mercy longs for a looking glass

peeved.

2007-11-02T16:14:00.001+08:00

I detest copycats, don't you?

I know Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.. but it's not very flattering for the copier.

In a world fed on pop culture, it would be the height of hubris to assume somebody is copying me. Me. Of all people, why me. I am not particularly brilliant, or a source of All Things Amazingly Intelligent/Quirky/Beautifully Written. (This, you go to Yee Hui for. She has introduced me to NEIL GAIMAN!, Rachael Yamagata, and a fair number of other very very very lovely books and songs and quotations and a new depth of perspective.) And particularly in a context imbibed on pop - well that's pretty much what pop is, isn't it? To appeal to the sense of the masses?

So why am I complaining, really. As Ping says "Just take it that you're educating [them]". But have my references really educated. I doubt it. I feel that they are taken with all the seriousness of a dilettante, which is to say none at all. Like I told Nette - Somebody who says they like Surrealism's "stuff" ought to go read up about Dali's sexual connotations in his works.

(Point to note: I am into Surrealism, Veristic Surrealism but not Dali's paranoic-criticality. I prefer Magritte. But in any case, I am now into Impressionism and Monet. And Post-Modernism like Edward Hopper.)

At the end of the day, really, am I any better than the copycats.
I should presume not, actually, except I take my own likings for my sake, not for anyone else's. and I take them with more seriousness.

But I smack of a hubristic sense of self, still.
Yes, so shut up laura.

the great escape

2007-09-29T22:20:00.000+08:00

Paper bags and plastic hearts
All our belongings in shopping carts
It's goodbye
But we got one more night
Lets get drunk and drive around
And make peace with an empty town
We can make it right

Throw it away
Forget yesterday
We'll make the great escape
We won't hear a word they say
They don't know us anyway
Watch it burn
Let it die
'Cause we are finally free
Tonight

Tonight will change our lives
It's so good to be by your side
And we'll cry
But we won't give up the fight
We'll scream loud at the top of our lungs
And they'll think its just 'cause we're young
And we'll feel so alive

Throw it away
Forget yesterday
We'll make the great escape
We won't hear a word they say
They don't know us anyway
Watch it burn
Let it die
Cause we are finally free
Tonight

All of the wasted time
The hours that were left behind
The answers that we'll never find
They don't mean a thing
Tonight

Throw it away
Forget yesterday
We'll make the great escape
We won't hear a word they say
They dont know us any way
Throw it away
Forget yesterday
We'll make the great escape
We won't hear a word they say
They don't know us any way

The Great Escape; Boys Like Girls.

Thsi is such a feel good song. It's very very cathartic if you know what I mean? I can listen to it over and over and it sort of lessens and throws everything out the window, if only temporarily.

COURSEWORK IS OVER COURSEWORK IS OVER COURSEWORK IS OVER COURSEWORK IS OVER COURSEWORK IS OVER COURSEWORK IS OVER COURSEWORK IS OVER COURSEWORK IS OVER COURSEWORK IS OVER COURSEWORK IS OVER COURSEWORK IS OVER COURSEWORK IS OVER COURSEWORK IS OVER COURSEWORK IS OVER COURSEWORK IS OVER COURSEWORK IS OVER

Have you any idea what a burden removed that issssssss. The air is so much lighter, the sun so much brighter (and bloody hotter), the sky so much bluer, the rain so much more blessed... only problem is i cant' really settle to studying again for Os, after burning myself out at prelims and this coursework.

Although I am sad I shan't see my coursework till march next year. i decided against an in-situ work - imagine all the hands flipping through and running over the acrylic paint - the paint would have faded and decolourised by the time the markers came round.

Oh but I should like to try installation once again. I'm supposed to be a very spatial person. Supposed being the key word, if I am really so spatial i would have mastered Joy Luck long ago.

Speaking of Joy Luck, I really, really have come to A True Appreciation of it! It's really really beautiful, looking at it now. I used to think Lindo was such a terribly pushy mother, so unsupportive of what Waverly wanted truly, and treating her as a bragging point. But that is the way Asian mothers love their children - love is equated with pride. and who doesn't want the best for their kid? who wouldn't strive to empower them for life, imbue in them the capacity to excel and be the best they can, to become a leader, not a follower and tower over others? why would you let your child enslave herself to the trappings of societal dictations, or wallow in mediocrity forever?

The book is beautifully written, the characters are so lifelike and although they are all Chinese they are never for a second, stereotyped. And the daughters are continuations of their mother - it's so well crafted! And then the metaphors in each vignette, and her language is Impeccable. And teh oevrarching metaphor of full circle. I like the phrase "full circle" more than "reconciliation", because a circle in itself is an abstract concept and a powerful metaphor for a beginning, a divergence/conflict, a converging, a reconciliation, and finally a never ending hope and future.

It detracts Macbeth somewhat. Though Mb will always hold a dear place in my heart since it was effectively The book that catapulted me into everything else. But it's so much more satisfactory to conquer JLC rather than Macbeth because JLC's not chronological but spatial.

Speaking of Lit, I got a 23 for Macbeth and a 23 for Joy Luck! I could scream. it was so tremendously relieving because I thought I was done for for sure, rambling like nobody's business. I still have to tighten my argument though, looking at Mrs Low's corrections I feel Inadequate. Capitally so. The other JLC question - the passage based, which I was moaning about was my undoing, I scraped a 17. But I know I deserved it. Bad timing and poor reading of the question.

My unseen poem was all right, slightly worse than I expected but then again I did throw it together in 20 minutes so I should be content. But my argument and analysis apparently is 'laboured' and 'unsophisticated'. Oh dear.

All my other subjects went ok! I'm really happy this time round. Straight As save Chinese. if I can move A Maths and Bio I should be Perfectly Contented. Oh and SS of course. BAH I CANT' DO SBQS FOR NUTS HELPS ME HELPS ME. it's horrible ok, so much EFFORT and squeezing my brains dry and i get a lousy B4):

All righty I think this may be my last post before I effectively shut this and move to LJ permanently, though I wont' delete the things I have here. Too much sentiment.

So take care, keep the faith and i'll see you sometime!

edit.

2007-09-13T23:37:00.000+08:00

what was here previously was perhaps the most arrogant, aggressive thing i have ever said, and i honestly didn't mean it to be ad hominem (ie, attacking the speaker and not the argument), and i'm sorry to ian if it came out that way, it was just terribly aggressive that's all, but anyway thank you for accepting my apology even though i was so arrogant.

Singing "here we go again"

2007-08-29T11:20:00.000+08:00

"The closing of a door can bring blessed privacy and comfort - the opening, terror. Conversely, the closing of a door can be a sad and final thing - the opening, a wonderfully joyous moment." - Andy Rooney

I got this from aunty yinting!

Despite everything, all the stress and criticisms and late nights and frustration, council is probably the best thing that ever happened to me. I absolutely abhor being Sec 4, there's so much looking back and wondering and regret and seeing everybody else start their IJ journey and wanting that all over again.

"If I could repeat my life all over again, I'd make the same mistakes, only sooner." - Tallulah Bankhead.

Prelims have been all right so far - have had:
Coursework submission (gaaaadd.)
SS
Chem prac
Lit
Bio prac
A Math I
History Elective
English I & II
E Math I

and am facing Chem and sova tomorrow. So what am I doing here?

A Math was actually do-able, and it riles me so much that it wasn't as hard as Mr F had been telling us it would be. BUT I lost my head entirely and forgot how to integrate cosine, can you imagine that??? And I got full marks for one integration test too. How tremendously stupid I am.

Lit - I spent so much flipping time on Macbeth when I came to the poem it was already 9.00, (The paper ended at 9.25.) and I am definitely not going to replicate the success I had at Midyears. I think I did a fair job, because I am fair at manipulating words but still, it was all in disarray. I was going on about diction, then went over to wax about antithesis and rhythm, and then I realised I forgot to include imagery under diction.BAH.

Joy Luck was no better. I'm not sure of the essay. I wrote hell of a lot for that (9 sides I think) but it wasn't a very sharp concise overwhelming rhetoric, sort of a mumble jumble and plod along through it. not to mention irrelevant material probably. gah. Passage based was a nightmare, I went on forever about how hostility between Jing-mei and Waverly was conveyed because questions on literary devices are the only thing I know how to wax lyrical about, then neglected part 2, so I wrote only 4 sides. Which is an average of 2 sides/1 page per part, OH MY WORD. and I did a couple of other stupid things too, like not reading the entire question. eegads.

English essay went all right. I think I won't bother with descriptive during exam conditions because my descriptive vocab doesn't tend towards those generic things. I describe inane things like the weather, so if the essay's about a storm I'm in my element, but if it's an "event in which you felt happy", forget it. my rhetoric is all right, provided i don't lose my head why not do the exposition. and in any case I'm terribly terribly verbose, I'll slip in words like Sisyphean route and other archaic words and obscure eponyms. I am lousy at application of words.

The essay topic was "teenagers in this day and age require more parental guidance". Pretty good, I got to slip in the single Newsweek statistic I remembered. Not bad eh, considering I don't read all of them. Haven't read the last..4 yet. Only thing is I only realised before I handed up the paper that some of my punctuation was wrong GAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

OH I HAVE TO TELL YOU WHAT HAPPENED DURING BIO PRAC. we got a sucrose solution with yeast in it, and after pouring some of it our I immediately capped the air tight canister again, and proceeded with the prac. Half an hour later or so, the cap suddenly shot off and did this graceful parabolic arc in the air and landed on the floor. It was terribly funny.

ok enough destressing.

but before I go I have to tell you about the lovely message (L)Ena (HAHAH) sent me! It was awesome. It made me realise I was losing steam and I need to pick up soon and that I've got people who've got my back anytime and that I don't want to ever ever ever leave IJ.

Whither Thou Goest

2007-08-05T17:46:00.000+08:00

I will follow you in pursuit of a mermaid's song

Even as you sail to the end of the world, I'll follow along

And break the enchantment of a faery ring,

Whither thou goest, and ward off an absent-heart sting.

I will brave with you the hidden terror of a basilisk lair

And travel with you through elven-dwelling fair

I'll search for you the answer to a sphinx's riddle,

Whither thou goest, from beginning end and middle.

I might lessen the fury of a selkie-borne storm

Be a reminder of where you've come from

And even if we never return,

Whither thou goest, through dark valley and fern.

I hope you never lose your heart to a fairy cruel

Or scar yourself in the heat of a duel

For I will weather your weal and your woe,

Whither thou goest, there I will go.

(Copyrighted. And she is, I assure you, quite insanely possessive of these things. Thou hast beene warned.)

Your journey's been etched on your skin

2007-08-04T00:19:00.000+08:00

I would call you up every Saturday night
And we'd both stay out 'til the morning light
And we sang "Here we go again."
And though time comes by I will always be in a club with you in 1973
Singing "Here we go again."

(James Blunt, 1973)

I hate that I've given you the capacity to hurt.
I should stop being so passive.

Life, in a word is awful.

All around everybody's been going: two more chapters of bio and i'm done with revision! i finished the tys! and look at me. haven't started nothin'.

And it isn't laziness, i hate it that art is consuming so much time. I want to study but it's like, I got to do my art first you know and you know how much time it takes.

Right now I don't think I can even meet the prelim deadline for art. And for much less any subject. And i need the prelim grade. But I need to do my art. But I need to do half a million a maths papers and bio papers as well. But I need to do another 50 0000000 SS essays too.

Lit is the only respite, even though I'm certainly dead for Joy Luck because Mrs Alex is Awesome and not hounding us for another 9q238102947192348 papers on JLC.

Jeanette tells me I should stop whining about art because when I joined AEP I agreed to all the work. I beg to differ! I didn't bargain for the whole lot of tosh the MOE is coming up with (LIKE SOVA. AND VAT. WAH LIKE WE GOT NO LIFE OUTSIDE ART), I didn't bargain for school appointments - and school appointments that simply are too..I dunno, good? There's so much unforeseen circumstance when I was Sec 1 and got the letter. How was I supposed to know it would be overwhelming in Sec 3? How was I supposed to kwno the MOE would implement an extra paper? How was I supposed to know they'd gone and fiddled with the theory component?

I hate the way AEP has gone, as a programme, and as what I've learnt from it.

The exhibition at NAFA only reminded me of my shortcomings.

(And it was so unbelievably.. elitist. I didn't like the tone of some things. It was just so.. 'them and us'. Maybe I'm just ultra sensitive and making up things.)

This time last year doesn't seem so long ago.

Where did the year go? There's so much more we wanted to do.

Sometimes this time last year seems an eternity, that I've grown 12 years in a span of 12 months after confirmation, after euthanising my dog, after camps and camps and camps and organising and after conflicts and after rejections. Paychel wasn't far wrong when she said I had the mentality of a 36 year old.

-
And i know, i know what people have been saying and it's painful - why can't you see the strengths instead. Why must you use history as your yardstick. Why do you generalise before even giving us the chance. Why do you make prophecies that we struggle so hard to disprove but end up fulfilling them anyway.

Do you know what it's like to open your heart to something, to pour out every achievement in your dimunitive existence that you've ever been proud of, that you could ever be satisfied with, that you could ever look at and smile, and say, "I can do this, I am genuine, and I have faith"? Have you any idea how horrible it is to have that all thrown back at you, and be told it isnt' good enough, it isn't well done, it isn't enough?

hypocrisy of the dilettantes

2007-07-15T00:06:00.000+08:00

Live Earth was a bit of a fall-flat thing, wasn't it? I heard some of the perfomances on teh radio today. I mean. Awesome and all that but like Life! said, I highly doubt some of these people know what the Kyoto Protocol is. Dad saw the concert on TV and said it was a major failure because when everyone left the place was swamped with litter. What bitter irony.

Heard what FOB said about saving the earth - it's like working out, you do it only if it's convenient for you. Which is spectacularly true.

Sighs.
I do detest those overly blatant hypocrites. I mean, nobody's entirely free of a little bit of hypocrisy now and then, but i absolutely abhor people who go all out swearing and cussing and making some wild desperate stance while not actually knowing the true depth and how inextricably complex it is. If saving the earth were so easy as slamming others on your blogs then Kyoto is pretty meretricious isn't it. If saving the earth were simply about SAVE THE TREES STOP DEFORESTATION COMPLETELY! then why is it so hard to stop? It's not a black/white issue you know, we need the wood and space to fuel the economy. You can't stop deforestation entirely because there are developing nations who are heavily dependent on timber to eke out a living. And it would be severely selfish and high handed to tell them to stop and let their economy crash. It's not an issue of saving the trees, it's an issue of saving the trees from profligate rampant deforestation and the economies of developing nations and still finding the supply to demands for timber.

Mm I guess I'm a dilettante by most measures as well because I never really bother and then there's the art thing where I sheepishly concede to using copious amounts of paper to sketch/doodle/test stationery and eventually ruin anyway. (Hey but if you ask me to talk about Singapore's waste disposal and the pros and cons of it I can rattle of some coherent argument thanks to the SSC HK last year. Don't ask for exacts and stats though I have no memory for those.)

OK. Joy Luck beckons. Ciao world.

just the memory of your face

2007-07-11T23:52:00.000+08:00

This is how you remind me of what I really am.

A lot of things remind me of you - my drawing pencils and nearly empty sketchbook, most of all. And AEP sessions on Wednesdays, particularly. You remind me of how I stagnated as an art student, that the things like composition and colour that should be coming naturally to me by now still don't, and that I can't even handle basic things like eyes and noses and head curvatures accurately. You remind me of what I wanted to be and what i really am now, and it's horrifying to sit back after nearly four years to think that it somehow went to waste. And in so many words - it's embarrassing and disappointing.

And then there's the things you say! Words and phrases that I would use myself. You remind me of me sometimes, when you talk about things like passion and this society's obsession with paper qualifications and just being yourself - I know exactly what you mean, and to have to spit it out and throw it like some sort of ungrateful utterance while meaning it all so much.

And the worst part of it all, you're an everyday reminder of how i vacillate and shape my own circumstances from inaction, and it's frustrating.

All right ignore this, i've just been thinking about my art for a long while.. and certain things set it off. I think I'm suffering from burnout.

I seem to be bordering on a Rose Hsu Jordan complex nowadays. Ironic then, that I'm Auntie An-Mei for this Joy Luck Club hot-seating thing Mrs Alex wants us to do. I actually did want to do Ying Ying really badly but this is where the Rose Hsu Jordan complex comes in.

The only perky bit of news - Honours Day invites, i did get something, despite my abysmal performance last year: 1st for lit (ha.ha.ha.) and 3rd for english, and surprise surprise surprise (this made my day more than the first two actually): the mother st mathilde award for leadership. Which is for all Excos la, but the thing is I don't feel like I should get it. No, this is NOT a self-esteem issue. I just feel that it's more the kind of faith and optimism and the unswerving belief my teachers have in me that gave me this award. So my achievements are not a measure of my ability, but rather, the faith they have.

Which is what I've really wanted to say for a long while, and when Ms Low wanted me to say something about Faith, Hope and Love for the Honours Day video, that's what i said. Hannah says it doesn't sound like something I'd say, and she is in a way right, I'd say something like how transcendent the ij legacy is. But it's what I really want to say.

I sound and look like a prat in the video by any rate, I'm not what you call camera friendly, and when i'm nervous my voice goes monotone and low.

The biannual AEP exhibition opens on the 25th, and my photography project has been selected for display. Which is a bit of a joke actually, if you know what i mean. But now that it's up I wish I'd done something to make it look like a whole series, and not simply snap any viewpoint that looks interesting. I guess they're good shots separately (CONSIDERING I NEVER LEARNT HOW TO WORK THE ANALOG CAMERA) but I guess the mark of a mature photographer is one who can find some overarching theme to capture. I wish my performance in AEP last year wasn't so dismal.

Advertisement!
'AEPtitude' (wah lao copy our school's slogan la. ours is 'aeptitude with artitude'.)
Runs from 25th July.
Opening ceremony on the 25th, 5.30 is open to invited guests only (I think this is a bit snobbish, it's not like a once in a lifetime chance to see Titian or something.) but if you're interested, it's at NAFA.

Well nothing doing. So I'll say goodnight and go.

that smile of yours creeps into my mind

2007-06-30T15:19:00.000+08:00

the song colourblind has been going through my head a lot recently ever since i heard it on thursday morning.

so, rough recollection:

friday - youth day celebrations, mass was good i guess, ms ng sang for us! nette says it sounds like those disney songs like where the girl swirls across a bridge or something, though it was actually a christian song - trust his heart. it's a very uplifting song. the hymns were uplfting as well, you know how you feel when you're singing your heart out for love never mind if you're off key? sort of 'lifted high on spirit wings of love'.

anyway concert after that, the cat high chinese orchestra and wushu team came to perform. and yours truly, ever the anglicised, was actually impressed. sort of. well i didn't get goosebumps during the co performance but i won't deny it was very good.

met mrs alex, who asked me about the ri book club discussion the day before and asked me to do a write-up, and halfway through mr armstrong came up the stairs to hear her asking about sji's jlc thing, and he only heard sji, and demanded to know what was wrong with sji boys. haha it was really funny because he suanned all of ri as nerds.

recess was -
"horror horror horror tongue nor heart cannot name nor conceive thee!"

melodramatics. k but really the canteen was horrendously crowded, and then freda's band was playing + all four levels crammed into an enclosed area + ij girls at that (meaning you can expect cheering and screeching and generally noise above a few thousand decibels.) + THE HEAT NOWADAYS + all four vending machines going haywire...

anyway after the extra long recess it was lessons as per normal. inclusive of an e math test graaaaaaaar.

can you imagine all that in the stifling heat. and chem practical with no fan because we were doing heat of reactions yesterday and the fan would've affected our readings.

and so thursday -

got chased out of last period english earlier than asked for, not complaining though because i was roaring hungry.

anyway the discussion with some ri boys was on the joy luck club, and although ty thinks it wasn't helpful because she didn't learn anything new, i think it was pretty awesome getting to think for yourself and reason and contend with new ideas and the more technical big-picture of the book (even the title came into discussion). and interesting how singaporeans are also somehow caught in the fix because of the east values vs west circumstances. and the infamous gce o level question - if you were to recommend the jlc to a friend what would you say to make him/her read it?

and fairly intelligent answers for one, not like jervis, who would say, 'read the book'.

new computer coming on monday + need to get down to art srsly it's due 20th august + handover and prelims on that day and so no more of that, no more.

i need to stop quoting macbeth, nette is convinced i'm lady macbeth in disguise.

fragile things

2007-06-24T23:22:00.000+08:00

I think that, despite the really aggressive competition and all, and that proverbial needs must when the devil drives, in general little children shouldn't be going back to school feeling as if they never had a break at all. I realised that I can whine as much as I like I have got to live with it, but still you would think that in such a highly developed world where comfort can be created so quickly that kids around here should at least feel refreshed and not burnt out.

I haven't studied an ounce at all this holiday and doing Biology papers makes me feel increasingly dumb because I can't remember half the facts required. This is Alarming.

Well, new term, new circumstances, might as well make the best of it and have a (relatively) early night.

if i don't say this now i will surely break

2007-06-20T22:57:00.000+08:00

I love The Fray I love The Fray I love The Fray I love The Fray I love The Fray I love The Fray I love The Fray I love The Fray I love The Fray I love The Fray I love The Fray I love The Fray I love The Fray I love The Fray I love The Fray I love The Fray.

Okay. Their new song Look After You is simply...brilliant. (new favourite word!) Oh yes it issss. K granted the chorus sounds a bit weird when he sings 'oh' but other than that... it's such a sweet song and you all know what a sap Laura is when it comes to music. And I've got the tune stuck in my head.

(I still like Fall Out Boy and Motion City Soundtrack ok.)

Other than that song, I have slowly grown addicted to Elliott Yamin's Wait For You. (NO it is NOT the curly hair.) I generally dislike overtly sappy songs because they are so tried-and-tested and shallow. And callow. (I didn't mean it to rhyme.) And even more so I used to dislike the idea of a guy waiting for a girl to come back to him when she's out of his league/not interested (I mean move ON already. I'm pretty sure you don't love her all you Hollywood razzmatazzes are only up to spur-of-the-moment infatuations) BUT this song is different. It's sort of.. more sincere. Well, maybe it IS the curly hair but you can't deny he's got a sexy voice.

... I just logged onto Friendster and my profile is blank. it is either:
1. I am going mad.
2. The computer is going mad (is already mad, more like.)
3. SOMEBODY (LISA?!?!) logged into my page and reset it.
4. Friendster is going senile.

All quite likely possibilities, save the first one.

OH CRIMINAL MINDS IS BAAAAAAAAAACK!
Say Hello to Awesome Tuesday nights.

Yesterday's opening episode was the second part of where it left off in Season 1 and golly it was BRILLIANT.

I'm still hyperventilating thinking about it, it was amazing the way it was so complex and interlinked and at the same time sort of deep and erudite (Chaucer, Fowles, The Collector OMGZXC) and Spencer Reid is amazing. And i mean Reid as in the character, not the actor. I think it's terrifically sad how Reid's mom is so brilliant and intelligent and erudite and yet schizophrenia attacks.

AND AND AND AND
(Sheesh I'm high)
I drew out one of my compositions todaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay(:
Not very much in comparison to some people, but it's a start.

Ok aside from all that I put on weight. I'm sure of it. (There's not weighing scale in my house.) All the blasted chocolate.

SO. I am going to cut down on carb. And snacking.
Let's see how long this keeps up.

it's always better when we're together.

2007-06-19T13:12:00.000+08:00

The Head Girl (PSH wait till you hear her pick up lines..), gibby gabby gooey (SHE SUPPORTS ME. NYAH.) yours truly (my fringe looks awful.), smellythewoodhead heah (who never supports me hmph. voldemort i tell you.), Danielle *** (haha she might slap me if i reveal her new surname.) chchchchtrini!, Sarah (sans gerbil food.), JOYtothefishes in the deep blue sea, JOY to you and me, and of course... (seated) The Drunken Bull.

Woops. I mean, Bill.
Tsk. Tipsy on Pepsi.

This was after the handover GM after National Day 2006 celebrations, and I like this picture tremendously even if i look..awkward. It evokes a lot of memories - first official day as executive councillor for Council Welfare and Development (the awfullllllll admin files..), and our growth and progress as a person, but above all, it encapsulates what I love most about IJ: The Student Council. Yes, The Student Council.

Council life has been amazing. I met really brilliant people - aside from the exco, there's people like JOY who's a total brick, JESS who is my one and only pok-aye (haha no, i'm not interested in anyone else!), Danielle who sits by me in class and is superbly entertaining, WOLS and WOLS-er - that is, Tess and Boon (honestly they rival each other for the title of Queen Wols.), and then so many people I can't really name them all here. And you somehow know that despite your differences you're accepted for who you are AND what you do.

It pains me to hear people asking why the CHIJ Council places so much emphasis on 'frivolous' activities like cheers and esprit and school spirit and bonding and fun and games. All I can say is, look at the kind of bonds we have made, the kind of camaraderie forged - and it teaches you about servant leadership - because we're in this together to make a change, and we're not in this together to rule or get added authority or power. We are most certainly not bimbos, thank you very much. Yeah maybe i'm biased since I love council so much but i can tell you that it's this love of what we do, who we do it with that makes us pretty efficient and pliable to last minute duties and things like that.

Of course you then can argue that we don't love what we do, we just love the company. Yes maybe it is a bit of that but I have absolute faith that our councillors are not in it for selfish gain. And srsly at least they're maximising the council experience - i mean, you don't pay for happiness, like what Paychel says, it's about finding happiness in what comes your way. They could gripe and moan that they have to handle this on top of everything else, but at the end of the day they've got 2 courses of action - sit there and be ineffectual, or stand up and do something. And it's that strong sense of camaraderie that brings them to it.

I'm not saying any other student leadership body is stupid to focus more on other things, or slamming anyone, really. It just hurts me and all of us to hear people saying things like we lack gravity and we're all fun and games blah de blah. OK so maybe we could do with a bit of serious stuff during camps and so on, but we pride ourselves on our specialty - esprit instilling events.

And although I may whinge that art + council + studies is way over my capacity to handle, I wouldnt exchange any of it for the world.

dreams, dust, gone.

2007-06-18T01:36:00.000+08:00

Thank you to Rachel Lee, Denise, Nette, Sarah, Mich and rawr (even thoguhi miss your calls like 4 times sorry.)

I'm feeling an awful lot better - Dad's talk put things back into their proper paradigm and made me reconsider what is an end and what is a means to an end. And Mom's indignation ("rather short-sighted") on my behalf - it's like one of those Joy Luck Club moments when the daughter comes full circle. And Lisa's always been very cutely indignant on my behalf, forever hitting the spot with her remarks.

Yup. So thank you very much to these special people you are AWESOME.

And of course, thank you to God. On Saturday during mass i felt... perfectly at peace. Not angry or raging and unfair, or lost. I'd felt like i was floundering, because as things go you start to go to God only when some crisis comes your way. and I felt guilty, for being arrogant and many many other things, and the sermon was all about God's immense love and forgiveness.

I took out my stuff from con 2 camp the other night, when Lisa was at camp and i had the luxury of keeping the bedroom lights on at 2 in the morning. I went through all my warm fuzzies from con 2 and council camp because I was in PMS mood and when Laura is PMS-ing she goes into highly strung paranoia and insecurity. And she gets highly retrospective and introspective.

Anyway. I felt awfully better after reading all that, and especially the letter we all wrote to God. And it's funny how you change in 2 years, but somehow in that exact same aspect you don't. If you get what I mean. But seeing how you yourself has grown as a person.. and for the better, it made me feel at peace somehow.

"For I am your greatest encourager"
(2 Thessalonians 2: 16-17)

-
I finished Burning Bright by Tracy Chevalier in about 6+ hours and it's bloody Brilliant. Chevalier is an absolutely powerful tour de force.

Where to start!

1) Her beautifully acute and sensitive pick of reality, and so subtly done you'd never notice it. The mix of emotions and reactions people often have - she encapsulates them with the simplest words that never fall short of cogent.
2) The theme of antithesis - you'd never notice it when reading, her book is way too absorbing for that - but the way it's manifested - in the two protagonists Jem Kellaway and Maggie Butterfield, how they are opposites of each other, how they discuss opposites and grey areas with William Blake, how he lives out opposites in his world, and the overarching antithesis of them all: Innocence vs. Experience (as seen in Jem and Maggie respectively). I'm sure there's more but I can't remember.
3) Plotline, as usual, is gripping.

I couldn't put it down once i started, I probably wouldn't be able to sleep for speculating what would happen next so I went to bed at 3.

-
I cannot believe Paris Hilton sometimes. Really, adding colour and excitement to our dull every day lives, yeah totally. Perfect raison d'etre I tell you, never mind if she totally flouts every rule in the book, breaks her own morals, exerts such insalubrious influence over little girls around the globe (see March 5 issue of Newsweek, The Wild Girl Effect). But it's okay, really! We totally idolise insalubrious-living brats who exploit sex and circumstance to get them where they are, really. Their dirrrrty living is really so amusing! Totally makes my day, I tell you! Poor, poor little rich girl! Never been lonely and cold and hungry before? Oh dear what a monstrous, atrocious, absolutely inhumane crime against humanity!

Ok enough sarcasm. Gisele Bundchen is alarmingly.. hedonistic. But then again so is half of Hollywood so that doesn't quite mean anything nowadays. What I'm really getting at is the short-sightedness on her take on condoms. Yes yes so they prevent STDs and pregnancies ergo no abortion. Ergo you can have some hedonistic life, do whatever you fancy just because you use a condom. It creates some sort of dangerous thinking, that you're inured to the negative repercussions just because. Which is no actual reasoning at all. In essence what i mean is that it's going to open a Pandora's Box - and an even more appalling one because it's masquerading under the promise of all things fine and dandy but when you get down to it, it's creating some reckless sort of mentality that you're going to be caught by a safety net. Which you're not going to be. In fact condoms in some sense could lead to a rise in STDs seeing that they're not foolproof.

ALL RIGHT. I need to figure what to do in Art tomorrow.
See ya.

There will come soft rains

2007-06-15T12:26:00.001+08:00

"I think now that fate is half shaped by expectation, half by inattention. But somehow, when you lose something you love, faith takes over. You have to pay attention to what you lost. You have to undo the expectation."

Rose Hsu Jordan, Half and Half
(Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club)

stream of consciousness

2007-06-12T19:22:00.000+08:00

i'm feeling a bit depressed at the moment to compose my thoughts so this entry is going to sound rather disjointed.

i have just wasted 2 days, art yesterday was... an absolute waste of 6 hours and when i came home i sort of settled how my layout of text vs picture will be for each page. then i sulked when dad came back and nagged at me about chinese oral exams, wasting about another 5 hours or so.

so art + chinese is weighing heavy as hell on my head.

today i bought my watercolour paper finally, even though i don't intend to do watercolour i need thick paper, thicker than regular cartridge paper at any rate.

(ms low wants 80% of our final project due at the end of june, if you want to gauge my stress level right now i've completed about... 0%. we aren't talking about the prep boards here.)

and so, if art isnt' suffice to kill me, then chinese will, and the holiday homework will finish it off nicely - 2 chem papers, 2 bio papers, 2 a math papers, 1 e math paper, comprehension (ergh.), and SS/HISTORY PAPERS. graaaaaaaaah. we all know how accurate laura is in her ss answers.

this is why i told gab i was going suicidal with the art when i begged her to help me with the council shirts because there is absolutely no way i am able to go get them printed at this rate.

whines.

i'm consuming a tremendous amount of chocolate just to spike my endorphin level a bit, because i've been tremendously moody.

i miss nette and dan ): nobody makes me laugh like they do.

yeah i've been rather down lately because of plenty of things. not just the art (though this is without a doubt the main factor) and homework, but relationships gone horribly wrong. or going horribly wrong, and not doing anythign to save it, or not being able to say anything.

the other day i did something i hadn't done for ages. and i really mean, ages, like the last time i did it was december i think. and considering how we used to call each other nearly every other day, i mean you can't help but be bitter at the way things have gone.

i wonder if you noticed my absence in your life lately.
and even more, i wonder if you figured out why.

to half a soul and to a notion crazed.

2007-06-09T11:17:00.000+08:00

{edit}

i feel empty, like sort of tired + dazed + thinking to much + slow + overwhelmed.

to nicole.

2007-06-07T00:26:00.001+08:00

let me be the one you call
if you jump i'll break your fall
lift you up and fly away with you into the night.
if you need to fall apart
i can mend a broken heart
if you need to crash then crash and burn you're not alone.

hello nic i have a letter for you, i'll give it to you when i see you. but in the meantime, be strong ok? you'll be all right, take heart.♥

the faery reel.

2007-06-05T17:02:00.001+08:00

yeah i'm tired & i want out.

so wrap me up in dreams and death.

2007-06-05T14:44:00.000+08:00

'SUP WORRRRLD.
I HAVE BOUGHT, with my times vouchers since last honours day:
-ANANSI BOYS BY NEIL GAIMAN
-FRAGILE THINGS BY NEIL GAIMAN (poof times bookshop only had those two)
-BURNING BRIGHT BY TRACY CHEVALIER
-HARRY POTTER AND THE CHAMBER OF SECRETS.

the last one was a total whim, but i love rowling for what she writes. yes refer to the may 31 post if you haven't already been subject to my bursts of "don't-tell-me-hp-is-overrated" annoyance.

i've read fragile things already, i think some stories were a bit of a letdown. i agree with yeehui that it was better than smoke and mirrors somewhat, but gaiman is the absolute master of language uh huh eat that you stupid chick lit writers.

srsly - "and i fell for her like a suicide from a bridge" isn't he amazing, the way he puts things? like this phrase (koped from rawr), it tells about the way he fell for her, sudden sharp, rashly, impulsively and so headily irrevocably and bordering on morbidity in obsession. ok ignore me. i'm rambling.

others were simply amazing like a study in emerald and the fairy reel. but i think, and this is very strictly my simplistic opinion, that i don't very much like the stories that deal with sexual references. i know they're amazing parodies of life and all, but it i'm a prude so sue me. i still fangirl neil gaiman though. nothing can change that.

lisa koped anansi boys and i don't want to compete with her so i shall start burning bright soon. it's got a lovely cover by the way. bronze and beige and very artistically-done flames. chevalier is a tour de force in her own rights. i haven't been let down by her, she's got a very tasteful way of writing.

bah ok there's art tomorrow. i've reached a point where i'm stuck and moving out of stalemate takes too much effort so i'll gladly face the consequential stress later, but not now. it's too hot right now to stress.

i hate the heat. even when it rains it's still humid. the heat does things to my hair i tell ya. and my diet too for that matter. and my sleep patterns.

"People break so easily, and so do dreams and hearts."

2007-06-03T12:31:00.000+08:00

Cassandra
Break, break, break, she cries, the
Words syncopating and juddering in
Her chest so that she isn't sure
If it's just her heart. Her words are
Thrown out, expropriated by cruel
Irony and arraignment and the golden
Beauty of this demigoddess
Helen. And all she can do is watch, in her head
As the ramparts of Troy and of her
Heart are torn asunder
And try
To cry
Her plangent warnings to ears
That will believe her.

and that's a lie we can both keep.

2007-05-31T15:29:00.000+08:00

i'm kind of frustrated at the dead-end i keep getting myself into.

i'm sick, sick, absolutely sick of people cramping what i want to do, what i like and the way i think. i don't so much mind being branded weird/strange in a joking manner, but i'm pretty sure my way of thinking, the way i relate to the world at large alarms some people close to me. yeha i'm certain of it, becasue it affects the way i do stuff sometimes. (and gushing on about goldsworthy, dylan thomas' genius, dalia ravikovitch's take on women's supression in her poem clockwork doll are just some of them.)

well, like i told jia yu the other day, the surrounding pedantry is absolutely asphyxiating.

what has been getting on my nerves lately is the way people take writing and art and literature as either pure entertainment, just scratching the surface of the amazingly profound depths words and art can reach. it's not so bad when done out of ignorance ('cause i do it a lot too) but out of a sheer intolerance of something beyond their comprehension.. that just gets me riled up.

like this whole pottermania thing, i was talking to chel lee yesterday and i think the whole craze over broomsticks and spells and paraphernalia has damaged the beauty of rowling's creation irrevocably.

the potter series per se, at its very basic fundamental core is a transcendently superb and cogent expression of the good vs evil bipolarity. beyond that it is amoving expression of a human capacity for love and goodwill. and rowling's characterisation is wondrous, just look at what she has to say about draco malfoy on wikipedia. and i've attempted playwriting once (to horrific result i assure you i will stick to poetry forevermore) and it's no joke fleshing out characters. thinking of complexes (inferiority complex, God complex, tortured-artist complex, mary jane complex) and carrying them out consistently in a bunch of people whom you've made up on the spur of the moment is no mean feat, every detail of their appearance, clothes, actions, face, speech, body has to be in line somehow with their personality. and rowling does all this for a whole series that has captured international attention, amidst creating a whole new world of magic (complete with its own ministry and schools and communication system), AND on top of this, every detail in her books (from the wood of the wands to the names of her characters) painstakingly underscores some mystical connection (DID YOU KNOW THAT HOLLY, THE WOOD HARRY'S WAND IS MADE OF, WAS BELIEVED BY CELTS TO HAVE PROPERTIES TO VANQUISH EVIL ISN'T THAT AWESOME).

so imagined how deflated i feel when somebody tels me it's overhyped. because yes the media frenzy is appallingly shallow, but the book in itself is magic.

i'm a pedant in my own sense i guess, but i'd never diss somebody's craft even if i didn't understand it. i'd never diss music as a trifle just because i don't excel at piano/singing. i don't think scientists are extraordinarily free/detail obsessive people just because i'm not interested in it.

(i can't stand how she made that snide remark about art students.)

anyway, i was talking to rachel chen a long time ago and she mentioned how acjc was so vastly different from ij because there, everybody's really passionate about their craft (mainly music) and they actually hold lengthy discussions about music and composers.

granted, i think i might kill myself if i had to converse extensively and in depth over mondrian (or any other artist for that matter, even goldsworthy) it in some ways does trump quelling that thirst for another level of knowledge just because people around you shout you down for referring to the die brucke in your paper (it's frustrating discussing the real meaning of expressionism with people who assume it's mainly just about expressing yourself freely. srsly. i think warhol expressed himself pretty freely but he's not expressionist. in fact he was anti abstract expressionism) and simply aren't willing to open their minds to the fact that a whole cosmos of culture exists beyond their mundane world of who's knows who, who likes who, who's talking to who, who's annoyed with who. i guess i'm guilty of this sometimes but at least it's not my 100% preoccupation.

not just another cosmos of culture, but i get the feeling some of us (myself included) forget that another world in society beyond our comfort zones exists - the impoverished, the needy, the disabled, the oppressed, the terrorised.

which is why i have taken to the phrase "and there are people dying in africa but that's ok" which i knwo is very hypocritical of myself. because i'm not in any way making it better for them either. but at the same time expresses my...frustration with people overly concerned with such flippant, inane, facile details. yes, facile f to the a to the c to the i l e.

i'm being such a hypocrite. bah.

Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night

2007-05-29T17:51:00.000+08:00

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

(Dylan Thomas)

thomas is a genius. this is my absolute favourite, even before A Poet Reading (part 1) by edwin thumboo - it's amazingly forceful and so emotionally intense, and his rhetoric is never forced but yet so cogent and so clear and shimmering (if you see what i mean, otherwise ignore my rants again) and, and Awesomely Awesome.

i mean srsly who the hell handles the villanelle with such impassioned feeling and never makes it seem pedantic or mechanical??

technical mastery aside, i think the poem is so evidently of pain and sorrow and so heart wrenching (once you get past the repetition and the archaic-ish syntax (if you can't, go here, they have a pretty comprehensive explanation of the poem http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/38.html).

i mean, for all they say about death - "better be with the dead, whom we, to gain our peace, have sent to peace, than to lie on the torture of the mind in restless ecstasy", and sleep - "balm of hurt minds", "sleep that knits up the ravelled sleave of care", at the end of the day i don't think all of us are that willing to go so peacefully, or let our loved ones go, selfish as that may sound/be.

no i'm not afraid of death but i am awfully afraid of dying. (i can't remember who said this, but i agree wholeheartedly with him.) at least that's how i think i'd feel, but i can never say for certain until i've run the course i guess. youth does not knwo how age thinks and feels.

haha. sorry for the dismal tone, i think it was the baby photo that set me off thinking about where i've come, and the holistic report thing we have to do that makes me wonder how much i've grown and whether i'm justified to feel proud of myself as a person, not just a student. like thomas says "Though wise men at their end know dark is right, Because their words had forked no lightning they Do not go gentle into that good night." i mean, i don't want to be remembered as the girl with the "strong command of english" forever.

-

as i've said, holidays are a misnomer, they should srsly consider changing the name to something more sensible.

...

2007-05-29T00:13:00.000+08:00

Because Michelle Adrienne Smelly the Woodhead Heah Yen Wei dare me to:

i was only a bit more than a year old, and now you know why i look so garang.

i still don't have a reason & you don't have the time

2007-05-27T01:15:00.000+08:00

i know i know screwed priorities right? a day before the chinese o level paper and i'm typing clandestinely at 1.16 in the morning.

a lot of stuff has been going on - results were ok mostly, 'cept for chinese and bio (which i.studied.like.nobody's.business.for ok it's infuriating), founder's day mass and mrs morier & gabby (i heart gabby and she knows why YOU HEAR THAT MICH & SAM I DON'T FRIEND YOU LE.) said i read the offertory prayers well!(:, and then chinese intensive. and teh killer heat.

i hate the heat. i've been taking two showers per day and i hate wasting water too. it's making me super grouchy and plus chinese imagine how homicidal i feel 25 hours a day 8 days a week.

OH THEY MODERATED MY SS/HISTORY MARK(: i was so miffed at first 'cause i got 88 for history and 45 for ss which left me with a B3, so the teachers decided to have pity on me (haha) and pushed up my grade. k i kid, i don't really knwo why they moderated my marks along with a few other people's.

oh, oh, i just realised oliver wood is preeeety hot! k random.

k. i need to have a bit more gravity and go sleep now, got tuition tmr morning baaaah.

and so we stand.

2007-05-21T23:55:00.000+08:00

like bloody idiots not able to do anything, either because you don't realise how we're pitching forward into this unbridgeable chasm or because "[we are] in blood stepped in so far that were [we] to wade no more, returning were as tedious as go o'er"

and it just dawned on me - i feel so guilty everytime i spend time with you because it reminds me of all the stupid little teasings and inside jokes we had, all the nonsense and made-up stories and pretend things we had, and we were so caught up like little girls enamoured with a paper harlequin.

(why a harlequin i don't know, i guess it reflects how lifeless and. and. manipulated our ways have become.)

and now i realise that all this. detritus of a relationship is only such because we failed to transcend that stage, that initial phase where we could tease and poke fun and make fun of - and it's horribly sad and futile now and so horribly irrevocably screwed up that i will cherish the good times, and close my eyes and pray the bad times are only a figment of my (overparanoid, please let it be so) imagination.

i.want.to.watch.harry.potter.
random i know but i refer strictly to the first 3 movies i didn't really like the fourth.

you were meant for me

2007-05-19T01:11:00.000+08:00

elliott! <3!
i think i have a thing for curly-haired guys too.
but i'm still faithful k, denise. don't look at me like that.

anyway i love denise.
it just hit me that this is the rock steady friendship that's going to be with me all through life.

i'm pretty tired of life now. tired of familiar people and things and pedantry strangling me. i want to leave ij, not because i love it any less but because. any longer and i will grow disillusioned with it, and already everyday i am forcing myself to be civil to some people even when i know their allegiance shifts like, overnight and at the drop of a hat. yes, just basically civil, which is appalling when you think of the kind of friendship/trust/love/honour we thought we had - you know that kind of friendship that is supposed to transcend everything. turns out it cant' withstand very much, and it's kind of nice to knwo you meant that much to them all along, despite what they say and do even, somehow it's never, ever going to be the same.

Pandora's Box.

2007-05-17T00:12:00.000+08:00

i.do.not.want.to.get.back.my.papers.
i.feel.sick.to.the.stomach.
i.am.typing.like.this.because.i.feel.clenched.up.and.about.to.hurl.

i'm falling sick - i look pretty goth with the bright (dehydrated) red lips and pasty skin tone and black hair.

well. whatever the case thinking about exam papers makes me sick, sick, sick to the core, and i predict i'm going to be bawling tomorrow. today. whatever.

bye world wish me luck.
(& chinese Os in two weeks, coursework submission - actually more like STARTING coursework - coming up. life is pretty bad and khairulanwar if you do not take my side i'm not going to talk to you anymore.)

cassandra

2007-05-12T10:08:00.000+08:00

I will weep for your elisioned truth.
I will not let them have your dignity as an immolator
When this demigoddess traduces you.
Your heart, abraded by want of love
I will not let my doubts be your reneging traitor
When this entropy dictates your arraignment
All out of love for Helen.
Your words, plangent yet too-palladian, i will defend.
Your world, so withdrawn from human reach, I will
Protect.

alrighty i did this at like 1 am yesterday morning, it's about the trojan prophetess of doom cassandra who has now become an eponym for something forever forseeing doomsday. she's also paris's and hector's younger sister, and the one who cries out, when helen first comes ashore to troy, that helen will be the fall of their great city. of course nobody likes it.

cassandra is blessed with mantic abilities yet cursed by apollo such that nobody will ever believe her. and hector, even though he cannot always bring himself to believe her words, is the only one on her side even when helen insults her. (and when helen insults everybody must follow suit.) so this poem's from hector's point of view. the last line is crappy. i couldn't think of a way to fix it up so it'll stay that way til i get my creative juices up and flowing again.

i think the pact by jodi picoult is much, much better than my sister's keeper. and that's a turning point in my thoughts of her writing, i never really liked her to start with.

i still doubt the credibility of her characters. emily seems a little too mary-jane-ish (eponym for goody two shoes) and way too perfect and this whole suicidal thing, come to think of it, is a rather trite way of developing a character. it's cliched and not very skilfully crafted.

i think amy tan does a far better job in terms of characterisation - you can sense that tan's characters are fleshed out and moulded so delicately that every action they take makes perfect sense - they are created wholesomely and so refinedly and crafted with such painstaking detail.

but all in, picoult does a marvellous job in fishing out all sorts of emotions from you from her characters! something tan never exactly did until i had to do that essay on recommending the joy luck club to somebody.

towards the end i hated emily though. for what she did to chris, who puts her every need before his and he cares so much SO MUCH for her! and now she cannot put his before hers, it's always hers hers hers hers. i can't figure out how to get there and i want it to stay this way forever so i want to die now so i can keep it this way forever. so she gets chris to make a suicide pact with her, and chris loves her so and he cant' handle life without her but no, for her own good all else must give way. it's so infuriating that anyone could be so selfish and weak.

and the interesting thing in this book is that, although i thought melanie gold was so. screwed up, i found myself so frightened by her. because in her i see myself. i'm obsessive, reserved and when adversity comes i can't handle it and what's to stop ME from turning heartless like her?

and the court scenes were Excellent. with a capital E. i liked the pact better because it was so absorbing, the way the chapters were arranged so that you peel off tiny bit by tiny bit and when more and more details are revealed it makes the epiphany so much more poignant and so cogent and forceful. it's really beautiful. and you just get drawn in deeper and deeper, step by step.

-

and for yet another time familiar faces have stopped eliciting the same response and i'm suddenly floundering again.

haha actually not really it's kind of liberating, but this is what mugging does to you - it compresses everything into the furthest recesses of your brain and for so long that when it's time to let go you find you've pushed everything out of your head.

ok world that last line of the poem is relaly bugging me i will go change it now. adios.

i am beautiful in every single way and words can't bring me down.

2007-05-11T00:10:00.000+08:00

i don't know why that song popped into my head.

denise and i had a fantabulous time today, oh em gee i miss her like crazy 'cause she's so funny.

haha my writing skills are in a deplorable state. i'm hankering after the pen again and a newfound fetish for eponyms. but eponyms are intractable to use. and i want to try a different style of things. i was going through my older, immediate-post-cap poems and they're more representational somewhoe. now they're abstruse and so. gormley-sort of intractable. haha omg, sova is messing with my head! mimosis! axiality! dynamism! submit to the inertia of the work!

SO MUCH FOR MUGGING CHRISTO AND GOLDSWORTHY LAH didn't even come out. i like goldsworthy he is transcendently transient. and i have a newfound respect for dorothea lange's migrant mother, nipomo valley photograph, i finally saw for myself that steely resolve and courage in her face.

anyway. today was superb(:

- guys who carry their girlfriend's bags probably think the bag's so fetch so they dont' really fuss carrying it. not kewt lehzxc where is your manliness dude. haha imagine EH DEAR COME BACK WITH MY BAG LEH.
- ages and ages looking for a place to eat until i settled for breadtalk.
- our "ugly ducking" periods coincide! from p4 to sec 2. we are preeeety swans now.
- ages and ages in hmv - darren hayes or savage garden and every album i picked up is cracked. and so much for cute taiwanese guy please! haha.
- "WHY IS HE SO UGLY WHAT'S HIS PROBLEM" classic.
- denissha and lola. ergh.
- ma-a-jorly long talk in food junction for like. ages. (:
- i think i have paedophilic tendencies. khairulanwar this is what you do to me. but the baby was srsly adorable he kept smiling at us(: swoons.
- awesome bus ride home. denise has the ability to command the buses! she went COME, 52, COME! and it came. then when crossing the road she saw her bus and ordered it to stop, which it did. awesome eh i'm tagging with her when we need a cab.
- and, and, HEY HEY YOU YOU WO BU XI HUAN NI DE NU PENG YOU! NO WAY NO WAY NI XU YAO YI GE XIN DE!
- and it's official, we're together :D

i'm happy. h to the a to the p-p-y.

these deeds must not be thought after these ways, so it will make us mad.

2007-05-09T10:20:00.000+08:00

in any case i think i have gone the way of lady macbeth, moving in opposition from macbeth and going from determination to roiling inner turmoil.

i think, but dare not speak.

i'm.trying.so.hard.but.it.isn't.working.

and i hate it, i think i've given up hope on myself. i hate how people tell me to shut up when i say i've screwed lit/english and every subject because i really did, i have this queasy roiling fear in the pits of my stomach (how i hope to god that it's just memory, the warder of the brain acting up) that i really, really messed up big time. and right now i'm praying so hard for a miracle that won't happen.

"I think now that fate is half shaped by expectation, half by inattention. But somehow, when you lose something you love, faith takes over. You have to pay attention to what you lost. You have to undo the expectation."

Rose Hsu Jordan, Half and Half
(Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club)

she reminds me of a west side story.

2007-05-05T01:06:00.000+08:00

Cure her of that
Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased,
Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow,
Raze out the written troubles of the brain
And with some sweet oblivious antidote
Cleanse the stuffed bosom of the perilous stuff
Which weighs upon the heart?

(Shakespeare, Macbeth)

I'm not missing you.

2007-04-22T17:55:00.000+08:00

haha. yeah who am i kidding man.

i miss the old you. the way we were. and the way i could tell you everything without reserve and now everything i say goes through a filter, not because i don't trust you (or maybe yes because of that too, seeing as how you constantly forget what i tell you or forget that it's supposed to be a secret) but because everthing i want to say to you is a criticism or something.negative. something full of anger and something that will potentially injure this pathetic sad ghost of a friendship we have now.

mids are coming, i haven't really done much ugh. and coursework deadline is same day as lit, how am i to finish? oh.sod.i.hate.life.

and i really mean that in every sense of it, not just to be emo and attention-seeking, i'm so tired i put my head down from exhaustion and find myself crying from sheer helplessness/hopelessness.

i seem to have been this close to crying the whole week - quite pathetic i am, i know.

Yeah so we can hear Cartel blasting in the background
(Or maybe it's just in my head)
And don't realise the uncanny parody in the way
I am pleading with you to "say anything else".

a little less sixteen candles

2007-04-12T17:29:00.000+08:00

it was, in a word, awesome.

woke up in the morning to denise's cheery birthday wish - how not to be happy?

got serenaded by joy and jess first thing in the morning, those two stupid nonsense shyts CAN SING MAN. then sam and nic and many others gave me birthday wishes and cards (: and a heartwrenching affirmation letter from nette which made me tear.

got serenaded again by the whole combined lit class, just as mrs alex walked in. i swear i was so embarrassed, but everyone was so awesomely sweet!

(it is a mark of how awesome the day was that i can't find any other vocabulary.)

but what really took the cake (NO PUN INTENDED) was recess time! the other 6 excos are so terribly sneaky & i didn't suspect a thing at all. but then again i'm just gullible. THEY PLANTED BILL IN THE ROOM SO I WOULDN'T COME OUT TO SEE WHERE THEY WERE. no wonder bill kept laughing so much at everything i said.

and according to eyewitnesses and sarah herself, they spent a good 5 minutes trying to light my cake candles, and then burst into the room singing happy birthday at the top of their lungs.

i teared. again.

the classic, exco defining escapade: the candle fell onto the happy birthday sign and it melted, to much screaming. and mrs nicks, mdm zu and ms teo came down to wish me as well (: and i got a special rendition from ms teo.

classic.

it made me so immensely nostalgic and happy and heartwrung all at once. worrd, but i can't tell you how i felt, just so amazingly blessed to know such Amazing people.

well even in spite of the circumstances i still had training. it was raining, blah, and we nearly got it cancelled. then the weather cleared and nette, being nette, sabotaged me. thank goodness the canteen was too noisy.

haha i still had tuition anyway after training, but i had like, another 2 slices of cake? put back on the inches i lost over lent. lisa didn't want mom to give me my present til she got home - and it was super pretty - a pink graphic tee and, and, and a handmade necklace & bracelet set made by mom.

dan got me a famous amos cookie on a stick (: blaaaah getting fat, i am, and don't give me that look paychel.

i suppose birthdays are all surreal, i don't feel any different from when i was fifteen. but it was sweet in the literal and metaphorical sense now it's time to start mugging for myes.

mermaid

2007-04-07T14:31:00.000+08:00

In our coral halls of emptiness,
We let things glide by under a pearlescent veneer
Hiding resentment under a nacreous semblance
And things, obscured by darker, myriadic depths we cannot fathom
Until we sit, cold and regal, still
Refusing to defer
But our hearts like lost seashells washed up among driftwood –
Still calling and yearning for each other

In the memory of an echo.

sova is a tremendously stupid subject to study, and even ms low concurs that we need some basic training in art history before tackling abstract themes.

i mean. by all means, change the style of questions in the paper so as to better fit art appreciation but it is ridiculous, not to sya the least - tremendously stupid and a failingly large error to try to teach us to identify a style in any painting we see when we cant' even define the style of precedent art periods.

how'm i suppose to tell you that anthony gormley is influenced by brancusi when i don't even knwo what brancusi's style is?

how are we supposed to identify a common thread of thought/concept/belief/dogma in a period when we cannot even learn it as a collective whole? i can only tell you that the impressionists believed in immortalising and forever capturing the fleeting, transient effects of light and hence the name impresisonism but this is, of course, because i studied two years of art history.

and this new method of grouping artists according to themes - ideas & imagination, space & structure, self & society - is just a euphemism for telling us what we should think. THIS IS ART for crying out loud, let us identify and categorise and analyse out of our own capacity as an art student! what if i don't believe gormley should be categorised under ideas and imagination (heck i can't even recall what he was actually classified under) but should be under space and structure? after all he's the one with the whole abstract chingbang of axiality and dynamism in his works.

it is a failingly large oversight to implement this style. we learn like an average of 12 artists a year? you are not going to effectively educate us on art.

and this categorising system is extremely extremely hard to remember. i can't rememebr the 4 themes firstly, and i see absolutely no need to pin them down to a particular theme anyway. it's art and it is ironic that some avant-garde artists who strive to be decompartmentalised are being compartmentalised into categories.

and i can remember titian and donatello and el greco and mannerism and baroque and even the separate culture style of baroque - how the dutch are extremely careful and meticulous in the study of light, how the french baroque are decadent and extremely grand and frivolous - and this was in sec 1! i cant' even recall who else i've learnt last year except for erm. gormley and henry moore?

you can learn to appreciate art without breaking up periods and blindly slapping labels onto artists. and that isn't appreciation per se. true appreciation doesn't mean you need to study them according to themes. appreciation is being able to sit back and see the artist as a tour de force in his own rights, and ultimately a part of a larger collective group that in some way impacted other artists and the world around us.

closure

2007-04-02T18:03:00.000+08:00

yesterday i wrote down every insecurity that ate at me and had whittled me to an ashen-faced, bleached thing of fear.

today i crushed that paper up, triumphantly.

thank you nic star, sam b, and sarah, for the power to conquer my insecurity.

consider it not so deeply.

2007-04-01T18:21:00.000+08:00

you know honestly, i may be better at shakespearan literature than i am at modern prose like jlc and a dip in the poole but that doesn't mean i can't get an overdose of it. anymore of it and i shall starte typing such for all eterne.

i jest. it's a grat play and i still love it very much, and this symposium gave me such deeper insight to the play.

ray mcniece was super funny - he has an amazing way of performing his poetry! it surpasses those dramatic poetry slam thingys where they play with spotlight and have the words flashed in white behind them. hes got superb enunciation - something i dearly need to learn - and an ineffable sense of humour and eloquence and onomatopoeia (i must learn how to spell this properly soon). and he's so charismatically laid back and irish. k being irish has nothing to do with it. but it's cool how he just starts talking about himself and his experiences and so subtly slips into a poem! and you don't realise it until he's in the midst of it all because you think he's sort of ranting btu actually you realise his slips and funny noises are part of his performance, like 'te-te-te-TEpid tapwater taste better" or something.

the third session i went for was sji's joy luck club presentation. good organisation - i normally try to talk about the separate pairs and then get al mixed up and don't really show any overarching theme well because my essay is disjointed; instead what they did was analyse the chinese face of the mothers and the american face of the daughters and show how that assimilated into a double face.

gregory nunn's their english teacher, and he was an actor previously! he's acted macbeth and that's what he did in his slot, it was Great because you really got into macbeth's mind and how greatly "sick at heart" he is and how desolate and lonely and reckless and half-crazed by his insecurity he is, and how passionately charged the macbeths' relationship is initially.

then the very last session i went for was suzanne choo's unseen poetry course. i was torn between the unseen prose and unseen poetry because i'm so bad at prose. decided on the latter anyway, and glad i did because i can sort of specialise? but anyhow will kope the prose workshop's notes in case some intractable poem comes out and i have to revert to prose. she is astounding, really, i don't think i have ever actually come across such a non-pedantic, broad minded yet concurrently stable framework for answering unseen poetry questions!

we had our presentation first thing in the morning, i hope i did good? i really have no idea and we've all been on an emotional roller coaster and left our stomachs elsewhere. q&a wasn't too bad i guess, though i blanked when the first question - what caused the degeneration of their relationship - came out. i hope i didn't come across as condescending though. i am no expert on macbeth. it's just the way i talk, i guess? when i go too fast for anyone to actually hear what i say and then my favourite word - TRANSCEND! - slips out i honestly don't mean to show off or anything. ugh.

have been sleeping near 3 nearly the whole week, so i came back and slept till it was time for church, then i came back from dinner and went to sleep again and woke up this morning.

only now i keep having phrases of macbeth running through my mind - i know how lady macbeth feels to be so emotionally sapped yet must go on because i cant' break down at this point - midyears and chinese prelims are coming fast and furious, and the deadline or coursework is charging steadily nearer and all i've done are 3 observational sketches. fantastic ah.

and when i feel insecure - which i have been a lot lately, friends tell me not to let it affect me, and that famous line by lady macbeth comes to mind - "consider it not so deeply" and "these deeds must not be thought after these ways, so it will make us mad." and i am going mad, i just told paychel to take her mouth hence. (it's "take thy face hence" actually.)

desiree very sarcastically (i am going to kill her on monday but i love her still, the crazy anti-establishment woman that she is) told me that it is always good when i can relate to a fictional character.

chinese prelim oral after school was frightening! can you imagine having your heart constantly juddering and syncopating in your chest all day and then it culminates and falls perpetually! anyway prelim oral exam was only one of the many smaller peaks. i think, i think i did okay, she seemed satisfied with my answers after 3 questions and she was sort of smiling and nodding her head. that's good i guess? i honestly can't say. i'm just glad i didn't have to stop and think for long pregnant pauses, even if my grammar was a bit strange at times.

and, and, if i have ever said i am insecure before, i take it back now because right now i am feeling at my lowest point and so, so low that i cannot get up again, i cannot scale those treacherous, slippery walls and ladders because in my heart of hearts i fear i am no good.

but hey, it's Holy Week, and like father andrew was saying, it's time i put all this aside and really, really give it all up to Jesus and just focus on him and remember his great love for God and for us. so that's what i'm going to try and do, because no point harping over insecurities; time heals all wounds eventually.

-

2007-03-28T21:59:00.000+08:00

yeah so today my brain is throbbing with some monstrous mutating thing howling and jumping all abotu inside it, tyring to burst out of my skull, and i took one look at you and your stubborn, overly self-assured, whingy whiny clingy insecure petty and disgustingly selfish ways and i begin to wonder of this is even worth salvaging.

[edit 11.50pm]
I've given up on giving up slowly
I'm blending in so you won't even know me
Apart from this whole world that shares my fate
This one last bullet you mention
It's my one last shot at redemption
Cause I know to live you must give your life away
And I've been housing all this doubt and insecurity
And I've been locked inside that house
All the while you hold the key
And I've been dying to get out
And that might be the death of me
And even though there's no way of knowing
Where to go
I promise I'm going because
I gotta get out of here
I'm stuck inside this rut that I fell into by mistake
I gotta get out of here
And I'm begging you, I'm begging you, I'm begging you to be my escape.

i'm so sick of it. so so so sick of it. i just want to focus on my exams right now i just want to focus on being a good cw&d head i don't want to have to deal with people like you. i don't want to have to deal with this, and i don't know what i should do now.

it's horribly hatefully futile. i don't know it's far worse than hate i guess, and it seems to be escalating ot the point where there's going to be no return now that i've seen what you're like truly under all those layers.

"i feel as if i had been running to escape someone chasing me, only to look behind and discover there was no one there." - the joy luck club.

only i think we've been chasing each other with such resentment and dread that we dont' even kwno where to stop. and the epiphany hit me today, i don't think we can ever reconcile ourselves to each other because we did rush so quickly, too quickly into this and nobody is thinking rationally.

poison, poison, poison. that's all that seems to be on my mind now. that, and the monster that's just begun its keening cry again so my head hurts and my eyes keep sliding in and out of focus like a dead fish's.

thank you, nette & joy.

stop getting up for the letdown.

2007-03-26T01:32:00.000+08:00

yes i should.
charm's brave. i wish i could have done that but the worst thing is that i seem to be the only one realising how much resentment and tension there is between us now. if i open my mouth i might just spoil this thing altogether, seeing how fragile it is. and really, even if i talked abotu it, there's nothing i can do to change the way people are.

vat to be submitted later today, wish me luck. i'm horrifically paranoid it will not garner a good mark.

And it's okay
If you had to go away
Oh, just remember the telephones
Well, they're working in both ways
But if I never, ever hear them ring
If nothing else
I'll think the bells inside have finally found you someone else
And that's okay
Cause I'll remember everything you say
Cause you and I both loved
What you and I spoke of
And others just read of
And if you could see me now.

[edit 5:20pm]
to put it in a jaded, trite way, i don't think i'll ever escape those demons from the past. whether it was my insecurity or something else.

so make my bed the grave and shovel dirt onto my sheets.

Impasto

2007-03-25T00:54:00.000+08:00

I thought you said we were invincible
Maybe you were inebriated.
Choleric to the last, you declare and promulgate so ardently
And you are so impetuously impulsive. Now in retrospect,
Perhaps this febrile [ - ]ship was nothing more than an athanor to our insecurity
And maybe we were made purblind by our common desultory odium.
Now you are overly-loud and forcedly cheerful
As if to cover up how venal you are.

hi. wake up and look at where this is going, take a look in the mirror please. but i don't think you'll ever see past how your hair or acne is so bad to see the person i used to treasure inside. what happened to the old you. or is this really you, and we just rushed into this too quickly to stop and think about it and then our constant proximity drove us mad and opened up our eyes to all our faults and opened the tap on resentment so we never really got to fix it but let it all gush away, driven by some mad raging irrational disgust that we look back on in retrospect and wonder why we never fixed it, why we never turned the tap off on the way we were.

then i realise that we took it lying down all along and we went with the flow, down the gutter and now "our problems are much, much deeper than that, so deep i don't even know where bottom is."

and then i wonder if i really just made this whole fairytale up because come to think of it, it was too good to be true.

-
i'm growing increasingly diffident by the day - i feel terribly stupid and clumsy with my words, i hope i don't go the way i did last year with my literature and writing.

and my art. i just need to finish my annexe bit of developmental sketches and i should be more or less done but right now i've taken a step back and realised my drawings look a bit facile in colour pencil. i'm growing very insecure over my whole concept of a natural playground - it isn't exactly a burst of colour and sound and response that city kids would love but rather muted and it's about eliciting fresh responses? and i want to ace this so so badly. i don't know, i honestly don't know how i'll do and it makes me sick with worry.

i met ms chye in church today (: she asked me how i was and about my literature and whether i'd been writing and she told me to continue because she remembered i write beautifully (:

oh khairulanwar hurry up and come back from ns and get well soon ):

ij-sji

2007-03-18T00:16:00.000+08:00

i suppose camp was in its on way a success. it wasn't typical ij style of fun fun fun and more fun but the councillors seemed to have a blast anyway, in the most professional sense.

day one:
I WAS ON TIME!
k milestone in my life considerign i can't hear my alarm clock half the time.

- i hate wacko, fen should stop springing these surprises on me when i don't intend to play. at least gabs was alert. which i never am.
- powerpoint font too small, bad judgment error on my part and i lost it when peopel began sniggering about my macbeth reference but hey at least i sounded cheem OKAY.
- exchanging cheers: is kind of scary when the ratio is like 1 ij to 2 sji.
- lunch was. reaally appetising GABBY WHAT HAPPENED TO HARVEST CATERERS HUH.
- i-realities: i think we were all afraid that it would sally right over the councillors' heads but they seemed pretty receptive. a bit sleepy perhaps after lunch.
- making fun of poor kendrick - kenny is mean fullstop.
- games! dan chased me away. well the icecream game was fun. though terribly messy. someone ahemkatahem spilt her icecream accidentally/on purpose. these kids don't know where their mouths are nowadays, tsk. and moving can game got modified so much by The Ultimate Sadists kenny and sharidian.
- war game - i suppose it was fun lah. but it was kind of disappointing the way some people took it. anyhow i got saboed to the maxxxxxx: YI FEN YOU WATCH OUT. she jumped ship like totally okay and i got two bucketfuls up-ended while i was DRYING OFF. and samira had to pour cold water from the cooler. traitor. and i got attacked by my own facils. WHERE IS YOUR CAMARADERIE, WOMEN? and what was worse was that the balloons didn't break like owww. took plenty revenge though :D
- reflection. yi fen and i were freeeeeezing haha shut up mag and joy.

day two:

YOU GUESSED IT i was late. by 45 minutes. i woke up at 715. in my defense i had tennis after camp yesterday and insomnia because i was panicking about ss and bio.

- camp shirt came!
- service learning at kwong wai shiu hospice was. wow. it really puts things into perspective.
- lunch with sam b, cat tang, kat tan (CHEATER) & val yeap. fun people :D talked about a lot of things.
- dhar is an idiot, fullstop.
- DRAGON BOATING! sang a number of nonsense songs and cheers and did the sji warpath cheer by banging our oars. joy, clarissa (too unique already lah), sarah ho, sab, rou urn, mel, pei ying, dhar the idiot, si yinn, cat & kat make terrific dragon boating partners. and madam zu :D haha and our spirit was so strong our instructor fell into the water. super funny.
- the bus ride back was typically full of off-pitch singing, good fun, national day songs (patriotic lah we are.) and disney songs.
- sun tanning while waiting for the rest to finish showering. super shiok! HAHA AMANDA GOH: ----------------- AH?
- talentime: decent no-frills entertainment but the sound system screwed up):
- affirmations were nice, i wasn't expecting any so when i got some it was really sweet(: and mel's made me tear. it was so sweet and short and i am so glad that at least i have fufilled my duty to one person.
- cheers, songs (sexy back blaaah) and reach for the stars.
- clean up. EEW PEOPLE LEAVE HALF EATEN WANGWANG BISCUITS BEHIND.

so in one sense camp was good, but from where i'm standing, i wish some things weren't the way they were. a bit cryptic i sound but this is no criticism of anybody but myself. i guess for the last camp i will ever attend/facilitate in my career as an ij councillor. well never mind. people had a great time so that's good that they dont' leave with a bitter aftertaste.

well for me, i've got things to think, vat to finish (ARGH I HATE ART ALREADY BURN IN HELL LAH STUPID THING) ss and bio to study for , chinese oral to try and bluff my way through and the sngs lit symposium.

the holiday went by too fast. i am sniffing with a runny nose and i have a premonition of febrile shivering.

kbye world dont' expect me back!

a welcome arrow through the heart.

2007-03-14T14:21:00.000+08:00

haha sometimes i can't believe that this -thing- has come so far, that it's at this point and that makes me deliriously happy but other times i wonder sadly if it will ever transcend this, if it will go on or will it forever stagnate here and die this way.

k you kwno what i'm being morbid. never mind.

tomorrow is the long-planned-for sji-ij combined!

i think i will miss the councillors desperately when i graduate.

AND ALI TAKE YOUR BOOKS OUTTA THE ROOM!

O God, You search me.

2007-03-11T00:07:00.001+08:00

Before a word is on my tongue, Lord,
You have known its meaning through and through.
You are with me beyond my understanding:
God of my present, my past and future, too.

I have been Emotional this week. Very Emotional.
Not to the crying extent but just thinking, thinking, thinking until my single state of person that function is smothered in surmise and nothing is but what is not and here I am quoting archaic Macbeth and equivocating.

And I have been thinking until I cannot act anymore and I am trapped in some paradoxical paradigm.
And I cannot help but keep wondering and thinking of a way I can confirm/disprove my suspicions. (which are pretty silly and insecure and trivial, by the way.)
And I keep forgetting to finish my night prayers.

The March 9th quote on my calendar was startlingly apt:
"We need to be able to pray. We need prayer just like we need air. Without prayer, we can do nothing." Mother Teresa.

And it scares me, because this was the way I went last year - slowly pushing God out of my life and then trying to pray but being so suffocatingly, blindingly, flailingly unable to.

Okay why am I capitalising I normally don't capitalise but never mind it's good I start using proper punctuation.

And I am disgusted with myself. For taking so long with VAT that i have to put everything else in the backseat for the time being and concentrate on my own academic needs. It's disgusting. (I'm sorry to you 7 people wh have to contend with my disappearances)

Yeah. So I'm quite tired out (HOLIDAY IS A MISNOMER. IT MEANS FULLSTEAMAHEAD AND DON'T YOU DARE STOP.) and my mind is in a whirl so I can't really comprehend what i mean when I type all this, but I'm going to put it in God's hands because He is with me beyond my understanding.

train this chaos/turn it into light

2007-03-08T20:13:00.000+08:00

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,

To the last syllable of recorded time;

And all our yesterdays are lighted fools

The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!

the terribly depressingly beautiful speech macbeth makes in act 5 is stuck perpetually in my head. it's beautiful in a morbid, dark, sinister, futile way.

maybe because i still am undecided whether i want time to speed up or slow down.

my eyes are so tired that everytime i close them all i can see are white flashes of light that don't go away. i've been staying up past 1 since saturday, and the midnight oil burning came to a culmination this morning when i went to bed at 3 just so i could have at least 1 read-through of my chem notes.

bye world. i'm going to draw now and sleep at 9.

And I knew that the lights of the city were too heavy for me

2007-03-04T23:36:00.000+08:00

Quietly slipped away
And hanging on in the crystal intensity
Of our polarised stands.
Yet in our phantasmic, vertiginous tempest we
Acquiesce, and attempt to
Untangle Gordian knots, simply because

You are transcendent.

irritant.

2007-03-04T00:27:00.000+08:00

and that's what i've been today.

i effectively got on jeanette's nerves; i'm sorry nette i dont' know why i went that argumentative. and i really didn't mean anything by it i was just. blabbering. (it's a side effect, it is, it is!)

i think the roarosaurus reared her head again this morning, firstly cause dad has like, such an unswerving sense of urgency i tell you. i left the house at eight because dad wouldn't drink his coffee faster. so i imploded when they wanted to swop pictures in the ppt and would've killed poor paychel if she weren't feeling reconciliatory.

sorry pays, i didn't mean to give you The Look like that):

eurgh i feel lousy.

why can't i hold my temper? it's direly frustrating when it gets out like this because i feel like i'm damaging relationships with people who are so terrifically patient with me and have put up with me for so long but still i take it out on them and i'm terribly disgusted with myself. the good thing that God blesses me with - fantastic friends - and here i am wreaking possibly irrevocable damage on it. i'm immensely angry with myself.

we're about 1 and a half weeks into lent and i haven't really kept to my resolution of holding my temper better. maybe i'll be better this week. yes i will be better this week.

sound and fury.

2007-03-01T00:48:00.000+08:00

where are we going in all this?

when every picture i cherish
when every memory i store
when every where i turn
when every word must be weighed to see if it will tip this delicate balance
when we take sides
when we fall apart
when every laugh is forced
when our demeanor becomes overtly cheerful and forcedly ebullient
when our stands become polarised in this quietly-whirling storm
when relationships we thought firm and founded begin to falter, crumble and fail
when this is all the support you get
when this is all the support you give
when you start to weigh and calculate
when are we going to go back to normal?

if normal isn't too far away, that is.

[not-eloquent-enough-today]

2007-02-27T18:36:00.000+08:00

HI WORLD.
I HATE VAT.

it's due end march, and i have zilch sketches. whoopee.

and i can't figure out HOW to organise my research notes and finalised sketches. i cant' figrue what should go where.

coursework is no good either, ms low must be dreaming if she wants us to submit it by july.

i absolutely refuse to do anything that i am forced into by duress, and in light of this stupid deadline i am coupled with i think that's a fair promulgation.

and suddenly i dont' feel invincible anymore, and i have never felt so dejected, faltering and such an absolute failure as i am now.

self-awareness camp 2007

2007-02-25T00:37:00.000+08:00

keshveen has parkinson's, pardon the blurry quality on that account please. otherwise, meet my dorm mates for sac 07(:

NETTE(: the wonderful comforter.

"fairytales are more than true, not because they tell us dragons exist, but because they tell us dragons can be defeated." gk chesterton

SAC was phwoar-worthy. no, we didn't sob or cry that much - whoever it was who told me that we're gonna sob bucketloads was exaggerating, but we did cry.

it was so amazing in the sense that we found out so much about each other and never imagined taking it this far as a class. i mean, i grew to like 3/4 in time, but now i think 4/4's just marvellous in our own ways, even if the staffrooms think we're noisy and disruptive.

and it totally, completely transcended my expectations. i didn't want to share at first, not in front of people whom i barely talk to and after yi fen's bubbly sharing i think i positively made no sense at all. i never imagined sharing with my class abotu my dog dying last year. and now that it's out i guess it's finally time for closure, i can stop crying every night for two hours on end about it and i can move on and let time take it's own healing course.

i spent the two months after my dog's death in some state of detachment, and even after confirmation i still spent christmas week crying and begging and pleading for one more day, even if it couldn't happen.

maybe this is why things fell apart, because i bottled up my poison and then cut myself on the glass until i ruined everything i had.

sac didn't exactly heal the wounds yet but it was what i needed.

even confi camp didn't do this. not that confi camp is any less better - it's always always going to be up there for always and forever because of the inexplicable high and tranquility we get. but sac's a good complement to it, because it empowers you to take charge and keep that high and energy going and channel it into something positive. it teaches you something about goal setting and believing and unearthing your own strengths all by yourself.

k i sound like some publiciser for sac, but this is how cool it is.

and the dorm room times :D
FEN AH FEN. tsk tsk.

you begin to wonder why you came.

2007-02-19T00:22:00.000+08:00

sometimes, familiar faces and things fail to elicit the same response in you. and that's scary - if one day i wake up and find myself detached from everything i've come to love and grown accustomed to, or suddenly find i cannot cross this abyss, then i don't know what will help me find my way.

[edit]
well i just answered my own question.

God will help me find my way.

awake.

2007-02-17T13:50:00.000+08:00

all drunk on sparkling juice.

the angel, being blessed by an angel, don't know what gabby's doing, another angel, being condemned by the devil, and the horny devil herself.

share the love!

we heart you.

bill is definitely drunk.

the pretty hot guestbook done by yours truly.
(somebody asked if i spilt paint on it accidentally, i was so miffed.)

we're soaaaaaaaaaaaring, flyyyyyyyyyying and there's not a girl in ij that we can't reach(:

in motion.

exco 06/07(:

investiture was a blast, despite all that tension running high before the event. well it was annoying to say the least, having to micromanage some things because i'd assumed wrongly but never mind, i shouldnt' have lost my temper.

it was crazily surreal, going up on stage to get my badge from sr grace and standing before 500 people who must have some sort of expectation of us somehow, and it was scary and amazing and wonderful all the same.

now that it's over means no more embarrassing umbrella dancing to my humps or we are family and looking desperately over at gabby to know when to get up. and hearing val's attempt to injetc humour into her emcee script and telling the audience that i oversee the pampering of the councillors (HAHA i scare them more like) and walking offstage after the skit to be congratulated and hugged by teachers and friends and councillors alike, and the note that the leadership comm wrote to us after it all - that they're proud of us - is suffice to make me cry and jump with joy.

then valentine's day ran concurrent with invest, i got a beeyootiful rose from beatrice the bimbo and tons of chocolate, nice-smelling shampoo from sarah and an air kiss from my retarded pokaye. yep this is how vday in ij goes, even if you aren't attached youknwo that you are loved.

and then cny celebrations - yi fen and i wore two ponytails like two little kiddies all over again. tying my hair that was is addictive. my ponytails are so much swishier now. maybe i shall start tying them that way more often. 4/1 and 4/2 played one way for their dedication song! nette and i had a fun time jumping and shouting. confi camp all over again but ij style. it was great.

but it makes me sad too, watching sarah's amazing video she stressed over. all the memories! so much to say and so little time left. it made me cry for real, listening to josh groban's awake because it seemed so apt.

So keep me awake to memorize you
Give me more time to feel this way
We can't stay like this forever
But I can have you next to me today.

so keep me awake to memorise you.

2007-02-11T01:22:00.000+08:00

this week has been frightening.
i think we all spent it on the verge of tears half the time, because we love her so much and it's devastating and frightening that this could happen to somebody so close.

God rest him and grant her strength to carry on.

i cried for people when the o level results came out. it's my turn next year and it's so terrifying - what if i prepare and prepare but it all goes horribly wrong somehow? i don't think i'll be able to cope with that disappointment. it was freaky, and even if i wasn't receiving the resutls i went cold all over from the suspense as well.

then i cried watching american idol and seeing people's dreams come crashing around their ears.

i think i've screwed up some things this week, and i'm sorry if i hurt anybody.

and saying i love you sometimes isn't enough to encapsulate how much you'll miss that person when you won't see her on a regular basis anymore after this year.

bright shining as the sun.

2007-02-08T18:33:00.000+08:00

"remember, when your heart feels restless, when your heart feels hurt, when your heart feels like breaking - then remember, 'i am precious to Him. He has called me by name. i am His. He loves me.' and to prove that love, He died on the cross"

- mother teresa

but what if i'm a mermaid in his jeans with her name still on it?

2007-02-02T23:40:00.000+08:00

You are the Way, the Truth and the Life
We live by faith and not by sight
For You, we're living all for You.

sam b sent me this song and made my week so much better.
i've gone into some sort of emotional throes for many reasons - seeing all my castles, both the (presumed) solidly founded and built ones as well as those in the air come crashing down around my ears.

but One Way's a really good song to listen to when you're sad - even if it's one of those songs that make you want to jump and shout for joy, and you feel the direct antithesis of that. it made me so much happier, 'cause 'You're the only one I need' and when i turn to Him he's 'always there'.

this week has whizzed by way too fast - littestontopofchemistryontopofamathstestwhichwashorrendous and the workload piling up. it's frustrating. and i shouldn't complain. but it's like this - your aep o level art project 1 is due end march. from now to end march is 2 months. stupid things like collab meetings, redundant to-dos and things keep popping up, and i've effectively wasted a month already not doing anything. i only have a draft (not even 400 words long! my vat is supposed to be thrice that!) of my first page which is essentially copied information and nothng else to show.

i've been relooking into other areas for the coursework as well because flora and fauna seems to have come to a deadlock - i cannot incorporate PR without compromising on some ethereality/fantasy and in any case, o level markers do not like frivolous things, to quote ms low verbatim.

anyway, i've been thinking about capitalism vs communism. random i know, but at least it's more worthwhile than focussing on my teeny teen emo world.

communism - is it really that ostensibly good sounding? i (and The Queen of All Things Communist herself, won't say who) know that the ideology didn't work out. but is the idea of shared wealth as compassionate as it sounds? maybe this is a very selfish argument, but it isn't fair to those who work hard for their pay. why should they give up something they've earned through their own merit? they work hard to get ahead - so isn't this setting them back? but this is selfish, because the contention over capitalism is that it's somewhat heartless - those who have the resources, know-how and contacts will get the job, they're going to succeed because they're just born with a headstart. and people can't help being born into lower social classes, which sets them back unfairly.

whywhywhywhywhy are we debating about whether we should share. doesn't it seem terrifically messed up somehow. maybe it's just the catholic upbringing talking, but it seems horribly calculative and petty and incentive driven and not at all compassionate to ever have to think about how much we want to share.

and things like this eventually serve to make me emote like a PMSed dragon, because then i go on this note that the world is messed up.

k world, invest rehearsal tomorrow morning.
i'm tired of spending copious amounts of my saturday in school when i could be doing my VAT report.

i should blog less frequently.

silent all these years

2007-01-30T23:45:00.001+08:00

But what if I'm a mermaid, in these jeans of his
With her name still on it
Hey but I don't care 'cause
Sometimes, I said sometimes
I hear my voice and it's been here
Silent all these years.

herein begin the killer migraines again, squinting from the back of the class & late nights do miracles to create a purple throbbing monster in my head in the mornings.

cinematic razor-sharp.

2007-01-28T02:27:00.000+08:00

crikey, laura, get a grip on yourself seriously.
you know how pathetic you sound when you whine about your tests? and how many times do you need to be told that defeat isn't the real failure, and it's better you flunk now than at the real thing.
do something, you stupid facile child, and stop being so weak and wishywashy, and for crying out loud, being all pathetic and whingy isn't going to make your last year in ij any longer so you might as well have your head up and accept it and be happy.

well. now that wasn't unbelievable, i am not being sarcastic up there anyhow. only i still regret the judgement error i made in the lit test, but dudette like move on srsly.

when your spirit's broken and you can't bear the pain.

2007-01-26T23:03:00.000+08:00

this week has been sorely trying.

coach was in a superbly foul mood on tuesday, and the weather did nothing to ameliorate that so we got cooped up outside the squash courts doing racket control drills and jeanette keeps making me laugh when we do footwork drills together. stupid nette.

but even so, in light of what else has been going on, i think training was the least of it.

i failed ss miserably, the first time ever, and it's terrifically shocking and depressing and i'm still in shock about how it all went wrong. i've been writing this way for 3 years and scoring with it, so imagine my catatonic state of despair when i got back my paper. at least i know where i went wrong, and as vonne shi jie says, better i get the shock now.

god. i miss vonne. VONNE IF YOU'RE READING THIS I LOVE YOU.

have been staying up to 2 the whole week mugging and trying to finish homework - had chem and lit tests on the same day.

lit test sucked to a capital. how to write 7 sides, i only hit 4.5. anyway, i studied STUDIED and mugged and laboured over the page where malcolm tests macduff and says 'a good and virtuous nature may recoil in an imperial charge' and 'angels are bright still, though the brightest fell, though all things foul would wear the brows of grace, yet grace must still look so' and COR i can QUOTE SO MUCH but brilliant me made a terrific judgement error and wrote down only ONE - the angels quote because i like that one. tremendously stupid, aren't you laura.

bio today was lousy as well, i only read hormones and endocrine glands fpr the first time at 1 this morning. and i flipped out when they compared a camera to an eye AND I DIDN'T STUDY EYE STRUCTURE I LABELLED THE CILIARY BODY AS CIRCULAR MUSCLES. gaaaaaad. i didn't kwno what iw as writing for the essay either.

and i haven't been praying. not intentionally, no, it's just that by the time i stumble into bed my mind is reeling from bright angels and weak poor innocent lambs t'appease angry gods and moles and collision theory and fovea centralis and accomodation spilling out of my ears. i try to, really, to clear my head and focus on my breathing but i fall asleep before i get there. i must must somehow not fall asleep - it's this exhaustion that inevitably leads to me forgetting to make time for God and that makes everything so much worse.

confusion is overrated, honestly. confused doesn't even begin to describe it.

it's like:
- things are falling apart to halftime. my grades seem to be on the steady decline and the more i try the worse it gets and with the O levels teetering on the horizon, this is bad as bad can be.
- nostalgia running rings around your head. no longer having sec 4s around to save the day, no matter how gloomy and dismal, makes everything worse): and seeing people grow up! my sister is in sec 2 (half her teachers have taught me/know me through council/cca) and it makes you think so much about how good life was back then. for me i've realised sec 3 was the best year. i love 2/1 very, very much, but it was the councillors who made sec 3 worth every second. which leads me to my next reason.
- leaving ij. it's already week 5 of the first term and my final year is moving way too fast for my liking. it's scary, the thought of moving out of your comfort bubble. ij's been so good to me - i've met great people and forged firm friendships (you people know who you are) and i've had so much opportunity to grow academically and spiritually and character-wise - OBS, CAP, leadership camps and seminars, student science conferences, science symposiums-to-come, events planning and all. hard pressed to find another school that lives up to all that. and it's gonna be culture shock to the max when i leave ij for a jc (right now i dont' even think i can get into my preferred jc, which is as yet undecided.) but i will miss everybody, all my friends (please don't let us break up and fade away), all my teachers (i know ms ho is glad to see the back of us though :D), all the councillors and everybody, every thing, like the smelly ole council roome of yore and the maclab and the needlework room and the starbucks area, and tiny things like that. and it's terrifying, and nostalgia is really playing its trump card on me right now.
- and there's the annoying keane song (i hate keane btw, theyr'e superbly mournful and eerie sounding.) that 'everybody's changing and i don't feel the same'. i'm frightened that i will leave ij, remembering all the good times but with this niggling sadness that i never resolved or bridged this abyss between people. and then there is the issue of juniors. not in the condescnding way, i mean, it's just that they're younger than you so might as well. it's crazy and bewildering to remember the way you were when you were sec 3 and there was somebody older. and that presence alone sort of lulls you into security, because they were there for me, like yvonne. then they go away and now it's my turn to be sec 4. flustering and wildly flailing to finally notice so.

i had a long talk with joy on wednesday - she was supposed to be studying lit and iw as supposed to be looking for a tree to sketch but the school only has those palm ones outside the level 3 staffroom and i wanted a spectacular gnarly one. anyhow, i robbed her of half an hour of her time, but nevertheless JOY, YOU'RE A BRICK, REALLY. in the good sense i mean, because you're so solid and dependable and strong, even though i know you go through hell-and-high-water, you're always there for me and you make me think and reflect and handle my problems and you're superb, really.

anyway, she made me think about how i've been handling this whole enmeshed crisis in my life right now, and i have to say that in comparison to her, my handling of my emotions is less than admirable, almost pathetic.

gretchen says pioneering is overrated.

maybe it's just what comes of being in the council, it's all about leaving a legacy. and i want to do that, maybe that's what's holding me from moving on.

when the oceans rise and thunders roar.

2007-01-23T23:49:00.000+08:00

because that's what they seem to be doing now, everything seems to be hurling itself in full Regalia of the Losses and Annoyances at me and all i can hear is the roaring and screaming of the floods and i'm way over my head in art coursework and VAT and good grief i have GOT to start my vat soon. today i had a scare in history - i saw my mark as 2/13 for my essay on the yalta and potsdam conferences and i baulked. only it was actually 9, but i'm still displeased. and chinese was such a nightmare, i've never gotten this low in my life before even if it is a minor weekly test thing.

i'm worried sick with the way my writing has festered almost irrevocably, and hwo so many other things seem to have been spoilt as well and oh please God, i will soar with You above the storm.

a broken arrow through the heart.

2007-01-21T14:44:00.000+08:00

i am homicidal right now.

the laptop is malfunctioning like me when i am on PMS + stress mode at one go and i cannot use the spacebar or the n key or the / key (and those are the only keys i know of, i hate to think what else isn't working.), which annoys me to high heaven because i'm in the midst of reorganising the investiture booklet.

so i try to send the psd copy to my hotmail account, which doesn't work because some other keys are not working and i can't sign in. i've just asked yi fen if she could send the jpeg copy to me, but it's only going to be the jpeg copy which means i can't edit the layers. WTH.

this is so infuriating why must everything turn against me right now.

roar-osaurus.

2007-01-17T22:01:00.000+08:00

i drew a new animal in aep today. it's called the roar-o-saurus, it is made by the forbidden and illegal practice of subjecting a duck egg to extremely annoying conditions and when it hatches, produces a monster of such danger and PMS-yness that the ministry for er animals has given it a five star danger rating :D

i might use it in my aep coursework. HAHA.

and paychel, it shall be my pet. (seeing that only i can roar louder and longer than it :D)

put the doctor on the phone.

2007-01-14T17:47:00.000+08:00

2nd week back and i fall sick.
2nd week back and i fall sick DUE TO STRESS-RELATED CAUSES.

haha the doctor was like, what HAVE you been doing in the first three days of school??

spent sunday night in a restive febrile wakeful state before getting up for school with a temperature, took panadol and the fever broke around 7. then i started shivering and my eyes were so tired and hot and got all leaky when i closed them and wong thought she made me cry so she panicked and went off in search of somebody to console me.

then danielle (MY SAVIOUR! haha i shouldn't feed her ego. but i owe her.) made me go home and went with me to get the permission slip to leave school early.

then there was the clinic, which was a nightmare waiting. HELLO, HAVE YOU HEARD OF TRIAGE. you do not keep patients with a blistering high fever and a smelly old paper mask waiting while you see to less urgent cases!

anyhow mom suspects it's tonsilitis since i couldn't talk and had a sore throat and high fever.

k anyway, gto a bunch of muck tasting pills to take and by monday night i was so sick of the taste that i begged dad to bring home some sweets to mask it.

went back to school on wednesday and wham, got greeted with more admin work AND MY O LEVEL ART QUESTIONS to do. lovely welcome-back i say. got another mild fever that night.

wong has been very kind to me this week. i have been hoarsely going SHUT UP WONG and she shuts up. and she gave me chocolate to eat when i get better hahah.

have spent the last 4 days whispering and paychel has not done anything to make it better.

"WHAT DID YOU SAY LAURA?"
"LAURA GO ASK DESIREE."
"OH WAIT I FORGOT, YOU CAN'T ASK DESIREE."
"WHAAAT? DID YOU SAY SHUT UP?"
"HAHAHAH LAURA YOU CAN'T ROAR ANYMORE!"

paychel's a meanie, i tell you but she makes me feel better so PAYCHEL IF YOU ARE LISTENING, MY VOICE IS BACK NOW AND YOU ARE GOING TO GET IT ON MONDAY.

to the love, i left my conscience pressed.

2007-01-04T23:59:00.000+08:00

it's only the second day back at school and i am already besieged with killer headaches and insomnia attacks.

panadol-induced regularity is frightening, sometimes.

verita.

2007-01-02T16:31:00.000+08:00

it's the second day of the new year and i am already fraught with anxiety over my looming inevitable indispensable inexorable doom.

and i know this is belated but we love you back.

2007-01-01T12:01:00.000+08:00

michelle adrienne (smelly-the-woodhead) heah:
thank you for everything, all the updates all the laughter all the online sessions till 1 in the morning all the teasing all the poking all the circular arguing all the nonsense all the time in the room that i haven't cleaned yet all the stress and paranoia and for all those times you stood by me, i hope God blesses you on this special day and have a blessed year ahead of you (:

we can't stay like this forever.

2007-01-01T11:09:00.000+08:00

holy spirit youth night & xmas eve.

i dread this year. i dread it because of o levels mainly, and i've spent 3 years trying to hide from the inescapable truth: that i must face my doom.

right now i feel like i'm teetering on the brink of deliverance/insanity.

all right all right it's the 1st day of the new year, wont' be such a pessimist, thank you to the council, nine nuttering nonpareiled ninjas, room 5 people and the lj/gs gang and 3/4 06ers for making 2006 a great year (:

still.

2006-12-31T00:33:00.000+08:00

When the oceans rise and thunders roar
I will soar with You above the storm
Father you are king over the flood
I will be still, know You are God.

(edit, 4.46pm)
i'm tired.
of routines and studying and pedantry and this warped education system and tepidity and apathy and i want to do something i believe in for once.
and sometimes i wonder what i'm doing all this for.
and i quite wish i wasn't feeling this way.

paper faces on parade.

2006-12-30T21:46:00.000+08:00

the masquerade was cool, great job joel!

some loser stole my mask though, i can't tell you how annoyed i am in words. what kind of loser steals masquerade masks? i am so so so miffed okay, i spent and unwilling $11 on that thing and i was so grudgingly guilty after buying it and now it's stolen. i'm pretty sure stolen, because i know definitely i left it on my table and when i came back to get my things it wasn't there, nor on the ground as far as i could see. and denise and some others helped me look for it after the whole thing because i left early and couldn't find it.

garh. anyhow thanks everybody who looked!

everyone looked really fab dressed up pretty, and denise! you looked so cute dancing :D haha all right great job singing as well you crazy bimbo.

thank you, c.lee and nicole! (for you-know-what.)

anyhow. okay there were cool prizes, like a topshop voucher (which went to a boy no fair okay.) and video ipods and stuff like that. oh and nic lost her phone halfway, the poor girl. all's well that ends well; somebody mistook it for her own phone and took it by accident.

haha okay we all know laura cannot dance so let's forget about that bit. my heels are too big for me, so i've got a bit of skin torn off the place where the strap tugs but it's not really major or anything.

came home early (1130, wth because i knew if i stayed till midnight i'd be like cinderella and have no lift home.) and called clare twice, i love talking to clare but she distracts me so much >:( HAHA okay won't tell you what i mean.

k then the 28th:
0730, bright and early, ecm, grouchy laura roars, bill turned up at 9, we're punishing her by making her go with the very first batch of sec 1s for learning journey at 0745 in the morning, met the rest of the councillors for embarrassing campfire songs practice which i didnt' sing, they left for lj, hung around and ate dried orange peel (cravings :D), did up the board which still looks pretty crappy.

haha then we met sji for collab meeting, and it was supposed to be a surprise thing for sarah, but rach mich fen and i left school late, AND SOMEBODY MADE US EVEN LATER (ahemcoughmichcough) by leaving her wallet in school so gabby & bill had to stall for 45 minutes heh.

finally finally got to carl's jr 45 minutes later than planned, then sarah came down the escalator blindfolded because gabby and bill threw a shawl over her head and it was so funny okay ask gab for pics.

wanted to smash sarah's and mich's faces into the cake but we decided against that in case carl's jr threw us out for making a riot.

walked around looking for smelly's shoes, & i want topshop ballet flats they are dropdead gorgeous but cost $66. hello, reality.

saw QUITE a number of people! haha yesterday the whole world was at cine now it's at marina.

and on the 27th we had our 'exco' lunch.
well 2 of the dwarves (gab and bill) didn't make it sadly ):

had fun in pastamania with rach sarah mich & fen, gossiping and poking at each other AND THEN WE SAW SZE YENN AND NICOLE CHEAH OMG. haha sarah and i went OH MY GOD! for 30 seconds straight because we miss nicx so much and we may have an aep dinner how kewl is that.

k then mich sarah and i went to far east to get stuff, i bought my mask (scowls) and mich bought a pair of leggings (and didn't wear them sheesh) and a bolero & sarah got her sexy figure hugging pencil skirt :D

if only our council uniforms were that well-fitting and not like the ill-sewn, ill-cut, ill-fitted poofy mushroom ball it is we wouldn't mind so much.

came home and called rachel (: i miss talking to her.

all righty it's been a hectic 3 days and i haven't done much apart from finish up that chinese essay finally and er, read the content page of a maths in depth.

happy new year in advance everybody (:

for always and forever.

2006-12-29T12:47:00.000+08:00

arah natasha razziffi:
i love you, you crazy chirpy ever funky esprit momma!
for all the times when the agony aunts needs erm, another agony aunt, you're always there (even though you forget what i tell you, tsk.) and it's been Great to a capital having you here with me.
happy sweet sixteenth, dearest sparrow, and here's to the KFC :D, the 7am ECMs, the stress-induced bad hair days, late aep days, the gerbil food and the fellowship of the 7 dwarfs (:

wo ai ni wo zhen de mei you pian ni. (:

this is my december.

2006-12-25T15:05:00.000+08:00

yeow. i am Tired to a capital. i apologise for my absence - have been convalescing. and this is pretty apparent in the way i am dropping nouns at the start of a sentence. and so this is what has been happening.

> today.
watched charlotte's web, and it's really heartwarming and lovable and a good way to spend your day, seriously. wilbur's so adorable! though i freaked when all 514 spiders began hatching UGHHHHH.

then there was the midnight mass! I SAW SMELLY! AND NICOLE AND ANGIE AND DENISE (: haha it's so weird that i got confirmed like two weeks ago and i miss them so much.

haha. mom decided to go for 9 am mass so lisa and i tagged along with my cousins, and typically left the house at 1130 (we are supposed to be seated by 1130) and thus had no place and ended up with the stairs. eew.

i like midnight mass though, when it's dark out and everybody's dressed (for once i see no berms and slippers!) up in their best and looking fab. then you can sort of feel the notes sparkle in the air.

okay laura you must be mildly synesthetic if you are feeling notes sparkle in the air. but you get my drift.

>yesterday.
I AM FAT FROM OVEREATING i had to hold in my stomach during midnight mass because i was sure i looked bloated from all the food.

AND I GOT MY PRETTY PRETTY COPIC MARKERSSSSSSSS WOOHOO!
although i asked for a black marker among them and got dark dark grey instead but never mind i suppose. pure black is unlikely in nature, and heck i don't even sketch real stuff anyway. i doodle.

okay rewind to friday!

woke up at !&)^@#! six-fifteen AM on friday just to be in school at 7.30 which doesn't really make sense since i'm pretty low-maintenance and take at most fifteen minutes to get out of bed then another fifteen to eat change brush teeth. ANYHOW was in school at seven. eew loser lah - in natty's words. sec one registration was boringggggggg because sarah mich and i had nothing nada zip zilch to do and i wasn't about to revisit ushering horror. so we walked around, sarah, me and her orange peel. AHAHAH SARAH ARE YOU PREGNANT?

when we met ms ng she offered some orange peel and i told ms ng that sarah's pregnant so she eats sour things to stop the nausea :D then later ms ng asked sarah if she was still feeling nauseous HOHOHO.

anyhow. so from 8.30 to 10.30 i did nothing except sit and talk to smelly & sarah and a handful of other councillors. sarah has GUTS man don't mess with her she calls people she has never talked to before pantats! HAHAHAHA.

aep publicity tour was well. er more like giving invisible support to mees low though i feel bad for not saying much. not like i could've waltzed up to 'em sec oneses and told 'em about dali and the likes right they'd flip and run off in teh opposite direction. AND MS LOW JUST AHS TO DISPLAY THE WORK THAT I DID AT 5 AM IN THE MORNING, and it's friggin' UGLY UGG UGGG because the perspective is wrong and teh colouring and shading are 'i-don't-care-so-i-use-broad-swashes-of-colour' sort of eeew. YUCK.

then she gave us advice on our o level piece and i have to start drawing again eck. and she gaves us some tips. sort of. actually she said the same thing she'd been telling us for 2 years straight.

er okay then we could finally ciao and i went to bishan to get some supplies and stuff.

okay rewind to monday and tuesday: sji camp and nothing much to say except smelly took one HUGE one for the team andd bore the brunt of the surprise water attack while sarah and i escaped pretty dry. WE LOVE SMELLY!

oh and we helped make the disgusting muck, because it is ij council specialty. only no mj to tell us about half formed chicks in the eggs.

er then we were trying to eat pringles discreetly at the back of their -5 degrees celcius lecture theatre and sarah held up a chip and gave sharidan her cheesiest grin when he held up the camera but then we were too far away to be seen thankfully. haha we were eating like majorly unglam lah okay we'd wait for majority of them to look the other way and then stuff the chip whole in our mouth.

BILL PUSHED ME OFF MY CHAIR JUST SO SHE COULD GET A BETTER VIEW OF THE SOS SIGNAL. how mean is that!

okay then the next day i woke up mildly febrile, with a horrendously bad sinus, a sore throat (okay my doing, we shouldn't have imitated anybody.) and a hacking dry cough.

friiiiiiiiiiiiiday friday i went to vivocity finally. i'm such a loser i know everybody's been to vivo before me. the mango outlet was hectic-crazy and stupid ah lians kept bringing in their boyfriends who weren't doing anythigin but blocking half the space.

i like mango's clothes but they're too big for me. i bought two tops though. i'm not too keen on the first one which mom made me get. it's brown and has minimal leopard spot print and zebra strip print and gold splashes on it. it's actually quite cool but not something i would wear. i like the second top though i had to beg mom to let me get it. it's one of those super long skinny things that you wear over a miniskirt and leggings but i haven't seen a nice pair of leggings yet. (topshop has shiny gold ones. think wonderwoman.) and it's dark purple-grey and sleeveless and has black lace on the sleeves and collar and has a mock-print of lace on the body in black. it's cool!

er okay that has been my not-so-boring week.
i have 4 more paragraphs of my chinese essay to write and i'm done done done DONE with homework.

we're exco-ing for xmas! haha aural pun not intended.

HAPPY XMAS EVERYBODY(:

Cerulean.

2006-12-13T14:05:00.000+08:00

Weep, weep for this elision truth,
For detritus that shall burn and smoke and engulf us
In our agony-throes.
Whitewash what you will
And plug out protracted screams of refusal
And let your bland light and armchair concern simply
Define our darkness, not dispel it.

ONE WAY, JESUS.

2006-12-12T13:00:00.000+08:00

i'm now afraid of what mark reads on my blog, but anyway i will kope the bible phrase he put up on the con 3 blog from paul's 2nd letter to timothy, because it is one of my favourite phrases:

"I have fought the good fight, I have finished the course, I have kept the faith."

of course, not that i am happy i finished cat classes, saturdays are going to be hectic and pedantic now, ugh.

THANK YOU SO MUCH TO SMELLY HEAH, JESSICA TEO THE RETARDED POK-AYE, GIBBYGABBYGOOEY, BRANSON & AMANDA, CHERI, CHERLYNN, CHRISTINE, BEATRICE AND TY, YEE HUI, AND SUNNEH AND ALL WHO WISHED ME HAPPY CONFIRMATION.

i love clare ♥

mom's wearing the wedges i picked out for her! (actually i picked out the aqua-grey pair but they had no more stock, only the display one which was broken. but the pink ones are nice.) NOTE THAT I'M STILL TALLER THAN HER DESPITE THE WEDGES AND I'M IN FLATS WAHAHAHA.

geri's jubilant that even ah bang didn't come for calista. score for the scorned! haha.

clare the cantor, kit the sadist, geri the...weird.

secret keepersssssssssss! my smile's screwy in this picture but never mind.

grace/regina ( i still don't know which is which), C.LEE, denise the meano bimbo, christine & uncle greg.

mass was good, the homily especially was..empowering and enlightening. and the hymn choices were really inspirational, especially the communion hymn, the summons. like phwoar, it's the first time out of confi camps and p&w that a hymn ever spoke that much to me.

okay so mom did my hair and she stressed out because the curled ends wouldn't stay and kept straightening out and my fringe kept standing up despite the copious amount of gel she put but it eventually stayed, except for that stray bit of fringe that sticks out in virtually every picture up there ^. then she insisted on make up and i felt like a taitai but lisa insists i looked pretty okay and everyone liked my eyes :D haha i'm such a dolt with make up i was like MOM HOW DO YOU PUT THIS ON YOURSELF, DON'T YOU LIKE, POKE YOUR EYE?

and so. before mass was crazy letter-distributing session, and everyone looked fab i tell you (:

AIYAH SAM BRAN AH. FORGOT TO SHOW YOU SOMETHING LEH. haha okay never mindddd.

mmhmm after mass mom whisked me off so quickly to go home lah which sucks because i don't have pictures with the lame jokes & ghost stories people or with smelly and the people who came to see me >:( oh well. i got pretty flowers though! (: and my godma gave me a calendar with a quote by mother teresa for every day of the year! it's lovely - every quote is packed with power and inspiration.

uh huh it's really saddening, but thank you to everyone, who made the last three years so fantastic (:

conversation got me here.

2006-12-08T23:08:00.000+08:00

i tell you, i need to use my brain more, it's seriously scrambled at the moment.

i (stupidly) told my dad to buy A5 sized envelopes. A5! that's too friggin big i think the correct size is A6 or something! YEEESH now my confi letters are in HUUGE envelopes. AUGH WHY DIDN'T I CHECK THE SIZEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE.

and then yesterday i did the stupidest thing ever, i got off the bus one stop too early. so i had to trudge past church and all because i didn't see any point depleting my ez link card further for one stop. NEVER MIND it's good exercise. but sheesh laura how'd you forget the sequence of bus stops. garh.

er, marie, clare, i'm going into panic attack #9292864137 now.

hanging by a moment here with you.

2006-12-08T16:20:00.000+08:00

MY CBOX IS LOCKING ME OUT OF MY ACCOUNT PHWOAR I REQUESTED FIVE TIMES TO HAVE MY DETAILS EMAILED TO BE AND NO EMAIL IS APPEARING.

I AM BLASTING LIFEHOUSE'S HANGING BY A MOMENT SO LOUDLY FOR ALL THE HOUSE TO HEAR BECAUSE MY LEFT NEIGHBOUR IS RENOVATING HIS BACKYARD AND THE NEIGHBOUR ACROSS THE STREET IS RECONSTRUCTING THIS HUUUUGE 4 STOREY HOUSE THAT POSITIVELY TOWERS OVER OURS.

I AM CURRENTLY RESISTING THE URGE TO YELL OUT OF MOM'S BEDROOM WINDOW TO SHUT UP PEOPPLE WANT TO LIVE.

replies:
MMARIE! hello mmmmmmarie! haha panic attack #817348162!
charm: THANK YOU! (:
gabby: i presume this is gibbygabbygooey? haha yes i do miss cat classes.
crystal: i think so toooooooooooooooooooooo :D
joy: phowee yourself.
nicole: NONONONO i don't wanna cry! i'm going to look like a clown in the photos! ):
ariel: whoops. okay will relink!

life has been pretty lazy actually, because i'm (telling myself that i'm) too tired to get down to homework. snowball effect of camps i say. (snort right that was two weeks ago laura you liar.)

anyhow, the HIV/AIDS youth conference was pretty interesting.

the summation of good food :D, five hours of CIP for doing nothing (okay that was a bad bad attitude to take. the cip was a bonus to what i've learnt), a pretty interesting and not cliched workshop - about social support for the siblings/orphans of the HIV-infected, an air conditioned place, a goodie bag (start using rubber!) and some interesting speakers like dr milton ayakumar and thought-provoking videos.

SO much more personal and humanised as compared to those websites we had to research about how HIV is transmitted.

the retarded pok-aye came in school uniform. neh neh.

i've finished caroline b. cooney's goddess of yesterday, a darn good book on greco-trojan mythology (what else?). it's about anaxandra, this girl off some rocky isle taken as hostage by king nicander of siphnos to be companion to his crippled daughter callisto. when pirates plunder siphnos, she's the sole survivor, and to save her skin and not become a slave she adopts callisto's identity. which is a problem, because callisto is dark-haired and crippled while anazandra's red headed and fit as a fiddle.

so menelaus of sparta comes along with his fleet and finds her, takes her back to sparta where she is playmate to hermione (who is sweet and nine years old). then we meet helen! cooney's description of her is PHWOAR. not in the physical she had blonde hair etc but she uses such intriguing lyrical similes to compare her to gold and a swan. but she's got a really new take on helen. the movie portrayed her as a bored wife of a boring old, thick husband who loved fighting, while the return from troy barely focussed on them but made her out to be a loving mother although unable to control hermione. anyhow, paris comes along and the the time he spent in the palace is in much greater detail than the movie and books ever conveyed, and describes how helen plundered her own palace and killed her own men.

cooney makes helen seem like a horrible witch (the word that rhymes with it i mean.) - she lives for fighting, she loves war, she loves bloodshed and violence, and loves this trojan war because it was fought over her, thinks menelaus is foolish to prefer peace, and absolutely hates it when anaxandra attracts more attention.

cooney's diction and imagery are good, she does so much research and lifts little phrases from epic greek tales which are very striking, and she describes the clothes, scenes, cities so vividly and ethereally! and she puts more focus on andromache in the story.

she has this signature way of ending and wrapping up all the loose ends on the very last two pages, so the ending's rather abrupt and when i flipped over and saw 'afterword' i, well, flipped. okay not really flipped, but i wasn't expecting it at all, though i'll concede it was a nice way to end off, though i did wonder what happened to hermione.

confirmation's tomorrow, i've got two more letters to write and dad's buying the envelopes and he'd better remember. i'm glad i bought my outfit early (not kanchiong, smelly heah) because now i can concentrate on being ready in the spiritual sense instead of stressing about pedantic things that don't matter.

okay i will be back with pictures. ciaozxc.

I can be a light that shines Your name.

2006-12-03T16:31:00.000+08:00

confi rehearsal yesterday was all right. i mean, it was a bit boring at first because i was sitting in the pew alone with my mom and standing-in godma, but later when we went off to join our classes it was some profusion of noise.

haha clare was right about something(:

so therese is going to be my confirmation name, and i don't care that it makes me sound older than i already look because confi names aren't about how they sound with your name. mine's after st. therese of lisieux, who said she would let fall a shower of roses after her death.

rachel looks like a naomi with her new hairstyle actually, but ruth is a nice name, chel, and i think it's very you-ish.

i'm going to miss catechism classes terribly! they're like this sort of break that you take to detox and grind all other flurry of activity to a halt. urgh, now i'll probably end up becoming a sunday catholic NONONONO i will not. i'm going to miss catching up with rachel on a weekly basis (we'll still have aep but stillllllll you get my drift, and i won't see my darling ebullient bimbo denise and my darling cantor/lesbian partner clare as often anymore.

and what about the lame jokes/ghost stories people! i won't get to see them very much either which means we can't laugh until we get abs or scream and tell lame jokes and bad ghost stories. and no discussing of ah bang either, crud.

worse still, i'm afraid that my spiritual life will fester and fade away as all the stress of Os breaks upon the bleak horizon, because once cat class stops it will basically mean i come to church once a week for mass/ hm duty which i do not want to happen.

so i will be confirmed this saturday, and that will mark the end of my confirmation journey. it's amazing thinking of it that way, after 9 years of catechism (of which 6 are forgotten, and one was a waste, frankly, but the other two have been pretty darn amazing) of which 3 have been eventful, but as the adage/cliche/whatever you will goes, it's going to be a new beginning as well.

OMG CHARMAINE CHEW JUST SENT ME STILL BY HILLSONG I'M VERY HAPPY NOW. THANK YOU ENCOURAGER!

Everyday, it's You I live for
Everyday, I'll follow after You
Everyday, I'll walk with You, my Lord

edit (5 dec).
it's amazing how it suddenly comes up to this, so suddenly after you've been waiting like for ever. i remember starting con1, i remember starting con2 (not that there was much to remember), and con2 camp, and starting con3 thinking, omg this is my last year of cat class, and all that name-choosing and clothes-buying and silly pedantic things we had to go through, and now i look back and wished i hadn't missed some lessons. even though i had valid reasons for missing them.

haha thinking about it, i've been in all three cat classes before but it's amazing how i still feel like i belong somehow. must be chel, the bimbo, clare, the room 5 people and co.

and i remember starting november thinking, omg i don't want to go for confi camp. then the hype gradually built up and it didn't disappoint, (must be the post-council camp trauma) and now it's pretty much nostalgia with painful wist because you know it's not going to come back ever, and that was the last time i will pack my bags for confi camp, the last time i will have to stress about retainers and oral care away from home, the last time i may ever have to be with all my church friends together, without having to think of au revoirs just yet.

i'm being so horribly and pathetically abject.

oh please please don't let me cry on confi day, i don't want to look like an idiot in the photos and yes i'm going to bring and remember that i brought my camera for once and not decline and wail that i'm not camera-friendly.

smelly heah you are a woodhead.

2006-12-03T10:49:00.000+08:00

Instructions: name 20 people you can think of at the top of your head. don't read the questions below before you write and tag 5 people to do the survey.

1. chelli.
2. clare quek.
3. denise-nth (bimbo)
4. smelly heah.
5. c.leeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
6. jessica teo the retarded pok-aye #1.
7. sparrow natty.
8. nette!
9. gabby kow
10. yi fen.
11. nicole benjamin.
12. mmmarie.
13. tia.rarh.
14. j.o.y
15. sam branson.
16. gibbygabbygooey(:
17. esti.
18. grandma yiping.
19. geri seah.
20. mrs ah bang.

How did you meet 14?
joy olivia yap: classmates in primary 1!

What do you do if you never ever meet 1?
chel lee: is my confidante and secret-keeper, and i would die without her.

What would you do if 20 and 9 dated?
gabby kow & calista: laugh my head off the way gabby does :D

Did you ever like 19?
geri: yes because she's sweet and in a platonic sense you dolt.

Would 6 and 1 make a good couple?
chel lee & jess: i don't think so. jess would kill rachel with her retardedness.

Describe 3.
denise: is an ebullient, cheerful, happy, effervescent, sweet, thoughtful, empathetic BIMBO.

Do you think 8 is attractive?
nette: is very sweet-faced and she has an admirer so yes.

Say smt abt 7.
sarah: is chirpy like a sparrow and likes to eat gerbil food and she is one of my confidantes.

Do you know any of 12's family members?
marie: nope.

What's 18's favourite?
yi ping: i know she likes menelaus of sparta.

What would you do if 11 confesses that he/she likes you?
nicole ben: i know she does lah. no need to say already.

What language does 15 speak?
sam bran: kanchiongness.

Who is 9 going out with?
gabbyK: HOHOHO I'D LIKE TO KNOW TOO. i hope her other half can teach her to multitask.

How old is 16 now?
gibbygabbygooey: same as me!

When was the last time you talked to 13?
tiara: last tuesday.

Who's 2's favourite band/singer?
clare: a variety but she likes r&b.

Would you date 4?
michelle heah: we'd kill each other within the first hour of the date arguing in circles! :D

Would you date 14?
j.o.y: if i were crooked.

Is 15 single?
sam bran: HOHOHO. yes she is, she has a shirt that says 'remind me again why i need a boyfriend.'

What is 10's last name?
yi fen: technically her surname is her first name but it's gwee.

Would you ever be in a serious relationship with 17?
esti: er. if i were crooked and liked frogs. but even then, nah.

What school does 3 go to?
denise: cedar girls.

5 accursed souls:
1. chel lee!
2. clare quek!
3. nicole benjamin.
4. denise.
5. sam bran.

it is the last light to fade into the rising sun.

2006-12-02T11:09:00.000+08:00

i watched troy last night. (smelly's dvd)

the set design and costumes are pretty, especially andromache's and helen's trojan costumes and hair pieces. and andromache has such a pronounced cleft in her chin but she's so delicate-pretty and yet so strong.

i cried when achilles killed hector! hector is the one decent trojan dude, and his brother paris is such a coward with a capital c.

and i'm pretty sure achilles loved polyxena and not briseis. both robert lancelyn green and lindsay clarke concur on this at least. (though they don't mention briseis, actually, other than achilles' steadfast loyalty towards her as he was to patroclus.)

andromache's pretty. i like her better than helen, helen of the thousand millihelen face. she's much more striking, particularly because her husband died, not like pretty boy trojan fop paris, who doesn't die in the movie sadly. herein i'm going to show off my greco-roman mythology knowledge and tell you all that he died of a wound from an arrow of philoctetes, dipped in the burning blood of the hydra by heracles himself.

that aside, troy was pretty bad. no interesting dialogue (they mumble half their lines and shout all bawdy the other half) and the only thing worth quoting was hector: "the last time you asked me that, you were ten and had stolen father's horse. what have you done now?"

and worse than no dialogue was the overdose of bawdiness, sex, (censor!) and WA-HAY too much fighting. i went squealing everytime an arrow pierced somebody's eye. and in contrast, too little of any lighter, more emotive scenes, and hector's funeral was like 1 minute long.

maybe this is only so because i have overread robert lancelyn green's luck of troy and there was so much more focus on drama and loyalty instead of the fighting, but i think books somehow convey the trojan drama's epicness better. it just translates into bawdy drunken fighting and division of harlots and spoils on the screen.

deviant: i want to watch flags of our fathers but it's NC16 augh four more months! four more months!

confi rehearsal later!

though my world may fall i'll never let You go.

2006-11-30T11:31:00.000+08:00

maybe i'm not on a pumped-up high as some people are after church camp, partly because i am so tired from the snowball effect of homework, six days of camp, uncomfortable sleeping arrangements, late nights, panic attacks (in the figurative sense, clare) about next year's unbelievably unsurmountable stressload that the morphine-like high fizzled out.

but seriously, what good is a high if you don't feel good after it. i'm still feeling very serene and tranquil after confi camp, partly because it's been like reaffirming what you believe in and finding some direction again after a whole year of muddling long aimlessly from exam to lessons to event to planning to stress to another test to day after day of reeling reeking inanity.

and sometimes i still wonder how i'm going to do it all - the planning for investiture and peer support leading and orientation and executing all this as well on top of nine subjects and when your art paper questions are released 2 months late and your deadline for submission brought forward by half a month, and improving on chinese and my expository/argumentative skills and a maths all at once, and still wanting to go so badly for the uk lit trip in june.

i used to stress out and go into despair about it all, but now i'm happy in a quiet way because God's there for me and He'll take my burden for me and with me.

i think that the craziness of this year kind of took me away from it all, and somewhere along the way i just forgot about praying and taking time out for God and i hope to God that that is not going to happen next year, despite all the heavy panic i know i will be subject to next year, i don't want to get caught up in it again and be swept into its whirling flailing blind useless anxiety.

When the oceans rise and thunders roar
I will soar with you above the storm
Father you are king over the flood
I will be still and know you are God.

we live by faith and not by sight.

2006-11-28T22:03:00.000+08:00

replies first!
RachelC: hahaha i rememebr you telling me somethings about how you ate a bead an dyour neighbour used to mash up your poo to find it :D
nette: SNORT. yesyes sure.
mich, gabby, ali: hahaha so lame we are. we were like within 2 metres of each other in the com lab. and mich, six days of camp was exhausting and i fell asleep during one session but it was gooooooooooooood.
sabrina: so do i! haha good for you.
jess: retarded pok-aye i love you back(:
clarissa: OKOK no e no e. thank you for making my day(:
denise: i heart euuuuxcz.
trini: trn! wo hen xiang nian ni leh.
tiara: you all make me so paiseh lah. channing indeed. no problemo, thanks for yours!
gabbyK: hahahaha you couldn't stop laughing! they must be. hahaha.
bill: you bloody sure are right. imagine how murderous i felt when ruth toh asked me to come to school this morning.
yinting: sneaky pok you're gonna die.

church camp was amazing with a capital A!

couldn't see for nuts in the morning because my eyes were puffy and red from 10 hours of sleep over 4 days so i was giving rachel lee the who the heck are you look when i reached church before realising it was her.

koped the lame jokes from council camp and retold them on the bus there, plus the blind rabbit/snake joke mom told me.

phroar uncle greg bullies me.

CAYC is purple.
ok that aside, we had icebreakers (NO WHACKO PHEW.) and friendship dances and i think rachel is very happy worzxc.

thank god for my eyes.
angel of music indeed. (hacks.)

er then settling in and putting bags down and camp rules and surrendering phones and it's amazing how time flies when you're actually attending the camp. when you're camp runner you just want it to be over so you can go home and sleep.

did some self-exploration thingy and a lot of doodling and sharing about ourselves.

then we had one game of captain's ball but the ball went to the same people over and over so i gave up and went to bugger sharon and co, and OH there is this shower cubicle that is actually two joined togetehr, so it's got a shower head and a toilet bowl in one. so kewlzxc it's like a shower room and a changing room all lah got so much space and don't have to worry about falling into the toilet hole. (gabby kow nearly did this ok. she cannot multitask one lah. open the door, step backwards and nearly into the hole.)

ok that aside, after shower time we had dinner (FOOD FOOD FOOD and i didn't really notice bland or not because starving day messes up your eating habits.) and after dinner was session one, where we tied up our pictures into scrolls and offered them up. nothing very deep.

after the session was free time! sharon, clare, kit, geri, marie, joanne, gabby, nicole, rachel lee, calista - like phwoarrs. we are the lame jokes/ghost stories gang. we laugh at each other's laughter.

haha, somewhere along the way we had a game of truth or dare. geri went first and calista immediately went, I KNOW. you like AH BANG RIGHT.

snort.
geri then confessed her undying love for ah bang, who, by the way, is some guy in a pontianak story she was telling.

i have abs from laughing! how kewl is that man.

hahaha get this, we were laughing so much we broke curfew (not like anybody adhered to it) but the facils refused to let us brush our teeth even):

k. day two and i couldn't get up.

crazy morning action songs. (POLAR BEAR ARE YOU LISTENING.)

session 2 was the cry-a-lot session. it started off mild, with us sharing about our families and i realised that this whole year has been pretty good, and even if i do get on my parents' nerves and vice versa i've got no main gripes.

then it came to the heavy part, when we were led into a dark room (the boys dorm, anti-climax to say but still.) and we were told to reflect a bit, and i began crying because i realised i left my dog out of the sharing that morning. then a stack of chairs or something dropped and the facils began shouting really angry things like i wish i'd never given birth to you or you're so useless, what's wrong with you why can't you be more like your brother! and i cried even harder, not because i identified with what they said (okay, maybe some of it.) but because there was so much hate that chel and i got scared.

think major waterworks after that.

then we got taken round on a journey sort off and at the end we burnt our letters to our family - the ones full of anger - and then went into the hall for some reflection.

okay, shush, don't scream at me and tsk and call me an amoral brat but i sort of dozed off during the session. not for very long but for a few minutes. the hall was so quiet and cold and my eyes were so tired from the combined effect of synapse collapse and dearth of sleep and overactive tear gland activity (BIO, joel!) that i put my head down on the floor on my hands and closed my eyes and woke up a few minutes later.

k, then we had time to shower and eat and returned to the hall for the next session.

2nd night sessions are always the best.
the blessed sacrament was brought in, we had some private closure prayer after reflecting and praying and it was really really good.

so we ended off on a high note with everyone shouting and singing(:

CLARE HAD A PANIC ATTACK.
she nearly sent me into one as well lah. DON'T EVER DO THAT AGAIN CLARE.

joel came up with some cockeye bio theories as to why her hands felt numb: her blood pressure kept changing drastically, she was subject to too much exhaustion etcetc and WAIT FOR IT, she had too little heparin in her blood at the wrist so it clotted up the blood and so it couldn't flow through to her hand.

wah lao lah polar bear. still want to scold me for not remembering bio properly lah. at least i could remember that heparin is an anti-clotting agent; i nearly yelled that it was a clotting agent.

haha broke curfew again by sitting on the swing with calista and kit, and calista managed to bugger off the guys from the sunday class into giving us their swing. how gallant. cough.

so more lame jokes plus milo plus ghost stories (AH BANG!) and stupid calista/kelly clarkson/maria bambang (as in susilo yudhoyuno bambang.) kept doing stupid things like sneaking up behind us and pushing us and screaming and waving her hands about while geri was telling us ghost stories.

had a gossip session with chel clare and denise, just like in con2 camp, sans crystal the stupid girl ran off dunno where.

i did readings for mass the next day! geri tells me that the age limit to be a lector is 20. GAH!

and aaaaaaaaaaaaaugh i screwed it up by reading like a bullet train. i heard people snigger at the end of it. (winces)

WELL on the bright side, father ignatius went, during his homily, WHAT IS A KING. ok we ask the reader. then he points to me. ij right? ah i know. ij TP right! you sound like you're from ij.

so i suppose it can't have been too bad if i sound like an ij girl :D
(this is like, warped chauvinism of some sort.)

yuck, i think my sentence syntax is pretty bad here but i don't care and i'm quite happy now.

but i miss the lj/gs gang terribly, and i'm going to miss everyone in con3 o6 terribly come confi in two weeks time): nicole and i are gonn acry and smudge our make up on confi day. well i won't be wearing much makeup. but you get my drift.

I MISS CAMP.
funny that council camp seemed so long and church camp seemed so short.

You are the way the truth and the life
we live by faith and not by sight
for You, we're living all for You.

council camp.

2006-11-23T20:40:00.000+08:00

hokay i am not going to replay the camp out because i missed half the sessions etc to prepare for games, and i couldn't spend much time with my sexy group CHANNING THE-REE. stupid tiara and danielle lah. now their exco-in-charge very paiseh already everytime they kenna bombed.

disgusting goop mixture-making was fun! MJ and ali and my jaan grandmother jocelyn came down to help. we had like, coffee; coagulated and dissolved (yuckssss), EGGS, grass, mud, toilet paper, sand, egg shells and helluva lot of muck in there.

obstacle course got pushed forward because the sky was getting overcast. they played through the drizzle then we went singing in the rain.

AAAAAAUGH UNGLAM PHOTOS LIKE MAJORLY MAJORLY UNGLAM PHOTOS.
this is how you reward me for taking minutes so faithfully at every ecm lah thanks.

exco sharing was aughhhhh. i'm such a negative person - my topic was the most most most negative.

macritchie walk wasn't scary-scary, though i think the sji exco attempted to scare us by telling us ghost stories, but i was more nervous than scared stiff.

and don't ever let dharlynnie tell you her green pingpong ball joke. it's not funny! it's so frustrating - it just goes on and on and on (like the song that never ends) and she was telling it to me all the way from outside marymount kindergarten to the HDB flats in toa payoh. wah lao eh.

our starving day was so mild - they had breakfast and were given a 'lousy' lunch and my dear group gave away my portion so i had AN oreo for lunch (AND SARAH AND PAYCHEL STOLE MY OTHER TWO OREOS THAT I INTENDED TO EAT FOR DINNER) and had bananas for a snack before macritchie walk and then supper.

the treasure hunt was kind of screwed - i didn't forsee some clues might get confused with others, and SOMEBODY (looks at gabs with an evil glint) planted one group's food on the bridge linking the tech block to the classrooms instead of the one linking the barre/st john block to the st gaeton science labs.

then the clues that my sexy group got were all hidden in unobvious places like above windows and INSIDE classrooms (sji exco lah. who else.) but roth and francis went round with the group to help them so that made things easier since i didn't have to panic abotu one group getting confused.

and it wasn't really scary phroar. somebody touched the set of clues not meant to be planted, so i had to take off the set i'd just planted. (in G404 locker 12 lah. some more 4th floor so dark worzxc.)

and i really did mean to make them think instead of giving them the answer but i gave up and just told it to them when they used their lifelines.

oh and we were supposed to patrol but after the two excos began exchanging horror stories nobody was really up to it i guess.

ali and yi fen saved some cheese rings and gave me a whole can of cocktail sausages. so privileged, i am. (though of course gabs and smelly insist i stole the can of cocktail sausages.)

haha omg we stayed up to 3 using windows live messenegr and it was so stupid lah we were sending each other instant messages to each other and tagging each others blogs within like 1 minute of each other.

took even more unglam photos UGH. stupid cheena peace signs and dao sleepy looks.

stressed about warm fuzzies - my handwriting got steadily worse and worse but i love group channing all the same(: they're so sweet really, they remembered me even though i ciaoed within 10 minutes of first seeing them and made me an identity band and gave me their milo and made me sit with them for supper.

tiara, eunice, phyllis, melissa (or valerie?), danielle, jessica, eliza, winglam!

so today was just a lot of admin and picture stuff, and i miss camp. in an entirely different way. it's been an amazing experience really, though i had my lowest points as well.

haha it's so stupid but i can't bring myself to clear yi fen's last and finalised copy of the proposal for this camp from my hotmail inbox.

i'm really really touched (in in sarah the inner blonde's words, my heart is molested lah) by the warm fuzzies i got - it's really amazing how the teeniest of notes from the most unexpected of people light up your world.

well anyway came home today around 2 and unpacked all my dirty yicky stuff and i hope my jacket doesn't smell anymore because now my room does. took a 20 minute shower (well i saved enough water for 3 days so go away.) and slept from 3 to 8.

and oh, branson offered to do my nails for my confi. haha yay i'll have nice nails.

ok world i have to go pack (AGAIN!) for church camp now and i think i won't be in church on time. urgh. cheryl gabrielle 'i-know-what-you're-thinking' goh, audrey and eunice aren't going to be there):

oh gah, i just remembered something. i haven't submitted my form for the church d&d or collected money either, and eunice and cheryl are like giving me a week's leeway actually. whoopsie.

can we just have our own celebration lah ok? we can go to jerry's! (:

oh and the exco is performing for sec 4 farewell so watch out. more unglam videos of me. eeeeeeeee.

rar.

2006-11-21T20:10:00.000+08:00

camp was/is tiring.

i have a sinus, headache, sore throat, ankle ache, muscle ache all over and it's ONLY the first day and to top it off it's fly night where those stuuupid flies come in because it's rainy and converge around your lights and end up in your soup.

i don't have enough shorts to cover both council and church camp!

oh no oh no.

sniffffffffffs.

ok goodbye world. you might see me again on thursday but i think i'll probably sleep for most of the day when i'm back.

it caught and frayed the very heart of us.

2006-11-20T18:40:00.000+08:00

hello worlllllllllllddd.

chronologically, here's what's been happening.

>friday.
the learning journey was pride-instilling.
i can totally brag about ij and have solid proof to be proud of ij's legacy. like for instance, ij was offered independednt status but it isn't in ij's belief to create an elitist education. after all, father barre set up schools for girls, for those who needed the education. setting up an elitist barrier would defeat what he strove for so hard. and while we mayn't be up there academically as RGS and all, and we probably aren't five-stars in terms of academics, to put it as ms nicole teo says, ij's education extends beyond the tangible rewards. and education's about making a person the best she can be, and just grades isn't enough to do that.

of course all schools say this but then again, you don't hear of their school spirit much.

i've never realised the carvings on each pillar at CHIJMES are different and unique, but they are PHWOAR!

of course, the heat made me grouchy.

anyway. lunch with 10 others (minus smelly):) - sarah, bill, paychel, trini, jess, gibbygabbygooey, j.o.y (JOY OLIVIA YAP'S INITIALS SPELL HER FIRST NAME HOW COOL IS THAT!), boon, clare and yi fen the superwoman!

i think we made SO MUCH noise that burger king was happy to see the back of us. but we gave them good business anyway.

haha we went from confi names to names to moles and how stupid they are.

paychel's confi name is nadia. and bill the deaf old pokkai heard my dear and jess heard is as maria. imagine the explosion. and not maria as in ma-riee-a but as in mah-ria. you know. slang for maid. haha.

bill calls her sister po. and paychel doens't believe what her sister's called.

then we went on to the mole test we got back nyahnyah small teeny disconsolating triumph. what use is 24.5/30 in a test that doesn't even count when you can't even get an A2 for finals in chemistry.

anyway, back to the moles. jess the retarded pok-aye #1 agrees with me that they are useless little stupidities meant to confound you. and paychel sulked, according to trini.

deviant tangent: i am talking to shona woo zhi yi now! i miss shona woo zhi yi. she's so funny and random.

ok as i was sayingggggg. after that bill and i went to the concourse to grab stuff for camp.
$9 investment of raffia string.

after we grab 4 packs of balloons, and i head towards the ocunter she suddenly calls me back so i hurry to the back of the stall and she asks "do you want pink or yellow raffia?"

-.-

haha i told her pink just for the fun of it.

camp's tomorrow! i'm flipping out pretty badly and i'm hyperventilating. i'm suepr hyped up about it! this is my virgin camp organising experience! i'm still not entirely sure of the sequence of events stilll.

i am going to be in school at 6.30! neh.

k anyway.

>sunday.

was smelly's jess' esti's sam branson's gabby's beatrice's angelin's trini's confi and a multitude of other people.

arh i couldn't get a picture of esti. sucks lah.
smelly, jess, trini, gab, branson and basically everyone lah was really chio worzxczxc.

went with joy to risen christ church. haha met her at 430 at tpc, and we sat in macs for some time during which i kept breaking the conversation to point out somebody from my church.

the mass was looooong and draggy and grandma jocelyn missed her knitting.

went people hunting after mass to give them flowers.
now i can't wait for my confi.
went for dinner at mos burger with joy after that.

>today,

jeanette made everyone late by being late for half an hour.

nette, ty and desiree all came to my house to do our history project.

got distracted and started watching ruby pan and hossan leong in parliament.

nette has a nine year old mentality! she was our consultant for the poster :D

desiree: 'i can't think i can't think i can't rememerb how to weigh factorssss ugh my brain's dead. tsi yin can you do it?'
tsi yin: 'me? my brain's ALWAYS dead.'
d: 'well better than jeanette right. no brain.'

haha how did i last a year with these squabbly old couples.

then desiree had this laughing fit and wouldn't stop laughing for no apparent reason.
snort.

pacific war's an oxymoron.

i'm getting abstractly random and typing in fragmented sentences, which means i am getting bored of rambling and waffling on.

ahhh council camp tomorrow! and then church camp the day after and i think i don't have enough shorts to go round, dammit.

bip bip bop.

2006-11-18T15:39:00.000+08:00

BRANSON!

1) branbran.
2) i challenge you to not use your phone AT ALL during council camp.
3) baby pink.
4) fellow poem writer who understands the grievous dismay of having people think you are mad to write poetry.
5) primary 3 and you saved me from being late and being booked by another prefect.
6) a cat.
7) why are you pro sji? i mean, of all schools.

RACHELC!

1) neighbour!
2) i challenge you to uh, uh. wear black mascara and lipstick for your grad night. ahah.
3) navy blue.
4) you're sweet and patient.
5) when you came over to play for the first time.
6) a puppy.
7) how did you survive seeing the scary dragon lady almost every day of the academic year?

haha you know what i just realised!

my social life is so dead and soulless that it is pointless resurrecting it.
i don't think i've even caught a movie since january. and i haven't been out with my friends more than 3 times this whole year i think, unless you count things like drama and dance night and the post cap outing but EVEN then i could count them all on two hands.

and the even sadder bit is that i still have no time to go out much.

well ok it's not SO bad as you think it. i'm not mugging every day (haha i haven't started on any of my homework yet) and in fact i'm quite content to while away at home.

ahhhh meritocracy, how do i hate thee, let me count the ways.

josh groban and imogen heap.

2006-11-17T21:30:00.000+08:00

I watched the morning dawn upon your skin
A splinter in the light
It caught and frayed the very heart of us
It's been hiding there inside for all this time
How a sure thing winds up just like this
Clockwork silence only knows.

imogen heap and josh groban sound good together.

and i feel my heart is turning.

2006-11-16T23:38:00.000+08:00

i feel so immensely stupid now.

what is wrong with me, honestly.

and no i'm not just referring to the fact that i can't do the rate of reaction worksheet.

every lifeline leads its own way to the heavens.

2006-11-16T18:50:00.000+08:00

hello world, i've got SPLENDID news for you.

our brilliant board of examination assessment thinks that giving us themes for our art coursework paper will lighten our load considerably. hence they are only releasing the questions in january next year. and with the earlier o levels, the deadline submission will be pushed forward as well.

au contraire to what their eeny meeny we-are-doing-this-for-your-own-good-(ostensibly) minds think, themes will only further stress us out because we cannot start work (not even THINKING about it) until january next year. so we shall while away two months doing absolutely nothing but stuffing our faces with junk and imbibing ourselves with mindless crass pop culture and be all disgustingly pedantic when we get back. furthermore we shall not be able to finish a proper standard piece, and OH BY THE WAY, the requirement is STILL eight A2 prep BOARDS.

there is something wrong with this overly aggressive meritocracy we have here.

i really really love art, and it pains me to have to worry over my standard JUST BECAUSE i am using it as a point of negotiation in dsa, like it's some negotiable commodity.

heck, it's ART and it's subjective! why should i even have to worry about how nonpareiled my ideas are! why should i see a need to meet a barometer of some mundane pedantic minded idiot with not a semblance of open-mindedness!

this is what meritocracy does: it turns you into some sort of crazed monster, and at your sanest points you realise that it is quite, quite futile and quite, quite pointless and you realise you hate studying so much, you hate having to bargain for points for cca and cip and achievements and enrichments and leadership and participation and whatever it is in this leaps system and all you really, really want to do is actually, just learn.

i probably will be banned from going to uk next year for the lit trip and this is really sucky.

i don't want to ever ever ever leave ij.
and i don't ever ever ever want to sit for O levels.

somewhere along in the bitterness

2006-11-14T19:48:00.000+08:00

JOY!

1. jelly-baba!
2. i challenge you to uh, uh, sing sexy back at camp.
3. yellow. dunno why. must be the joyful connotation :D
4. i love how you have so much initiative and always make me calm down when i'm supersuper stressed and YOUR FAT MOMMA JOKES!
5. primary one and i sat next to you!
6. a horse, because you're strong like one!
7. where do you get your fat momma jokes?

i had four hours of maths today.
world record, that'll be.

my alarm rang at 7.30. my phone is starting to have serious issues; i set it for 6.45. anyway i shall set an extra two tomorrow morning.

a AND e maths in school today, and i think i've differentiated so much to the extent i can't differentiate the quotient from the chain rule. and loci are getting annoying. i can barely hold my hands still (parkinson's!) because they are so tensed up from getting exact measurements and holding that intractable compass of mine still.

and then there was the collab meeting which i left early for flash animation lesson thingthing and i hate flash, rachel is going to do all the work while sam and i scriptwrite/direct.

nehnehneh.

haha seriously she's the only one who actually knows how to create a proper motion tween. mine don't go the way they should (haha you should see my flying circles, man, they like, craawwlll for an inch then stop). i'm lousy at computers, i am.

wah my eyes are very pain now. my eyes are going to turn glaucous and blind by the end of the year.
tedium at its epitome!

aaaaand then i was on the bus home (it's 4.45) and then a message comes reminding me that tuition is at 4.30. naturally i baulked.

so i went for tuition straightaway though i was so hungry):

two hours of intractable boring tedious banal trigo and circular measure, which is equally banal and boring and tedious but even worse than trigo because there's so much mroe room for carelessness and i can never get the right answers somehow.

tomorrow's the last day of schoooooooool!(:

oh, and haha, whoever said that (: and ): are insincere sure took a long time to figure that out. though i use them because it sounds stupid to say 'i am overjoyed and elated' or euphoric or whatever.

geekspeak is for t3h l33t, d00d.

i'm sort of random-happy now.

desiree and smelly are both back from their con3 camps!
desiree was waxing lyrical about something today. mm-hmm. ahahaha she was so amusing! she kept smiling to herself during maths.

rawrs ok worldddddddddddd i have loci (lo-chi? lo-chye? lo-sai? lo-kye?) work to dooooo here i come shaky hands and ugly-looking triangles.

a waltz for the chance i should take.

2006-11-12T23:15:00.000+08:00

it's a new week and i'm grateful for that.

Tag me if you wish and:
1. I'll respond with something random about you.
2. I'll challenge you to try something.
3. I'll pick a colour that I associate with you.
4. I'll tell you something I like about you.
5. I'll tell you my first/clearest memory about you.
6. I'll tell you what animal you remind me of.
7. I'll ask you something I've always wanted to ask you.
8. You must post this on yours.

NETTE!
1. cor-nette-to!
2. i dare you to pick up the samba and rhumba after the jive.
3. lime green, without a doubt.
4. i like talking to you about anything under the sun, including vosovic-groban crosses and helluvan ugly babies(:
5. sec one and we had to go for tennis together at yck.
6. a kitty, after the time you stopped at the gate after the lit paper to say hellooo kittieee!
7. er well i'm normally pretty up front with you so i don't have anything.

SABRINA!
1. sabrina the teenage witch! haha.
2. i dare you to declare your undying love for ij, in front of everybody, at the next combined!
3. ivory.
4. i like your responsibility and willingness to undertake things.
5. blessing of the school last december.
6. er. a gold fish because you have big eyes.
7. haha. how DO you keep your complexion flawless?

in other news, I HAVE GOT JOSH GROBAN'S NEW ALBUM(:

it is like PHWOAR.

even the other-language songs. i used to press 'skip' on my player with the first two albums, but lately i've stopped doing that, because there's some unearthly intangibility about them that emotes so much more than english. and alejate on his first album is nice, even if it's in spanish and i have to look up a translation. the words are very fluid.

not like chinese, where it's all ponderous and ear-splittingly painful.

anyway, un dia illegara is a must-listen to.
the album has this new feel to it. it's sort of hopeful and wistful at the same time. there's this african song weeping, which is a phwoarrrrrrrrrrrrr-worthy song, and machine sounds almost jazzy.

phwoarrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr i'm happy(:

i've finished reading mitch albom's for one more day as well.
i love mitch albom.

even if his prose doesn't dazzle flamboyantly like gaiman's does, his has this quiet, very patient, very sweet, very earthly-but-intangible feel to it. and my word, he does a splendid job of keeping you hooked.

it's about this boy charley who desperately wants to win his dad's approval as a baseball player, but his dad is just so. pushy and belligerent and doesn't really care. it's always about baseball for the son. his mom always stands up for him, but because he wants to be a daddy's boy he doesn't stand up for her when she needs it. and when she collapses on the day after her 79th birthday, he isn't there but playing baseball on an old timer's game just to make his dad happy.

and he goes into that intractable spiral of descent by alcohol, until even his wife and children leave him, and his daughter gets married without inviting him and only sends him the photos afterwards, because she doesn't want him to come and embarrass her.

so he tries to commit suicide and fails twice, but as he's lying unconscious he sort of visits his mother when she is 79 and spends a whole day with her.

it's so good, honestly.

in other newsssss i.t lessons for the acsi symposium start tomorrow.

goodbye, eyesight.
hello, fuzzy vision impariments and violent green and purple flecks.

inanity.

2006-11-09T20:49:00.000+08:00

Tag me if you wish and:
1. I'll respond with something random about you.
2. I'll challenge you to try something.
3. I'll pick a colour that I associate with you.
4. I'll tell you something I like about you.
5. I'll tell you my first/clearest memory about you.
6. I'll tell you what animal you remind me of.
7. I'll ask you something I've always wanted to ask you.
8. You must post this on yours.

JESSICA.
1. you're my number one with a bullet!
2. don't sing sugar we're going down for a week!
3. grass green.
4. your ebullient nature.
5. primary four and you had a tie. (hee.)
6. many animals. :s
7. tell me about HEMHEM.

MICHELLE
1. SMELLYYYY!
2. do the chicken dance after ecm this week.
3. mauve.
4. for tolerating my pms fits.
5. you slapping me with the name of sissy at the first gm of the year.
6. mouse?
7. why are you so skeeeeny?

i think i'm a hypochondriac.
when ms ng mentioned ringworms and athelete's feet in bio today i panicked, thinking of the white skin that keeps peeling off the soles of my feet.

then i realised i didn't have those reddish marks in the picture, and my skin wasn't hard and dry, it was soft and peeling and not flaking off.

then just now i had a chronic headache (which i am still having actually) and i panicked about cell phone radiation and brain tumours, before realising that my lack of sleep is what probably led me to having such wracking headaches.

in other news, branbran (thou shalt NOT ask.) has inspired me to take the commonwealth challenge for once (this year i had cap portfolios to think about, and last year i wasn't keen much) and i am going to do between worlds. i've already started actually, and am 1300 words through but i'm worried that it is irrelevant because commonwealth loves those cheem cheem social commentaries that display a fresh insight on current affairs. my essay, for all its vocabulary (which i have reigned in, k, and is now subject to my cousin's cutting-edge grammar skills) is at kindest, a pretty aesthetic piece that gives a substantiated ability to develop a character and maintain traits of the character (which is not even consistently done but let me exalt myself for a bit.)

i'm still fixated on remember from the troy soundtrack, regardless of whether josh groban sang it or not.

aw danggit smelly, gabby, jess and branbran won't be around tomorrow.

tuesdays with laura.

2006-11-07T23:00:00.000+08:00

hola amigos.

i'm superbly depressed now; according to smelly the lit trip to uk is in june next year, one month before our prelimssssssssssssssssss. this sucks cake marjorly my mom may make me pull out and i want to go so so badly because we're going to stratford-upon-avon and austen's and shakespeare's birthplaces aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah bugger, disappointed isn't even the word to begin describing it.

):

and paychel says she may not go wah lao paychel how can one):

this is making me superbly depressed.

OH and to top it off my edusave is near depletion. rawrs.

on the brightside, josh groban's album is out todaaaaay. shall give myself an xmas treat with my angpao money leftover from not going out this year.

augh retail isn't going to work if i can't go but i can't screw up prelims either. sobs.

time can be transcended.

2006-11-07T22:36:00.000+08:00

whispered-
thank you denise.
thank you for just offering to listen to me cry.
thank you for just being there.
thank you.

just knowing that you are there for me to call makes everything so much more bearable.

Remember.

2006-11-05T23:25:00.000+08:00

Remember
I will still be here
As long as you hold me
In your memory

Remember
When your dreams have ended
Time can be transcended
Just remember me

I am the one star that keeps burning
So brightly
It is the last light
To fade into the rising sun

I'm with you whenever you tell
My story
For I am all I've done
Remember

I will still be here
As long as you hold me
In your memory
Remember me

I am that warm voice in the cold wind
That whispers
And if you listen
You'll hear me call across the sky

As long as I still can reach out
And touch you
That I will never die
Remember

I'll never leave you
If you will only
Remember me
Remember

I will still be here
As long as you hold me
In your memory
Remember

When your dreams have ended
Time can be transcended
I live forever
Remember me.

-remember; troy soundtrack.

i think this is the most haunting song i've ever heard. interestingly it doesn't remind me of lindsay clarke's witty, intense return from troy but rather more of robert lancelyn green's luck of troy (yes the one that stereotyped and glossed over our beloved argive paladin's flaws but was good all the same.)

you have to hear it for it to haunt you. maybe it's to do with the phrygian sounding flutes and all that oriental exoticism thing going on in the background, but it's so wistful and nostalgic-y

ok worldddddddddddddddddd time i got back to moles.

Si nada puedo hacer, Alejate.

2006-11-05T18:07:00.000+08:00

i went to the times at centrepoint today, the place is so small and irritating and it stocks mainly chick lit and i could only find 4 neil gaiman books (anansi boys! but i'll cash all my vouchers at one go) and one philippa gregory book which didn't sound very keen and no chevalier at all but tons and tons of bimbo books and chick lit and those never-heard-of books that might be worth a read but not your money.

plus nothing was in alphabetical order.

imagine the headache i got from all 'em sparkly book spines (from the chick lit, what else) and squiggly girly bright lurid pink fonts.

the loft is a really really nice shop. it's got a ton of intriguing furniture and things like that and they're all really really pretty.

omg laura what's with the double reallys.

k anyway, there are a ton of cds i want to buy but i'm broke and times doesn't sell cds.

i'm so horribly and abjectly lazy nowadays, i can barely concentrate on moles right now even thoguh i've got a test tomorrow and i don't know when my a math homework is due please don't let it be tuesday!

i'm not at all motivated to work right now, because, darn it, it's the holidays. (whines)

on the brightside, mom says i may go to uk for the lit trip next year, despite the skyhigh cost(: but ty and nette aren't going, but paychel and fen may go and i haven't consulted sparrow the natty yet oh please say they can go!

i mean. i love art very much but i really cannot bring myself to work on a post trip piece, and chances are it'll have to be an A1 sized thing and what with the ongoing o level coursework, no way. and as much as i hate to concede i find it tedious, unless i do an ink drawing but who shades that much for an A1 sized canvas! and writing, even though i take ages to warm up, can go pretty quick for me once i'm in the mood.

argh, that aside, i really want the o level questions to come out quickly; i'm dying to know what the themes are so i can get started planning and not while away my life in front of the computer/over my chem textbook.

moles are confusing useless little stupidities that are meant to confound you intensely.

oh, and i need new drawing pens too.

panegyric.

2006-11-03T18:37:00.000+08:00

haha. nette got her wish and i eventually wound up using this skin but vanessa's going to throw daggers at me when she sees me because she thinks otherwise.

but i like this skin. it's so open and airy and light-hearted.
(jess: who needs guys man! there are robots to do your work instead!)

have finished reading the queen's fool and the other boleyn girl.

i think tqf is better, because it was compelling and complex from the very beginning, and the backdrop of the inquisition just piled on the intrigue and anxiety. tobg was a bit slow moving at first. but gregory's got this fascinating way of writing. it's so smooth and perfect and seamless and the story just holds together perfectly and you just HAVE to read on and on and on.

tobg made me sad. even though i disliked anne boleyn immensely, i liked george well enough; was a pity about the homosexual/adultery/incest ring.

i'm reading the virgin blue by tracy chevalier now. tisn't too hard to get by, but it's a bit slow moving when she goes back to isabelle du moulin's time.

ok i'm getting bored and i can't find anythign to blog about.

i could crush you with my voice.

2006-11-02T21:27:00.000+08:00

i've got a crying throbbing purple blazing wheedling pounding brain-pulverising killer headache.

phroar.

2006-10-31T13:18:00.000+08:00

Sunsets
Because you hold my hand up to the dying light
To dispel the falling darkness, and
In the dusk, even if you have to go
You hold my hand up still
To put the first star in the sky.

and this is a pretty bad poem but at least i'm writing again so shut up. i'm not whoring for comments here, and in any case it isn't a love poem, and it's sort of dedicated to the nine nuttering nonpareil nefarious (can't recall the order anymore) ninjas and the hongkong people and so many other people like the aepers and chel lee denise and all the church people and old 2/1-ers and 3/4-ers like grandma yi ping, tsi yin, desiree, yi fen, cor-nette-to and so many others i won't start naming because i'd go on for eternity because without them honestly, this year wouldn't be half as fun.

this year's been a pretty crazy one.

i like 3/4 immensely. even though 2/1 is a nonpareil, 3/4 comes a pretty close second. so maybe we aren't as enthu about dance and netball competitions like other classes are, maybe we're kinda clique-ish still but the one thing about 3/4 i like is that no one judges. they don't analyse your strengths and weaknesses and decide whether you'd contribute better to the class in banner/cheer/sport aspects; it's like, if you want to do cheer even though you're in aep or whatever go right ahead. nobody labels anyone, or at least labelling's done in a tongue-in-cheek manner.

i still dislike the 160 decibel noise levels and i get headaches from that, and maybe i started out missing 2/1 like hell but throughout this whole year i've learnt to love 3/4 and the people for who they are, because they're so accepting. yep there are a million and one tiny things about 3/4 that i like immensely, and i think as far as most classes go, we are f-i-n-e fine down the l-i-n-e line and so we love it all the t-i-m-e time.

of course not the noise levels, but then again, no one's perfect.

then there's the student council! even though i'm a noob this year, council life has been fantabulous. i couldn't wish for another more fun/enthu/hyper/supercalifragilisticexpealidocious (!) bunch of people. honestly i was afraid to join becasue i know what it's like, from aep experience, to have somebody new elbow their way in and i know no one likes that. plus camp collided with aep cip. nevertheless i think it was a worth-it exchange - i remember laughing like hell and having a darn good time, listening to joy's fat momma jokes after the night trail, and oooh the night walk and singing elmo's world and the weird dude in the ij pinafore and whacko and ESTI WAS SCREAMING! haha esti screamed.

there's SO MUCH stuff that happened this year - orientation and the crazy homeroom system that nobody could get used to, open house, sports day + actually getting hyped up for the first time, investiture, leadership camp(: convention, CAP! and teachers' day, ms tan's farewell, opening of the beurel gallery and the chapelle de barre (good food :D + good company - stockings = phwoar!), smelly sarah paychel joy jess gabs billbellballbull yi fen, OUTWARD BOUND SINGAPORE!, the student science conference in hongkong with shona, paychel permaine pess and ah niu.

maybe my grades have gone on a roller coaster to nowhere this year (phrar, my grade averages couldn't rise above 70.) but in terms of experience i wouldn't do anything different.

well other than studying harder for mids.

i've had my fair share of upsets as well, not just in terms of academic disappointment, and sometimes i wonder if i am strong enough to get over them, but it makes me rethink about everything. i won't go so far as to say that it makes me realise who my true friends are becuase that's just ridiculously trite and immature, but it has made me realise that i've got so much to learn from the people around me, 'cause they're the ones who have tolerance and patience and love enough (and muscle power :D) to hold my hand up to put the first star in the sky.

athanor.

2006-10-30T22:25:00.000+08:00

another long pointless conversation/argument with smelly heah the woodhead who likes logs.

laura:
oh good grief it's britney spears on radio.
yeck

michelle:
you're listening to power?

laura:
now i'm on class 95
haha call in and dedicate a song to me.

michelle:
YOUR HEAD LA.

laura:
my head what.

michelle:
YOU SHOULD BE DOING THAT FOR ME : D

laura:
naw you should be doing it for me!

michelle:
NO

laura:
YES!

michelle:
NO NO NONONONONOO

laura:
aiyah arguing with you pointless lah

michelle:
yeah, you say that ALL the time

laura:
yeah because it it true.
the argument gets circular!

michelle:
haha, i should be the one saying that

laura:
no lor. i would start arguing but you go NONONONONONONONO and NONONONONONO and NONONONONO some more lor.

michelle:
whatever. arguing with you is pointlessssssssss

laura:
i ditto that sentiment.

i think, that if you locked both of us in the council room for a day we'd drive each other up the wall in two hours.

josh groban has a new album coming out!
(hints ever-so-subtly.)

she'll take him to the brink of deliverance

2006-10-29T23:06:00.000+08:00

layla kaliff's shakespeare in love is immensely catchy. i more or less have given up trying to be a non-conformist where music is concerned; good music is good music.

i think i'm moving away from fall out boy, sort of, and more into melodic nice tunes. smart lyrics are important but secondary. i still like fob immensely because they are so different from jesse mccartney and whatever cliched trash there is, but i'm more into josh groban (HAHA NETTE, NO NOT BECAUSE OF WHAT I TOLD YOU!) and the fray now.

oh OH, i don't like panic! at the disco much anymore. the song gretchen sent me was fine at first but after hearing it for 6 months it's overplayed, and theyr'e so claustrophobicky and their other song - i forget the name - the one going aroudn on airwaves now is so jerkily restless and annoying.

ok, to each his own.

went to amk library todaaaaaay! (sings) i got a phwoar-worthy haul: the other boleyn girl by philippa gregory, the virgin blue & falling angels by tracy chevalier and illustrated novel by gaiman (who else) the sandman - the dream hunters. like, phwoarr.

i want to watch troy!
good grief. this greco fanaticism is really gripping me.

turn it into light.

2006-10-27T23:31:00.000+08:00

sometimes i don't know how i'm going to manage, because right now i'm being defiant on-purpose and whatever i say just comes out with this underlying tone of anger and nobody wants to say anything (well, not those who know anyway) because they don't want to make me upset and sometimes it's like nothing matters any more; i don't care what happens to my grades or my eyesight or my back curvature or my grades or my art and that scares me immensely and sometimes i can't even pray properly, and that scares me even more.

edit (9.54pm)

2006-10-25T20:59:00.000+08:00

i think i was really abject on that last post.

it's not anyone's fault that they're coming across insensitive when i don't say anythiing. i'm being a stupid self obsessed prat again.

i'm taking it back because smelly thinks i was referring to her. and i suppose she was right when she said to not think about it so often.

so here goes.

wednesday: the biennale was fab. i loved the secret garden and the i feel like i am in a fishbowl thing. sam knocked her head, the loser. some videos were a bit boring though. never really was into cinematography. and the mermer and mocmoc thing was just disturbing. especially when they videoed ventral views of the merlion. they stuck the tail in a positively er, phallic position.

i think bill will kill (phwoar, triple assonance) me if i say anything else :D

i passed a maths by one mark, maybe with moderation a bit more but i scraped through the fact i didn't know how to do matrix manipulation ok.
lit was a big fluke if you ask me.
chinese - i passed i passed i passed and not borderlinely! missed B3 by half a mark though rar.
chem - shudders.
aep - tops for paper 1 again and i've got a $20 borders voucher. 70% for drawing paper, and not bad considering i wasn't even hoping for an A. tops for sova as well but since i've got the paper 1 prize ms low gave it to valencia. i don't really mind.

friday: open studios went quite cool, we've got a hothot gallery to ourseves. that aside mees low decided to exhibit the crap sketches i did at 4 am on the day of the deadline so my name is smeared forever. two of my photographs got put up - the chandelier one i took while studying a maths (i really was ok, i was just stretchiing my neck.) and the one from the council room door a crack open and you can see the red an dblue and yellow tables outside. i meant to turn off the lights so the contrast'd be greater but that slipped my mind.

sze's and val's fashion was phwoar-worthy, and i think rachel's installation was amazing.

and nette, that is one ugly baby. sshh.
(we'll go to jerry's one saturday ok.)

saturday: after church was jerry's, and not that hot stuffy no aircon and no carpark but a lot of lizards place in some ulu ulu part of singapore ( i cant' even recall where it was) but the one in town.

heehee nette. the ice cream brownie's good ok, but really really filling.

borders after that to spend my gift card!

have been into troy and all lately so i bought lindsay clarke's the return from troy and am looking for the sort of prequel: the war at troy. it's an interesting book, and succeeds at where robert lancelyn greene's the luck of troy failed. rlg just glorified them and heaped on the thrill, and clarke does this marvelous job of weaving fact and fiction and spells together but gives the characters a new depth - theyr'e not some sort of demi gods you think they are from grecian lit and all but they're living, fallible, anguished humans. some parts get a bit windy and i was nearly screaming at odysseus to get the bloody hell home but naw.

mom was enthralled by the cover of the queen's fool by phillipa gregory so she let me get that as well(:

now i'm going to blow my times vouchers on the virgin blue, neil gaiman and oh please oh please have rebecca reisert's the third witch! and phillipa gregory too.

i have a new sketchbook tooooo. it's black and not those horribly ubiquitous spiralbound cheapskate things and it's made from acid free paper! ok the last part was random.

k i'm going off. my chatter sounds forced and i'm disgusted at my own volubility.

books.

2006-10-17T22:25:00.000+08:00

i've been so steeped in books lately to make up for the horrific neglect this entire year.

so firstly, i've been reading the time-traveller's wife and finished it over the weekened. yee hui has the most amazing books i swear. (and yes, yeehui, i am normally that fast i only took so long with stardust because my mom was reading it and neverwhere was a bit slow-moving.) it's the the TEH ultimately best book ever, it's so sad how she has to retell her story to him, all the details of their relationship, and niffenegger (i think that's how it's spelt, and desiree insists that the surname reminds her of the nifflers in harry potter) has this quiet absorbing way of writing. it's a bit like chevalier but in a more earthy, solid way.

then i attempted labyrinth by kate mosse and it's so hard to read, i gave up after two sub chapter thingies. it's an interesting (albeit cliched) premise, and althoguh her language is not in itself ponderous there's this lack of fluency in the way the chapters run togetehr, and you can tell it's a very amatuerish book because you can feel her sort of 'warm up' first before she gets into the swing of things. or maybe it's just 'cause i read the ttw right before that.

then today there was the trip to kino, and i didn't get gaiman's novel, stardust. on yee hui's advice i got the illustrated graphic novel, which was so hard to locate but was a definite PHWOAR-worthy buy, the illustrations are so breathtaking (and make me feel worse about my drawing paper) and in such great detail and vivid colour and they're not the ghastly sort that my mom was apprehensive of when she saw the sandman comics. i'm re-reading it now and gaiman's prose remains, as ever, a nonpareil. he claims his cat dictated the story.

couldn't find phillipa gregory, or rebecca reisert ): or felix cheong either but then again i wasn't relaly looking that hard for them.

got gaiman's coraline as well!

then mom and i went sourcing for art books, i so dearly wanted the fashion book of andy warhol but i settled for this book on drawing fantasy landscapes. there was another on drawing fantasy figures, which i am infinitely more interested in, but the stuff there was a bit ghastly and not all prettypretty the way i like, so i reverted to the landscapes book.

AND OH, there was this book called wonderland; it's a photo compilation of all things surreal and beautiful (or at least the synopsis at the back said summat like that.) and not surreal as in dali or magritte fantastically-absurd-but-a-bit-vulgar sort of surreal but really pretty pretty surreal (as you can tell i'm a sucker for beauty, but no-ho i'm not shallow hokay) and i wanted to get that but it was $60+++ ):

lisa got picoult's the pact, which i will steal from her in due time.

i'm a happy girl now.
though the thought of chinese and a maths papers tomorrow is slowly eating away at the edges of my euphoria.

NEVER MIND, biennale tomorrow as well!

hua yu COOL!

2006-10-16T21:49:00.000+08:00

(how cool can your language be when you need a word from another language to describe it man.)

laura:
smellllllllllllyyyyyyyyyy.
wo bu xi huan bio.
wo na me yong gong ye bu neng de dao A1 de.
he wo de hua wen hen lousy. wo hen pa wo bu hui ji ge.

michelle:
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA
it took me quite a while to figure out that
just type in english!

laura:
bie xiao wo le. wo zai lian xi wo de hua yu
HAHAHAHA
bu yao wo jin tian yao zuo yi ge ah lian.

michelle:
HAHA, okay. Go be an ah lian somewhere else

laura:
wo bu xi huan ni le

michelle:
since when did you like me?

laura:
wo ai ni platonically de

michelle:
CHEEEEENA PIANG

laura:
wo bu shiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii

michelle:
yes you are!

laura:
bu shi!

michelle:
I can see your nose growing longer

laura:
bi zui ni the sui ba geng jia da le.
hokay bad grammar

michelle:
...
i give up, can't you type normally!

laura:
bu ke yi!

HAHAHA I LOVE DRIVING SMELLY UP THE WALL :D

ok that aside i am going to kino tomorrow! i'm going to while away a fortune on gaiman and picoult, maybe phillipa gregory and i am going to get stardust even though i've read it before because that is my absolutely favourite book.

i love neil gaiman. yee hui got me hooked on him.
he's got this ethereal way of writing, and describing that is simply magical. his prose sort of dazzles and shimmers, figuratively.

i mean, picoult's good but she has this ponderous way of writing, even if her subject matter is untouchable. gaiman's subject matter sometimes revulses me, like in smoke and mirrors, but he's got an amazing, jaw-dropping way of turning and weaving the plotlines silver and gold.

having said that, i'm dyingggg for second glance and tenth circle and a million other books by her and OH PLEASE LET THEM HAVE REBECCA REISERT'S THE THIRD WITCH PLEASE. ohohoh and felix cheong's a call from crying housee.

(stupid smelly was ignoring me until i spoke in english again.)

oh and i am so DEPRIVED of reading it is sinful and immoral and i shudder at the dearth of books i have read. i am so uncultured for a capper. (grimaces)

AND OH, I KNOW SYDA WINNERS. my grandmama and sarn won third for SYDA! hokay so i didn't win but i am l33t ok i know someone who won syda and i'm so proud of grandmama yips and sarn!

(smelly just threatened to never talk to me again if i spoke in cheena again.)

ok there is grey's anatomy tonight, even though i have already watched the season finale i want to watch and cry again.