it's 2 in the morning, i'm staring at my genetic notes and the horrible droning voice of prof jayaseelan is coming back to me and dragging me towards the wonderful land of sleep. soon i will be dreaming of cheesecake and other Happy Things, and life will be good again.

so, the 2nd day of CNY is finally over, and normal life can soon return. every year i dread CNY because it spells endless meaningless visiting, and altogether more contact with the parents than is humanly tolerable. i find it a drag talking to relatives who barely know anything about what's going on in your life, and then dole out advice in patronising tones. each time they see me, they ask my age and what course i'm studying, and proceed with a snippet of their own personal experience with someone in the field.

for eg, the other day one of them described his impression of doctors almost exclusively through explicit teochew phrases, and i had to sit by with a fake smile on my face pretending to be amused. at the end of it, i gathered that he was a medic in the army, and that he didn't quite like the MOs he worked with. omg, a medic telling me that doctors are useless?? like, fuck off already. then of course another irritating thing is that i don't understand the bits of dialect, and therefore fail to find whatever joke they might making funny. i'm sorry but it's not my fault that my parents don't speak dialect at home :( i'm innocent! besides, i have the feeling that if i did learn dialect, its ultimate purpose would be to enhance my vocabulary of expletives. hmm, but that might not be too bad an idea at all, come to think of it.

so, this is why i hate visiting so much, and why i end up sitting anti-socially with my sis (and sometimes mom) in front of the TV, rotting my brains out watching whichever stupid travel show happens to be playing. whenever there is food in front of me, i take the opportunity to stuff my mouth continuously, in order to further minimise conversations of mock sincerity about things nobody gives a shit about. apathy might be a social ill, but at least i'm not a hypocrite.

anyway, so that was pretty much how my CNY went. if not for the angpaos i would have absolutely no incentive to go, and i certainly think i will put a stop to it from next year onwards. i cannot afford to waste whatever precious free time i have on such senseless activities, when it could be better spent watching the latest episodes of Grey's / Scrub's / Prison break. or i could be reading the Princess Diaries! that would totally help me acheive self-actualisation.

incidentally, the other day i awoke with bad orthostatic hypotension and managed to stub my third finger in a dazed sleep walk to the staircase railing. as a result i've had a swollen third distal interphalangeal joint for the past 3 days, and might have given a few vulgar hand gestures to choice people. all inadvertently, of course! i hope this injury does not affect my future as a neurosurgeon or any other specialty requiring a lot of manual dexterity, which is just about everything except for radiology. and i'm not keen on having my ovaries fried, thank you very much.

and finally, on sunday my sister (and i really wonder where she gets these things) showed me the most horrific tabloid page ever: BRITNEY GONE BALD! apparently, the hairdresser at the salon refused to entertain her ridiculous request, and so our dear friend brit just picked up the shaver and went at it herself. 'twas not a pretty sight. but, unlike many of her fair-weathered fans, i've stuck by britney even through her coochie-bearing episodes, and so i will continue to do so in the good faith that she's truly on the verge of a mega comeback. as of late though, this has become an increasingly trying task. but whatever, maybe some of you will like her new look:

Why Britney, Why??

yesterday was an almost perfect day. it was the best valentine's date i've ever had in my life, although it was also (sadly) the only proper valentine's date i've ever had in my life.

we had dinner at corduroy & finch and i really enjoyed it. even though the duck was on the bland side, the salmon rosti and the noilly prat linguini were excellent, IMHO. a bit filling though! the dessert sampler was not too bad either, and even came with its very own serving of pimple-popping warm chocolate cake. i loved loved loved everything :)

school was pretty good too! i baked brownies for me + mark's anat groups and OGs, plus friends who sit around us in the LT. i was relieved that everybody was nicely appreciative of the effort, and no one like projectile vommitted afterwards or anything. weiliang and weiwen offerred me some kinda cheesecake, but i rejected it as it came smashed in a tiny tupperware with evidence of prior eating. it was quite disgusting. anyway the only thing i'm annoyed at is that my OG returned me my brownies (still in the box tied with ribbon) and claimed that nobody ate it because they thought i was trying to poison them. WTF? i mean, betty crocker's isn't gourmet food, but it's certainly edible. i even took out the burnt bits, and heroically sacrificed my voice by eating them!

but on a much happier note, i realised my anat group is really quite nice. the guys actually went out the day before to buy us girls individual red roses, which i think are of quite high quality because i put mine in water late at night and it has survived well till today. AND they happily ate up my brownies. gerard even got us these retarded ikea bibs and wrote our names on them with fabric paint. i certainly wasn't expecting for the guys to do stuff on vday, and the girls to kinda forget. oh well, it just means that they'll spread the joy later in the year, and that's at least something to look forward to :D

Something to Smile About :)

OOOMG!!!! i just found out that CA2 for biochem is covering sem2 + the WHOLE OF SEM 1. i am now officially truly and royally f***ed beyond belief.

today i tried the New Body fitness workout at amore, and i nearly died. it was like one hour of continuous squats, lunges and pushups! plus we did them all with hand weights. it is like the most painful thing i've ever gone through in my life. my muffin-top has about 12 hours to make itself scarce, or i am seriously going to be pissed with someone.

after a few days (okay, just one) of frantically compiling tentative programmes and event budgets, we finally met the sponsorship rep from NHG today. the whole thing lasted for a grand total of 10 minutes, so it was a bit of an anticlimax. but i think they are going to give us half of what we asked for, which is close to 10k! of course this is pittance compared to their annual revenue of 1 billion, but it is a good start nonetheless.

the meeting left me totally hypoglycemic, so we decided to have lunch at the coffee grounds cafe where we were anyway. it was mushroom pasta and oreo cheesecake! and the oreo cheesecake was like the yummiest thing ever, and even mark agrees with me. i have finally got him to understand why people can bounce about for hours after a slice of good cheesecake. yet another satisfied addict! ;)

on sunday me and my sis did a spot of shopping at vivo. mostly we wanted to go there for the huge forever 21, but as usual we were let down. the prices are like almost 250% what they are in USD! from now on i'm only ever going to buy f21 stuff from online sprees. i have been suckered enough by exorbitant prices, and i will stand for it no more!

oh and incidentally, almost immediately upon stepping into vivo, i managed to walk right in front of this big entourage of asian popstars. maybe they were from some Kdrama or something, but i have no idea because i don't watch Kdramas. they are stupid! and i don't listen to mandopop or j-pop or k-pop or whatever because i don't understand what they are singing. there is no joy in bopping along to a song whose lyrics you do not comprehend. anyway, i was so shocked by the commotion and seeing dozens of teenyboppers screaming and waving their digital cameras in the air, that i just stood there for a few seconds and blocked the way. i must be like the most unfortunate star spotter ever. when unidentified ugly asian stars come to singapore, i get shoved right into their faces. when beckham comes, i wait for 3 hours only to miss his entrance because i have to run to the toilet to relieve a poor bladder.

life is unfair, it really is!

the weekend seems to be arriving on schedule, and will be a fitting closure to a shitty week. i can't wait to just kick back and SLEEP. i even have a good feeling that this might be the week i surpass the 12hour barrier of continuous sleep. important things are just around the corner!

FRS was on tuesday and i was just 100% glad to get it over with. i thought our research topic was stupid to begin with, and i was dreading presenting it because i knew it would just be terrible. thankfully, yus did a really good job over the weekend compiling all the slides and prettifying it. we even had a 1 minute clip from scrubs! that was like my favourite part of the whole presentation. i tried to tell my group from the start that lumbar puncture was a bad thing to focus on, because 1. it's boring and 2. it's dangerous. in the end they decided to go ahead with it, and structured our 'experiment' on The Use of Hypnosis In Pain Management In The Lumbar Puncture Procedure. the number of words in the title should already give you an idea of how retarded our project was. and i totally knew we were going to get screwed during Q & A, which we did. i think i came up with quite a smart answer though, given the situation. dire straits indeed, my friends.

otherwise, things in general seem to be picking up. i have resurrected my healthy lifestyle plan, and am proud to announce that today i actually made it to the gym and used BOTH the treadmill and the bike. this is like a 10000% improvement from whatever active things i have been doing the past 3 months, which mainly include shopping. plus, on sunday i went for pilates and then jazz dance class at amore, at the end of which i was pleasantly surprised to find that my heart rate was actually up and away. i was disappointed though that the jazz turned out to be more like street jazz with hiphop-ish moves, which was not what i was hoping for. but at least it was fun and gave me a pretty good cardio workout, so i think i might go again this week. whee!

and i've made plans for valentines' day! i wanted to get my PBL group donuts from the donut factory, but when i passed by today i was horrified at how long the queue really is. ST lifestyle said it's 45 minutes!!! i mean, the donuts are pretty and fluffy, but they're not THAT great. who the hell has so much time to waste standing around and queueing??? anyway, i've decided that i'll try to bake something instead. i made a preliminary check at the supermarket, and i think i will be attempting either a betty crocker's or hershey's fudge brownie mix. maybe i'll add some M&Ms for colour, although i personally detest finding them in brownies.

oh and guess what, today our PBL tutor brought us chocolate fudge cookies which he ACTUALLY BAKED HIMSELF. how rare is it to find a doctor who bakes??? and a consultant who actually gives a crap about his irritating m1 kids. plus the cookies were super nice. they were like fudgey and moist, like pure semi-solid chocolate disguised as a cookie. apparently there's like a special 55-70 formula behind the ingredients, plus lots of melted butter and a bit of flour. whatever it is, it sure tasted good. and i guess it's a good thing i went running later in the day.

haha, toodles!