i have been feeling incredibly stressed the past few days, and am not in the mood to say much except for a few little things today:

1. yawn! it has taken me a long time to make this connection, but now i know that the reason why i yawn so much is because yawning is an involuntary reflex enabling our lungs to take in great amounts of oxygen, and i need more oxygen because i have low blood pressure! it occured to me today during anatomy tutorial when i was freezing my ass off in front of the air con vent and my fingernails had all turned 50% blue and i couldn't stop yawning to save my life. incidentally, i admit that part of the yawns might have been out of boredom since we had our first TWO HOUR tutorial in the creepy anatomy hall. plus i was being blocked by a hanging skeleton, so halfway through i had to get up and push it aside. somehow, i managed to accidentally knock some of the bones, and almost toppled the entire skeleton onto myself, which was when i obviously let out a very unladylike swear that sort of resonated in the excellent acoustics of the creepy hall. definitely a good thing that our tutor is going deaf and wears a turban.

2. vote for paul twohill! i would normally be ashamed to admit that i follow singapore idol, but today i have to say that paul's sad face at the end of the judge's comments really struck a chord with me. it's as if he's always been the insecure, awkward child who's just trying to make something of himself, and today the immense strength that it takes to keep up that front really showed. he may not be hot, but he reminds me of all the times i tried to pretend that people's stares didn't bother me and all the times i tried to fit in only to trip on my face. poor paul! last week i was really rooting for joakim just to stick it up ken's face and i'm glad he made it through to entertain us again with a much-improved but still hilariously poor performance. in fact, i look forward to watching joakim every week because his lousy singing is truly testimony to how singaporeans really do have a sense of humour, and are prepared to show it by voting religiously to keep him in. but, as much as i've been endeared to him, i think this week paul deserves a break. remember all the times you've been publicly humiliated for trying your best in a competition and sms 5 to 43657! let's save paul!

i have been a Class A grouch recently, but now i have hope that tomorrow will be a better day :)

big news everyone: as of yesterday i have officially become a licensed driver!

when i was thinking about this post, the first phrase i thought of was license to kill. but now that i'm remembering how if i kill anybody or even come close to it, i'll be fined plus my license will be revoked, that phrase suddenly isn't so funny anymore. it has not been easy getting this damn license and God knows i can't pass the test twice.

the reason i say that is of course not because of my lack of skill, but because i was blessed with almost perfect conditions yesterday. i had like one of the most lax testers in the history of the universe, who was so chin-chye about things that he nearly made me parallel park twice. then i had to tell him which route he was supposed to test me on, which happened to be a bad one because it involved the tiny ubi road 4 which is always congested with parked vehicles along one lane. but this tester apparently was in no mood for jams and delays, so he practically gave me straight roads all the way. plus, when i had to overtake the roads were almost completely clear! i was shocked when he asked me to turn back into the circuit so fast, because he completely missed testing me on U-turns and emergency breaks. i thought maybe i had driven onto a bus lane or something and he was too mean to tell me to my face. then he was like 'overall you were okay' and started calculating my demerit points and then when he ticked the 'passed' box i was like shocked beyond belief. i think i went like 'thank you SOOO MUCH!' and nearly had a bimbo moment but whateverrr, i PASSED! :D

anyway, the sad part is that my parents, just like my driving instructor and boyfriend, have determined that i am Not To Be Trusted with the car. so now i only get to drive around the estate and maybe short trips to nearby places. i definitely should not have told my mom how i space out after 30 minutes of driving. anyway i suppose it's just as well cos the only thing i get to drive is an MPV which is hard to park, and i also haven't really driven an auto car legally before. but considering how i have this tendency of stalling manual cars, i think having no clutch is obviously a good thing. at least i know how to operate a manual car though, which will come in handy when i get my red ferrari.

in other news, i need to train up! now that i have a Goal i will need to have discipline to match or face public humiliation. i'm thinking of going for the terry fox run soon since it's at sentosa where the scenery is nice! anyone interested? :)

so it's almost the end of the week and i've managed to get through quite unscathed. i'm proud of myself ;)

as a little point though, this has been a rather slack week timetable-wise and the Interesting Things of The Day have included first aid practical tests, like today. i have to admit that i was actually quite worried about the test, mostly because i am completely devoid of any psychomotor abilities, as all my classmates over the years will attest to. i am, like, a psychomotor freak. doing things the normal way is just uninstinctive for me, which is why i tend to make totally awkward movements and miss catching objects which are thrown at me. anyway, being a psychomotor freak means that i might actually kill a person while trying to perform CPR, instead of bringing him back to life, which is a problem because saving lives is one of the things which doctors are expected to do. for example i always end up positioning myself to do chest compressions directly onto the dummy's rib cage instead of its sternum, despite the fact that my hands actually find and start off at the right spot. mark says my hands have a way of wiggling into awkward positions no matter what, and i hate to say it but i think he's right! anyway the good news is that it was just a dummy and not a real live person, plus we got 3 tries each to save its life. haha!

what wasn't so funny though was discovering the station after adult CPR yesterday: INFANT CPR. at this point you're probably going wtf?! and guess what, that was exactly what i was thinking too! and the guy demonstrating was so anal that he kept making us practice flipping the stupid baby dummy over and whacking its back and then kept pretending that it couldn't breathe so that he could keep making us do rescue breathing into its gross little plastic nose and mouth. it seemed as if he was actually getting a kick out of watching us give frantic mouth-to-mouth to a plastic dummy, and i wanted to throw the bloody baby at him. anyway after all that i started worrying and having a minor panic attack because i was dreading displaying my lack of psychomotor skills on the baby. but then guess what, they didn't even test it! i feel a bit cheated :( all the worrying yesterday gave me major OCD involving watching excessive tv and eating like mad after dinner. definitely detrimental to the health!

as for tomorrow, i foresee it will be a completely different story because we have cadaver class number 2. we had to take an oath to be respectful of the bodies, which btw i am because i would never be gracious enough to offer mine up in the name of science, but from a completely objective and scientific point of view, the preserved bodies look a bit like terriyaki chicken =P i think to be safe i will steer clear of jap food altogether for lunch tomorrow. and then of course we have tutorial with our professor who talks at the rate of roughly 5 words per minute, so i think i will need a good rest tonight and lots of coffee to get me through the day.

and now, i think i shall go reflect on what a horrible person i really am...

the past few days have been mostly horrible and partly stressful, and i've been going through a bit of a grouchy and not to mention luckless phase. but through the minor disasters and major mood swings, i'm glad that i could always count on coming home to people who love me, and homey food to remind me that i'll never be too old for my favourite things.

and of course, mark, who is my sanity through all the madness.

today has been such an incredibly bad day for me :(

at midnight this morning i saw a vacancy for my driving practical on the 25th of this month, which is great because my original retest date was on the 25th of october which is like 2 months later. so i quickly jumped on the chance to book it, which meant cancelling my prior booking first because you can't hold 2 at the same time. but the moment i clicked the button to confirm the new date, the bloody server lagged on me and took like five years to process it. by that time, i got another message box popping up saying 'Sorry, there is no vacancy for that slot!' and then when i tried to go back to book the first date which i got, that one had been taken up too. which means, i now no longer have any test date :( what a great way to kick start the day...

then, i woke up this morning with a sore throat, a tiny voice, and a runny nose. after 3 glasses of water before breakfast, eating bread still felt like stuffing razors down my throat. plus, i spent half the time in school today frantically gripping my nose with a tissue. and because of my throat i had to sacrifice the morning coffee, so i had to keep awake during lecs and tutorials without caffeine. i think i must have yawned at least thirty times during anatomy tutorial so i bet my professor hates me. a good first impression, that.

when break finally rolled around, i managed to sit down for about one minute with my food before i realised some brown splatter on my bag and my wallet which was sitting near the top of my bag. it took me a few moments to register that i had BIRD SHIT ON MY WALLET AND MY NEW BAG. and it wasn't even like solid hard white shit which is marginally cleaner, it was bird diarrhoea. omg, it was disgusting. and the best part is that today is the FIRST day that i brought my new pink bag to school. of all the places the bird could have taken its shit, it had to do it directly over the opening of my bag, so that it landed on both the outside and the inside and my wallet. and, of all the days this could have happened to me, it just had to be today. can you believe my luck?!!

finally, to make things worse, we had anatomy practical right after lunch. so i got to spend one and a half hours in the company of cadavers with my food still sitting undigested in my stomach. at first i was quite freaked by the thought of the dead bodies, but when i saw how they were all yellowish and skinless and barely recognisable, i just felt sick. then of course the smell of the embalming fluid started overpower, but here i lucked out because of my nose malfunction. this luck stopped however, when my professor flipped off the cadaver's rib cage and started poking about the thorax and abdomen. as he was fingering the intestines and spleen and trying to show us how nerves feel different from blood vessels, he inadvertently flicked all these little pieces of tissue off them, and guess which direction the little pieces of tissue flew? so, while i have to say that my first experience with dead bodies wasn't as bad as i had anticipated (and here i suspect that it's only because my day could only get -so- bad), it certainly was a less than pleasant afternoon.

anyone had a worse day?

this is the oil painting i fell in love with at the national gallery in london. up close, the silver streaks across the canvas actually shimmer and the shading changes when you look at it from different angles:


Lake Keitele
Akseli Gallen-Kallela, 1865-1931.

i don't know why i'm suddenly having such an affinity for pictures of deadbeat lakes, but here is a cool photo from the site where i love to steal wallpaper from:


Lake Sublime
Steven Davis

and this is me:


Hot Hot Hot

cheers!

yesterday was nus Flag Day which means that there was a high chance you were accosted by someone in a puke blue shirt between 0600 and 2200 hours asking you to donate to some noble nus charity shit. since it's all part of the great rag and flag tradition where the faculty which collects the most money wins, the m2s have been nagging at us for weeks to turn up to help extort money yesterday. our og was supposed to flag at toa payoh, but ended up being public nuisances around bugis and city hall, where we dispersed in order to divide and conquer. except, when we got started around 11 (after a good mac's breakfast) we discovered that dentistry and arts year1s had beat us to prime locations. mandy and i started the day off at bugis and walked through raffles city and suntec, where we were invariably sucked into the shops. whatever could we do; we were merely serving our national duty as fine patriots of the economy! anyway, for the hour or so that we actually -did- our charity work, we practically raped joshua and woochiao flat, especially given the amount of haggling and travelling and begging which went into their one-third-full cans. haha! it's all about the innocent beseeching look and the polite 'excuse me sir, would you like to make a donation?' and then of course there's the 'thankyousomuchsir' or the 'fuckoffsir' depending on the kind of response we solicited. mostly we didn't need to use much of the latter, although we were amazed at how many people would actually risk their lives to cross the road in the face of oncoming traffic just to avoid being stuck with us at red lights.

so, compared to the excitement and activity (haha) of yesterday, today has really been a next to comatose day for me. i spent half of it sleeping and the majority of my waking hours doing 'arty farty' things as mark just called it. i painted 2 ikea photo frames in the afternoon, one of which was in a yellow colour which looks ok from certain angles and makes me feel like puking from others:



i wanted to spray it with fixative so that the paint won't keep coming off on my hands when i touch them, but i couldn't find the can of spray which i bought in december, and the mental exertion from searching and getting pissed caused me to develop a headache which required even more sleep afterwards. then i touched up the stitching on the pencil cases i made earlier on and sewed down the straps on my bag which keeps falling apart everytime i pick it up. so it has been quite a productive day, except that i haven't quite started doing what i was supposed to do in the first place, which is: study.

apparently some people in my og are so kiasu that they've like studied the entire cell biology chapter and first aid course book which were uploaded onto mednet, and this is stressing me out because it is making me feel more stupid than i need to feel. i looked through the first aid book and immediately i knew there would be trouble because half of it is like common sensical stuff, which is a problem because i don't do very well in situations requiring common sense. plus, the grand finale is to perform CPR on a dummy, which i am not looking forward to because i am not keen on putting my mouth onto a pair of unhygeinic unwashed plastic lips.

happy national day everyone!

today a terrible thing happened: i peeled! i noticed a whitish patch on my left shoulder just after i got back from a quick run, and on closer inspection, a whole roll of skin literally came off my arm. i thought it was a skin disease and that i was going to die. so i decided to take a long hot bath, and at the end of it, i discovered patches on both my right and left shoulders. now i look like i have barnacles growing on me, which i suppose is retribution for laughing at mandy last week. damn, and i kinda liked my tan :(

school is starting very soon, and so i have been slacking like mad the past few days. for someone who doesn't even own access to cable, i sure watch a lot of tv. a typical day involves me sitting on the couch from 6-12, watching tv nonstop except for quick runs to the kitchen and toilet. i have watched enough oprah to be almost completely desensitized to the usual tearjerkers she loves to feature. this is certainly no way to live a fulfilling life, but i am to be excused because i am making up for the slack time i will inevitably lose in the near future.

yesterday was bond signing and matriculation day, and for the first time in a long while i felt the familiar surge of Stress and Death which i feel whenever i know i'm doomed. the bond period is for the course of studies plus housemanship plus another 5 years in government slavery, which means that i will most probably never get married and have children, and so i will die a lonesome death all by my lonesome self. plus, i finally went to get my textbooks with mark, and they cost like five million bucks which is a huge rip off because all they have are like pictures of skeletons. the fact that i couldn't even carry them by myself is certainly not a good sign either...

in happier news, today i cooked cheeseburgers for dinner! the patty turned out a bit weird but at least everyone agreed that my fried veges rocked. and on monday i cooked prawn noodles and attempted tsubaki-inspired prawn tempura, which was very brave considering that the batter requires 1 cup flour and 1 egg, which means that i came into contact with a real live raw egg. it was disgusting but i braved it in the name of food. anyway according to my sister the tempura was ok albeit bland, plus i can't figure out how to cook it without having the damn prawn curl up halfway in a most unappetizing pose. help, please!

oh and on sunday night i treated my TP debaters to swensons and they gave me this really cute bouquet of roses. i was quite touched! then i left the bouquet in my room till just now and the bloody baby breath began rotting and stinking up my room. so now it's hung upside down on the little bamboo screen behind my study area where they will become dried flowers which i can admire forever and be reminded of the time when i was actually responsible for the wellbeing of people other than myself.

time to catch project runway now!