Fee Fi Fo Fum.

Also, Daylight Savings Time Is On

2008-03-12T00:32:00.003-04:00

recently my life seems to be a neverending cycle of school, homework, anime and sleep. oh, and eating. sometimes more than one at a time, and there's really a sense of... um... whatever the opposite of fulfillment is. basically i'm bored out of my very-limited-yet-still-overtaxed brains. um. brain. (oh, how i wish i had more than one...)

so i decided i should blog, and maybe in so doing, build up enough of a head of steam to address gan's writing challenge, which for me is currently two rather well-written (imo) paragraphs which have absolutely no plot whatsoever. meh.

so. i skipped school today. but that's not as significant as the fact that i actually completed TWO homework assignments today! heh.. unfortunately the only reason i have to do such a crazy thing (right up there with skydiving) is because i have a crazy amount of shit to do over the next 2 weeks, including 1 exam, 1 programming project, 1 lab report that's 5% of my entire grade (could be more) and there's still the 16 hours of community service i need to clock to elect into HKN. MEH.

i also skipped aikido today. #&#$!$!@#!$. i have definitely skipped more aikido than i really should. i mean, the new guy has more lesson this term than i have the entire last year. yeah.

let's see. today i also created some really weird shit out of taiwan sausages, chicken cubes, soup base, mushrooms and ramen. which didn't taste as bad as i thought it would have, although i'm never going to put taiwan sausages in my noodles again. EVAR. on the bright side, i'm starting to like the idea of one-pot meals. and i can flip an egg without a spatula! *beams*

okay whatever, i'm going to back to watching Azumanga Daioh. =D

Memory

2008-03-03T17:04:00.006-05:00

i've been thinking about memory these few days. i read somewhere that memory is "a tricky thing. it's not linear. you reassemble the fragments every time and 'reconstruct' the past". and i don't know if that's true but it sure sounds right to me.

see, there's this memory in my mind that i'm not sure if its a memory or not. i have this distinct memory of my dad bringing me to a dairy farm, way back when i could count my age on one hand (and now i can't count my age with ALL my limbs. geez i'm old.) but the thing is, my dad doesn't really remember if he ever did that. and i'm not that sure if it ever happened. which means this 'memory' of mine could be nothing more than a particularly vivid dream. it's kinda weird. also sort of intriguing. i mean, some things i remember: i remember crying my eyes out the first day at preschool. i remember my primary school principal addressing my batch. i remember all that, and those memories have a distinct sense of reality to them. i know they're real. but some things? not so much.

and i think about her and those few weeks and i realise that almost no one else knows anything about it, and i think about how weird, how different our subsequent relationship has been as compared to my (few) other breakups and i can almost, almost, make myself believe that those few weeks never happened, that it was all a dream, because no one else knows, and she doesn't seem to acknowledge it, so it seems like i'm the only person in the world still validating its existence. and if i simply.... stop?

if i just stop, who else is left to say that it was real and not just a dream?

Spring Break

2008-02-26T23:28:00.001-05:00

yay kaya toast with homemade kaya!! =D

Food, Photos and Endings

2008-02-19T21:04:00.003-05:00

how many times have you gone out for a meal with friends and just as the food arrives, everyone takes out their cameras and starts taking pictures of them? i think it's kinda weird, but people persist, and i have pictures (not even well-taken pictures) of the most random things (i think my photo of the CNY steamboat, with its excess of raw meat on unglam plates has got to be the most 反胃thing i've seen in a while).

but still i can't help but think that food and photography do go hand-in-hand, at least by the number of food blogs that have been popping out everywhere (i actually have a senior over there and has a pretty awesome food blog - she made 叉烧面 almost from scratch == awesomeness), and i was just thinking about how amusing it would be to set a dish of steaming hot whatever on the kitchen table, and then proceed to turn on your lights and shoot the hell out of it with an SLR.

on a semi-related note, i was reading Tinker, Tailor for a bit and came across this photo:

while in the states, i've been to a few museums and took a fair number of photos of art pieces that weren't really very striking (and thus shall remain hidden in my hard drive forever), but this photo would, i think, look much less striking if it wasn't for the silhouette on the left.

anyway, on a non-related note, i was thinking abt gan's writing challenge the other day and musing about endings and how they dictate themselves. i mean, it takes absolutely forever to come up with a beginning and almost as much effort to come up with a body, but i'm always elbow-deep in a story when the ending just comes out of nowhere and goes "alright, you're done".

there's a moral (or at least, a lousy joke) hidden in that somewhere. i hope it's not the lousy joke.

An Off Day

2008-01-29T16:27:00.000-05:00

i know i told gan that emo blogging is just about the worst thing that you can do, especially when you're feeling emo, but i really need to say this, and there's no one i know that will hear me:

i have really, really, really bad good dreams.

i will spare the details, but i woke up this morning at 9am, semi-consciously dry sobbing and really really bummed. and i hate that right now, i am someone that wants something that i cannot have, and once in a while i have a dream in which i am someone that has that thing and it's weird, but i hate those dreams, because i will invariably spend the rest of the day moody and haunted.

so today i skipped school, i skipped aikido and i feel thinner somehow, like i'm not all here and i have spent the whole day sitting in front of my computer, trying to find something to do that will interest me but nothing seems to be worth doing. i am, at least, thankful that tuesdays are days where skipping school is actually not that big a deal.

i hate these days.

Leadership

2008-01-23T19:06:00.000-05:00

so recently the singapore students' association over here have been seeking nominations for the exco positions, since the changing of the guard is coming, so to speak. and suddenly everyone is fluttering about asking each other about who's running for what, which strikes me as amusing because, in typical singaporean fashion, no one gives a fuck about what the SSA is doing most of the year, so why are they so excited now?

considering that no one really wants to run the ssa, i wasn't too surprised when i got nominated for president. i was, however, surprised when people actually asked me if i was going to run, making like they were actually interested in me as the president. somehow i get the feeling that they just want another sucker to make sure their local eatery discounts don't disappear.

not that i would mind terribly doing it. what i do mind, though, is being the president of a committee that i wouldn't want to work with. i've been thinking about that - considering that i don't get paid for this job, is it too selfish of me to only want to do it if i get to choose who i do it with?

anyway, when i rejected the nomination i got another email urging me to reconsider, stating that i was identified as a candidate with outstanding leadership potential, and i was amazed by how much 'outstanding leadership potential' meant to me. or rather, by how little it meant to me. it's a strange thing, leadership. i cannot remember if i sought it before, but now, it seems i have it, yet i no longer wish to wield it.

Food Culture

2008-01-13T23:34:00.001-05:00

just a thought about food culture, in relation to meeting culture: i took this project-based course last year and one thing that struck me was that the reason why the majority (i'm using the term 'majority' very loosely here) of project meetings in singapore tend to be more focused than those i've had over here is because the tendency to talk about out-of-point stuff here is ginormous. and considering that i am fully aware of how bad it can get in singapore, that's saying something.

i had put that down to the fact that singaporeans tend to do their off-shop talk after their meetings, but americans don't seem to have that culture. and it just occurred to me that it would be impossible to do here, mainly because it's really hard to get everyone to agree on where to eat when you actually have to pick a particular type of cuisine. i mean, not everyone likes italian. or thai. or american. and, for gosh's sakes, just because i'm chinese doesn't mean i want to eat chinese all the time (and damn if i could only pound that into certain peoples' heads...)

this revelation has made me appreciate the food court. a lot.

Still Water

2008-01-06T15:27:00.001-05:00

increasingly shallow msn conversations with certain people have prompted me to wonder about the... shallow-ness (to coin a word) of the human race in general.

i mean, i believe that humans aren't shallow - that, within all of us, there is a certain amount of real substance and depth of thought, which allows us to be able to hold real conversations that are not tainted with stupid remarks.

(okay, i'm saying this in the face of the miss teen usa south carolina video. i suppose there really are idiots in this world, but i'm going to ignore their existence for the sake of this blog entry.)

so my question is: why do people find themselves unwilling to engage others at that level? cause, seriously? i'm really rather tired of making certain people laugh by invoking pink M&Ms.

geez.

In Weather News...

2008-01-05T02:55:00.000-05:00

there are icicles outside my window!
and they're growing!!!

2008

2008-01-02T03:47:00.000-05:00

well. another year. this year started with a flight cancellation, leaving me stuck in chicago for 6 hours, but i got upgraded to first class in the end so... i don't know.

another year. i think all i can hope for is that it will be better than the last.

After The (Snow) Storm

2007-12-23T03:40:00.001-05:00

so i went down to check out how much snow was left on my car after that snowstorm over the weekend. and....

what.

the.

FUCK???!!!

(-___________-")

First Major Snowstorm Of The Season!!!

2007-12-16T04:32:00.001-05:00

yes, that is my driveway. um. or what's left of it.

The English Language Is Fundamentally Prone To Idiocy

2007-12-11T20:43:00.000-05:00

shit the exams are getting to me.

Feeling Culinary

2007-12-03T23:43:00.000-05:00

"darren is feeling culinary" goes my facebook status these couple of days. possible sentence construction issues aside (comments, xping? xD), it sort of pretty much describes me these days.

i don't really know when this love affair with cooking started, actually. maybe in secondary school with home economics and a certain ms kwong, but for as long as i can remember, cooking was one of those things that i can do one. i mean, i never really cooked for real until i came over to ann arbor, but i never doubted that i could. it's one of those gut feelings, you know? i can do one.

aye. the point of this entry really is just to exclaim that i'd much rather spend my time in the kitchen experimenting than studying, especially these few days. or, actually, ever since a week or so ago when i messed around with my muffin recipe and ended up with muffins that are (in my stomach's opinion) a shit ton times better than my old recipe.

so, yes. I WANT TO COOK, DAMMIT!!

"A Figure, A Living Thing"

2007-11-30T12:20:00.000-05:00

"She's small and naked and human, and all around her is
hard, cold, sharp, and dirty, and everything is in ruins."

i was reading an article in Esquire about Miru Kim's work (read it online), about her 'urban exploring' and she was talking about how she was shooting in this "former asylum that was bombed during World War II"...

"I went in there and I started shooting, but I wanted to put something else in there, other than this space, a figure, a living thing."

i've been floundering in my photography recently, knowing that something is wrong but not really understanding what i need to change in terms of what i shoot, and miru kim's work was simply inspiring. i remember seeing that photo and thinking 'this is it. this is what i want to do'. it really, really hit the nail on the head.

now i just have scrounge up enough money to buy my flippin' SLR. =\

Here Is The Secret That Nobody Knows

2007-11-29T23:50:00.000-05:00

i think that telling others about a once-important relationship lessens it, somehow. as if in the telling and the sharing, their importance is, deliberately or otherwise, downplayed, reduced and simply made smaller by attempts to console, to empathise or to sympathise. but it's not. it's not small and it's not meant to be small. not yet.

and as long as it's big, no, it's not okay. no, you've never had a similar experience. no, you bloody don't know how i feel. because this is big. this is devastating. this is so enormous in its significance that i can't contain it. i drown in it. i am lost in it.

i think that eventually, in my own way, in my own time, i will take these memories and downsize them, miniaturise them, make them small enough that i can hold them in one hand, see them in one glance.

until then, no one will know.

Defenestration and Linguistics

2007-11-26T00:59:00.001-05:00

considering that just about anyone that's active on facebook these days has superpoke, i'd say that the vast majority of people that have facebook are familiar with the term 'defenestration', even if they don't know what it means.

i could just post the definition here, but while doing some searching for the meaning (it means 'to be thrown out the window'), i came across something rather interesting: the word 'defenestration' (from 'de' and 'fenestra', the latin word for window) was invented in 1620 to describe the throwing of two catholics deputies of the National Assembly out a window in Prague by protestants, an event that sparked off the Thirty Years' War.

i had initially wanted to question why on earth would they even bother to coin a word for the act of being thrown out the window (because, well, it's not quite something that happens everyday), but now i'm rather curious about who coined such a word, and how did it manage to make its way into facebook and from there into the collective consciousness when all it's been used for, in all of 400 years, is to describe an event that happened in Prague.

which brings me to the point that, in a perfect world, i'd be a linguistics major at some liberal arts college, striving towards a degree that will probably not land me any kind of job worth talking about, which doesn't matter because the last thing i want in this life is to have a brilliantly successful (read: busy) career that makes all my hair fall out by age 40.

and on a related note, someone i met over the weekend made this observation: that the singapore education system breeds engineering undergrads, who have no idea what engineering entails, or whether it would suit them.

Logitech diNovo Edge

2007-11-24T15:08:00.000-05:00

so the trip to chicago over thanksgiving could possibly have been the worst trip of my life, but my day was more than adequately saved by my going home and seeing the world's sexiest keyboard at my door!

sexiness by association: the world's sexiest keyboard box
(admittedly not very sexy)

sexy glowing-button-things!

world's sexiest keyboard in its new home

yay i own the world's sexiest keyboard!!

Sleep and Laundry

2007-11-21T16:15:00.001-05:00

there's this thing about sleep - as an overstimulated college kid, i never want to go to sleep, until the point that i want to (okay i guess that can apply to everything).

i mean, right now i'm cooking dinner for 8 and taking a break from standing in front of my stove, and last night i had a mahjong game that lasted till 4am, so right now i kinda really need some shut-eye, but my soup's boiling and i have last monday's Heroes to watch and BSG: Razor to watch and.. damn. i wish i didn't need sleep.

and this thing about laundry - like sleep, i hate having to do laundry until, say, i run out of clean socks (or underwear, which reminds me that i currently have more socks than underwear and i need to buy more socks. rule #124 of studying overseas: laundry happens either because a) you run out of underwear or b) you run out of socks).

but the post-laundry feeling. the post-laundry feeling, which comprises of your entire brainspace after folding your warm clothes that smell of detergent, that feeling has got to be one of life's little wonders.

Niagara Falls!

2007-11-20T16:39:00.000-05:00

okay so i admit it's a little overdue but i went to the niagara falls over fall break (like.. a month or so ago), which was -gasp- AWESOME... (americanese 101: the -gasp- before AWESOME is required. there is a scale, and it goes: "good", "fantastic", "awesome" and "-gasp- AWESOME" in ascending order of awesome-ness.)

oh yeah, and i went to toronto as well. it's weird how so many people have actually been to toronto over here, but all everyone knows is that toronto has really good chinese food (dim-sum is awe-sum). like, as if there wasn't anything else to do in toronto - like the Royal Ontario Museum, which is supposed to be the best museum in canada.

yeah, it was pretty awesome. (but not -gasp- awesome).

let me begin with: i love the niagara falls

they have this ferry that's filled with wet people in
useless raincoats that go real close to the waterfall

and it's true that the falls look better on the canadian side
(hah! take that americans!)

they also have really weird rocks
that look like they're filled with penguins(?)

have i mentioned i love the niagara falls?

only thing: the coffee at the Falls sucked balls.

the ROM is the best museum in Canada
(also the best in-joke abbreviation i've come across in a while.)

it has cool chinese sculpture.
(this is actually a piece of a rooftop.
makes you wonder where's the rest of the roof.)

also, fierce-looking chinese figurines.

and headless, skimpily-dressed grecian sculpture.
(yup. gotta love those headless ones.)

oh wow, random ship photo.
(um. i love toronto?)

Tabula Rasa

2007-11-19T17:20:00.000-05:00

tab·u·la ra·sa (tāb'yə-lə rä'sə, -zə)
n. pl. tab·u·lae ra·sae (tāb'yə-lē' rä'sē, -zē)

...
A need or an opportunity to start from the beginning.
[Medieval Latin tabula rāsa : Latin tabula, tablet + Latin rāsa, feminine of rāsus, erased.]

it's been a long hiatus. the last time i was here, i didn't know why i was blogging anymore.

it's been a while.