Wednesday, March 12, 2008
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
Monday, March 03, 2008
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?
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
yay kaya toast with homemade kaya!! =D
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
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.
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
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.
Wednesday, January 23, 2008
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.
Sunday, January 13, 2008
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.
