festi-trivia!

hi all!

hope everyone's having a great time at Bakkwa Gorging and Pineapple Tart Snuffling. I certainly did! hehheh. oh boy. the past 2 days have utterly annihilated my near-religious dieting and exercise regime - aided by my insatiable greed for more once the tastebuds have been given a taste of the festive goodies. Ah, the wonders of the extensible, elastic and seemingly bottomless stommick! :) and thus, sad to say, I have given up 3 of my hard fought, 3-week-long struggle-won 5kg lost. lol. someone ought to ban festivals for us dieting people, eh? haha.

well anyway, i received quite a few compliments about my looks and my proposed entry to university (proposed, no doubt, by my stubborn and utterly ignorant subconscious, which is self-explanatorily subconscious. as i said, i shall be receiving sub-sterling grades and thus university entry for me is a question mark and not a full-blown, cocky AHA! confirmation :D). but also quite a few jabs at how i am 2 times as big as one of my paternal aunts (as alleged by my uncle, who promptly received a clutch-fisted glare from my laser shooters) and 3 times as large as my nanny's daughter (as proposed by my father, who got a very satisfying knead on the shoulder. satisfying to me that is. judging from his grimace, i'd say he didn't enjoy it nearly as much as i did executing it :P) thus the resolution to double my exercising efforts tomorrow plus reduction of festive goodies down to a maximum of 2 pieces. yes. haha :) ah woe is the girl who diets during CNY.

i've gone and gotten a tankful of fish! partly because of the insidious influence from working with fishes all day in the lab (plus 10 very very slimy, mucus-y, bloody and un-dead eels) coupled with the festive mood. now look here, i'm not the kind of idiot who goes around to the spca to adopt a dog or a chicken or a dragon everytime a new lunar year rolls by, ok? they are the culprits behind the massive pet abandonment around march-april every year once the craze wears off and fifi's peeing on the rug doesn't quite amuse them anymore. those are abominable people. say: ABOMINABLE. they're honestly lacking conscience of any form. anyway. i intend to maintain my tank all through the tenants' natural lifetime, regardless of the lunar year of the dog or whatever. and the last time i checked, there wasn't a year of the guppy. so there. haha :) but anyway. one thing i don't understand is, my mentor has been standing close to me and whispering ominously "guppies DIE at the drop of a hat!" everytime i proudly mention my tank, but the guppies i've bought so far (around 10 or so) are all thriving and swimming and guppy-ing but the others have all dropped dead and gotten plastered to the filter pipe. i have been applying the right rearing technique as per the ah-pek's and my mentor's advice, and all the "weakling" fishes are thriving, so i really can't fathom how the hardier fishes like the tetra, the black-spotted tail and the swordtails are all upping their rears and going up to heaven. *shakes head* maybe i really ought to try the last resort. drop one of my hats and see if the guppies start upping THEIR rears. haha :D and amazingly enough, 2 of my relatives are rearing huge tankfuls of tetras! i don't get it. is there a new tetra craze going about? anyway. their tanks are utterly Zen and tranquil and beautifully lighted and the tetras are simply amazingly beautiful. heh. too bad my budget only allows for a teeny tank and no lighting. that would mean that any poor tetra in my tank would waste its luminescence cos no lights are available to promote its stripes.

i do SO wish my guppies would start producing guppy babies! i want to see what happens in a cross between the flare-tailed and the neon (light blue) strains! :) a regular scientist brain have i. hohoho. anyway, ll commented (with a hearty hahahahahahahahahahahaha) that i've been very excitable and agitated lately. which i cheerfully agreed with and attributed to the immense onloading of guangqiangs (teochew fried festive snack) and bubbly drinks :) heh. and i also produced a couple of virtual *hics* to further prove my point. haha :) come, hands up all those of u who've been stuffed silly! heh. i guess that's why drunk people get belligerent and start criticising the PAP. it's what i call the too-stuffed-and-talking-fart syndrome haha :)

anyway. i realised that pioneering cell culture on an ancient fish takes on meaning and wonder only within the confines of a lab. honestly. i was trying like a mad hare to boast about my accomplishments in the lab as a booster for my uni entry (cum scholarship appeals) and all i got was blank stares (in the general direction of the TV) and some stunned, polite-enough-to-garotte smiles. i guess not everyone's informed about the lifesciences heh. oh well. after the 3rd such sub-intelligent response i gave up with a huge exasperated sigh and retreated behind a Stephen King book :)

talking about intelligent, it seems i'm rather not part of that exclusive, elite group of people, either. my mum just informed me amusedly that i have my t-shirt on backwards. lol. and all through typing this darned entry i've been clawing at the collar and wondering why it's so damned high and whether my double chin has expanded to a quiveringly huge size. sheesh. sometimes i wonder if i'm paranoid or just bloody sub-retard. haha :)

ah! 1 more day of freedom to pursue the high-ended dream of sleeping in till 10am :) *blissful, beatific grin* how pathetic, the life of a member of the working population. just call us the sleepless zombies. haha :D so! you all take care k? and soak up all the festi-trivia, cos i wanna catch up on all ya kakis soon! (before i fly off on a one-way ticket to namibia to escape the results-releasing Doomsday) and go easy on the pineapple tarts! *_*

engulfed
but by nothing (of consequence)

fading into
the immaterial of it that isn't
shimmeringly
an ethereal quality (non-emulative, it is. but it isn't)
that simply melts
into solid
abandonment

i am it, and all i am.

HAPPY CHINESE NEW YEAR everyone! :) lol. doesn't it sound splendidly queer and brainless to have this incredibly festive declaration right after a pensive poem that's neither here nor there? :D

my own novella~

Sweltering hot days are not good days.

Anne sat numbly in one of the sleek plastic seats of the shuttle bus, feeling the dramatic jerk and buck of the abberrent bus beneath her precariously sliding butt, and shifted in sync with the crest of the next hump in the road. Her head snapped back on her neck on the downslope with a resonant crack and she winced.

What a shitty day, she muttered in the dissonant chords of the average frustrated, bored and angsty freshman. The remark drew a knowing smile from her neighbour, a punk in a purplish-tinged mohawk hairdo that was fifteen decades too late for today. The acid look that Anne favoured him with promptly dissolved the "by the way you're an eyeful and I really wanna chat you up" grin into a bitter grimace.

Outside, the whipping bus turned the rapidly whizzing landscape into a psychedelic swirl of variant greens enmeshed in grey concrete. Replete with the occasional splash of neon orange and yellow, it made the university campus mirror a bloated model of a kindergarten playground, or the day room of an asylum.

A colour-vision challenged asylum, Anne thought glumly.

And nobody would challenge it if she had said, it really looks like a day when the heat would kill you. but even then you won't get any rest from dying, oh no. Even in an airtight gasket-type casket (all the better to ferment you in, mah deeah) you'd bake and rot and bubble little oozing boils of p-

But at that very instant the neon blue-and-orange whirlpool stopped momentarily, and hiccoughed, and the world that Anne knew went up in impossibly neon orange flames.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

hah. i knew i couldn't write a novel. oh well what the hell. maybe i'll publish a collection of poems, and a collection of short stories. haha :) comment, people!

condemned to:fold, as you would

my mum's very very annoyed and very exhausted, thanks to that cad of a boss she has. Trying to hold her down cos she's relatively cheap and very efficient labour. I've been telling her for ages: say NO if you feel you're being injusticed or manipulated. But would she listen? NO! sigh. i can't do very much for her - after all she exercises her own judgments. i just hope she'll solve it soon, by way of action rather than moans and complaints simply because they don't work. we're not her boss and complaining to us leads nowhere.

my peers are smartening (up, or not) from their first taste of society and its multipleated dark arenas of politics. it is true to a large extent that HC-ians are the most guileless of the elite, cos we live in a sheltered, brother-ly environment that's completely idealistic and nowhere near what society doles out to a fresh jc graduate. we step out of jc expecting jobs to fall from the sky (huh? what's a resume? u need one to get a job?), expecting people to be nice and non-bitchy and perfectly pure and upcoming and un-deceitful. well, good morning, darlings. and welcome to the Big Bad World. you slog for 2 weeks poring over job listings, call and call till your ears drop off, send resumes by the dozens via email, put out postings asking for tuition candidates, and chances are you're still not employed 3 weeks after all these measures. why? because singapore has lots of jobs, sure, but how many temporary ones? not a lot in comparison to the multitudes of permanent posts waiting for the people who REALLY need the jobs. (not us, cos we only pretend that we need a job.) check out the straits times to get an idea of what i'm alluding to here.

and then there's office politics.

there are nice people, there are nice people who're actually hypocrites or gossips, and then there're hypocrites and gossips who're actually nice people. and my dear huddleclique-mate, you're the poor unknowing fellow stranded in category 3. cos u're too accustomed to talking without consequence, so you automatically assume that everyone in society wants to hear your bit about others. sure, it's human nature to hanker after gossips and injurous news about others (especially competitors), but it's a different story when the subject of your gossip turns out to be the person who hears them. i'm sure after 2 painful incidents you've picked up a couple of lessons about what to say (and more importantly, what NOT to say) when in public. it's even worse when you work in an enclosed office, cos the subject always has ready access to your neck for throttling when he/she hears the unsavoury news about himself/herself. so what to do? cannot be a mute (people will say you're antisocial or a prude) and cannot prattle (unless you're sick and tired of having your head attached to your body). being alive can be a pain in the ass sometimes. but just make do - try to exercise discretion whenever you speak amidst your colleagues and try your best to keep another colleague's name from a conversation. even for compliments - you'd never know when they'll backfire and land you in the bad books of another person who dislikes the person whom you praised. and woe betide the soul who offends the senior personnel or the boss. good luck and pack your stuff. i guess the keyword here is discretion. we're just cheap labour while waiting for results, so swallow your indignities and keep your head down with a low profile. that way if someone's out to get your head he or she would have a harder time catching your tail (and yanking it off with grim satisfaction).

i suppose life is much darker than all of us supposed. but we can't do anything except learn to be smart, grope our way along and buy good batteries for our torch haha. and i've just heard an excellent ghost story regarding the rg squash toilets, so kakis in search of mindless balm and nonsensities :) i'll tell y'all over lunch or a cuppa.

coupling whims:fancies

i saw a girl
no more than 12 (caught in the self-absorbing throes of adolescence)
morosely studying just that little
bit of paint [cluttering]
up the dizzying mezzanine
thinking no doubt
of love (puppy: canine, young dog; inexperienced and painful, this trip
will cost you.)

i sat quietly
nursing my own sorrows
and observing her.

i saw a woman
just blossomed into
(whatever) comprises the satirical benchmark of adulthood
staring into [space]
but nevertheless
about her worth
in life.
(and the round and round of all that is,
the round and round of all that no longer matters, and is inconsequential, and is intangible.
and there's no meaning in working so hard,
is there.)

i sat quietly,
draining the dregs of my own bitter brew
and observing her.

i saw a lady
well into the multiscented kaleidoscope of things (things: objects, of specific nature; referring to a well defined group of items)
channeling all her energies into
the phone she holds in her hand
juggling
her career and her children and her multitudes of personas
looking so frail between calls (falling only on the lethally bracing qualities
of the caffeine concentrate before her)
i think she may fa.l l ap.ar.t

still i sat quietly
trying to resist the pull
and observing her.

i saw myself
living life as society deems fit
revolving around
the third person (to keep my sanity)

it's my only release.

centrifuged

hi all!

1 week since i started work back at my lab! Been enormously busy - so much so that i became bone-tired on the 2nd day and got into a exhausted-vs-exhausted row with my parents. sigh. being too tired from work makes me crabby and unpleasant. the work hasn't been very fulfilling - till today my DNA is still not seen as a nice clear band. i'm quite frustrated, and needless to say my poor poor mentors are at the end of their patience with my slow progress. only the bacteria listened to me and grew quickly, but too quickly such that they became confluent, and made colony picking a pain in the ass. (and the neck, come to think of it. i was hunched over squinting over the petri dish for 1 hr, whilst foregoing lunch!)

i just realised today that weiqi, a fellow attachment student, was an rg-ian! haha! we behaved like demented long-lost relatives when we realised we're really kakis. and i was wondering why she gave me such comfortable vibes, like someone i know a long time before. oh but she brought bad news: Justina, the PSL chair for my batch, committed suicide. well this is probably old news, but i was hearing it for the first time and am quite shocked and very saddened. i really hold the belief that people who wish to end their lives prematurely, for whatever reason, frivolous or not, ought to take a good look at the poor patients who struggle with terminal disease, some of them just kids or even toddlers. i really don't think life ought to be frittered away so flippantly. it's a commodity that's meant to be treated with care and treasured well. there's always ten more reasons to continue fighting for life for every one for committing suicide.

well today i got irritated by a guy on my train whose girlfriend very lovingly wrapped herself around him, but he kept his eyeballs riveted on my cleavage. i felt that the girl deserved better than a useless man who concentrated only on the superficials. it's deplorable behavior when a guy has a perfectly good girlfriend who loves him so tenderly but he chooses to let his attention roam to whomever had a significant amount of chest tissue. i mean, come on. pamela anderson's silicone bags aren't gonna live forever, so QUIT staring, already. and love your girlfriend at least as much as you love big chests, for chrissake.

i've sworn to stay a greek lesbian for awhile, so that i stop torturing myself and my poor friends (one poor soul in particular) with my horrible tales of lightning-courtship and breakings. the last one has left me rather dejected - he was the first i really felt good around, as in, there was at least equal interest in each other compared to the other 2, where the guy chased me. CM was the worst. the very worst. well to this date. haha. ok no more sordid love affairs. i shall bore you all to death with my bacteria growth rates and polymerase chain reactions instead.

i feel that life concentrates itself into a tight unbearable ball when i turn semi-adult. such as in now, where i find my life engulfed wholly by work and work and work - i've neglected my health, my friends, my family. i feel especially guilty when i come home, make a fuss and throw a tantrum due to my exhaustion, and go to sleep leaving my family smoldering in the embers of my wake. they're all so stunned and dumbfounded that they don't retaliate much. but the backlash is really much worse in my heart. i find hot tears coming, but i always hold them back. i've got this weird superstition against crying. but then, i really feel rotten and lousy. and by saying so i feel so hypocritical. especially when i can't help but repeat the scene every alternate night. most nights i'm just apathetic and cool and distant towards everyone. my sis is a total stranger to me, and she doesn't acknowledge me with the usual run and hug anymore. i have to go in, peek at her, and smile goofily before she gives me a tentative smile. mostly she ignores me. i'm quite heartbroken. but i can't break the work contract, so i must must MUST try my very best to keep my weekends for my family only, and try not to lose my temper so often. but it's really really very trying! the overall effect makes me a melancholic person at night and slows my wound recovery - up till today the wounds are still exuding pus and not fully closed. at this rate, i think my op will be pushed further back, leaving a larger window of time for re-infection.

i hope meeting my kakis tml morning will make my soul a little lighter and return some of the past happiness to my heart - i don't really like feeling like an 80 yr old and behaving like an anally-retentive one.

Work work work

hi hi!

work commences tomorrow... haven't gotten any cny clothes. none that fit plus the usual derisive-terrified stares of proprietesses when i lumber up to them and growl:"anything my size?". summit postponed. brother angry about the no show of his much awaited HPGOA vcd as school reopenes for him tomorrow.

no chances of me making it through standing at lab bench for 12 hours tomorrow. changed dressing myself today. it was pretty asinine. i removed the gauze, syringed the cut with saline, cleaned the cut with chlorhexidine balls and gauze, slopped up the rapidly trickling blood, slapped a single piece of gauze over it which soaked through in 2 seconds, slapped 3 more pieces on top which lasted longer; i managed to tape on 2 strips of micropore before the uppermost piece started getting soaked. put one more piece of gauze on, then held on with my last 2 fingers whilst i tore out the tegaderm and pasted it on with haste. tegaderm sags under the sheer weight of 4 blood-soaked gauze pads right now, 6 hrs after i did the dressing. ditto this for 4 open wounds. man. i feel like i'm going through the whole anemia rigmarole all over again.

dressing changing can be a stress-filled handful.

plus i got dumped officially today. chalk 1 up for DUMPED and number 3 for FAILED LOVE HISTORY. chalk 1 up on my tab - need a lychee martini.

i wonder what alex will say when i keep popping over to NUH *next door only, dear. really. will be back RRRREEEEEEAAAAALLLLLL quick!!* for my appointments. tsktsk if in a good mood. black face and witholding of my Taq polymerase if in a bad mood.

nasty mental image of going through abdominoplasty and gastric banding in the next few months. ditto dressing change nightmare.

the ideals of a beautifully slim body and good health seems to have depreciated significantly since the last time i visited them. i'll be an excellent dressing nurse if nothing else. ready for employment :)

my parents and i are increasingly inclined towards my application for a stall to sell either char kway tiaw or hokkien mee. (with banana leaf) since my chemistry paper keeps haunting me incessantly with my smart aleck 6C sugars answers rather than the 3C sugars required. and the entire question 7 undone in paper 3. chemistry being the most important entry component in the uni score for medicine, dentistry, pharmacology, biology, chemistry etc.

and 710 verbal isn't impressively far away from the bare minimum of 700 for law entry.

i'm afraid of being unemployed even before i'm employable. chicken little?

welcome to your nemesis.