding without appropriate pants/gloves.. i'd be scared to do stuff like that cos i'll freeze but i guess i've had the fortune to ski before so i kinda know. oh well. and i'm also so thankful for my bro's ski goggles.. the sun was so bright. am aching rather a bit now though. but it was so fun:) nice to see snow again too.. i'm glad it snowed on the way there and not while we were snowboarding:)

so i think i've finally settled my classes, hope the french class won't be too hard. heh.

flying on sunday after all! yay.. God really provides. it was really rather amazing, cos yesterday I gave up hope and emailed yin nah to ask her to fetch me on saturday, and then this morning my uncle said there was space for me yippee~ also rather amazing the way I got my flights in progression. first it was sq on 6th jan 5pm, then 7th jan 9am, then 7th jan 5pm, then finally the flight i wanted. kinda weird cos when we were leaving for the first time i didn't want to leave on sunday, preferred saturday. and now it's the other way round. ah well.

i must also figure out how to get rid of the dvd i have so boah can get me the limited edition from korea. haha. darn. she's really sweet about it though. this is why US return policy is good, normally it's like 45 days with receipt. and kino is 7 day exchange policy. sad case.

it's been a mad rush! okay not really, but packed enough. tuesday met junming for lunch.. catching up was good.. and met yingling and anna in wisma! pleasant surprise no. 1:) after that i was walking along shaw underpass and met chris and estelle and engsiang! pleasant surprise no. 2:) it's rather hard to bump into people at stanford, and even if i do they're not necessarily people i know well, so i guess it's doubly pleasant now heh.

was supposed to cut hair on wed but shop was closed, so bummed around at home. oh.. made konnyaku jelly and my favourite fried dumplings! munch munch munch. yesterday went to novena sq to eat with christine and rachel. i have no idea why when i come back people like asking me if i'm attached. well it happened at least thrice so i figure that's substantial enough. haha.

anyway it was fun, and also interesting to retrace the familiar walk to the learning lab. really nothing changes. christine was so cute about the card, made the little snowmen stand up and was telling me excitedly "they're double-sided!" and she drew them herself. which is even more amazing cos they're really kinda small (and hard to draw & cut, i conclude)

went shopping and had some problems carrying her present around until i bought stuff at john little's.. the sale is quite crazy. but it's nice to get good bargains. and as usual i was inflicted with indecision and had to come back later to buy track pants/bedsheet. which wasn't such a good idea, cos by the time i went back it was peak hour so all the working people were buying stuff. ah well.

oh yes it's so annoying to walk about orchard and have people approach you and ask you to 1. donate 2. buy things 3. fill up surveys about something or other. why can't they leave us alone.. ugh.

i finally cut my hair today. my head suddenly feels very light. but again i go through this practically every year, or every two years. heh. and he decided to spray some colour so now i have golden-brown-ish hair! hmmm. oh well. it'll wash off tonight anyway.

how can you miss something that's right in front of you?
ahh. i have five days left here and i don't want to go back again. i'm like missing home in advance. it's so nice to have accessibility to town and different parts of spore. and to have good food. although truth be told i think america's desserts are better, today's andersen's ice cream somehow wasn't as nice as like.. coldstone's. haha. but of cos coldstone's is one of the best so that probably isn't a very fair comparison.

i have no idea how i managed to go out of the house without a wallet today, but thankfully i had $10 in my bag. sad case man. anyway. yes. it is when time runs out that one starts panicking. my french is still half baked! (here i remember my dormmate ed's wise words, although in the different context of me trying to finish my ihum paper,: in a couple of hours it'll be fully baked!)

and i still need to meet pple, and to shop and buy stuff - the shopping part is easy, the buying isn't. suddenly there isn't enough time again. sigh.

so, back to missing home in advance. i can already see myself back in my dorm and getting bored. and missing pple and all. ahhhh. human psychology; reverse psychology. actually i'm not even sure if that's the right word. wanting things you can't have? okay it's time for bed.

after blog surfing i decided it's time for reflections on 2005. time really flies.. partly realise it when i have to move to different classes in church heh. teenagers class was from sec 1 to 4, then young adults class jc 1 - last year, and now we decided to crash the foundation class, which is really for young christians but nvm.

anyway it doesn't feel like a year since we finished A's. i mean i suppose if i did go think about what i've done since then, it has been a year. but other than that, nah. and it's also weird starting school in late sept. heh. it always seemed so right that with the start of a new year, a new school year starts too.

so.. after the mad rush of uni apps and holidaying in sydney, came back to a job! thanks to my aunt.. first taste of how boring working life is, how i felt so cooped up in an office 9 - 5. 9 - 6 to be accurate. so that was january. i actually became rather attached to the place, i can't imagine why, given that the work was so boring, but well. i guess i kinda got to know some of them better nearer the end.

february was chinese new year and slacking around at home, waking up late. CNY, wondering if next year i'd get to miss it. i don't like CNY cos we're not very close to my dad's relatives so it's kind of a chore meeting them. actually it isn't that bad, i did talk to my girl cousins a couple of times. but i still don't like it anyway.

march was results. heh. what a way to open the month. but it was nice to see everyone again. and results were alright, thanks be to God! and relief teaching at RJ.. man.. i'll never forget denise's class. they left me really speechless. not that i normally have a lot to say to begin with, but that was definitely an experience. and the zoo. haha. also definitely another experience.

april was US uni results. another way to open the month. i know i was in a very very bad mood on friday (1st apr) cos i wasn't getting into places i wanted to go. and it didn't help that i was stuck at work at ubi the entire day. but i woke up on saturday to ser's sms and switched on my computer and opened my mailbox to an email i couldn't believe. i really thank God for his blessings. and am thankful that I still could go without a scholarship, even though this is definitely not a very ideal state of affairs.
and there was choir concert, which was cool. and started teaching at NJ. there's another new experience, teaching GP was never something I envisioned myself doing.

may. mid-may, ended my teaching (YEAH..) and flew off to Boston for brother's graduation. i found myself wondering how he could uproot himself from 4 years' worth of living there. but i guess there wasn't really a choice. and also wondering why most of his friends were asian. but now i know.

june. came back in 2nd week of june, left a couple of days later for church camp. that was fun.. i'm so glad i got to know church pple better.. it's amazing (in a bad way) how i got through so many years without talking to them very much. unfortunately i'm very capable of doing such things. hmm. nvm. at least that's addressed.

july. started with learning lab. one of the most interesting things i've ever come across.. and working with younger people was nice for a change. okay well relief teaching would sort of come under that category, but it's kind of different somehow. anyway i was kind of bored until i started annoying rachel, i can't remember when i started that actually but well.

august. also spent in learning lab. besides annoying rachel, there was christine too. although i can't remember when i started that either. and then people started leaving one by one.. i think i was really excited when i saw them online and asked them about how life was. but when it was my turn and i had to tell other pple about how my life was, it wasn't so fun. haha.

september. end of job and crazy times.. shopping consecutive days, meeting pple, ... and that eventful day before i left, spent in sentosa and dinner w my grandpa. so tired i hardly wanted to pack. and the night before i left, when i was near hysterical cos i was so afraid of what i was getting myself into and i had to come online and whine at ser, who did a pretty gd job of counseling me i think;) and then stanford.. a whole new experience.

october. second week of classes, still slacking around, thinking i was very free, and then that first ihum paper which i wrote in two days. i don't think i've ever felt so desperate in my life. well subsequent papers did bring on the same feeling, albeit less intense, but that was still the first time. which was the worst. oh and of cos, birthday! haha. day was rather uneventful but dinner was fun!

november. big game and thanksgiving week. i never want to watch another football game. heh. thanksgiving week = catching up on sleep, getting a bike (finally! the way i can survive without things there is amazing) corteo!!! ahh. and gilroy.

december. end of quarter, where has time gone? dead week with primal scream every night, finals, and time to come home! yay. i like being home. but all the same, it's time to go back and conquer the world. okay i have no idea why i put that last bit in, it just sounded nice. sometimes i wonder how to refer to stanford. "stanford"? "california"? "back there"? heh. more like second home or something. i wonder.

it's been a really interesting year though. hope this year'll be better!