the long awaited "reunion" dinner with 4/12 happened on tuesday at spagheddies. some of the night's many memorable incidences:

1. carol, who suggested the venue, decided that she had dance practice till 8, and therefore would not be humanly able to attend the dinner at 7. which was a problem because once we were seated, everyone sorta realised that we did not, in fact, feel like eating italian pasta. at which point mandy announced that she wanted to "grab hold and break carol's little ballet knees" for making her have to endure spagheddies. and for those of you who know mandy, you'd also know that with her, Violence Is An Option, and so this explained why i got a bit nervous sitting opposite her and her full setting of sharpened utensils.

2. jeanne has a new boyfriend! given that this "brand new addition" (in fong's words) has only been since saturday, i wasn't expecting such major PDA, especially when we were still getting over the question of "is it just me, or is that not wesley?". and when i asked what happened to the previous one, fong was only to happy to pipe that "pop goes the weasel", echoing general consensus that jeanne had been putting up with a jerk for 4 years too long. for the record, this "new friend" bryan/brian appears to be a step in the positive direction. public groping aside, he is at least easier on the eyes, which is a welcome change.

3. audrey and i brought the SAME bag!!! the first thing i noticed when i saw audrey walking towards the restaurant was "OMG, we have the same bag!!", which is completely unbelievable for a few reasons:

a) the bag is from sydney
b) we went to sydney at different times
c) there are a thousand and one other bags we could have bought from sydney
d) we both have a thousand and one other bags we could have used
e) WE BOUGHT AND BROUGHT THE SAME THING!!! ARGH!!!!

seriously, that was almost beyond freaky. like, can you imagine going to a party and seeing that your best friend is wearing the same dress as you??? only, instead of aud and i wearing the same dress, we were carrying the same bag. although, as aud quickly pointed out, there are 2 different patterns on the front and back of the bag, and so, for the rest of the evening we both made sure that we carried our bags with different sides facing outwards. i guess it's kinda cool in a way because we have such similar tastes, but this will definitely be something that i'll remember and laugh about when i'm 70. i mean, so maybe it's a roxy bag and roxy bags aren't super exclusive or anything, but still- what's the probability of that???

anyway, there were lots more discoveries and -moments- during the outing, but i think i'm already cutting it a bit close by giving the mandy comments, and contrary to what you might think, i do value my life. and so i shall shut up now.

tomorrow is april fools, and the girls have planned this really cunning trick for the guys. it's not really elaborate, but it's a damn good one, if you ask me. if all goes well, i'll have something really interesting to post tomorrow, and hopefully a few incriminating videos to boot! ;)

got back pretty early from school today, after yet another slack session of Tuesday PE With The Himbo. nowadays pe has degenerated into playing catch-the-sponge-ball in aircon, which means that it is possible to leave the place without working up a sweat. not that i'm complaining though.

the only eventful thing during the game was this tussle i had with a black-shirted Person from the other side. (don't say i never euphemise). i swear, i got the ball 0.1s earlier than she did, but apparently some people take winning during pe as life-or-death determinants, and this Person proceeded to grab at the ball and try to run away with it. only too bad for me, 'cos i happened to have caught the ball before her, and was therefore still attached to the ball. so this Person was actually not just grabbing the ball and running, but grabbing the whole system of me and the ball, and ended up dragging me for a few paces before proceeding to push me over and run right on top of me. and so i have a bruise on my knee, which is going to look gross in 2 days' time, and it will all be because of some madfreak who was gunning for the MVP of the year award during the annual PE festival. good for her then; i hope she goes on to win the olympics.

and also, concerning my failure with the Guy Behind the Counter, erica says that i should move on to Plan B. and when i asked what Plan B is, she said that Plan B means that i walk right up to the manager and say "Could I have the number of the cute Eurasian guy that used to work here 2 weeks ago?" and this is supposed to be a great turn-on, because all guys like girls who take initiative.

plan B is not going to work; i am hereby abandoning this episode of guywatch.

after losing it twice in 2 days, i've just finished reading The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, by mark haddon. i bought it a while back cos i saw 3 stacks of it in 1 day at borders, so i took it as a Sign. anyway, i was half-expecting it to be cult bullshit like dan brown, but this has been a pleasant surprise.

the book's primarily about this autistic kid, christopher, who likes to groan and cause scenes, and also happens to be incredibly gifted in math and physics. though that's probably quite common since autism is actually extreme alpha-male-ness, and a major trait of that is enhanced spatial reasoning. so anyway, in the course of the novel, christopher breaks up his parents and makes his mom run away with neighbour Mr Shears, then breaks up his dad who is getting it on with the estranged Mrs Shears, and finally proceeds to break up his mom and Mr Shears, so that everybody's living in separate houses and screaming at each other by the end of the book. scandal- i like! it's really almost like flowers for algernon, except christopher is consistently gifted in one area and also consistently unaware of proper social conduct, unlike charlie gordon, who is stupid most of the time but experiences a brief period of smartness. and also, christopher has a rat called toby, just like charlie, who has a mouse called algernon. how curious.

what's really freaky about the book is how mark haddon describes how the world looks like through christopher's eyes, and it makes you wonder just -how- he knows so much about being autistic. like how would you know what these kids go through anyway? it's freaky, that's what it is.

and also, i have come to the realisation that i am a truly horrible person. because when i was reading the book, one thought that struck me was "what if i have a kid and my kid turns out autistic?" and immediately i knew that i would never be the kind of patient, caring mom that the kid would need. in fact if the child cries for a prolonged period of time i would probably kill it. which is such a bastardly thing to do, especially considering you're the mother. but hey, not everybody can take this sort of crap on a regular basis, and that explains why there are so many cases of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, also known as cot death. it's by parents who can't stand their kids' noises, kill them, and then pretend that the child died of "natural causes". in fact there was this woman who killed 5 of her kids this way, and all the while the doctors were wondering how the hell her babies kept mysteriously dying on her, until they realised that the sound of their voices made the mom into some compulsive psychopath who smothered her kids. and this is why i really admire mothers who don't kill their kids, and even more so mothers who start cuddling their kids and singing to them and doing all that babynonsense while rocking the kid to sleep. like the baby really deserves all this special attention or something. i guess it's ok if you've got a really cute kid whose farts smell like flowers, but what happens if your kid is just some regular whining thing that drools and pees all over the place? what do you do then, huh?

and, as predicted, the first common test result we got back was for chem, cos we had chem lec first period and the teachers are like some sick machines who just churn out exam scripts. anyway the chemistry catastrophe was of gargantuan proportions, which i dont want to talk about. math was also pissing cos i lost around half my marks due to petty marking (read: messy working and/or working lacking units) and my tutor was being a royal P in the A when i went to approach her to ask for clarifications. one day when i come back to receive my A level script i'll have a field day giving her a piece of my mind. but that day will have to wait because stephanie tells me that the universities call up your tutors to ask them how you are, and i already think that some major butt-kissing is in order before anything vaguely positive falls out of mathtutor's mouth. it's even harder than squeezing water from a rock, i swear.

today's easter!!

this year's easter has been a lot more meaningful to me, because i've been going to extra church services and charimatic praise & worship sessions, and so this whole lent has been an extension of a period of personal growth and reflection for me. spiritually, i feel that i'm a lot more mature and focused now than i've ever been before. and that, in part, is what's kept me stable and given me strength when everything seems to be going wrong. i guess that probably doesn't sound like much to you, but the past few months have been really rough ones for me, and so this spiritual experience is something that i'm really grateful and thankful for.

on an unrelated note: raj got voted off the apprentice! :( i liked raj! i thought he was the quirky little oddball that added that dash of colour to the eps. trump is a stupid man. everybody likes raj! he shouldn't have fired him. i mean, he could have gotten rid of that bitch ivanna and the whole world would have been happy, but no, he goes and screws raj, who's really the most personable one around and the one everybody likes to listen to. or even jennifer, the two-faced politiking fako with the lips that scream 'botched-job-collagen!' would have been a better choice. why why why! i hope nobody watches his show anymore and he goes bankrupt... because he shouldn't have fired raj!!!

oh, yesterday we finally managed to have a team lunch for debate, which was only possible since kitson is back in singapore for easter holidays. apparently he's taller and bigger, but whatever. it's like most of the world is taller and bigger than me anyway and i've grown a bit immune to it after all these years. anyway we were eating at NYDC and making quite a bit of noise, and we got this really dirty look from the woman sitting opposite us as she got up and left after her meal. i'm sure the guys didn't notice, but me and rui did. perhaps it's some inbuilt bitch radar thing. in any case, it was nice hanging out as a team again, plus, you can always trust food to be the uniting factor. oh and we discovered kitson's appetite is still recognisable- unrepressed and unapologetic. after finishing his own pasta dish, he proceeded to eat rui's salad and pick on other random stuff from everybody else's plate. and then the most horrible part was when he and jon ganged up and tried to prevent me from eating my cheesecake, by constantly repeating how my "belt is looking a bit tight" and other permutations of how evil cheesecake calories are and how they'll add a few million kilos to me or something. for the record, the brownie-infused-cheesecake wasn't all that great yesterday, but i didn't think that the two of them needed any extra feeding, seeing how they'd already had a mudpie and weren't like some poor starving ethiopian kids or something. tsk. how ungentlemanly, don't you think!

was kinda bored just now and started blog-surfing through various blogs and archives, and i just realised that aud's blog has been up since 2002, -and- i can actually remember the first time i visited it back when we were in sec3 and everybody was hopping on the create-a-blog bandwagon. and that's when it hit me that i've been blogging for 4 years too, which is an awful lot of time when you consider it against the span of my life, and i can't believe i've wasted so much time on something which amounts to virtually nothing.

ok, i was intending to take this post to a deeper level but my brain is currently not allowing it. shall finish this up when ze muse returns.

hello guys, i'm back from the land of the dead!

well actually that's not completely accurate, because i think "land of the dead" would more appropriately refer to the place i'll be in -after- i get my marks back. and i'm guessing you can't die twice, so we'll just have to save the best for last.

yesterday's bio paper completely stank. i feel 100% cheated because after mugging ALL of this year's syllabus for 5 hours straight right before the paper, guess what came out? TWENTY marks on mendellian genetics, which i haven't so much as smelt since it was taught last year. that's right TWENTY fcking PERCENT of the paper was on the single j1 topic which i didn't study. how fcking fair huh! really, i had no idea it was going to be tested, if not i would have at least read through the chapter, since i do not believe in going into exams when you're completely unprepared for it.

so really, yesterday was hugely pissifying. in fact, when i flipped open section B and saw the huge long question on mendellian genetics, i thought to myself, 'hey, this can't be right! this isn't supposed to come out! surely i have the wrong paper!' but, as luck would have it, things only got worse, because when i flipped to the next page, i discovered yet ANOTHER long question on mendellian genetics. like what the fck was that! so i frantically flipped back to the front, knowing that i would not see the words "JC 2 Common Test" printed there, because surely, surely there was no way in hell that such suay-ness could befall me. well, i guess i was wrong. because not only did the bio paper consist mostly of the bloody j1 stuff that i thought was unimportant, it also did not test the j2 topics which i spent the whole time mugging. so all my knowledge on how Na+ activation and inactivation voltage gates open and close was wasted. i just hate it when life does this to you.

anyway physics was at least marginally better. more doable than any rj exam i've sat for so far, though that isn't saying much. maybe it's because i was up at 4 to practice questions. yup, i mean 4 in the morning. in fact, i jumped out of bed at 3.55, 5 whole minutes before my alarm clock went off. my biological clock must be freakily precise. or maybe this is just what the common tests do to you- on wednesday i woke up a 5am muttering about how "peritoneal dialysis" works for kidney failure and reciting the process of selective reabsorption in the proximal convoluted tubule. oh, and here's another no brainer- guess which other major topic didn't come out for the bio exam? that's right- the kidney!

oh, and in other news, i just caught Miss Congeniality 2, and it's a million times worse than the prequel. don't even bother watching it. the only good parts of the show are the scenes with the cute nerdy agent (Enrique Murciano). in fact, the funniest part of the show was probably when gracie's gay stylist says this during a briefing at the FBI headquarters:

"debriefing? i haven't had a good debriefing in a long time! though really, i must say i'm more of a boxers guy."

hurrhurr.

math, i am thankful to announce, was a marked improvement from yesterday's chemistry catastrophe. in fact i think i might be able to do better than just scrape a pass, which will be worthy of A Celebration, considering that good math grades have been in short supply ever since i became a gepper and resigned myself to a life of laziness. my dad says that i have a defective brain, because even though i can get full marks for SATS and other useless stuff like that, i have been consistently flunking or nearly-flunking math for the last decade. which is probably a nice way of insinuating that i am not emulating the values of Dilligence and Prudence as my alma mater would have me do, or that i am hopelessly a failure in all things involving calculators and formulae. in fact, i think that's probably the root of it- calculators and formulae. somehow they both hate me, because whenever i try to punch in any values or write out any formulae, it just comes out wrong. how come, i have no idea. like i said, the whole world is in a conspiracy against me.

anyway, i ought to be getting down to bio soon. because i need to put aside 1 hour later for CSI, which currently tops my list of Things Which Complete Me. i know i could probably just record it and watch it after thursday when i'm due to have my life returned to me, but it's just not the same, you know? it's like what your primary school teachers used to tell you about cheating during a test. even though nobody else knows, you know, and that makes all the difference in the world. although really, once you get to j2 cheating is way down there with the list of been-there-done-thats which figure about 0.1 on the guilty conscience scale. but anyway, CSI is different, because if i don't watch it i will absolutely and positively be a lesser person that i am meant to be. even if i watch it the next day it's just not the same and i would keep thinking "damn i should have watched it yesterday" and nothing in the world will make that thought go away. which is why i need to watch it later. ciao!

i think i am having a migraine.

chem paper just over an hour ago, and, like, it was a real joke. i think either the paper was hard or i am stupid. if it is the latter than i should probably go somewhere and kill myself, because we all know that nothing is more unforgiveable than stupidity.

in fact, if all the stupid people in the world killed themselves off, then we'd be left with only einsteins and donald trumps, which would be far preferable to having a planet of apes. firstly donald trumps make shitloads of money, and nobody can be sad with that amount of moolah in their pockets. and secondly, nobody would have to worry about their hair, because they'd all inherit the trump-einstein genes, which are potent enough on their own, but lethal in combination. so everyday would be a bad hair day, and it'd be no big deal because everybody else would look like they have a poodle on their head too. and lastly, if all else fails, the einsteins could whip up a few nukes and do a hiroshima/nagasaki, and then all our problems would be solved, permanently. no more irritating whining and whatnots. an unpopulated world is always a happy world.

actually, in light of how i'm headed straight for flunkdom with my chem script, blogging is probably the last thing i should be doing now. but alas, i am in no mood for the twin evils of differentiation and integration. or should i say, in this case, i think i should allow myself some time to get over the mental kamikaze that was the entirely shittifying chem paper.

what really worries me is that this might be the start of More Things To Come, and i don't think my brain and I (lately i have come to regard them as separate entities, seeing how no logical person would be able or want to regurgitate the exact conditions for the oxidation of 1,2-dimethylcylcopropene or any of that shit) can take much more trauma. so i guess it's a good thing that i really am (as a few people continually assert) a closet MGS girl, and therefore believe that The Best Is Yet To Come. literally, not figuratively.

oh, and my day was made worse by 2 other things. firstly, i jumped out of bed at 530 in the morning, owing to a lagging biological clock which had yet to register that my paper was in the mid-afternoon, and therefore i did not, in fact, need to be in school by 7. so i went back to bed hoping to catch a bit more sleep. and that, you must all be thinking, must surely be a good thing? well no. because what happened was that i woke up at ELEVEN, and, as you can imagine, was activated by a major swearfest. which meant no revising dehydration and dehalogenation and nucleophillic substitution for me.

and then, i also have to report that since the last sighting of The Guy Behind The Counter, i have hit a dry spell. even though i've been religiously going to coffeebean EVERYDAY since then, all i've been rewarded with has been The Man Who Can't Smile, The Man Who Mispronounces My Name, and the various idiotic permutations who were responsible for mixing the eggs with my salmon sandwich yesterday, even though i specifically said not to twice. yup, not once, but TWICE. i bet my Guy Behind The Counter would have done perfect without me even having to remind him. with this kind of crappy service, it's amazing why people still pay 5 bucks for coffee.

this is, of course, unless they are on guywatch duty. heh.

i can't believe it- the holidays are almost over!

i think this is the first time in the history of my life that i actually used the holidays to do something other than waste time or further my quest to be the most sedentary person alive. in fact i think that the operative preposition there should be "and" because everybody knows that dillydallying and being a lazy couch potato are not mutually exclusive. they quite complement each other, really. which, i guess, is why being highly efficient in both of them can have serious and detrimental repurcussions, as i have so discovered approximately 30000 years ago.

the rest of this post has been deemed inappropriate by the relevant parties and subsequently deleted.

i'm blogging from a newly reformatted PC. this is because my system was recently screwed up by some powerful spyware, which prevented me from doing most things other than chat online. like if i wanted to open norton antivirus the spyware would immediately shut it down; if i wanted to log into my email the window would mysteriously close; and if i wanted to search for "anti spyware" on google, THAT window would automatically close. what a shittifyingly cunning thing the spyware is! i bet if i surfed porn it would be absolutely OK, as opposed to me trying to clean up my hard drive. not that i surf porn or anything. i don't. really!

anyway, yes. i had something important to blog about:

today my day has been radically different from any other day this year, because, i have met the man of my dreams. well not exactly literally but i'm sure you know what i mean. anyway, this revelation occured at the coffeebean near my house, and was in the form of the Guy Behind the Counter. and mind you, he wasn't just cute or hot (which he was, by the way), he was also polite and cheerful and efficient. i could judge all this just by the way he handled the cash register and prepared my order. no Ice Blended Malibu Dream will ever match up to the one i had today. like, everything about him was swoon-worthy, right up to the way he said "sam? here's your order.. thank you and enjoy your day sam!" the only problem then, was that i was too tongue-tied to say anything but "thank you".

that's it! nothing but a feeble "thank you" like the way you say "thank you" when someone holds the door for you or something. this CLEARLY warranted more than just a gesture of appreciation; it warranted worship of some sort. but there i was, the ditzy and klutzy person that i am, screwing up my ONE chance of ever living happily ever after. this Guy Behind the Counter is different from all others, and my instincts tell me that he must be treated with the same reverence as The One. henceforth i have a target, and shall stake out the coffeebean outlet for The One whenever possible.

go ahead, laugh. -you- didn't get served by an incredibly crush-erific Guy Behind the Counter, so there.

it's the first day of the holidays.

the rmun briefing was relatively painless, though there were times when i felt my blood pressure sky-rocket. these mostly occured when claud or matt were alerted to various screw-ups, and proceeded to rectify the situation with a slew of flustered hand motions or, in matt's case, a lesson in how very versatile the f-word actually is-

1. as a noun and adverb:

"why the fuck can't you just fucking follow the fucking instructions"

2. as an adverb and verb:

"it's when you think you're so fucking smart and don't fucking do as you're told that you fuck up the whole thing"

3. as a noun:

"[insert name] is a real fucker"

4. as a verb:

"tell [insert secondary school] to fuck off"

5. to form a compound word:

"how un-fucking-professional."

there must have been others too, but i can't remember all. anyway, excuse me but i'm not bitching per se; i am relating what i found marginally hilarious, given the context of things. anyway most of the time the negative energy was chanelled between the both of them, and therefore was somewhat contained. i'm not blaming them for being in shit moods, because i would probably have been that way too. it's just that i have long reached the state of blissful nonchalance with all things concerning hissoc, and so am unaffected when things screw up, as i am sure they inevitably will. (no doubt this is my fault, but whatever).

also, in a cunning ploy to cut short kwok's "warm welcome speech" to the secondary schools, we decided to present him with a birthday cake to celebrate his belated birthday, right in front of all the secondary school kids. you can just imagine how pleased he was, what with all the attention directed to him. later, however, i got a different perspective from shang- "you should have seen the horrified look on his face when this whole bunch of girls emerged carrying his face. he was like, 'why no guys???'" hahahaha. exposed.

after hissoc i met up with a few classmates to play captain's ball under the hot sun in the open space next to the canteen. there were only 7 of us, so we all had to run like mad. i must have burnt 50000 calories or something. plus, somehow my teammates INSISTED on throwing high balls, which they obviously knew i wouldn't be able to reach, given my status in the height department. dammit, it's not my fault that i'm short!

ended off the afternoon with triple decker cheesecake at coffeebean. i swear it is the BEST cheesecake i have ever tasted in my whole entire life. if there is a nirvana for food, this is it. my month-long quest for the best cheesecake is now officially over; i have found it and there is nothing else that can compare. the only thing that comes close is the NYDC oreo cheesecake, but even then, it didn't have the thick layer of crushed oreos that the coffeebean one had.

i'm shallow, so sue me.

i cut my hair today! was seriously thinking of chopping it all off and going for something between a butch-cut and a bob (more specifically, the jennifer aniston look of 2001), but luckily good sense prevailed and i realised that

1) i always look like crap with short hair
2) jennifer aniston has a personal stylist everyday and i don't
3) even if i did manage to get jennifer aniston's hair, i would never be able to carry off the look
4) it will take 6 months to get over the mistake
5) the process of growing my hair back will be a pain

and so, i really have my mom to thank, because had she not insisted we all go for lunch at swensen's before that, i might have gone ahead with the short hair plan, and disaster would have struck. and this post might have been radically different, consisting, i think, mainly of suicidal tendencies and expletives. i wonder why people even have to have hair in the first place. it's just like an extra thing which you have to worry about and wash and comb/brush and style everyday. and like if you're lazy and don't wash your hair for 2 days or something, (hypothetically speaking, of course) you feel guilty about it, like as if you're turning into some monstrous disgusting slime fest. which would never be the case if you didn't have hair to begin with. really, the human body never ceases to amaze.

finally watched Hitch yesterday- it's hilarious! it's funny but not even in a completely brainless way, plus there's quite a bit of tongue action, so really, there's something for everybody. go watch it if you haven't already!

and tomorrow i have to go to school at SEVEN in the MORNING for this cruddy briefing, which should be a crime punishable by law because it's the HOLIDAYS and nobody is supposed to be out of bed when the hour is still a single digit. i wish i didn't have to go. but i guess it's marginally important, considering it involves around 30 schools and considering it's the largest student-run conference in singapore. and also, there's the slight problem that -i- am giving the briefing, which sorta complicates things seeing that i can't obviously pon it, can i?

damn, and they call these the holidays.

today has been quite a tiring day!

confirming my theory that our teachers are in a conspiracy is against us- GP, PE and break collaborated to give our class a 3 hour break, on a day when we couldn't go to j8 because the break was too early and couldn't go later either because we had chem SPA. like how sick is that!
but, being the proactive people that we are, we were undeterred by this attempt to ruin our day. i never thought i'd EVER see the day when i'd go looking for a PE teacher and ASK for PE- me who devises elaborate plans to pon every lesson- and i'd never thought i'd be UPSET that PE was CANCELLED. what is the world coming too eh!

the clarification for that: if i am being made to run like a horse around the track by a PE teacher when what i really feel like is a good long nap, then i am doing so against my will, and restricting the freedom of my choice and will is the utmost violation of my human liberty. however, if i become aware of the fact that i am getting lazy and fat, decide to do something about it, and hence choose to run like a horse around the track, then it is no longer a violation of my freedom and thus perfectly acceptable. so you see, there -is- a logic behind the whole PE ponning issue.

anyway, the reason we were looking for the PE teachers was to borrow a ball so we could play captain's ball as a class. or a few of us in the class anyway. in the end we played 5 on 4: the girls plus gerald/joseph versus the guys. and we didn't get THAT badly thrashed too! go us! it kinda sucked playing with the guys though, because they play like monsters. like they play as if they're on some continuous 100m sprint, only it's not 100m and it's not a sprint. plus people like bobo are so cunning, it's like one moment there's no one around you, and then the next moment, this stick like extension of an arm appears in thin air and there's bobo, grabbing the ball before you even have time to whack him in the face, or anything violent like that. in fact at one point nic got so irritated with marc joe always intercepting her balls, that when he caught the ball, she jumped on top of him and just wouldn't let go! and mj was at a loss because obviously it's highly ungentlemanly to tackle a girl, so i think we got possession again after that. hahahaha. it's too bad we didn't have tung and her tunginator power, but all in, it was pretty fun.

oh, and i realised that sports fulfils very different purposes for girls and guys:

guys play sports highly competitively, and mostly spare little thought for the safety of their body parts or anybody else's, for that matter. guys strategize before they play, and operate in a very military-style, no-nonsense way, even if it's just a friendly match. and they sweat as if some inbuilt water bag has exploded and left them and their surroundings drenched with uric acid. after they play, they sit down and stare at each other for prolonged periods of time, making little or no verbal communication.

girls, on the other hand, play in a way that reflects how they interact socially, minus the bitchiness- aggression is usually more subtle, they try to include everybody when passing balls, and encourage each other even when someone's screwed up their game for them. they don't sweat like wild pigs. when someone falls down or gets injured, everybody stops and shows concern. and after they play, girls usually walk off quickly, drink water, and talk nonstop about who was the most violent or what was the funniest part. and, since they feel really good about doing all that exercise, they eat!

that, i suppose, is why girls hardly lose weight when they exercise. because after they exercise, they eat. and so the fat goes back on, and the exercise was a waste of time, as far as diets are concerned. a few of us are on a mission to help feifei aka spherica aka erotica pornstar lose weight, so we've gotten really good at this dirty trick of talking about how much oil and fats there are in whatever food she wants to buy, which usually results in her being so disgusted that she doesn't buy it. and, on the occasion that she does go ahead and buy the food, she usually shares it around to feel less guilty, and so, we win too!

oh, and the best part is that after i got back from school, my mom, who is now ALSO on this healthy lifestyle thing, asked me to go to the gym with her. and so i felt obliged to treadmill away with her, as such fulfilling my exercise quota for the rest of the week. tomorrow i will be allowed to sit on the couch and rot, as i inevitably will end up doing, since it's the FIRST DAY OF THE HOLIDAYS!!!!

yay!!

ok, i have to make an amendment to my previous post. apparently, there are people who actually -did- catch the entire song that nah sang, as is proven by this excerpt from audrey's blog:

"Oh! The real reason why I wanted to post this today was because I wanted to type this out before I forget: during bio lect yesterday, mr nah showed us one of the most hilarious things I have ever seen. This goes way up there with the end of the world video. (warning: do not watch with parents around!)

Anyway, back to what mr nah showed us. It was some homer simpson drawing with him lying on a couch holding a beer, and before you ask yourself "hmm, I wonder what this has to do with biotechnology?", it had absolutely -nothing- to do with bio. So anyway on to what was in the speech bubble of the drawing:

DOUGH... the stuff that buys me beer
RAY... the guy who sells me beer
ME... the guy who drinks the beer
FAR... the distance to my beer
SO... I think I'll have a beer
LA... lalalalala beer
TEA... no thanks, I'll have a beer
That will bring us back to
D'OH!

That was the only interesting and mildly useful thing on his slides for the entire lecture, so I'd say I've been pretty attentive, eh?"

i also think it's a bit freaky how the both of us tend to post almost similar things. i guess that's what you get when you're classmates with someone for 7 years, and friends for almost 9.

today something happened during physics lec:

while benny lee was lecturing, erica and wanling were taking turns to play the "tap the shoulder" trick on chrees- the one where you mysteriously try to tap a person on their shoulder and not let them catch you doing it. anyway, wanling and erica were both failing horribly at it, so i decided to join in. unfortunately i'm just as pathetic, so when i leant over to tap chrees, it was a bit obvious and she noticed it, and said a very exasperated "be-nny!". since 'benny' is the term of endearment my class has given me, chrees' exclamation must have just been a very natural reaction, and nothing unusual at all, right?

only, as luck would have it, when chrees cried "be-nny!", the lecturer had momentarily stopped talking and so the whole LT was quiet. so it really sounded more like "BE-NNY!". and then, it also so happened that the lecturer was benny lee himself, so he thought that the "BE-NNY!" was actually referring to him. also, it's too bad that his last sentence before that was something like "so we'll finish up this last example before going for a break", so it sounded like chrees' wail was in response to that. and so, poor confused benny lee looked up and said "huh?", with the most quizzical expression i've ever seen.

that's when the sheer jack-ness of the situation hit us and our whole class started laughing like mad. seriously it was so HILARIOUS, i nearly died laughing. it's a good thing it was almost the end of lecture too, because our whole class couldn't stop snorting and giggling after that.

poor chrees- now she has to live with people constantly going "BE-NNY!" to her and reminding her of her one moment of misfortune. i guess i feel kinda bad, cos in a way it was partly my fault that she ended up malu-ating herself like that.

people who insist on giving other people horrible nicknames like "benny"- beware!

currently, i am supposed to be writing my bio S essay, titled:

"Discuss the similarities and the differences between mitochondria and chloroplast with reference to energy transformations and their prokaryotic origins."

which is presenting a bit of a problem given that mitochondria and chloroplast are microscopic organelles barely 1 micrometre in length, and as such nobody really gives a shit about them, much less with reference to their energy transformations and their prokaryotic origins. and i am supposed to be producing a FIVE PAGE essay on this! have you heard of anything more ridiculous than that??? something tells me this is going to be a long night.

in happier news, today rathi ho and the GP teachers were off on some course, so we finished school at 12 today. which is just as well, since it was our triple science lecture day, and God knows that the human brain can only take so much. only bio lecture was a waste of time though, especially when nah started singing the most spasticated homer simpson song ever. it went something like:

"dough, a food to go with beer,
ray, the light that shines through beer,
me, the one who drinks the beer,
far, the distance from the beer"

and so on and so forth. how that had ANYTHING to do with biotechnology i have no idea. all i know was that my stomach was dissolving itself with hunger and that it was about then that the voice in my head started saying "cheesecake! cheesecake!"

after physics lec quite a few people from class decided to catch the 1pm show for Hitch at j8. i am proud to say that i resisted temptation. i am supposed to be saving money and movie quota so that i can blow it during the holidays, which are ONLY A WEEK AWAY! anyway, the saving money bit sorta didn't work out, because i caved into the "cheesecake!" chant at coffee bean, and HAD to have the rasberry cheesecake brick with erica. and then, of course, i had to have an ice blended drink and other food to go with it. incidentally, erica claims that she lost 0.5 kg after running for half an hour yesterday, which sounds a little dubious. i never knew exercise had such rapid effects! anyway fishie immediately dismissed it as 'nonsense', saying that if it were true, she'd lose 2kg every training session. which i guess would be a bit freaky. because where does all that weight go to? do you sweat it out as sweat? or do the fats like vapourise or something??

omg i need to start my essay!!

sorry, little screw up: the previous 2 posts are actually earlier ones which got deleted. the latest is the 3rd one down. too lazy to republish in proper manner.

was meaning to talk about this one of these days, and since i've just been accused of having an obsession "about fitness and being fat and stuff", i guess now's the appropriate time to speak out.

1. why is it that our society (particularly asian, and particularly singaporean) wants women to be thin? why is it that advertisements always feature stick thin models, and why is it that all our female pop stars (think jolin tsai, fann wong etc) have to look consistently anorexic in order to be popular? where does this inbuilt desire to be thin stem from?

i’ll share something: 4 years ago, i had this gymnastics coach from china who was not only a scarily flexible contortionist, but was also scarily thin. this was the muscular sort of thin, btw, not the grossly flabby and flaccid sort of thin. anyway, this coach of mine used to stress that all of us on the gym team follow her nutrition regime: starvation. i swear, whenever we had successive b div and c div training sessions and she had to train us from 9am to 3pm, we never once saw her eat anything. in fact, the only thing that entered her mouth was water. i remember how horrified she would be whenever a few of us would enter the gymnasium holding plastic bags of burgers and fries, or even drinking from paper cups with "coca cola" labelled conspicuously across them. even remnants of junk food were offensive to her, and she would never allow us to get away with leaving even empty bags of food in front of her. then, there’d be her usual "you’re getting fat and need to lose weight" speeches, followed by an extra set of PT for the victims. i remember having to balance on tip-toes with one leg in a vertical splits position for 10 minutes once after this madwoman determined that the 0.5 kg i had gained was preventing me from executing her routines properly. seriously, i hated her.

i think that in western societies, the ideal body weight of females is a lot healthier than what we asians perceive it to be. maybe it's because women over there get to hide under layers of clothes for most parts of the year? the newspaper once ran this article on local celebrities and their weights, and practically every single one of them (female, 20-somethings) had body mass indexes (BMIs) of 16-18. what’s considered the "healthy" range is 18.5- 25. yet, we have all these people plastered on slimming ads where they relate their "success stories", as such ingraining in us the idea that thin is beautiful.

it doesn’t stop there. the more you think about it, the more you realise that you don’t just want to be thin; you want to be thin thin thin. sumiko tan once wrote that even though she’s probably considered slim, she still harbours the guilty desire of being even thinner than this, and that this new standard of "thin" evolves into something that is continually changing and thus continually sought after. i think that to some extent, all women share this view, including myself. and because of this, we are never content with the way our bodies are, and are on perpetual crusades against the new spots of "flab" that keep appearing in the mirror.

so really, i guess our society as a whole has evolved into one that is "fatophobic" and constantly assaulted by media that perpetuates this. although perhaps the irony is that along with our increasing obsession with being thin has followed the rise of deep-fried fast food empires. so, maybe we're eating more unhealthily, but we're also more conscious of it? and while we harp on about "inner beauty", none of us wants to be faced with the stigma of being the fat girl who's always inadvertently the butt of insensitive jokes.

2. which leads to the next point: exercise. here i need to clarify that i wasn’t always an exercise freak. for the most part of my life, i have sought to be sedentary and laughed at people who go to the gym. but this changed last year when i came to JC and discovered that there exist whole congregations of girls who actually voluntarily exercise on a regular basis (in fact, my first theory on why almost every girl in rj is thin was that all the fat girls are locked up in a broom cupboard so that nobody sees them.) it took me a while to get over this initial shock, but eventually i submitted to the idea that people nowadays tend to exercise to keep fit. and so i started exercising, and soon joined the ranks of those whom i had previously classified as freaks.

to clarify another thing: exercise in itself is not fun. maybe this wasn’t clear in my previous blogs, but after thinking about it for some time, i can confirm that exercise itself isn’t an end, but the means to an end. you exercise to lose weight, you exercise to get toned, you exercise to not fail your napfa—losing weight, getting toned and not failing napfa are all fun; exercise isn’t. it’s just something which you have to do in order to achieve your desired result, and (if you’re lucky) settles into being a past-time which provides a purposeful avenue to channel your energy to. nobody enjoys running on the treadmill, you only run because this running is going to help you become thinner or win a marathon. and in the event that you –do- enjoy running for no reason at all, then you genuinely are some kind of sick freak, and have more to worry about than just your weight.

3. on why us girls tend to obsess about diets and fitness—it's true, but that’s just how we are! guys obsess about sports, cars, and computers, so why can’t girls obsess about how we look? it’s been proven that women’s conversations typically revolve around diet and clothes, but what’s wrong with that? half of us in the world have to fulfil the feminine quota, and what else do you expect us to talk about, newtonian physics???

what do you think?

today, school sucked. like most days, it was long, boring, and horrible. the only difference was that today ended at 4 with a bang (ie bio SPA) and also i discovered that 6 days from now i will be taking 3 papers in a row- physics SPA and GP common test papers 1 and 2. this means roughly 5 hours of continuous mental exertion; that’s 5 more than what you should have to do in an entire week. plus today i also had to put up with markwang’s non-stop suanning about me being a cow, looking like a guppy, and liking certain unfortunate male specimens. life is so unfair.

also, because i owe my most notable physics spa screw-up (ie the one that won the Pulleys Anonymous award) to a lack of prior information on the exam question, i have decided that that will never happen again. it also helps that i have my mom’s blessing on this, she who has urged me to “keep updated” with speculations on test questions which are Coming Attractions. which is why I was thoroughly informed on the bio SPA i had to do today.

as such, i spent half of today worrying about whether i should use potato cubes of uniform thickness or potato discs of negligible thickness, or potato strips of different lengths, or “potato stock” as half the guys in my class were in favour of. however, seeing that a food blender is probably not on the list of Common Items to be Found in the Biology Lab (on that front i must say pulleys do have an advantage, because surely they’re common items in the physics labs!) i decided against the option of creating catalase soup from potato chunks and water. in fact i wasn’t sure if the guys were just pulling my leg because they wanted to see write “mash the potato, then mix with one part water and blend well” in my a level report, so i decided to just do it the safe way and chop up little potato cubes. in the end i think miss hor said we could make “certain assumptions” about the availability of catalase solution, which btw i think is a load of bullshit because nobody i know carries a test-tube of 1.0 m catalase solution (aq) around in their pockets. they shouldn’t be allowed to use catalase solution! that’s cheating!

i bet nobody will listen to me.

it's the end of the week!

so what's been new and happenin' in my life? last check: nothing! if not for today being j8 day with the girls, it would have been a complete waste of time. PE with the himbo revolved around throwing tennis balls up into the air, hitting them across half the court, and then running across in unison with the rest of the class to retrieve the balls and begin the process again. like i could almost have fallen asleep during PE. and the only thing stopping me from ponning the period altogether was the thought of coffeebean and food later on at j8. especially since i had to listen to hunger pangs from both my growling stomach and my partner, fishie, who for 40 minutes verbalised her decision-making process for choosing between crystal jade chicken wings, roast duck rice, bread talk and KFC as her lunch preference(s).

anyway, it appears that the rest of the girls in class are concurrently on diets, albeit for different reasons. feifei dearest is trying to lose 1kg so that she can qualify as lightweight in her upcoming judo competition, chrees and nicole think that their faces are fat, fishie has been told by her maid that she's "getting chubby", and wanling (who has no need to lose any weight whatsoever) is accompanying feifei and chrees. and so, they have all taken to bringing ham-and-cheese sandwiches to school for lunch, which have been deemed "healthy" by our resident dietician josie. it's a good thing we didn't get chased out of coffeebean. after lunch somebody had the bright idea of taking a group neoprint, which as usual, turned out highly spasticated and unflattering. i think i should just give up on taking photos; cameras hate me. anyway because of this little neoprint escapade, we ended up having to run all the way back to school for chem prac, during which i could feel my Ice-blended Malibu Dream bobbing up and down between my stomach and the back of my throat. it was a most disgusting sensation, but at least i was getting the most mileage for the money i paid for the drink, since in effect i got to taste it twice. haha! is that gross or is that gross?

bio S was a waste of time- if i am to do well in it, then i have 6 months to transform myself into a book-hugging nerd who can randomly spit out the full scientific names of various genes in our body. like gee, that'd have great practical applications in later life- imagine how much easier it'd be to fight a cold flu if you know exactly which part of your cell's DNA is being assaulted! as i was saying, i need to become a nerd. my target is to mug the whole of the 1500 page Campbell bio textbook. once Campbell is my friend, i shall proceed to memorise scientific journals. cambridge markers had better watch out! ha ha ha!

joseph (ie josie) had a number of burning questions today. one of which is not repeatable here as it is clearly the working of a sick brain. another one is quite interesting though- if identical twins have exact genetic makeups, then technically one of them can get away with murder and blame it on the other, because nobody'd be able to prove from DNA who's at fault. apparently there was this guy who screwed his twin's wife and got her pregnant, and then went to court to fight for custody of the kid. but because DNA tests couldn't tell which twin fathered the kid, and because of the absurdity of the case, the judge ended up granting joint custody to the guys. and also, how did siamese twins chang and eng manage to get it on with different women, PLUS have several kids while at it? singaporeans should be ashamed of our birth rates, because if siamese twins can do it, then surely -you- can do it too!

to finish off the week, i decided to run around the track, and was surprised that joseph volunteered to accompany me. at first i was apprehensive because guys tend to be of the "i'm so hot, i did my 2.4 in 9 minutes" mentality and love to show off how they can sprint 6 laps without breaking into a sweat. and that is NOT my idea of a jog. but luckily joseph is a decent guy, as far as guys these days go at least, and so there was none of that nonsense. i think his girlfriend has it real good because he's clearly very much committed to her too, which is something she shouldn't take for granted because joseph is seriously one of the best materials for boyfriends that i've seen in a long long long while. i hope he invites me to their wedding someday, which, seeing how things are going, may not be that far off from now. :p